No.41823
>>41822I'm learning english and at this point I do nothing except watching series, read books and browse sites that are in that language. I hope one day my english cock grows larger so I can have something to show to other people who haven't even grow an english cock, it'd be very amusing to see their reactions when they see an adult english cock fully erect, I want them to swivel in my direction and look at my second dick in awe since everyone thinks that having a english cock is great for your future because of that brainwashing crap that they teach you in school that being a two cock man make you more useful in today's society, the only difference is that I'm not paying THEM to grow a second dick, I'm doing it all by myself, therefore when my dick reach its ultimate phase it'll be even stronger than the english dicks of people who were normaly teached in institutes how to grow a second dick by the supporters of globalism. I'm watching you Globalists, I never wanted to be teached a second language, they forced us saying that it'll be wise because the employers want you to have a second dick, I never wanted to have a second dick but you forced me and ostracize me when I said no, I didn't want a globalist dick and you made me think that I was a retard for saying this when I was clearly not, all I've got to say to you now are these words: I'm coming to get you globalists, with my fully erect cock to punish your anus, this is the dick that you wanted me to have when I was a young boy, now prepare that globalist ass because I'm gonna tear it and let it so loose that no one will hear you when you fart
No.41824
japanese, but im doing it very half-assed only remembering a bit of vocabulary at this point. even just knowing 1 key word out of every 3 dialogue in anime is neat. it pops out and i have some connection to the words spoken. i plan on just learning tons more of the vocab while continuing watching anime, and then learning grammar and how to write later on. listening to sounds seems a lot easier than decyphering symbols
a website i found is animelon.com, it has a decent selection of anime there with multiple simultaneous subtitles in romaji/english/etc, dialogue logs, speed settings to slow down what they say, and i can copy/paste the subtitles as they appear if i want to google them to learn more. having romaji display with english subtitles helps pick up new words
aside from that, and some other youtube videos, i haven't used any tools mainly out of laziness
No.41849
I've been learning Japanese for about 2 years. At the beginning I mostly used the Core deck for Anki and Tae Kim's grammar guide. Started reading some basic manga after a few months and kept learning from there. Now I mostly read books/light novels and visual novels or browse Japanese sites while keeping a deck of mined words.
Sites/tools I've found most useful:
http://jisho.org/Basic Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary. It lets you pick kanji by radicals as well.
https://djtarchive.neocities.org/bunpou/full_day.htmlCollection of grammar concepts from the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. Includes example sentences for each concept as well.
http://rikaisama.sourceforge.net/Browser addon that displays the meaning of words when you hover over them. Also has an feature that lets you import new words directly into an Anki deck. I use it to build up my mined deck.
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/Collection of Japanese books. It has a lot of older books from authors like Daizai Osamu and Natsume Sōseki. You can read them on the site or download them as txt, pdf, and some other formats.
http://manga-zip.net/Place to find and download raw manga. The sites the downloads are hosted on are kind of shit but from my experience it has a better selection in terms of raws than most torrent sites.
https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E8%8F%A9%E8%96%A9https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/More detailed dictionaries.
http://www.imabi.net/Another grammar site. Has quite a bit of stuff that isn't covered in Tae Kim.
No.41850
>>41849What's the best place to start? Most of the links your posted seem to be sites that are only useful if you already have a basic understanding of the language, where should you go to if you want to start from scratch?
No.41852
>>41850Tae Kim like
>>41851 said and the Core2k/6k deck for Anki. Progress slowly but make sure to at least do something every day. Also if you haven't learned hiragana and katakana yet I would recommend going through Heisig's books. Get away from romaji as soon as you can.
No.41853
>>41822I've been using duolingo to learn French online. My family isn't French I just love romantic languages
No.41855
>>41851>>41852Alright, thanks. I mainly want to learn the language so I can finally watch anime without needing fansubs. A lot of bigger fansub groups seem to mistransalate things or at least not properly transalate dialogue so I want to know for myself what characters are saying without a middle man ruining it for me.
No.41858
That hurts my eyes op. Consider using the anki dark mode extension.
No.41859
>>41853As French native, good luck. This language is full of exceptions.
>>41849>>41857I wanted to learn Latin and Japanese so thanks for the links. But, what is the best way to type in Japanese with a normal keyboard?
No.41862
>>41857That site seems to be focused on medieval latin, with a focus on english latin. Even if your main desire in learning latin is to access english medieval texts, latin learning should begin with the classical models; so you should be careful.
Remember to do copious reading, alongside any grammar you learn; Ørberg's
Lingua Latina per se Ilustrata is the most famous reader right now.
Also, the declensions must be fully memorized ASAP. Di te ament.
No.41864
>>41859If you're using windows, you can go into your Regions & Language Settings and add Japanese. There's a shortcut that switched the keyboard from latin letters to kana, and then you just type the equivalent romaji. 'か' would be 'ka' and so forth.
No.41865
>>41864Wow, that's easy. Thank you.
No.41866
>>41865Yup. I'll type up a little list of the shortcuts because they were a bitch to figure out for me.
Alt + Shift = switching from ENG to JAP mode.
Alt + ~ = switching between romaji and your selected kana in JAP mode
Alt + Caps Lock = switches from Hiragana to Katakana
Ctrl + Caps Lock = switches from Katakana to Hiragana
(polite sage)
No.41868
>>41866Nice, I just need to learn the language now.
No.41876
>>41856I was already aware of the thread, just thought it wasn't very useful.
No.41878
Italian. I started with Duolingo, then worked through a grammar book. Lacking more structure, now I usually read news sites and wiki articles, since they are usually easy to understand.
I’d like to tackle a more serious piece of writing, but it is daunting.
No.41879
Not really learning but I read things (news, wiki, youtube) in languages I havent studied but can somewhat understand like Yiddish, Danish and Dutch but I only know 2 languages. I do not care to study others
No.41880
Norwegian, Duolingo, I'm barely learning anything and I don't really care.
No.41883
Im learning japanese but is really hard and the simple fact that it uses another kind of impossible of learn letters is insane.
Im a native spanish speaker.
No.41944
Does anyone know a good core anki deck for portuguese (preferably br)? I can't find anything. It's just piddly 100-word decks and one decently sized deck but it's really low quality (with a lot of inaccuracies and ear-stabbing google translate vocalizations). Any tips greatly appreciated.
>>41880børk børk
No.41945
I'm trying to learn Spanish because I think it will be useful in the future. I want to open a home improvement business some day and lots of people who work in the industry only speak Spanish. I just started using duolingo. I find it ridiculous how it tells me I'm 9% fluent in spanish after learning a dozen words. I guess it's a technique meant to motivate stupid people.
No.42054
Swedish, and I'm already fluent in it, and Italian, and since I'm a native Spanish speaker it's not very difficult.
No.42064
>>42054Why do you need Swedish? Planning on immigrating?
No.42065
>>42064I've lived in Sweden for some time now
No.42068
>>42067>every sentence was ne~ ne~ ne~ also ne~ ne~ also neeeeee~das cute
No.42069
>>42067Look for universities around the country that give remote courses (i.e. lessons are given in Skype or something similar and exams are turned in online). That should give you more options.
No.42071
>>42067>paying to learn a languagei would mock you but i was dumb enough to spend 800 bucks on learning how to TEACH a language when i dont even have income and nothing evr became of it
No.42072
>>42071I teach Spanish and get paid 30eur per hour
No.42081
>>42080try learning just a little bit more each day. Russian is a very hard language to learn for english speakers (and maybe brazilians). If you are slovak it should be easier.
No.42082
>>42080I've been learning it for 7 years.
>Learn the alphabet>Present tense conjugations>Tense, don't forget about verbal aspect>Cases for nouns and adjectives>Plural>Use Anki for frequent 1000-3000 wordsSpend time on each part until you're comfortable with using it and seeing it. Learn some basic grammar then grind vocabulary then learn more advanced grammar like participles or changing prefixes. After about 10 months of this I read a lot of wikipedia and watched a lot of Russian series and cartoons only understanding 40-60% at first but after a while it became easier and I could understand words I knew written but I said wrong so I didn't understand it when spoken before. The letter o if unstressed sounds like the letter a, which confused me and messed up my pronunciation at first.
After 4 years I understood 80-95% of a standard news article or tv show. I just stopped studying after that and just used it whenever there was nothing interesting in english or something interesting in Russian like USSR films
No.42086
>>41862What's the difference between Classical Latin and Medieval Latin, and where would I go to learn it?
No.42087
>>42080>>42082why do you even need it?
No.42088
>>42087I'm a russian and I have no idea why anyone would want to learn the language
No.42089
>>42088same here. hence the question
No.42090
>>42087(Not him) Learning a language is as much a hobby as anything else.
Some people enjoy the process.
No.42091
>>42090of course, but the question referred to the choice of language, not the process of learning itself
No.42092
>>42087I didn't need Russian per se. I liked some blogs that were about events in Russia and other countries like Ukraine, Poland, etc but they were mostly in Russian and the people in that "community" didn't speak English or French. I wanted to talk with them and understand the posts better, before learning Russian I just used online translators, so I studied the language.
