/hob/ - Hobbies

I just decided that I'm going to give up on learning Japanese. I'm not that good at learning languages, to be honest I'm pretty much a brainlet, and I forget kanji really fast. It's a lot of effort, and all of this just for the weeb meme. It's not worth it. I would prefer to learn simple languages ​​related to my mother tongue (Spanish) like Portuguese and Italian and hopefully I will read works by Pessoa, Dante and Leopardi.

Russian and ancient greek. But it seem it will really take a long time before I can achieve my goals of fluently reading in either.

>>61695
I kinda regret trying to learn japanese, but now I don't know how to give it up for all the effort and time I put on, I feel stuck. I also think that if I had chosen a language that was at least indo-european I might have it learned already.

Learning Spanish, watching a 10 minute spanish video every day, slowly reading a spanish book, playing WoW on a spanish free server.

>>61743
You're lucky that there's a huge anime, manga, and VN Spanish-speaking community. They've even translated many VN's that are likely to never get an English translation (or that English-speaking fans have been waiting forever to get translated) like SayoOshi, Sakura no Uta, Tsui no Sora remake. I've also found some manga that have been getting translated very slowly in English, had already been finished in Spanish (Violence Jack, for instance).

I'd recommend to watch and read all your anime, manga and VNs in Spanish. This is all assuming you even like those things, of course.

On the other hand, I don't think I can recommend any Spanish-speaking TV shows or contemporary movies. From what I've seen it's all shitty romcoms, Narco stuff, or just plain annoying normalfag shit. I do highly recommend all movies from the Mexican Golden Age of cinema. They're all really good and you can find many of them on youtube.

>>61745
>conchas de Bulma
Top lel

>>41822
i don't know of a latin lexicon so i use google translate as my lexicon while trying to translate newton's philosophae naturalis principia mathematica by hand

>>62249
You know you can use Whitaker's words, right?

I've been reading "Russian for the mathematician", an old Springer book that looks like it was typeset with an old typewriter. Outside appareances, I find it to be a very good book, at least for me. It streamlines the lessons by restricting the language to that most useful for mathematics, for example, verbs are not described by their full conjugations, only for он/она/оно, мы, они, and the rest are not even mentioned. It ends with a section of readings which I guess (I haven't got there) can be read with just the content of the rest of the book.
The absolutely best feature of the book, though, is the systematic study of russian morphology. It teaches words not by themselves but by their roots and the use of prepositions with verbs to form new words.

All you people learning Japanese are just weebs who want to watch anime without sub. Fagssss.

>>62270
Yes.

>>62270
i tell everyone i'm learning it because i just like learning stuff, but really my super secret reason for learning japanese is to hopefully one day work on translating japanese games and other media and to combat the mentally ill savages that call themselves "localizers".

>>62318
I could be doing this right now but as soon as you're able to, you realize casuals do not deserve the effort or the accuracy. Fuck them, I just let them wallow in shit like they deserve and laugh about it. Everyone else will just learn the language themselves.

>>62319
i don't care about casuals, i care about people like me who actually give a damn.

>>62319
>>62321
The point is, people who actually care do learn japanese to overcome the trajslation barrier.
Casuals won't and they get fucked for that.

I'm trying to learn english and some things that i do are for example, change the language to english on my pc and my phone, watch youtube videos in english and make post like this one that help improve my writting and my reading

>>41822
i have a physical book for learning chinese, haven't touched it in a decade

>>59072
How long did it take you? Trying to get through Spanish then French. How did your roadmap look like for the romance languages?

Whats up with all the people here trying to learn 2 or more languages at the same time? I thought it was a no-brainer that it's incredibly inefficient to try and learn several languages at the same time.

>>62812
adhd tards on ritalin get bored and switch activities every 5 minutes. they'll drop both languages in less than a month and watch steven universe (2 episodes then drop it) instead, or whatever garbage catches their fleeting interest.

My third attempt at learning German. This time I didn't give up after a couple days and I really feel like I've leveled up my understanding and I've been honestly having fun with it.

