What are you learning?

[Feba]

Re: What are you learning?

From the Constitutional Law link above, I found the following:

Open Yale Courses

Courses from Yale; not interactive like the above, but offer downloadable videos, and apparently, audio. Seems like a good thing to use as one would audiobooks, at the very least.

[Feba]

Re: What are you learning?

Anybody learning Korean, or interested in picking it up?

Picking it up again, probably for serious this time. I'm essentially starting from one; that is to say, I know hangul, and jack all of anything else.

[DakAttack]

Re: What are you learning?

I want to finish my French education, but I don't know where to begin. What class would I fit into? Should I start over?

I think I left off with conjugating verbs. I remember that being a hassle.

[Mezlo]

Re: What are you learning?

Anybody learning Korean, or interested in picking it up?

Mmm... Korean BBQ and soju... Good sheet... I think I might make some this weekend !!!

[Feba]

Re: What are you learning?

Dak, you could try Duolingo. It has a placement test that should allow you to skip the most boring stuff, and then slowly work your skills up to probably an intermediatish level. It will at least give you an idea of your current abilities, and allow you to brush up on some skills that you've missed.

I would define "Finish" before you set out to do that, though. If you want to be fluent, it's pretty much a never ending process; define how much of the language is "enough" for you to stop studying and move on.

[Malacite]

Re: What are you learning?

I want to finish my French education, but I don't know where to begin. What class would I fit into? Should I start over?

I think I left off with conjugating verbs. I remember that being a hassle.

It's the grammar that always irked me.

[Aksannyi]

Re: What are you learning?

French actually wasn't too bad. Nowadays I get confused with all of the verb tenses more than the conjugations themselves. Sure, there were some irregulars (what language doesn't have them), but it wasn't that bad to learn.

I would like to take a refresher course in French one of these days. There's quite a lot of vocabulary I've forgotten over time but I still know a lot of the basics, so I'm still able to communicate fairly well. This also explains why my Spanish isn't terrible either, because I know most of the most commonly used words.

This is a site that I was linked to by BG, it seems to have some good tips, particularly the section about acquiring vocabulary words. I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here's How

[Feba]

Re: What are you learning?

Article is mostly good advice, comments are mostly a big pile of sad though.

The two things I'd caution on (not oppose) about the article are 1-, there is no "one system" for learning languages. The author isn't saying hers is the only way, just that it's what worked for her, but there's enough there for it to be misconstrued. 2- The whole "no English!" idea has some good points, but it is my understanding that more recent studies have shown this to be less effective. I do most of my language learning in the target language, and I definitely think that above the intermediate level you want to minimize your use of English to near zero, but there are some things that are just quicker to give a translation or English explanation for and move on.

For example, if I want to understand a verb or adjective, I definitely want to look it up in a target language dictionary, and see how they define it. On the other hand, this ranges from ineffective to a complete waste of time for nouns; totally understanding a definition may not aid you in figuring out what the hell they're talking about. It's definitely worth using native dictionaries occasionally, so you learn how to describe things you don't know the word for, and figure out ways to 'talk around' your vocabulary, but to always rely on the foreign language is going to lead to the occasional brick wall, or wasting ten minutes of study time trying to figure a single thing out. Using your native language is even harder to avoid if you're studying by yourself; with a native teacher or tutor who can explain things when you're having trouble, it's much simpler; when you have to figure out what the problem is, look it up, and try to understand the description, it's near impossible sometimes.

Things from the comments that are just plain wrong:

* Someone mentioned that certain peoples' brains are well set up for languages, and other people are just doomed to struggle. Just no.
* "I live in America, so places that don't speak English are super far away". You have internet, get a headset and use it.
* Someone suggests only learning closely related languages. Uh, I suppose if you just want to brag about how many languages you can speak, sure.
* "I can't do immersion because I don't have the time/money to travel". No, you can't do immersion because you are lazy. Anyone can immerse themselves domestically, as long as they have internet access. You can watch near infinite TV, youtube, listen to music, read books, chat and skype online, etc. etc. I was immersed in Japanese for half a year before I actually went to Japan.
* "How does this compare to Rosetta Stone?" this irks me for so many reasons. Mainly that RS has marketed itself to the point of discouraging people from learning languages; they make it seem as if they're the ONLY method that works, so you're either rich and learn fast with RS, or you're poor and incompetent with anything else. Nothing could be further from the truth, and there is nothing RS does that can't be replicated in plenty of other ways. I'd really like to see how much of the cost of their product goes into their marketing department... Partially because you then go on to say you can't afford it anyway. If you can't afford it, why the fuck do you care how effective it is compared to Rosetta Stone? That's like me asking a Honda dealer how their sedans compare to a Bentley; does it fucking matter? I'm not buying the Bentley anyway, and the Civic is going to get me from Point A to Point B in nearly as much comfort, nearly the same speed, nearly as safe. The differences are minor at best. On the other hand, my eschewing automobiles until I can afford the Bentley WILL keep me from ever traveling period.
* "I've been learning Japanese for a couple of years. I've finally gotten pronunciation down, and a few dozen words", No, you haven't learned Japanese. You have memorized a few phrases, and practiced a few sounds. Even at two minutes a day, that's ridiculously low for two years, let alone the minimum half hour you should be putting in (really, I would say longer, but still). A few dozen words is more like "day one" than "two years".