>>42090They must be very boring people then
No.42093
>>42088vodka tastes better then
No.42094
>>42093vodka tastes like shit in any case
No.42098
>>42092You need something Ukrainian explained, just ask. Haven't seen much interesting content outside English internet for years though.
No.42976
i learn kanji as i learn japanese words and phrases.
for this reason you shouldn't start with kanji first. you should start with hiragana.
katakana is for foreign words and names so it's not really necessary to learn right away. just learn it as you go
No.43590
>>42088need it to access anywhere East Slavic that isn't Kiev, Peter, or Moscow
No.43605
>>41822Learning Korean right now, the Alphabet is easy enough but the pronounciation is a nightmare
No.43702
>>42080Читай книги. Никто узнает как писать падежи, друг, так только изучай слова.
No.43703
tried speaking succubus again today
gave up after using a word in the wrong context, because every word in succubus has 50 trillion meanings depending on hidden context
now my mom is angry and I'm back to being mute
No.43706
>>43605Me too, wizzy. Try reading "Fluent Forever". He really emphasizes that you need to learn pronunciation before anything else. With Korean, it's especially important. Even polyglots who learn languages for fun agree that Korean is fucking hard to train your ear for. Even more than Japanese.
This audio file really helped me distinguish the different sounds.
https://rhinospike.com/audio_requests/gwyner/14336/ No.43851
>>42086Technically, the term 'Medieval Latin' has no linguistic validity, in the sense that it IS latin, and thus it doesn't have any kind of separate existence as a language.
However, after the fall of the western roman empire the latin system of education kind of broke down (5th/6th century), and the old, urban schools of grammar/rhetoric died out. Thus the mantle of education had to be taken up by the Church, and while said institution was able to preserve the latin tongue, it was unable to do it in a completely uncorrupted manner through the entirety of the catholic world. Sometimes the changes/corruption were minor, but sometimes they 'ignored' the classical paradigms in such a way that it would've baffled Cicero himself. (Wikipedia has a decent list of common changes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_vocabulary,_syntax,_and_grammar)
Another thing is the difference in vocabulary. Medieval latin is often Christian latin, and it shows through the words employed, such as: "trinitas", "presbyter", "cherubim", "seraphim", "deipara", "evangelium", "paraclitus", etc.; that again would've confused Cicero. (There are even latin dictionaries specially made for the medieval period)
It must also be noted that catholic/latin europe was a pretty diverse place, so medieval latin is also characterized by certain 'regionalisms' that have the potential to cause confusion in the student. The irish, for example, are noted for their impenetrable/obtuse latin, which is now called "Hisperic" (5th-8th centuries)
So, it is always recommended that the student begins with the classical models, so that, when he gets to the medieval period, he'll be able to identify the differences and "medievalisms" that characterize it. If you are interested, check pages 362 and onwards in the PDF for further info.
No.43852
What's the fun of learning latin if nobody knows the true pronunciation system. It'd be like learning japanese, but pronouncing the words like in some badly dubbed anime. If you went back in time to rome you'd sound like a retard.
No.43853
>>43852Nobody learns latin to speak it, as it is done mostly in order to access the literary output of certain periods. Spoken latin is only used in educational contexts (as in Vivarium Novum) or as a form of "educated showoff".
The Church still uses latin orally in some limited cases (for example,
https://youtu.be/g-NJNSBNsyk?t=5s), and it is used in their hymns, chants and recitations of scripture (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB792T9HJDo). They have settled, obviously, on the italian pronunciation.
The comparation with japanese doesn't seem valid to me, as japanese has a "living" population of speakers that can actively define the standards of pronunciation. Latin would be more akin, it seems to me, to learning Old Japanese; you don't really need to learn how to pronounce it, if your only aspiration is to read the
Kojiki. Pronunciation would only be a matter of the first importance if you were a philologist or some other kind of scholar, or if japanese (I don't know it) had some kind of special grammar rules according to pronunciation.
No.43854
>>42080>Please, give some suggestions for a total beginner.Turn back before it is too late.
No.43855
Classical Latin since late november.
I've used Benjamin D'ooge Latin for Beginners. I made great progress with him which i wish i had continued having after finishing that book, but i don't know what resources to use for that and i doubt there's any, i'm guessing there are no shortcuts form here on out.
And i've been using a Latin reader composed by Frederick Warren Sanford and Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se illustrata. I also have a Concise Latin Grammar by the aforementioned Mr. D'ooge, but i've not delved deep into it and i've yet to discover anything new, but i have it at hand to refresh my memory.
No.46332
>>41944You can surely find people that speak BRPT here, wouldn't be too much of a stretch.
Also, focus on being able to read and write well first, that's my BR tip
No.46333
>>43605>>43706hows has korean been going for you guys
i started almost a month ago with anki. a few years ago i learned hangul along with some basic phrases using a book, but i quit it after a while. i'm hoping to continue at least with anki for a few more yearsr just continually adding stuff. will learn more of grammar eventually but it's too boring to read about so i'm probably behind
No.46334
>>43854i feel like the difficulty of a language only makes it more enjoyable to me, i don't expect to be fluent in less than 3 years atleast. english was such a small step frankly
No.46336
I've got the intention of learning how to read in a new language every six months, at least to the point of being able to reasonably follow a book with the help of a dictionary. I may catch on some listening as a collateral. I barely speak even on my own language, so that's of no importance to me.
Right now I'm doing Spanish, one more month and I will move to Japanese, as I will try to alternate each language with the most distinct possible from the previous one. I use Duolingo and Clozemaster, also set PressReader and YouTube for the language I'm learning. I think learning grammar has no use to my purpose.
No.46975
https://youtu.be/ehxW_dZXbqk
>Eleven hundredIs this really how Americans count? What next, ten hundred? Ninety nine hundred dollars? Soon we will hear " I received quarter past ten thousands dollars" What is wrong with simple and clear one thousand, eight hundred $. If their country is so big that billions are often used why won't they use the highest decimal?
Inb4 yes, I have aspergers. Laughing at other languages' counting systems has nothing to do with it. No.47259
>>46975its pretty fucking simple, say eleven hundred and then say one thousand one hundred. when they both mean the exact same thing you simply receive the information faster
No.47307
>>42092I'm sure you're so much more interesting.
Pro-tip: You're not
No.47328
>>42088>>42087Not the guy you were asking, but, a good reason to learn Russian is if the person is into Russian Literature, which in the 19th century was amazing. There is also the fact that if one is into poetry, being able to read them in their original language is better and Russia used to have amazing poets back then.
No.47827
>>47823start learning a bunch of cognates and lettering to help you (start learning the alphabet from the start), then go into numbers, then telling time, then conversational russian, then more advanced russian.
See what resources your local library has for books, and learning software for free.
No.47828
>>47823I would say learn the writing and reading from books, but use an all oral/audio way of learning to produce the sounds. Pimsleur is a good resource, because it teaches you to listen and pronounce, then you can use that to augment the writing that you are reading.
No.50490
>>47945Have you heard about the Yotsuba reading pack?
No.50897
I'm learning German and Spanish. I speak both at an intermediate level, so now I'm working on my listening comprehension by watching videos and listening to podcasts in those languages.
No.51529
just started learning Arabic for….. reasons (I enjoy larping as a spy or something)
download language keyboard and using an app or website to learn the writing system first
then I'll be using duolingo and tinycards, and after that clozemaster. anki for hard to remember words and new words.
keep a notebook nearby to write things down, and practice writing. randomly try to write about random subjects and see what you need to learn. at first you want yo write specifically about things you commonly do like hobbies or work and such before moving on to things you don't really do.
No.51542
>>42080I am still here after 2 years and nowadays I'm thinking of learning it seriously this time. I'll do it.
я буду делать это No.51562
i find that if you have a general understanding of basic linguistics, you have better tools to tackle language acquisition. i've been learning japanese (half a year now) and i'd say outside of vocabulary (which is just rote memorization), i've been able to retain most things.
i've built my conception of japanese off of tae kim's, who states that the verb (and conjugation) is the essential component to forming a complete sentence in japanese. japanese sentences are basically details added to help describe a verb. that's why plurality in nouns isn't important (sentences like "I kicked the ball." and "I kicked the balls." would be the same in japanese unless the plurality was extremely important, in which case you would specify with the exact number and a counter) my own additions have been:
1. the emphasis on building clauses with particles and particle combinations. i like to think of particles as very loosely functionally similar to prepositions in english except with the order reversed. particle clauses seem to be just "noun phrase followed by particle," so it's easy to break down sentences. particles are really important for "arranging" lexical meaning.
2. japanese has a variety of techniques to form noun phrases out of general ideas. "to iu", "koto", "no" and relative clauses make forming noun phrases, and thus particle clauses, very simple.
english doesn't really have particles, so my knowledge of linguistics helped make understanding japanese particles very simple. additionally, knowledge of phonemes gives me a lot of predictive power for reading kanji and the ability to discern geminate consonants and long vowels, which to my knowledge are generally allophonic in english.
No.51563
>>51562forgot to put 3, which is the importance of "verb stacking" with the -te form. you can communicate very intricate or extensive actions by using -te conjugated verbs. because of how robust japanese clauses are, you can have very long runon sentences that are considered complete thoughts. the japanese idea of a sentence is necessarily different, so it's important to understand the -te form.