So my initial plan was to learn (or rather recognize) at least 500 words through Anki and then try to decipher text and get the hang of the language. This is really hard, especially in German where you might recognize all of the words but the entire meaning is lost on you. Is this in the past, the future, is he giving it to her or her to him etc.

Anyway, I discovered a really great course on German with an interesting approach called the Thinking Method, which is actually just The Michel Thomas Method but free. The instructor sits down with one or two students and helps them construct bigger and more complex sentences. The way its done is really intuitive, as he starts out with the smallest building blocks and then gradually builds a sentence from it. So you start with "I want" then "I want this" then "I want this tomorrow" and so on, and each time he prompts you by saying "how would you say xyz" but before that he gives you all the blocks, so each step you're really just adding one more block. Eventually, you get a sense for the language and how words should be put together to construct meaning and only with like 50 words of vocab.

The difference between Language Transfer and the Michel Thomas Method is the instructor. You can find the recordings through torrent, so the paywall isn't an issue, but the difference in instructor is very noticeable. Michel Thomas is old and he's just too aggressive with the students, while the other guy has this conscious philosophy of not making the student panic or anxious because it just makes things go harder. Many times I had to just stop listening cuz MT kept making the guy repeat himself and interrupting him because he got the sound wrong and it was just cringe. These lessons are done through audio, but I've found the transcripts to be much faster and easier to follow, especially if you don't give a shit about speaking.

So yeah, I really recommend this website. Unfortunately, the German course in incomplete despite the title, but the 50 tracks are absolutely gold. After two days, it feels like I've leveled up my understanding a lot. I think it's a great foundation. I'll definitely go through it a couple more times and more thoroughly, along with MT's stuff since it seems like a logical continuation. In the meantime, grinding Anki daily with the top 4.5K most common words by frequency and trying to read some kids books.

https://www.languagetransfer.org/

I went down the Twitch rabbit hole of Korean thirst traps and since I have nothing else to do in life my goal is now to learn the language to the point where I understand what's going on without relying on the translator. Let's see how far I get before I give up. Other language learning attempts in the past have failed because there was no clear end goal that I was working towards.

>>63107
Managed to stick with it for 190 days and made tons of progress on my comprehension. I can watch TV shows relatively comfortably if there are German subs available. My listening is still lagging behind. Reading the news and native-level novels is still very difficult because higher vocab requirement. I'm at ~4K words in Anki and I probably need double that to be able to read most native content.

It seems that learning a language just requires a long ass time no matter what you do. You need 10K vocab minimum and thousands of hours of exposure to the language before you've built a mental model of how the language works and you can see some signs of fluency. Anything else is just a stupid hack.

>>65128
how much time did you dedicate to it per day?

>>65446
Wish I tracked my time more carefully tbh.

I spent anywhere from 1 to 3h per day. Anki takes about 10-30m and the rest I can just read/listen/watch whatever content I wanted. Usually I'd watch one or two episodes of a TV show, read a couple pages of a difficult text with tons of lookups and then read something easy before bed. I didn't do any pure listening for a while because it was too hard and you had to focus a lot, but lately I've unlocked that and I've been listening to podcasts while playing games.

222 days in and I'm still on this intermediate plateau where it's hard to notice progress until you come back to something you couldn't understand before and it's now noticeably easier. Tried reading Harry Potter again and it flows much better now, although there are still vocab holes.

>>65128
>>65453
Anki kannste eigentlich inzwischen sein lassen, wenn du kein Anfänger mehr bist. Leute lernen Englisch, indem sie englischsprachige Medien konsuuuuumieren, Videospiele spielen und 4chan browsen. Ist mit anderen Sprachen nicht anders. Vokabular im Kontext ist tausendmal besser. Kein Mensch grindet Flashcards.

>>65518
Anki actually serves a crucial role of priming vocabulary before you encounter it in immersion. It creates an entry in your mental dictionary that is then accessible to you and saves you time when looking up words. You only acquire the word after many encounters of it in various contexts, but that initial mental dictionary entry actually speeds up the process a lot and makes immersion smoother because you're not constantly breaking your flow.

