Learning Languages

[kriss]

is anyone here bi-lingual or multi-lingual?

I've been hacking away at Japanese for a little bit now and in particular have begun working on hiragana by breaking the 47 characters down into memorization of 5 or 6 a day until eventually moving onto katakana and from there, the years long process of getting enough kanji to function.

It seems this is one of the more harder to tackle languages - Mellie has begun learning the basics of Italian.

anyone have tips for language acquisition methods that are able to be adhered to on the regular? So far I've just spending a couple of hours a day repetitively writing out whatever characters I'm studying and it works really well.

[Guest]

i took two years of German in college and had class four days a week for an hour. Definitely helps to look at/read/speak the language every day. i've been out of college for almost two years now and can barely remember any of it.

[withengineheart]

Moved to Norway from Minnesota a few years ago. Immersion is definitely the way to go, but hey. Not everyone can move/wants to move to a different country.

First year at the University, all my classes were in Norwegian. I knew how it was supposed to sound having lived there when I was 9 but couldn't communicate for shit.

I basically wrote down every word I heard that I didn't understand in a book and looked it up in my bible (dictionary) each night. Went pretty quickly after that.

Tips:

-Move to given country

-Get a girlfriend there; speak to her in English, let her answer in the foreign language. Helps placing words you weren't sure of to situations.

-Write shit down, look it up

-Watch TV with subtitles

-Start out with comics, move onto short novels

-Learn whole sentences first; It's a lot easier to fake your way through conversations while in the learning process if you know how the phrase is supposed to sound. Then go back, dissect and translate the words, write it out again after having figured out the subject-adjective-verb placement.

-Watch foreign films.

Just had my first oral exams in Norwegian and passed with flying colors. Definitely suprised myself. Realized I've started dreaming in Norwegian which is apparently a sign that it's sinking in.

Good luck Kriss! Japanese is a helluvalot harder to work your way through than germanic languages..

[lonesomexloveus]

ive decided that if i ever learn another language, it's going to be sign language. universal.

[somethingvinyl]

I took Greek in grad school, but it was ancient so not really relevant today.

[kriss]

Moved to Norway from Minnesota a few years ago. Immersion is definitely the way to go, but hey. Not everyone can move/wants to move to a different country.

First year at the University, all my classes were in Norwegian. I knew how it was supposed to sound having lived there when I was 9 but couldn't communicate for shit.

I basically wrote down every word I heard that I didn't understand in a book and looked it up in my bible (dictionary) each night. Went pretty quickly after that.

Tips:

-Move to given country

-Get a girlfriend there; speak to her in English, let her answer in the foreign language. Helps placing words you weren't sure of to situations.

-Write shit down, look it up

-Watch TV with subtitles

-Start out with comics, move onto short novels

-Learn whole sentences first; It's a lot easier to fake your way through conversations while in the learning process if you know how the phrase is supposed to sound. Then go back, dissect and translate the words, write it out again after having figured out the subject-adjective-verb placement.

-Watch foreign films.

Just had my first oral exams in Norwegian and passed with flying colors. Definitely suprised myself. Realized I've started dreaming in Norwegian which is apparently a sign that it's sinking in.

Good luck Kriss! Japanese is a helluvalot harder to work your way through than germanic languages..

Tokyo is actually in the ten year plan so I'll get to that soon enough. Not sure that Mellie'd be down with me getting a Japanese girlfriend - though certainly I wouldn't argue if she were

I've been mainly using textfugu.com as they give free lessons on how to completely work through Hiragana and Katakana with an intro to Kanji. From there it costs to get to the rest of the lessons but if I can get that far in the next couple of months (been emailing with the site's founder and he said that at the pace I've been working - as long as my mind doesn't hit cruise control - I should be able to have the Hiragana and Katakana down inside of a month to the point where I can atleast start doing things like reading children's manga with the Kanji highlighted below the two simpler alphabets, etc), I'm willing to pay for those.

Thanks for the tips everyone!

[j4m35]

i've got french and latin under my belt. start reading books you know well (for me, for example, it would be something like harry potter) in the language that you want to learn. it'll help immensely.

german is next up for me. i'm really excited to learn it.

[Guest]

I took 2 semesters of Japanese my first few years of College. I don't remember anything. I can watch some shows in Japanese and understand what is going on, but if I see someone write it or try to speak I am at a loss.