No.51772
>>51542what is you native language? how are you learning it?
No.51782
>>51542Good for you. Learning something new is better than doing nothing and wasting away.
Also, a correction: it's not "Я буду делать это", it's "Я сделаю это".
Affixes play a huge role in the Russian language, and I advise you to pay close attention to these when learning it.
Смешить is not
рассмешить. Рассмешить is not
насмешить. Насмешить is not exactly
посмешить.
Once you can intuitively "dissect" words, isolate their root words and have a decent knowledge of various affixes used in different parts of speech it'll be much easier for you to learn new vocabulary.
For example: "дар" - a somewhat archaic, poetic word meaning "gift", or, in religious sense - "an offering to Gods"/"blessing from Gods".
"по
дарок" - gift
"по
дарить" - to gift
"по
дарочный" - adj. gift (e.g. gift card)
"
дарма" - somewhat archaic, meaning "for free"
"не
даром" - not without a reason, for a reason
These are just some words created using -дар- and various affixes, I've attached a screenshot of all related terms Russian Wiktionary article on the word "дар" offers.
Both phrases denote future tense, but think of the first phrase and its equivalents as English Future Continuous "I will
be doing it", and of the second phrase and it's equivalents as Future Simple "I will do it".
Just one thing, when you draw parallels with Future Simple, keep in mind that
it's implied you'll complete the action you're talking about in Russian. So it'd be somewhat close to the Future Perfect tense, minus the details about time. Bottom line is, it's something along the lines of "I will do it (and complete it)".
Despite the fact that drawing connections between the two languages is convenient and all, you should strive towards thinking in your target language and eventually drop using languages you know as a crutch to aid you in understanding Russian.Some more examples of the two verb tenses we just made up:
Я буду читать (эту книгу) - I will be reading (this book)
Я
прочитаю эту книгу - I will read (and complete) this book
Я буду рисовать (волшебника) - I will be drawing (a wizard)
Я
нарисую волшебника - I will draw a wizard
Note that different verbs denoting future completion of an action have different prefixes (in italics).
THE FOLLOWING ARE MY OBSERVATIONS AND THINGS I REMEMBERED ON THE SPOT. CONSULT A GRAMMAR BOOK, SINCE THERE MAY BE THINGS I COULDN'T REMEMBER AND I MAY BE PLAIN INCORRECT IN SOME PLACES.In examples above you may have noticed a certain pattern, with
some verbs in "Future Continuous" the Object is optional. The logic is generally similar to the English language. You can say "I will be reading", "I will be eating" as to explain the general activity you'll be performing without any particular details, you could if you wanted to, but it's not really needed, sufficient meaning is encapsulated in the verb itself; however, you can't say "I will be washing" - here you'd need to insert a word that'd explain the action in more detail since meaning is insufficient, like: "I will be washing the dishes", "I will be washing the clothes", "I will be washing my dog". Russian operates by the same principles: "Я буду есть" (I will be eating), "Я буду читать" (I will be reading), "Я буду петь" (I will be singing); "Я буду мыть посуду" (I will be washing the dishes), "Я буду мыть собаку" (I will be washing the dog).
Note that in everyday speech we say "Я помою посуду" and not "Я буду мыть посуду". The latter is grammatically correct, but still, we don't say it like that.
With "Future Simple" it's obligatory,
unless the Object is understood from context and you're giving a short reply in a dialogue situation. For example:
- Кто принесёт стул? (Who will bring a chair?)
- Я принесу (стул/его). (I will bring [a chair/it]) [его is a third-person masculine singular pronoun in accusative case]
It works just about the same way you use pronominalisation in English, except instead of substituting a noun for a pronoun you can omit it entirely.
Another exception is reflexive verbs.
For example:
Я буду умываться. (I will be washing [my face])
Я умоюсь. (I will wash [my face])
And intransitive verbs.
Я буду смеяться. (I will be laughing)
Я посмеюсь. (I will laugh)
Note that some reflexive verbs don't have a continuous form.
E.g.: Я застрелюсь (I'll shoot myself) doesn't have a continuous form, since it's an action that is quick and, logically, you can't be shooting yourself for a certain period of time and then stop.
Everything about "Future Simple" and "Future Continuous" that we have just discussed is also applicable to "Past Simple" and "Past Continuous" which I suggest we formulate now as well:
Я читал (эту книгу) - I was reading (this book)
Я прочитал эту книгу - I read this book (and completed it)
Я рисовал (волшебника) - I was drawing (a wizard)
Я нарисовал волшебника - I drew a wizard (and completed the drawing)
Кто принёс стул? - Who brought a chair?
Я принёс - I brought [the chair/it]
Я умывался - I was washing [my face]
Я умылся - I washed [my face] (and completed the action)
Я смеялся - I was laughing
Я посмеялся - I laughed (and completed the action)
Он застрелился - He shot himself (and completed the action)
My explanation isn't exactly professional and it's pretty convoluted. I tried my best.
I hope you aren't overwhelmed.
No.51783
>>47823>1. How hard is it to learn Russian?In terms of grammar it's very similar to Latin or Greek, if you've ever tried learning those two you know what I mean, not to mention the many exceptions from rules. In terms of vocabulary, you'll encounter many words with Slavic roots an average speaker of Romance/Germanic language will have a hard time understanding, and he won't have much linguistic material to go off from. There is quite a number of figures of speech the logic of which is also quite hard to understand for Romance/Germanic language speakers, I guess. In terms of orthography Russian is notorious for its many rules of proper writing, even the native speakers can't remember and follow them all.
Pretty difficult, I'd say.
>2. What is the best way to go about it?First things first, learn the alphabet. Try finding logical, grammatical, phonetic patterns within the language yourself. Don't even try to learn all cases, endings and whatnot by heart; make fun, non-standard examples that would illustrate these rules and try to develop intuitive understanding of these things. Read folklore and old fairytales, I'm not even kidding. You'll find more native Slavic words that are the biggest problem with learning Russian vocabulary for foreigners, plus most of the time you'll be able to understand their meaning from context, which is infinitely more useful and effective than looking a word up in a dictionary; grammatically they aren't challenging, but still present all the tenses, cases etc. to help you get used to them; they also contain plenty of figures of speech to help you acquaint yourself with the logic of the Russian language.
No.51785
>>51784P.S.: I'm a russian
No.51786
>>51784Russian literature and film are top tier.
No.51789
>>51784I wish I would live there.
No.51794
>>51784Looks extremely comfy. Better than the ZOGscape I live in.
No.51888
How can i improve my english writing? I can watch movies without subtitles and understand 90% but when i try to write something i feel like a complete retard. I thinking about fully rewrite some english book to feel the language, would it help me, or i just need to practice more by shitposting on boards, but when i shitpost i feel like a retard
No.52036
>>51999
what do you mean fluent? no one can become fluent in any language just by reading.
No.52965
I'm learning Spanish. I also dick around with Italian, Portuguese and Latin a bit. I'm learning them on Duolingo for the most part. If I moved overseas (I live in Australia) I'd probably move to Latin America, Spain, Portugal or Italy. There's just something about Romance languages and the cultures of Romance speaking countries that I like.
Inb4 cartels, favelas and all that.
No.52966
>>51888English is a fairly inconsistent language from my experience as a native speaker. It seems like one of those things where you just need to "feel" your way through it and being on the internet it's not like you won't find your fair share of people willing to correct you, for better or worse lol. What is your native language?
No.52967
necesito aprender espanol pero mi vocabulario es no bueno, no tengo metodos pero spanishdict.com
No.52990
>>52965Haha look at Escobar Senor over here
No.52993
learning English ,I have found that most modern books on grammar & composition are not that good, even most modern day dictionaries are garbage . I look for old books on archive.org they provide good information and go much more in-depth in the use of language as an organic whole , a clear, logical development of its subject. New books on grammar tend to be vague and disconnected, they go into details first without explaining the structure of the sentence.
>>51888Sentence parsing has helped me in writing & in reading comprehension, I recommend doing sentence diagramming exercises from books by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg & I use very old edition of Webster's Dictionary for phonetics & word meanings.
No.52999
>>42071tefl? yeah it's probably harder now since there are more native teachers in countries that used to hire for it
No.53064
Language learning had always been a sore spot for me.As someone who spent most of his life studying until burnout and then recovering from burnout,when I had the energy and motivation for learning a new language I didn't have the time and whenever I had the time I didn't have the energy and motivation. So for now I'm trying to do as little as I possibly can,get progress no matter how small. I'm a greedy perfectionist and this trait has hurt my progress a lot more than it helped.
I'm trying to learn German and Japanese, but I simply lack the motivation to keep going, because I tend to spend most of it for my normal studying, even that is usually not enough because my brain is fried to death for the most part.
Learning a new language successfully requires tremendous commitment, and I just can't find the willpower to do it, for the most part I study voacbulary for 10-15 seconds every day and that's it. I wish I could keep going but I can't.