I think the 15-30m a day is a worthwhile investment for what it brings to the table. There are definitely people that spend too much time on it. It isn't what makes you acquire the language, but as a supplement to immersion it's incredibly effective.

>>65520
I have seen people spending over 2 hours on Anki daily. I find that the opposite of being helpful. I tried it and didn't like it, I'm just too used to read using a dictionary and I have no problem in having to look up every word in a text I'm reading instead of memorizing a bunch of words in sequence. But I always tell people about Anki since it's just one more method of helping people.

Are there any fun gamified ways to learn (japanese) for a 30 year old zoomer with a short attention span?

I tried Duolingo but it seems like it gives you more of a taste of a language rather than being an effective tool.

>>65528
Nope. There's no shortcut or easy way around actual grinding, sorry.

>>65526
It's one of those tools that you can use in a lot of different ways, so people's mileage and experience varies. There's definitely workflows that make it more frustrating to use than it should be.

The default approach out of the box is actually quite tedious. You start by downloading someone else's deck that is usually garbage and has its own ideas about what you should learn first. And with language decks, as a rule, they always have both Foreign and English cards, which I've found is a complete waste of time. An English meaning can map to many words in your foreign language and its a lot harder to recall with no benefit for your immersion. So removing those, saves you about half the time you'd be spending learning and reviewing.

Another optimization I found was putting an example sentence on the front of the card. It made my retention rate like 99% and I started worrying that it was too easy, but actually it just saved me a lot of time because in reality you will rarely come across single words in isolation, so a sentence that provides contextual clues is a good way to both learn more effectively and have an easier time with reviews.

I spent yesterday reviewing like 200 cards and then I learned a 100 new cards, which amounted to about 45 minutes of study. That was definitely more time than I wanted to spend, but then I also spent the entire day immersing. You want to keep Anki like at most 1/3 of your total active study time. Like I said, it's just supposed to be a supplement.

>>65528
Any approach can be fun if you enjoy the process and see yourself progressing. One of the less tedious ways of a learning a language is through immersion, but even that requires you to actively pay attention while you read/listen/watch stuff in Japanese for at least an hour or two per day.

>>65528
>a 30 year old zoomer
A what?

After years of being a renegade, I am beginning to use anki, with various decks to approach different languages. It seems actually quite convenient, as long as I don't build up too many cards. I actually don't stress the review process, I just want to keep it as an addition to my main study workflow, try to soak in the stuff I want to remember to keep it fresh in my mind. I don't expect to _learn_ from anki, just to repeat stuff for later recall.
>>65531
Adding a sample sentence a good idea wi, I'll update my cards while they are still a few.

how to learn language fast? but with no effort plz

>>66330
Read hentai with popup dictionary

>>66330
Get scientists to freeze your body and wake you up in 200 years when you can just download a language in your head.

I am learning four languages at once.
>(Mandarin) Chinese,
in which I'm at an intermediate stage, so I don't study as conscientiously as before, I mostly just read. I have the perfect (series of) books for my situation.
>Classical Chinese
This one I haven't paid much attention to, but it's constantly in the back of my head. I have a few books for that, mainly a grammar and an introductory reader, but also a couple books for buddhist and a bunch of poetry, I also get most of my input from texts that appear in sinology books.
>Russian
I am at the early beginner stage of it, I haven't been exposed to all the aspects of grammar and I'm just building the core vocabulary, I have a main coursebook and a few supplementary ones.
>Ancient Greek
I am just at the very gate with this one, I have a number of good resources, a couple grammars, and an introductory reader, as well as an online course for reading Euclid. I have been reading about ancient astronomy and mathematics, which is one of my main interests in this language. You could say I can learn all about it without having to study the language, but I can't resist the siren's song. Anyway I study this once a week, usually on sundays.
My language studies are limited to the mornings, and in the afternoon I mostly read nonfiction (such as those ancient astronomy bokks I mentioned). For the most part I do one language per seesion, and I emphasize the modern language over the ancient ones, even if I have a personal preference for ancient languages in general, the reason for this being that I can get those off my way sooner so I can later focus on the other ones, and that I could access more content now and stop relying only in English books (though lately I've been finding more and more works in my own native language). I really want to move away from English as my primary language, so I'm trying to reach that goal first.
I don't use Anki, I use (e)books, a notebook, a dictionary, G**gle translate, and recently also chatGPT.