Minor nitpick: someone mentions wanting to talk faster so you don't "sound lazy". I think that's not really a problem; once you're comfortable in speaking a language, you'll find a comfortable speaking speed. For me, I probably speak slightly faster than most native speakers in Chinese, maybe about the same in Japanese. The people I know who speak slowly in English tend to speak slowly in their native tongues as well. I wouldn't worry about adjusting your speed too much unless people are having a hard time understanding you.


Aks, I'd recommend you try reading. You know the basics, and reading will help you to figure out where those are weak, while improving and moving past basics. Just mark the words you don't understand, and try to get things from context, if looking everything up in a dictionary is too slow for you. It'll help drill in your grammar, and teach you some odd exceptions to go with it.

[Aksannyi]

Re: What are you learning?

Aks, I'd recommend you try reading. You know the basics, and reading will help you to figure out where those are weak, while improving and moving past basics. Just mark the words you don't understand, and try to get things from context, if looking everything up in a dictionary is too slow for you. It'll help drill in your grammar, and teach you some odd exceptions to go with it.

Definitely for French and Spanish, that will help quite a bit. I would consider myself at moderate-high competency in Spanish while I'm more at straight up moderate competency in French. My new project is German, though I don't know if I should spend time learning a brand new language when I haven't really "finished" (since you can't really ever finish a language) learning the first two.

The main thing I like about that site I linked is the emphasis on pronunciation. I spent a lot of time learning to pronounce French and Spanish, and it's paid off. (Native Mexican speaker told me that I "don't have an accent" which I know is not true but I've been told by many others that I speak very well.)

I bought a few books for learning German and I have a lot of resource sites, it's just finding the time to study it at this point. Right now I'm at the point where I'll randomly ask my boyfriend for a word or a phrase but it doesn't really stick. I need to know how to spell a word before I can really know it, which is something my ex-husband never understood when I was learning Spanish. I think if I actually sat down and committed to it, I'd learn it very rapidly. The thing about learning languages isn't just the learning part, but the motivation and the desire to actually do it.

[Feba]

Re: What are you learning?

I skipped over something worth taking note of in the comments, that if you aim to speak more than two languages, you can make use of your second language to pick up the others. This is definitely a good idea, both where the languages may be similar (such as between Romance languages, or between CJKV), or where they're dissimilar, simply to distance yourself from thinking in English, and to drill in some ideas in your second language.

Obviously knowing Japanese helps my Chinese, and vice versa. Picking up Korean, much of the grammar is similar to Japanese, and much of the vocabulary is shared with both, and English. There's actually a book sold here, Chinese, the title translates to something like "Speak in 7 Days: If You Know Japanese, You Know Korean!"; I'm not buying it for now, mostly because I've found perfectly good resources for free online and don't see the point in spending my time and money on the book, but also partially because studying Korean through Japanese through Chinese is so fucking meta I would probably spend more time taking it to the library and blowing peoples' minds than actually learning.

My Anki decks are... eclectic. For one, I have no intention of seriously learning Russian, but I am trying to keep myself from forgetting cyrllic, so I do toss some vocab at it every now and then. The answers are frequently in Japanese/Korean/Chinese, where they're English loanwords (or names) anyway. My Korean deck definitely has more Chinese/Japanese answers than English. German (another language I have no intention of really learning, but I do need to keep some vocabulary for my legal studies) is mostly answered in Chinese, again because legal studies. There are some things in my Chinese/Japanese deck that are answered in Korean, mostly things from Korea (place names and people).

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I hadn't yet seen your reply when I posted my addendum, but yeah, uh, do that. Use French and Spanish to study German.

As for pronunciation, I try not to worry myself about it too much, mainly because even English is a bit strange for me. It's definitely important to work on and be aware of it as things come up, but there are some things I simply cannot get my mouth to do (umlaut U comes to mind. It happens in Chinese, and it's just awful). That said, I definitely do try to get my accent close enough to be understandable, even if I'm not going to be confused for a native (although that does tend to happen on phone calls, though, so I dunno). On the other hand, one of the things I did quite a bit of when I first started out with Chinese was using a program that, essentially, boiled down to saying one thing and asking you to choose which of the given transcriptions was correct. Learning two separate phonetic writing systems also helped, and probably helped with Japanese too (but honestly, if you have bad Japanese pronunciation, you're just kind of an idiot. Rhythm/pitch, sure, but pronunciation is easy as hell)

I'm dropping French for Korean for the time being, but I should probably put more focus into pronunciation for both of them. Korean, especially, I can read, but I'm not really super great on managing all the different vowels.

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EDIT: EDIT: I heard you like addendums in your addendums so I addended my addendum so you can read while you read