No.53071
>>53064One language takes enough time and effort. Ditch Japanese, if you're not 100% focused and committed, an Asian language is just a waste of time. I've posted about this before, me and my brother both began learning Japanese but he had other stuff he wanted to do and I'm don't. After 2 years he had pretty much nothing to show for it and this is a guy who managed to get a master's degree in a technical field. It's simply a matter of grinding hours. If you don't put the hours, it's not going to happen. So if you want to learn a new language proficiently in a reasonable amount without putting too much effort you should go for a language that's closer to your native one. German or French is a lot easier and I believe one can half-ass through it. I did with English and I'm not a particularly smart person.
>10-15 seconds every dayYou mean minutes? To reach n1 in Japanese, which they call advanced but it's really "having all the basics figured it out" it takes an average of 3900 hours. Doing 15 minutes a day would take you over 40 years. Doing little progress every day is good but having a realistic goal is also necessary.
I know you didn't really asked for advice but if I were you I would do one language at a time and if learning this language is not the main thing you'll be doing, stick to one that's closer to your native language.
No.53074
>>53071No I mean seconds. yes I know, it's a joke to even think that it's going to be enough. My real goal is to be able to work my studying time up to 30 minutes. Also I should say that I'm not starting from scratch, I finished a book about jaapnese grammar years ago, and I've been watching anime and learning a few words for years. so far, I'm doing surprisingly well at understanding it. Like I said, I actually made a lot of progress with the grammar but I forgot about most of it. Same with hiragana and katakana. Also I%90 of the time I can understand what the characters are saying in romaji, I just don't know the meaning behind it.
Learning Japanese would have no benefit to me in real life,it just feels good when I understand anime. So I don't have any real reason to learn kanji for that very same reason. So ideally but also realistically, the ideal composition for me when it comes to Japanese is as follows:
1-Understand spoken Japanese
2-Know Hiragana and katakana
3-Know the structure of kanji and how it works, know about 10 most common ones that are seen in anime so I can look stuff up whenever I need to and make sense of what I'm looking at.(this is not that important really)
Just 1 and 2 would be enough, and given the fact that I'm definitely not starting from scratch and can already make sense of like %30-%40 of an anime episode, I just need to learn as much vocabulary as I can in hiragana/katakana, and review and further add to the grammar that I have learned.
As for German, my plan is to learn a few thousand words and half-ass it as I go along(change my operating system's language to German etc) just like you said. I'm in no rush to learn either of these two languages,so being able to half-ass it is the only way for me, because I just have too much stuff to do with uni as it is.
so if we remove kanji, I should be able to get to a point where I can understand %70 of anime in a couple of years, which is more than I could ask for.
Can I ask how far did you get in Japanese? How has the journey been for you?
No.53076
>>53074You do have a reason to learn Kanji if you're learning Japanese. This topic comes up from time to time in the Japanese thread so I'll not go into details but imo you're not cutting any corners by ignoring Kanji, in fact you're just making the process of learning Japanese harder on yourself. Learning Kanji is learning vocabulary, it's as simple as that. It's almost like trying to learn a Western language but wanting to skip the abc. Sure, I guess you can, but it would take so much longer and would effectively cut your access to all sorts of learning and entertainment resources/media that I can't imagine being worth it at all. Also, I don't know if you use flashcards and anki, but those help optmizing the process of memorizing vocabulary by A LOT. You have decks of cards with the basic vocabulary in easy to remember sentences, you have a native saying the sentence, you have those cards organizes in a way so you can take full advantage of spaced repetition. Learning, say, a thousand common words when you can't read and they're mingled with a bunch of stuff, spoken quickly in anime is going to take you a much longer time than using flashcards for example. Also they seem perfect for you. You want to do just 5 cards a day? Say you just want to put a couple of minutes to it? You can. And you'll be learning Kanji, Kana and improving your listening at the same time. Starting out I think it's the best thing you could possibly use.
>Can I ask how far did you get in Japanese? How has the journey been for you?It's been 4 years now and the first year was the worst because you can't read anything without putting all your effort into it and you constanly has the feeling that "you're almost there" which is really frustrating because you're not almost there at all. Also the more you know the easier it is to put time in to it. I can spend the whole day reading manga now and it doesn't feel like studying at all. I never cared for listening, my goal was and is manga and video games, but recently I watched a few Pokemon episodes and they were easy enough to understand, though even at this point I didn't get every single word of what they were saying.
Also I shoud ad, unlike you, I don't go to school and I don't have any other stuff I want/have to study, so since year one I've been putting about 5 hours into it every day, many days even more than that and even then it's a very hard language to learn, that's why I said to try to stick to German. If you're serious about learning Japanese you'll have to find a way to put way more than 30min a day into it
certainly more than 15 seconds and even then it's going to take longer than 2 years. More like 5 or 6.
No.53077
I've been thinking about language learning lately. The standard methods of simple memorization are tedious and require a lot of time and it still doesn't necessarily translate (heh) into actual fluency.
What is all this practice supposed to do? The goal is to be able to perceive meaning in some arbitrary organization of words and sentences, but this is attempted through the painstaking method of mapping a known language to an unknown, foreign language, word by word. So that, presumably, when you perceive a foreign sentence, your mind somehow remembers each word and its mapped translation, combining each to give you a coherent, meaningful gestalt.
However, what seems pretty clear to me, is that for all of this to work, it has to be automatic and unconscious. There is simply too much "work" to be done for it be a conscious process. Even if you go from the foreign word to the native word, what about the peculiar grammar of the language, the way it organizes nouns, adjectives and so on, the way certain things offer contextual information that changes the entire gestalt. It's simply not possible to memorize all that, nor can you effectively communicate with all of that noise in your head. Yes, language learners are aware that this should become automatic and second nature at some point, but is this kind of conscious processing really going to lead to that?
I think the standard way of learning languages is just plain wrong in some way. How do children learn their first language? There are no words to map, rather they map their direct experience, their perception, some kind of sense of the world that is then represented by an arbitrary collection of sounds they heard from mommy or the television. After you learn your first language, this ability for quick acquisition is lost on you - perhaps because once you learn to see the world in linguistic terms, you create an implicit barrier and you can no longer just map words to experience without several months of Anki grinding.
When you read a post in English, the meaning is transferred relatively instantly. Trying to observe that process as its happening is interesting. It's not as though the sentence creates an image in your mind or that each word makes you remember how it looks like or even its general idea, rather each word is simply sensed as meaningful, without any intermediate representation. If the sentence describes some scene, you might or might not imagine it, have a small flash of vivid imagery and what not, but this is secondary to the first process which makes the sentence meaningful and coherent.
The meaning of a word has a distinct sense to it, something which is coherent even without its representation, whether that's a German word or a Japanese word or even something completely arbitrary. The actual organization of letters is completely unimportant. What should happen when you read a sentence is that each word is mapped to such a distinct sense and meaning, the word serving only as a cue for you to experience it in that moment. A noun is some object in the world or perhaps even something completely abstract - and yet you have a "sense" for that thing. An adjective is a quality, paired with a noun it transforms its sense into a different sense i.e. the sense of "frog" is not the same as the sense of "giant frog", it fundamentally changes how you experience it ever so slightly. A full complex sentence also has a "sense" to it which is a kind of sum of each the smaller senses, resulting in a coherent gestalt, a meaning, something which isn't even contained fully in the sentence but always something much more.
Anyway, there has to be a better way to learn than Anki and brute-force memorization with spaced repetition. It shouldn't take you 6 years to learn a fucking language, even an Asian one.
No.53078
>>53077Maybe you don't want really want to learn a language at all, wiz. I'm assuming you're
>>53074. When I began learning English or Japanese I wasn't interested in how it happens, I didn't put my time into philosophizing on how the brain does what it does or what a language is. To be honest I never even thought about those things. My process was much simpler. I wanted to understand American movies and video games and so I began grinding anything that had English in it. In other words I would immerse myself in the language every second I could spare. Same thing for Japanese now.
>It shouldn't take you 6 years to learn a fucking language6 is so you can understand a good amount of it, not all of it, and to actually express yourself with some accuracy, it would take even longer. Even in my native language sometimes I can't remember words or words fail me. I've been learning English now for 12 years and if you talked to me in person you could tell I'm not a native. I think you underestimate the actual effort necessary to acquire a language. To me it sounds ludicrous that you consider 6 years too long for an Asian language. It's fucking hard, it does take a long time and there's no other way than forcing yourself through it until it becomes a natural process.
Spaced repetition and immersion are about the best methods out there I'm afraid. I'm pretty sure you would know more Japanese now if you grinded on Anki for however long it took you to think about all that stuff and post it here. The longer you don't grind, the longer it takes for you to reach where you want to be. 6 years is if you take it seriously, but it can easily be 10, 20 or never, the latter being the usual length it takes for most people, as they either give up because it's too hard (it is) or find out they don't really care that much about it to actually go through it. Between 6 or never, I would take 6.
