Learning Languages

[̮ ɤ ̮]

I can't really say that watching movies in English ever helped me to improve my skills. Rading on the other hand was at least to a certain extend useful, as you get a sense for grammar and structure of a language. But as the others said, immersion is the key.

 

For French: I heard that the French don't really like speaking people (especially the Brits), so you may better go to Canada. 

[HybridxReality]

Yeah, Canadians are super chill, haha. That's who I'm normally asking with help, haha.

I do happen to have friends that write in French on Facebook all the time, so that' probably helpful too.

I would just like to see someone that's completed a language course on Duolingo and to see how much they can speak afterwards. That would be interesting. I want to seehow much of the French language they can understand with just using Duolingo.

I know you won't be completely fluent, but I am curious.

[BuzzersonKillwell]

I've probably done about 70% of the skill tree. I can read French pretty well. I'm not reading any novels but I can comprehend almost all the signage and websites I see. I can also read all the immersion stuff, but I can't translate it well because I don't always grasp the grammar or idiomatic usage well enough to do a correct, literal translation.

I can occasionally get the gist of a news program or song onthe radio but both the speed and the usage are different than "Educational French". They cut a lot of corners for the sake of brevity, the same as we do in English. So, my listening comprehension is still quite poor.

In terms of speaking, I suspect I could do OK in a pinch as I can form a lot of sentences in my head. But I know they'd be fairly broken and my pronunciation would be lousy so I've never attempted to try.

I don't expect this would change if I hit 100% on duolingo. At this point I don't think it is a lack of vocabulary that is the biggest hurdle.

[AlisaPet]

On 18.12.2011 at 7:55 PM, Guest markovianprocess said:

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.

As you may have heard, Livemocha is no longer in business and that link no longer works. 
Also, site, https://www.lingq.com/, is an web and mobile language learning tool for learning languages in context. This is a good analog of Livemocha!

[Battra]

I speak Mexican and Castilian Spanish and a smattering of Japanese.

 

My advice in any case is to practice in your head over and over and over and over.

 

THINK in the other language...all the time. Translate everything you're doing all the time.

 

If you don't know it... like let's say you're playing a video game.... okku ha tatakai da... I'm going to fight that orc!  If you don't know a word, say that one in English and look it up later.

 

My Japanese came from a bit of help with bilingual Japanese in  FFXI:Online and I was able to cobble together enough of a vocabulary along with being able to read all hirogana, katakana, and about 350 kanjis. Eventually I could communicate well enough to not have to out myself as an American and I've been able to play other online games on the Japanese servers exclusively with Japanese.