[almightyseancore]

i learned a shit ton of spanish from living in texas.

also my 9th grade spanish class did a 2 week trip to mexico, with each student staying with a different spanish speaking family out there, and attending a spanish speaking school during weekdays.

albeit 2 weeks isnt much time, but the immersion really helped.

so pretty much everything engineheart up there said, sans short novels.

i pretty much stuck to comics.

to this day i'm still not fluent in the language but i know more than most.

[avery]

i can speak french. i write it better than i speak it though because i took 4 yrs of it in high school, took the AP test and minored in french lit in college. my mother spoke french to me when i was little, but it was all simple stuff you'd say to a child and then when i started school, i spoke english and went through about 9 yrs of not speaking french at all. i find when i need to do my french papers, all that government speak causes me to go to the dictionary a lot.

what i try to do to keep up with it though is speak with my cousins, but that's also via internet (email, facebook) and i still try to read as much as possible (magazines, newspapers, online articles, books). like someone above said, watch movies and programs with subtitles (or sometimes without, to keep myself on my toes).

both my mother and my mother-in-law speak french but we all speak english to each other. i guess if i wanted to be more diligent about maintaining my french, i'd speak french to them, but they're so rigid and critical as it is, i'm kind of "mehhhh" about subjecting myself to even more constant correction and judgement.

i can get by conversationally pretty well so it's ok.

[beneathbelow]

2 years of College Arabic, plus Rosetta stone and lately the "pimsleur method" (look it up). plus I go to the Masjid "mosque" and listen to Arabic in its purest form, spoken straight from the koran. lots of Muslim friends, and I love to eat at one of the many Muslim restaurants in the area. I would love to go to the Middlebury Summer language school in Vermont. trying to save money to study and travel in the Middle East for an extended period of time.

[controlthebleeding]

ive decided that if i ever learn another language, it's going to be sign language. universal.

that's not really true. different countries have different ways of signing. there are some form of sign that are universal, but only a few. even people in different states have slightly different forms of sign.

also go live with a family that signs. you'll learn quickly. i learned how to sign enough to make people's orders within a few tries by an old man who was a regular. dude was fuckin' awesome. also my nieces' fiance is deaf and she learned sign really quickly after meeting him. within a month she was carrying on conversations with him like it was no biggie. it's probably the easiest language to learn if you are around it enough.

not that this has anything to do with what i've said, but his sister was gorgeous and also deaf. i would have bought her a trailer, but she wasn't interested.

[kriss]

I took 2 semesters of Japanese my first few years of College. I don't remember anything. I can watch some shows in Japanese and understand what is going on, but if I see someone write it or try to speak I am at a loss.

are you able to do this fully without the aid of subtitles or do you need them from time to time? Working my way though Hiragana right now before moving onto Katakana and atleast with those two alphabets, I can start building a word bank so that I can begin to piece together sentences and understand them when I hear them as I spend the next several years agonizing through Kanji.

[electrocute]

ive decided that if i ever learn another language, it's going to be sign language. universal.

My wife is certified in ASL (American Sign Language). There are different varieties. Not everything will translate that great. One of her patients used FSL (French Sign Language) and it was structured differently and there was a lot of miscommunication.

[Guest]

I took 2 semesters of Japanese my first few years of College. I don't remember anything. I can watch some shows in Japanese and understand what is going on, but if I see someone write it or try to speak I am at a loss.

are you able to do this fully without the aid of subtitles or do you need them from time to time? Working my way though Hiragana right now before moving onto Katakana and atleast with those two alphabets, I can start building a word bank so that I can begin to piece together sentences and understand them when I hear them as I spend the next several years agonizing through Kanji.

Without I get the gist of what is going on, but there is so much implied with the Japanese language I still miss a lot.

[kriss]

Yeah for sure. I've been finding that katakana is the predominant alphabet used on things like food packaging, japanese pop star magazines, etc with hiragana and kanji interspersed in to provide the context.

[Team Avatar]

i can speak french. i write it better than i speak it though because i took 4 yrs of it in high school, took the AP test and minored in french lit in college. my mother spoke french to me when i was little, but it was all simple stuff you'd say to a child and then when i started school, i spoke english and went through about 9 yrs of not speaking french at all. i find when i need to do my french papers, all that government speak causes me to go to the dictionary a lot.

what i try to do to keep up with it though is speak with my cousins, but that's also via internet (email, facebook) and i still try to read as much as possible (magazines, newspapers, online articles, books). like someone above said, watch movies and programs with subtitles (or sometimes without, to keep myself on my toes).

both my mother and my mother-in-law speak french but we all speak english to each other. i guess if i wanted to be more diligent about maintaining my french, i'd speak french to them, but they're so rigid and critical as it is, i'm kind of "mehhhh" about subjecting myself to even more constant correction and judgement.

i can get by conversationally pretty well so it's ok.