No.53079
>>53076I see what you are saying.I do use anki. Right now I'm still stuck on learning hiragana katakana.That being said I'm still not really convinced on why I should learn kanji:
>Learning Kanji is learning vocabulary, it's as simple as that.I don't understand what you mean by this. Why can't I just learn the hiragana/katakana version of the word? It's perfectly possible to fully read/write in Japanese utilizing nothing but kana. Kanji is too much of a clusterfuck and for my purposes(I don't even read manga, I just watch anime for the most part) I simply don't need to know how a simple word that could be expressed with 3 kana characters is expressed in 24 strokes butt-fucking each other in the outdated braindead fashion that is kanji. Even if later on I decide to get in on manga I can just find hiragana only manga or hell, translated manga. I'm really not that super into anime and jp media, for the most part I don't even the time to get into it that much.
>It's almost like trying to learn a Western language but wanting to skip the abc. I don't think this analogy holds very well. I dabbled in Japanese when I was in high school and it is perfectly possible to understand spoken Japanese without kanji.
>but it would take so much longer and would effectively cut your access to all sorts of learning and entertainment resources/media that I can't imagine being worth it at all.Can you explain what you mean by these learning sources? Here is my plan for now:
1-learn kana
2-Memorize vocabulary in kaan through anki
3-Learn grammar through grammar books that are written in kana/romaji
4-Profit
And if I get stuck or don't understand something I can always consult the internet. I don't know where kanji fits in this plan.
I don't need listening at all, not even right now, for the simple reason that my native language's phonetics are so similar to that of Japanese, I can understand %90 of what is being said phonetically.
>Maybe you don't want really want to learn a language at all, wiz. I'm assuming you're >>53074.No.The guy you are replying to is not me.
No.53080
>>53078>>53077Also I would like to add, if you ever find a better method to learn a language than what's out there right now, let us know. I would like to learn French or Chinese still in this lifetime. I wish you good luck in your endeavours wizzie, though I think you might be misguided on how long and how hard this is. Please consider giving Anki a shot, as it helped me a lot and despite your apparent distate for it, it is an effective tool for language learning.
No.53081
>>53078There's no harm in thinking about how to make learning more effective. I just find the standard methods beyond tedious and most people have simply accepted that there is no better method out there. Even if I managed to grind the several years required for fluency, I imagine it would completely kill my interest in the language(s).
I learned English because I watched a little too much TV as a kid and my daily thoughts are in English. I didn't "grind" any flash cards or even learned the grammar technically. I passed tests because I could "go by the ear" and simply wrote in what sounded correct to me, I knew the rules implicitly and have pretty much never done any vocab or grammar training. You could call it "immersion", but I think that surrounding yourself with the language only makes it more likely for you to pick it up - however, it doesn't explain the actual process of acquisition, but it does give a hint that language learning is much more experiential/perceptual. If grinding Anki is effective, it's only through a secondary process of such learning i.e. in the 10 hours of spaced repetition, you probably implicitly do about 20 minutes of actually effective learning that improves your fluency.
The polyglots that can learn languages quickly probably just do it more often. Even if they might use the same tools like Anki, their way of learning probably follows a different internal process that they aren't even able to describe.
Anyway, I'm rambling. My interests are in German and Japanese, and I've tried Anki several times but I just find it too tedious. I guess I'll keep experimenting. I'm not saying that practice isn't part of the learning, but perhaps word-to-word, phrase-to-phrase mapping isn't the most effective practice routine.
No.53082
>>53079Oh, OK then. So let me respond to you properly then. I mean Kanji is literally vocabulary, they're words.
>It's perfectly possible to fully read/write in Japanese utilizing nothing but kana.You're right but as you know, the Japanese use Kanji and apart from the stuff made for kids that comes with furigana, and manuals for language learners, without Kanji you simply can't read anything and that leads me to your second question.
>Can you explain what you mean by these learning sources?I mean how are you going to use anki? There's no decent deck out there that's kana only and for good reason. If you're planning to build your own deck, my opinion is that it's a waste of time. There are decks out there with the basic Japanese vocabulary in simple to grasp sentences and native audio. You should use those decks at least for the first few thousand basic words. It would take you ages to build a deck and it wouldn't be as good, and it would take you too much time you could put to better use.
How are you going to use subtitles for the anime? Japanese subs with sub audio is one of the best ways to improve your listening/reading but if you don't know Kanji there's simply no subs you can use out there, all of them have Kanji.
As for grammar books I'm against that on personal grounds, I think learning grammar isolated is a terrible method, or at least it's not for me at all. I know it works for other people, so it's up to you. Second, if those books use romaji I would ditch them, as romaji is not japanese and relying on them even for a second takes away the time you should be improving your actually useful Kana.
Kanji is not that hard, you just need to give it time for your brain to get used to it. I know you're thinking now you don't need it but imo it's one of those things that will come back biting you in the ass later. Kanji is integral to the Japanese language and you shouldn't cut it out thinking it's going to save you time because it really won't. When you're grinding vocabulary with the Kanji in there, you're just learning vocabulary, it's not like you're "wasting time on those damn Kanjis". And if you're willing to learn them you can use the best anki decks, you can use subs, you might be interested in reading some manga which helps with immersion. It just opens too many doors to simply ignore it imo, but of course it's up to you.
No.53083
>>53081>I've tried Anki several times but I just find it too tedious.You're going to use just for the first few thousand words, it's not like you'll be stuck on anki hell forever. It's just a faster way to get some vocabulary under your belt so you can start going through native material without been so overwhelmed. It's suppose to save you time and in my experience it actually does.
No.53084
>>53082>Japanese subs with sub audioI mean original audio of course.
No.53085
>>53082Kanji is stupid and ineffective as fuck. As if learning thousands of characters wasn't difficult enough, when you put kanjis together you can obtain a new meaning. Just another layer of clusterfuck that doesn't serve anything.
>If you're planning to build your own deck, my opinion is that it's a waste of time. That's exactly what I'm planning to do. I tried using other people's decks for German but I found them to be of horrible quality, and for good reason. Here is an example of a card from my german deck:
(Front)The word in german and the audio file of the pronunciation of the word(this won't even be needed for reasons that I have explained)
(Back)meaning of the word and an image representing the meaning of the word. So for example I'd put an image of a doctor for "der Arzt"
So far this makes learning vocabulary an absolute breeze, if I didn't have anything else to do I could easily learn 5000+ words in a matter of months. This is extraordinary progress, considering that all you need to do is learn grammar, which you won't even need to push through because you can just read something in German and because you recognize all the words, you can guess the meaning easily and learn grammar context what have you that way. I mean hell, that's how I learned English. nobody tutored me, nobody taught me anything about anki, I just learned it along by adding shit up slowly.
Without straying too far off the topic, building your own deck is anything but a waste of time. For starters you gain familiarity which is crucial for learning the word, and because you were the one who made the card you already experienced it already anyway.
>There are decks out there with the basic Japanese vocabulary in simple to grasp sentences and native audio. As I've said, the native audio is useless to me anyway. I already know how to pronounce everything and how everything is pronounced because of my native language, very few exceptions apply to this. As for example sentences, the German deck I've prepared already features, but I can't say I was able to obtain any kind of benefit from it for the simple reason that I for the most part don't know enough grammar for me to gain insight on how the word is supposed to be used.
>How are you going to use subtitles for the anime? Japanese subs with sub audio is one of the best ways to improve your listening/reading but if you don't know Kanji there's simply no subs you can use out there, all of them have Kanji. And why would I mind using kanji subtitles? I don't need subtitles for the most part even, when I was studying Japanese and learned a word in Romaji(bad stuff I know) I could effortlessly recognize that word when it was used in anime,because the phonetics are %95 the same, and the differences are easily distinguishable(as a matter of fact aside from r/l,I can't think of any other difference) If there are parts that I can't understand because it is spoken too quickly or whatever, I can easily learn what the kana writing of the kanji is and utilize the sub to learn it. And this has literally never happened so far. So far if I know the word's romaji/kana, I can recognize the word whenever it is spoken in anime %100.
>As for grammar books I'm against that on personal grounds, I think learning grammar isolated is a terrible method, or at least it's not for me at all. Normally I would agree with you, and you would be right if grammar books were the only thing a learner were to rely on. but in conjunction with the media consumption it's actually super helpful to get the little details. Moreover Japanese grammar is unbelievably similar to that of my native language, and given how I already exploited this fact by correlating japanese grammar to its equivalent in my native language I was able to run through the grammar book I used in high school effortlessly.
A lot of your advice doesn't factor in these advantages, don't get me wrong if I was a native English speaker living in America then everything you said would be true. But I would be foolish to not take advantage of the similarities between Japanese and my native language.
I greatly value posters such as yourself though. I don't remember the last time I had a meaningful and positive discussion interaction on an imageboard without the thread getting derailed by outsiders/normies or the interaction turning into a pointless flaming war. It gives me hope to see posters like you exist. Thank you wizzy.
No.53086
>>53085discussion/interaction*
No.53087
I've learned multiple languages. I'm too autistic to speak in real life, not even in my native language, but I can read foreign language content. For instance, I have read foreign language generals on 4chan/int/ such as the Polish one and the Russian one. Right now I learn Hungarian. I started with Duolingo, but I also use Memrise (vocab), Clozemaster (fill in the blank), HiNative (ask other users questions and to correct sentences), Drops (vocab), writing to native speakers, and listening to music in Hungarian - which I also refer to LyricsTranslate.
For Duolingo, it's important to use the Tips and the Discussion features to learn the nuances of grammar. I think Duolingo gets more hate than it deserves.