>>66555
>(Mandarin) Chinese
>I have the perfect (series of) books for my situation.
Tell me.

>>66559
Well it may not be for everybody, but I use John Defrancis' Chinese Readers. They range from basic to advanced, they use traditional characters, each chapter introduces 10 characters, words using those characters, and then it's pages upon pages of texts using those and previous words. I can't recommend them if you want to get through quickly, though, as the chapters are long and often repetitive, and they can get tedious.
I like them because all I have to do is open the book where I left, the texts are short (it's just about 50 of them per chapter), self-contained, and they provide the so-called spaced repetition, a lot of it.

>>66560
ok thanks

Trying to learn Japanese, but I cannot bring myself to do anything productive unless there is a powerful enough reason to do so. Initially I got that reason from a enormous need, yes NEED, to play more untranslated Visual novels, a massively valuable thing that has improved my life immeasurably and given me so much rare joy, I cannot state just how important they are to me.

I get all of my emotional fulfillment needs from VNs, the love I can never get from real people I can draw from the characters in VNs, and I draw from them incredibly deeply. My sole attachment to life. But machine translation is already good enough and the little Japanese I did learn was solely to fix mistakes in the translation. There's no more need for me to continue studying further as much as I would like to. I've stagnated fully.

>>66579
Loss of motivation is just cope for when you get stuck on a certain level. You got filtered.

>>66579
exact same thing happened to me though it was with general translations too instead of just MTLs
learned enough to correct VN translations if they had audio, many of which have terrible translations
it actually made reading VNs hard at one point because of the annoying shit localisers (Allah forgive me) do or certain word choices that very clearly are not getting the same message across

Learned jap mainly for VNs since i also would get most emotional needs from them but since i can just fix translations as i go along and dont need to do the whole thing, now i have no desire to carry on

>>65528
Skyrim has a Japanese translation.

>>65528
Just consume your usual japanese content, gather words and train it with anki. Guide (this channel has nice content on Japanese learning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBcQJESGQvc

>logout from YouTube account
>clear cache
>click in a Japanese video
>repeat until your feed is flooded
>use auto generated subtitles
>click to auto translate auto generated subtitles (optional when don't understand nothing)
>some Japanese channels has English subtitles
That's how I watch Japanese content and it's enough to understand everything, no need in learning Japanese

>>67078
For maximum smoothness you can use a translator (picrel not fully translated) and after some time the auto translated and the English subtitle will get cached and automatically turn on when available. It's good enough to the point I lost the motivation to learn Japanese.

>>41822
>what language are you learning
french
>what tools do you use to learn it
netflix,music and google translate
im now b2 and i consider myself pretty fluent this is the easiest and the most enjoyable way to learn languages

read the book, fluent forever by gabriel wyner(sp?) will help a lot.

different language require some different approach, you generally get good return on building vocabulary though.

biggest mistake people do trying to learn a language is they try to learn by latching onto their native language with those ideas, words, thoughts. you need to build an entirely new language from the ground up, that means not associating your new language words to your old language words, you need an intermediary, a translation and interpretation layer far more powerful for the mind, that is imagery and emotion. you need to build your language up from thinking the target language word, and first thing that comes into your mind are images, and not the translated meaning in your native tongue. that is the crux and major stumbling block/paradigm shift required to be proper successful and where most fail with their language learning.

find a movie you know really well, all the dialogue, get the sub and dub for it, play it in background or on another screen. listen to music in that target language, watch videos. have an actual physical good dictionary for that language next to you, do this as a habit you hear a word, you randomly open up and try find it, try find what it means.

language acquisition is making all these little easy habits that add up and require almost no effort, for years, culminating into almost effortless. or you can train hard all out for a couple weeks.months then forget about it and never pick it up again. i tried both, i made the mistakes, and learned, then got better. maybe this can help you if you try it. that book fluent forever check it out.