\

je parle francais!!!!

but not really. I studied in paris for a semester though Just got back home actually

[avery]

i can speak french. i write it better than i speak it though because i took 4 yrs of it in high school, took the AP test and minored in french lit in college. my mother spoke french to me when i was little, but it was all simple stuff you'd say to a child and then when i started school, i spoke english and went through about 9 yrs of not speaking french at all. i find when i need to do my french papers, all that government speak causes me to go to the dictionary a lot.

what i try to do to keep up with it though is speak with my cousins, but that's also via internet (email, facebook) and i still try to read as much as possible (magazines, newspapers, online articles, books). like someone above said, watch movies and programs with subtitles (or sometimes without, to keep myself on my toes).

both my mother and my mother-in-law speak french but we all speak english to each other. i guess if i wanted to be more diligent about maintaining my french, i'd speak french to them, but they're so rigid and critical as it is, i'm kind of "mehhhh" about subjecting myself to even more constant correction and judgement.

i can get by conversationally pretty well so it's ok.

\

je parle francais!!!!

but not really. I studied in paris for a semester though Just got back home actually

nice. i always wanted to do that, but i didn't want to leave the people i was dating at the time. i'm not a real big believer in long distance relationships. in hindsight, i wish i would've gone in college because the bf at the time was a waste of time. of course, that's hindsight for you...

i'm sure your french is better than you think or are letting on though because immersion works wonders.

tu as étudié où à paris? et quel sujet?

my cousins live in troyes and lyon. i have a close "ta ta" who lives outside of paris in nogent sur marne. both my mother and MIL lived in paris though--my mother in the 9th arrondisement on the rue de rome.

[Zick]

I took 3 years of Japanese in high school. We pretty much learned the same stuff in years 2 and 3. Year 1 was just learning kana for the most part. I probably only knew about 20 kanji upon leaving the class because my teacher was pretty shit. I still know how to read kana for the most part but I couldn't tell you what it meant

[Guest markovianprocess]

I took basic French in school, but I'm using a website called www.livemocha.com to brush up. They have basic language courses in most languages for free, so maybe it's a good place to go before you shell out on lessons.

The great thing is they have a large user community, so you're able to get feedback from people that speak the language.

[xlovecolouredx]

i try to practice my poor english skill at here since i joined. glad you guys don't feel annoy about my english.

well, if you guy wanna learn thai, i think i can help....

[kriss]

^ I won't lie, I've looked at Korean and Thai as other languages to pick up since atleast with those, I'm not dealing with three different alphabets. Tips for Thai?

[HybridxReality]

This is a pretty old thread, but I'm bumping in case anyone else has more insight on this subject. Maybe some books to check out or anything of that sort.

I'm trying to learn French and it's going a little slow. Mainly using Duolingo and I've been memorizing a good amount now.

I had actually stopped learning for a month and went back, because I didn't want to lose all that I learned. Well, I did lose some of it, but I still remember a good amount.

[BuzzersonKillwell]

I've been doing the same off and on for like a year or year and a half. I should pick it up again, it's been like a month.

 

I've found Duolingo to be a great tool for learning vocabulary, but pretty poor for grammar and reading and listening comprehension. I'd suggest the book "English Grammar for Students of French" which breaks down sentence and grammar in French AND English, so if you don't know what a demonstrative pronoun is they'll give you examples in both languages and highlight the differences in sentence structure.

 

It seems like the grammar stuff will eventually get sorted as you move further into the language but I found the background to be helpful, especially some of the grammatical concepts that weren't intuitive if you only know english. The other thing I use is the podcast Coffee Break French, which also covers some grammar stuff but helps with listening comprehension. I'd recommend starting with Season 2. 

 

Lastly, a lot of DVDs you might already have sometimes contain French subs or dubbing. I know Arrested Development does, so you could watch that. Spending time with the language in any format is helpful.

[HybridxReality]

Don't give up! Hopefully this is a little bit of a push, haha.

I'll definitely give that book a shot. I couldn't find an eBook for it, so I'll probably end up buying it or finding a PDF for it. Appreciate it.

I think I am following that podcast on Stitcher, but have yet to listen to it. I'll actually give it a shot soon.

And yes, I've been trying to do that with movies lately (Inglourious Basterds). I guess I'll just set it to all movies I watch from now on.

I've been told by French speakers to immerse myself in it as much as I can, so that's a good tip.