>>53064I consider learning a few words and phrases to be better than not knowing anything at all. Worst case scenario - you're doing a daily mental exercise and future Alzheimer's will be postponed a year.
>>53077Unfortunately, it's rather impossible for an adult to learn a foreign language through immersion alone, as we already have a language in our minds to describe everything we see. Your mind will automatically shut out all of the foreign words, sounds, and grammar. You won't learn anything from, for example, listening to foreign songs or hearing a foreign person speak. Adults need a basic foundation before learning through immersion, and that's what purpose I see in memorization programs. If you can listen for these basic words, you will then be able to figure out new words and grammar from context.
No.53107
>>53085You can learn the verbal aspects Japanese just fine via hiragana only. In fact I've learned about ~3000 vocab words purely in romaji (yes, I know it's bad but it's convenient and doesn't make a difference in ability to recognize words anyway).
And yeah the grammar is pretty simple and straightforward. (Only thing to watch out for are the idioms/expressions, but that's just like any language).
And I'd actually argue that learning the vocab first makes kanji much easier. From a philosophic standpoint, children learn to speak and understand before they can read/write. From a practical standpoint, if you do learn kanji later you can just worry about learning the sounds rather than the meaning. This works nicely since many kanji are in fact only used for their phonetic parts.
No.53108
>>53087>For Duolingo, it's important to use the Tips and the Discussion features to learn the nuances of grammar. I think Duolingo gets more hate than it deserves.Because the phone app doesn't show those tips (or it didn't years ago), only the interactive pick the word that fills the blank part.
No.53111
I realized that I will never use whatever language I learn enough to warrant the painstaking process of learning.
This destroyed my motivation to learn any language, doesn't matter though.
No.53112
>>53079>It's perfectly possible to fully read/write in Japanese utilizing nothing but kana.That puts you on a sub-elementary-school level. Even children's books have some Kanji in them.
Even if for some insane reason you learned Japanese just to listen to cartoons, Kanji help out a lot. They're basically vocabulary, both in that they can carry the whole meaning of a word or in forming compounds. If you can hear the word and break it up into the kanji in your head, you can understand words you've never heard before. That's even more true for written words because you get to see the kanji.
Not trying to call you a retard but not learning Kanji when learning Japanese is like building a house without the foundation.
>>53078>6 is so you can understand a good amount of it, not all of it, and to actually express yourself with some accuracy, it would take even longer.6 years sounds a bit much to me. I've been doing Japanese for about 20 months, don't know the true average but I would say about 4 hours of meaningful immersion/day. I can read LNs and understand anime (that aren't military themed) with over 95% comprehension. I will admit that I can't pop open Japanese Wikipedia and read about the moons of Saturn, but that's mostly because I've never tried technical stuff.
I haven't really done much speaking so I'm sure I would be shit at it but living in Not Japan I don't get many opportunities to speak it.
I do agree that spaced repetition and immersion are the best methods.
>>53087>it's rather impossible for an adult to learn a foreign language through immersion aloneIf it's immersion alone and nothing else, it would be painfully slow but possible. Anki/SRS programs help speed up immersion immensely. I have never experienced my mind "automatically shutting out all of the foreign words, sounds, and grammar."
No.53113
>>531126 years really isn't much. I was talking about understanding most of it. Newspapers, articles, books and so forth, not just video game menus and light novels. Try to read an issue of Gunzo from beginning to end to know what I mean. Even people who pass n1 tests have trouble reading newspapers for example
my case. Also I try to be realistic so not to bullshit people. There are plenty of geniuses online saying how they're breezing through Steins Gate with 9 months of Anki or whatever when I know for a fact this is absolute bullshit.
Also I agree it's nonsense to not learn Kanji but I said that multiple times itt, I rested my case so to speak in this matter.
No.53115
>>53087>Unfortunately, it's rather impossible for an adult to learn a foreign language through immersion aloneI don't think this is the case. "Immersion" is a vague term that can mean something simple as watching foreign media, or something much more effective like actually living in a foreign country. The higher the level of immersion, the more likely you are to engage in the language acquisition process which isn't simply memorizing words and grammar. For instance, going to the store would require you to actually use the language as a tool and the stakes are higher than reviewing a flashcard (getting the wrong kind of ramen might ruin your night or you might embarrass yourself in front of the cute store clerk). In such cases, you are more likely to try to use the language to actually think and problem-solve, deduce meaning based on context, sense the meaning rather than the verbatim translation, you know, use the language the same way you use your native one (you're also more practically motivated to learn the language). Despite English being my second language, there is no subconscious jumping from my native tongue to English - these words are used directly as tool to convey meaning and organize experience, rather than being abstract representations, mappings to native words.
Spaced repetition is effective for memorizing because of one component: recall. Practicing recall is very close to the actual process of "remembering" something. However, I think that word-to-word, phrase-to-phrase mapping is a bad approach, because it only makes you better at remembering static instances instead of learning to "understand" the language. The idea is that if you learn all the words of a sentence separately, that somehow translates to understanding the sentence (as I mentioned in a previous post, the meaning of a sentence is always much larger than the sum of its words). A word isn't simply a static instance that has a distinct meaning that just needs to be known, rather, it's a dynamic thing that gets modified by the words around it. Reading is much more about "getting a sense of something" than "remembering the meaning of all the words" (you can sort of observe yourself as you read, how each word changes the distinct meaning shape/feeling of the sentence).
I've been thinking about developing better strategies for learning. Something which would distill the effective parts of various popular strategies into a single tool for practicing the skill of "understanding a language", which consists of small intuitive and perceptual skills that make you good at grasping the meaningful gestalt.
The first basic idea is that you learn words better through context, especially when those words have different forms based on gender, tense etc. Instead of learning a single word separately through Anki, you learn it in the places you're most likely to encounter it, learning how it interacts with the rest of the language. Of course, this can be done through "common phrases" decks in Anki, but this isn't dynamic enough. Seeing the same sentence over and over will result in memorization, instead of the intended understanding of all the nuances of the language.
The second basic idea is that you learn better if you practice "understanding", rather than "remembering". The difference is subtle, but understanding is more of a perceptual, intuitive skill, which essentially boils down to - guessing correctly. Instead of being given the answer, you will have to deduce the meaning based on context. This would hypothetically train your intuition for the language, training you to quickly identify nouns, verbs, connectors, to gauge the subject and object of the sentence, the tense and so on (all the rules you're forced to memorize). Of course, this would be too difficult and frustrating if it was pure guessing, so something like multiple choice is better (even when you don't know the word, you can try to deduce it and filter the possibilities). Also, another possibility is increasing the contextual cues in the sentences, like coloring male and female words blue and pink, or changing the font size of a word next to an adjective that mentions size i.e. small/big (these could be turned on and off, like training wheels).
The third basic idea is that language learning is boring and tedious, so finding ways of sustaining interest are crucial and would likely boost effectiveness simply because people did it more often. Gamifying the process is important, keeping scores, charts, graphing progress through vocabulary, hours spent and so on (Duolingo does this). Also, the material has to be engaging and worth going through, so no static examples of hypothetical waiters serving you a cappucino, but actual material from literature or foreign media, stuff that you actually want to understand.
I have a prototype for the guessing part of this potential app. I scrapped 5k most common german vocabulary into a list and the app gives you multiple choice quizzes. From playing around with it for a couple hours, it's at least fun and engaging, but actual effectiveness would require extensive experimentation. I've been able to learn to guess the meaning based on structure (especially easy for German since it has a lot of compound words), but single word mode like this is quite limited ("uns" would be much easier to guess in a sentence). The idea is to make an application that you could input a text in a foreign language and it would help you read it by giving you contextual cues for you to guess the correct meaning. Some cues would be difficult to implement since it would require natural language processing on my part, but in the most basic form it would just lookup a word in a dictionary and make a quiz for each word, or give you a random sentence or paragraph to arrange in order or to find the given translated word in the sentence or paragraph. It would at least speed up the usual strategy of reading and looking up unknown words in a dictionary, if nothing else.
No.53145
>>53087Do you know if HiNative is only for very specific translations or if it allows for more detailed explanation requests?
No.53156
>>53145HiNative allows you to ask questions of different formats, such as "What is the difference between [] and []?" or "Please show me example sentences with []", as well as allows free questions without a format. Furthermore, you can comment on your own questions, if you're unsure about an answer and need further explanation.
No.53158
>>53156Thanks, I'm registering for it. It's just that so many questions seemed to be solvable by even google translate, but now I'm seeing some more elaborate ones.
No.53196
>>51888read books in English and chat with people online
No.53286
I'm mostly learning Spanish and Norwegian on Duolingo and Japanese on both Duolingo and Memrise.
No.53456
A lot of posters are learning Japanese. Please be realistic guys. Here is a link with the difficulty and hours it takes for fluency in various languages according to the State Department. This is based on if your first language is English. Languages like Japanese and Mandarin are exceptionally difficult thus requiring immersion in countries that speak it. In the time it takes to learn either language you could've learned at least TWO LANGUAGES.
Source:
https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ No.53470
>>53456speaking english natively should be counted as a disability, it fucks your pronunciation for life unless you're learning dutch or something.
No.53497
>>53456it's not about the amount of languages otherwise you'd speak toki pona
No.53539
>>41822I'm not really learning french, but lately I've been watching documentaries in that language; and as spanish is my native language, I can understand the basic idea of some sentences. I'm too lazy to read a grammar book.
No.54736
Learning Chinese mainly with pimsleur's. I've tried to learn languages a lot many years ago, I feel like this time I will stick with it. I have 很好 pronunciation of consonants and tones. I whistle pretty good melodies after practicing, its got my mind on tone.
I read a book on Confucianism many years ago and liked it a lot, gonna learn literary Chinese and read original texts. I'm also very interested in the characters. Also gonna learn Japanese, and learn a small amount of Cantonese because Chinese loanwords to Japanese retain certain sounds that now in Chinese remain in Cantonese and I want to relate them.
I also want to learn Latin and Greek later on half for history and half for etymology(also German for etymology). One interesting etymology I know is that world comes from were (man as in werewolf) and old, the etymology means "age of man". Also deer used to be a word for all animals, cognate of German das Tier.
No.54786
german, mostly via reading simple stories or trying to, some videos, and duolingo
No.55272
>>41822Recently (2-3 weeks ago) I found out about an extension called DualSubs that puts 2 subtitles on Youtube videos. I have one in German and one in English. It's a lot better than reading the subtitles and switching tabs to look up a word.
No.55277
I gave up learning French just because of a nasty female French teacher that I had to deal with when I used to go to school.
No.55319
Not a language but an alphabet, however I think that shavian 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 is very cool. It's annoying to me when words aren't spelled how they're pronounced.
No.55390
>>51784Not him, but the best hacking forums are in Russian (exploit.in, xss.as, etc). So if you're interested in or work with infosec/cybersec, learning Russian might actually be useful.
No.56322
>>56286My nipponese skills have fallen so far. My first guess was "However, from school to whenever (some-verb-I-don't-know) isn't possible". After looking up the verb it looks like it says "However I can't just quit school whenever". Google translate and the information on the left shows me the error which is that the expression いつまでも means forever not whenever, and also that the から-まで construct wasn't "from this to then".
Where did you get your japanese subbed anime? All I could find is english subbed or no subs at all unless I paypig.
No.56366
>>53085>Kanji is stupid and ineffective as fuckKanji itself is very obsolete. In your language, just learning latin alphabet, you can read anything since your are child, japenese people are haigly limitated to acquiring knowledge from books in early ages.
No.56367
>>56286I preffer using books to build grammar progressively and kanji. I had a very frustrating experience trying to learnig latin with iuxtalineal. I found that is totally better to me learning grammar first, after that go for original reading material. Like 1.5 years learning latin until I am able to read Virgil, Terency, Cicero, etc. Now I'm learning japanese form gramatical books, since 6 months ago.
No.56396
>>56366It didn't felt that way, but I'm interested if that's actually the case or not. To me, it's more of a matter of vocabulary rather than the letters they use.
No.56399
>>56366Kanji characters are complex but they're not obsolete. Replacing the vocab with kana alone would make it completely nonsense even with spaces. Unfortunately Japanese needs Kanji because of the extreme amount of homophones.
No.56422
>>56322
>Where did you get your japanese subbed anime?https://www.kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2Fyou can get srt or ass files here
No.56426
>>51529Any recommendations for learning Arabic
No.56427
I've been completing an average of 5 crowns (levels) per day on duolingo between spanish and chinese for the past 2 months. It seems rather discouraging to realize I have to keep this up for several years to learn a language. I'm already getting burnt out after just 2 months.
No.56428
>>56427You need to either start browsing spanish & chinese internet or watching spanish & chinese shows. Without putting the language to any practical use you'll never become fluent.
No.56434
>>56428I will do that once I finish the duolingo courses. I already watch chinese anime but that's just for fun at this point because I only recognize a few words. There is an extension called language learning for netflix that will let you put two sets of subtitles on the screen and do other stuff like slow it down or pause it after each scene automatically to make it easier to comprehend what you're watching. I plan to use that after I finish duolingo to work on listening/reading comprehension. I tried it already but I think it would be more useful when I have more vocabulary. After that I will start to do reading books, writing posts online, and then speaking in that order.
No.56435
>>56434Read chinese kids books and play videogames in Chinese. For video games you can pause and quickly look up vocabulary too. Pokemon is a favourite among language learners because of its simply vocabulary and its lack of realtime elements.
No.56444
I've been learning Spanish for 2 months and it's easy to reach B1 in the following months. It goes well with some podcasts while playing Euro Truck Simulator 2.
No.56445
>>56444What made you decide to learn Spanish?
No.56579
>>56445Sorry for the late reply. it's been 3 months, but I've made so much progress.
>why Spanish?beucase it's easier to advance in this language, compared to Russian, which I studied for years.
No.56896
when i watch movies in spanish (or whatever your target language is ), should i use spanish subs, english subs, or just go no subs at all?
No.56897
>>56896the target language, if you use another you'll think in that language instead of the target
No.56931
>>56930Hi there, you could always try maybe use a discord server to practicse talking the english? just an idea
No.56933
>>56930Make youtube videos, start streaming, spam vocaroo links on imageboards. All methods that doesn't require direct social interaction.
No.56941
I am learning Persian. It's hard to find resources and media devices to consume though, but I like the language.
No.56942
>>56941What made you pick Persian? Never heard of anyone wanting to learn that one before.
No.56951
>>56942I live in Turkey, that's why.
No.57009
>>56579el español es chill as fuck
No.57012
>>53107>In fact I've learned about ~3000 vocab words purely in romajiHoly fuck, imagine knowing 3000 words and not being able to read most of them, that must be depressing
No.57150
>>51782a year later, I must thank you. now I'm still learning Russian and I'll take your advice really serious.
No.57170
>>41822Japanese using the most primitive technology available to me: books, pen and paper. Any time spent behind the glowing dopamine rectangle is an opportunity to become distracted. I am putting my productivity in jeopardy at this very moment.
No.57957
I am going to try and learn Spanish. I've never really tried to learn a language before and didn't turn up for my French classes in school.
No.57967
I am learning Portuguese. I been at it for about a month so far and I like learning it. This is the first language I've tried to learn
No.57993
Over 5 years ago I spent about 6 months learning Norwegian for a few hours every day. It got to a point I could have conversations with a guy I knew online (only in text, his accent was hard to understand, and my pronunciation was dogshit) I used a "Teach Yourself" course to get a basic grasp of grammar and some words and then used Anki to learn a few thousand more words.
Forgotten 99% of it now because I no longer speak to him, there's barely any good Norwegian content and I won't be living in Norway in the future.
Can't think of any language that I would actually use on even a semi-rare basis these day (besides English of course), so it seems pointless to learn any as I'll only end up forgetting that one also.
No.57995
>>57993
>Forgotten 99% of it now because I no longer speak to him, there's barely any good Norwegian content and I won't be living in Norway in the future. that's why you don't choose a language of a shit culture that has no cultural content
that's why i chose japanese
No.58142
>>57995I think nearly every country has a shit culture; Japanese included
No.58274
I have been learning Japanese with an immersion based approach for the past 2.5 months and so far I am up to 2000 anki cards, I finished reading a grammar guide (for recognition only, no memorization) and I have spent roughly 100 hours immersing. The number is quite low because never immersed during my first 4 weeks. (WHICH I STRONLGY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO, TOLERATE THE AMBIGUITY)
I have also spent over 1500 hours listening to Japanese prior to any sort of study and that might have given me a slight advantage in terms of listening comprehension. I'm not sure. At this point I can already follow easy SOL anime, but most details are lost, I simply understand enough to follow the plot and it is actually quite enjoyable. I'm mainly posting this with the hopes that I will return here one day as this thread seems like it will stay up for a while and then I'll get to see how far I have come with the language and report my progress.
I know for sure that this method will work as it is what I did to learn English, and to you native speakers, can you spot any mistakes? Starting a new language made me realize how good I actually am at English, it's incredible how well immersion works, you eventually just get such a strong intuition for how the language is supposed to sound that mistakes are almost inconceivable.
Anyways, for those who want to follow a similar approach, and hate all shitty textbooks and the like I recommend you look up Refold/AJATT. Good luck with whatever language that you're currently learning and see you in the future.
No.58277
>>58274I'm genuinely happy for you. I hope you become fluent in it.
My depression and brain fog makes it literally impossible to even remember one single japanese symbol.
I once studied some basics like written numerals in Japanese, and I can't remember a single thing.
No.58725
I would recommend watching anime in 5 minute segments and watching those 5 minute segments with japanese subtitles(and english subtitles as a guide) over and over again. if you are a beginnger i would recommend you watch the segments 5 times each to build up your japanese and then you can do each segment 3 times instead of 5 after you attain a certain level
I learned so much japanese by doing this
No.58926
>>58274The Refold guy did an interview recently. It has confirmed some of my suspicions that language learning is subconscious and all the traditional methods miss the mark with the focus on grammar and conscious processing.
I'm currently trying to learn German (maybe Japanese one day) through this method, by focusing on immersion and comprehensible input. There's this great series of educational movies called "Nicos Weg" that go through A1, A2 and B1 levels of German in a very progressive way through storytelling. I've been watching it without subtitles and I can follow the storyline and pick up new words through context. I've also started doing some Anki German vocab on the side, but I don't focus on hard memorization, simply to be able to recognize words when they occur naturally as an aid to immersion.
Immersion is definitely the way to go, but I'm still thinking about how to optimize the process. What immersion achieves is just giving you a lot of INPUT which may be comprehensible or not, depending on random chance. Media like "Nicos Weg" is really good, since it goes progressively in terms of difficulty, getting close to the ideal "i+1" which is when you know most of the words and you're able to infer the meaning of the rest, that seems like an optimal point to be. But there isn't a lot of media that's designed to be that way, stuff like movies, tv shows and the news can vary greatly in terms of difficulty.
It seems to me, the more you're hitting that "i+1" optimal point, the more effective your acquisition. Immersion is good, but it's sort of a blind approach that can take years, depending on what you choose to immerse with. This is something AI could help with in the future, judging your current level of comprehension, then recommending media or even generating new media that is close to that "i+1" point for you
>>58725This is an interesting approach, but it can get quite boring seeing the same scene over and over again. It also seems very similar to memorization, where you're trying to drill in the vocabulary by mapping the subtitles to what the anime character are saying.
However, re-watching stuff is probably a good idea. I think watching something new with subtitles once gives you a basic understanding of the plot and characters, and then re-watching it without subtitles many times will increase the chance of getting comprehensible input.
No.58936
>>58274>2.5 months>2000 anki cardswtf, how are you retaining all that? I'm at 1 month and I only know about 150 words and a bit of grammar, I go over the same 15~ or so words every day for a few days until I move on, otherwise I can't remember crap
No.59072
I've taught myself French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Russian to the point where I can read anything and listen to anything with ease. I'm currently intermediate in Japanese and learning Mandarin. Besides those, I've tinkered around with maybe 15-20 other languages and dialects. For Japanese, I started off with Genki and Assimil then right onto various elementary graded readers. Currently I'm going through light novels and watching movies. For Mandarin, I'm using Assimil then will quickly go onto graded readers since I think my kanji knowledge gave me a boost with hanzi.
No.59075
>>59072>Russian to the point where I can read anything and listen to anything with ease. What's your native language? It's so hard if you're not a Slavic native speaker.
No.59082
>>59075English. It is hard, yes. In some ways I would say it's harder than Japanese or Mandarin. What worked for me after the beginner/intermediate stages was speedrunning through tons of Russian media with English subs to get used to the sounds of speech then forcing myself to go through novels that I knew would have somewhat easier vocabulary like thrillers. Sitcoms, of which there are many Russian ones, without subtitles will also be crucial because they tend to talk clearer and due to the short episode length it's easier to stay engaged.
No.59109
>>56951That
is a good reason.
No.59110
If I learnt a new language it would probably be German because I know a bit from school or Japanese because I could start absorbing little bits from anime and get some of the practice without effort.
I guess I should just pick one and stick with it but I couldn't decide which one so instead I did nothing for years.
Another option would be a mediterranean language so I could move to a beautiful place with good weather.
I should have done it when I could be neet, now I don't know if I'll get around to doing it.
No.59112
>>59110The fraction of words you would pick up from anime is like a grain of sand compared to what you actually need to be functional in Japanese. You really need a solid reason to learn a language if you want to be motivated to keep at it.
No.59113
>>59112>You really need a solid reason to learn a languageIt's simple.
Spite.
No.59114
>>59112Of course I'd have to mostly do other kinds of practice but I think I'm significantly better than average at absorbing language skills like that.
No.59279
I've been improving my Japanese and reading some novels now. One thing I need to start doing more is watching more Japanese films and series to get better listening skills. On another note, I took a kanji test recently. It consisted of knowing the kanji and each reading for which my results were around the 750 kanji. Those are not counting the ones I only recognized and didn't know the readings which would have put my estimated kanji level at around 900. I've still got a long way to go for the joyo.
No.59774
>>56399> Unfortunately Japanese needs Kanji because of the extreme amount of homophones.Not true at all. Korean has just as many homophones and there was no major issue with phasing out kanji. Japan could do the same if it had the will.
No.60512
I am going to be taking a German class as an elective at my university. I'm very excited but also very nervous as it's been a long time since I've tried to learn a new language.
No.60694
Germanfag here, would love to learn Russian.
No.60745
>>60744
Also, not him.
No.60746
>>60694Media recomendation in German?
No.60927
Is there any FREE site or app where you can learn to speak english by talking to other people?
No.60933
>>60927Omegle video chat people and ask them if they speak English until you get one
No.60939
I'm learning sanskrit.
No.61169
>>60939You and the Persian learner are intriguing. Many here generically learn Japanese and Romance languages, because muh anime and muh Rome. Can I ask why Sanskrit?
No.61170
>>61169Began learning it because of Buddhism but I find literature in Sanskrit like Kathasaritsagara and the Hindu epics to be equally worth it and fascinating.
No.61173
>>41822Anyone know any course or website (preferably free or dirt cheap) that I can learn Malay from?
No.61177
>>61169I've studied Arabic, Farsi, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The reason most people don't advance that much is because the media and materials available in languages like those are not even close to the quantity and quality of those in Western European countries and Japan/Korea
No.61193
>>61174Because my mother's family speaks Malay (They're Javanese Singaporeans) and I also live in a place with a sizeable Malay population
No.61226
>>60939I would love to learn sanskrit at some point, too, and be able to read the Mahabharata.
I've also began reading buddhism but in chinese. Of course chinese buddhism is full of transliterations from sanskrit which look whacky in chinese and makes it nearly unreadable.
No.61228
not needing to rely on translators for manga or doujins and anime would awesome, but in a way the budren of trsnslation acts as a filter and TYPICALLY only good stuff gets picked up anyways so i am not missing much. at least for manga however, something truly unfortunate happens quite often, groups will just stop translating and drop series and they will never get picked up again and finished. this sucks so fucking much, especially when you're following their releases and they just stop… the agony. knowing japanese i could finally escape that hell. it is a huge commitment though, i don't think i have it in me
No.61240
>>41822Lately learning Russian. I'm not as interested in linguistics as I used to be, but my mother speaks Russian so I gotta improve my skills.
No.61241
>>61240Are you learning from zero?
>>61228You could learn hiragana and katakana in a few days then finish a beginner's course within a few months. Getting from nothing to intermediate in Japanese should take maybe six months if you study at least 10 hours a week
No.61270
English is the language I've been learning. Now I've reached a point where I want to start visiting some English websites on a daily basis, but my English is not good enough to freely converse with native speakers. At the same time I'm fed up with the intellectual level of the online communities in my native language. I'm like an online refugee.
No.61695
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.
No.61740
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.
No.61741
>>61695I 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.
No.61743
Learning Spanish, watching a 10 minute spanish video every day, slowly reading a spanish book, playing WoW on a spanish free server.
No.61745
>>61743You'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.
No.61746
>>61745>conchas de BulmaTop lel
No.62249
>>41822i 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
No.62250
>>62249You know you can use Whitaker's words, right?
No.62259
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.
No.62318
>>62270i 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".
No.62319
>>62318I 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.
No.62321
>>62319i don't care about casuals, i care about people like me who actually give a damn.
No.62325
>>62319>>62321The point is, people who actually care do learn japanese to overcome the trajslation barrier.
Casuals won't and they get fucked for that.
No.62625
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
No.62639
>>41822i have a physical book for learning chinese, haven't touched it in a decade
No.62704
>>59072How long did it take you? Trying to get through Spanish then French. How did your roadmap look like for the romance languages?
No.62812
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.
No.62819
>>62812adhd 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.
No.63107
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/ No.65127
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.
No.65128
>>63107Managed 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.
No.65446
>>65128how much time did you dedicate to it per day?
No.65453
>>65446Wish 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.
No.65518
>>65128>>65453Anki 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.
No.65520
>>65518Anki 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.
No.65526
>>65520I 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.
No.65528
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.
No.65530
>>65528Nope. There's no shortcut or easy way around actual grinding, sorry.
No.65531
>>65526It'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.
>>65528Any 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.
No.65533
>>65528>a 30 year old zoomerA what?
No.65534
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.
>>65531Adding a sample sentence a good idea wi, I'll update my cards while they are still a few.
No.66330
how to learn language fast? but with no effort plz
No.66331
>>66330Read hentai with popup dictionary
No.66332
>>66330Get scientists to freeze your body and wake you up in 200 years when you can just download a language in your head.
No.66555
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.
No.66559
>>66555>(Mandarin) Chinese>I have the perfect (series of) books for my situation.Tell me.
No.66560
>>66559Well 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.
No.66580
>>66579Loss of motivation is just cope for when you get stuck on a certain level. You got filtered.
No.66603
>>66579exact 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
No.66990
>>65528Skyrim has a Japanese translation.
No.67078
>>65528Just 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
No.67148
>>41822>what language are you learningfrench
>what tools do you use to learn itnetflix,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
No.67318
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.