Language Learner's Thread - Cunning Linguists Welcome. - General

[QUOTE=Deimantassk;50810202]Okay, so I moved to Germany like 9 months ago, but I barely learned any German and I don't seem to have any motivation to learn it. Any tips how to make my German better without even trying? haha And if anyone wants to learn Lithuanian, there is basically no apps for it from my experience. So I can help kinda?[/QUOTE] Duolingo is a relatively low effort way of learning.

Find a German girlfriend who has really bad English.

[QUOTE=reevezy67;50810802]Find a German girlfriend who has really bad English.[/QUOTE] This isn't a bad idea, actually. My girlfriend is Chilean, and has been learning a ton of English from me. You just need to find someone who's willing to be patient and work with you to help you learn. You also need to be willing to commit to learning.

love is a good motivator to learn a language

[QUOTE=helifreak;50810305]Duolingo is a relatively low effort way of learning.[/QUOTE] Tried Duolingo, did not really stick with me. I don't know why. [QUOTE=reevezy67;50810802]Find a German girlfriend who has really bad English.[/QUOTE] Hahaha, like thats easy.

[QUOTE=elitehakor;50816408]love is a good motivator to learn a language[/QUOTE] That's the reason I'm learning Finnish here pretty much

Are there many conlang learners/speakers here? I've been learning toki pona for about six months now. There's a small community of speakers on IRC/telegram that I chat with quite often, that has helped quite a lot with my learning. I'm also interested in learning esperanto and a bit of lojban, haven't started either of them yet though. --- lon ni la jan li toki e toki sin anu seme? mi kama sona e toki pona tan tenpo mun pi luka wan. kulupu lili pi toki pona li lon ilo IRC en ilo Teleka. tenpo mute la mi toki tawa ona mute. ni li pona tawa kama sona mi. mi wile kama sona e toki Epelanto en toki Losupan, taso mi open ala e ona mute.

I'm curious, what are the recommended modern resources for esperanto? Back when I was first interested in it it was an e-mail course lol. Also kind of disappointed that my college doesn't offer any languages that are interesting to me, it has spanish, french, or german. I'll just do a test to skip the latter to get it out of the way but I was hoping for something quite different from any germanic/romance language.

Post your anki decks! Memrise, vocab lists, flashcards, whatever. I do 24 new cards a day. I want to get a new textbook. [IMG]http://puu.sh/rfn1G/bb9c3ce567.png[/IMG] [editline]18th September 2016[/editline] I just bought two books that I can't afford from Amazon China. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/JANG1Ux.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/yzAmHp2.jpg[/IMG]

[t]https://helifreak.duckdns.org/image/20160918130307430.png[/t] 198 cards in 42 minutes. Kanji deck alone has claimed 34 double sided sheets of paper and is well on it's way to the 35th. Looking back at the first sheet I now fit 4-5x as many per page as my ability to write shit small has grown immensely. [URL="https://helifreak.duckdns.org/image/anki-%E7%B5%B1%E8%A8%88-2016-09-18%4023-09-32.png"]Stats linked because it's in Japanese[/URL]. Never done anything with the Tae Kim deck with tiers, gave up on Russian pretty quickly, newspaper headlines got to the stage of making 3 cards then giving up, song lyric decks got to the stage of making decks but no cards. I think kanji was 20 a day (10 new, 10 of the opposite direction of yesterday's cards), vocab is 20 new a day until it starts taking too long.

How do you get the sub categories?

Drag and drop. Took me ages to figure that out.

Updated it all and added a traditional deck. [IMG]http://puu.sh/rfrmV/37a53ccc3b.png[/IMG]

[QUOTE=thelurker1234;51013752]I'm curious, what are the recommended modern resources for esperanto? Back when I was first interested in it it was an e-mail course lol. Also kind of disappointed that my college doesn't offer any languages that are interesting to me, it has spanish, french, or german. I'll just do a test to skip the latter to get it out of the way but I was hoping for something quite different from any germanic/romance language.[/QUOTE] I started learning Esperanto a few days ago, I would recommend checking out the Telegram groups and the IRC (##esperanto on Freenode.) The community is very friendly and helpful. In terms of learning resources, I've had Memrise, Duolingo, and Lernu.net recommended to me. :)

Decided to give Korean a go. Japanese still needs work so I'm going to forgo English on this one and hope for the best. A bit concerned I won't find a good language to ladder from Korean but I'll worry about that in a couple of years. Last time I took a look at Hangul I came up with the great (read: awful) idea of only using katakana to learn the sounds and I honestly can't think of a worse writing system to transcribe them in (오 and 어 are both オ, o and O respectively in latin). Don't have a particular goal with the language, just seems like the logical next step from Japanese (apart from an image in DAAS I said I'd translate eventually) - hopefully I find something to keep me interested. I did pick up まんがで韓国語がしゃべれる (Speak Korean Through Manga) while I was visiting my brother since there was a Japanese book store there, I'll have to give it another look once I learn Hangul.

[QUOTE=helifreak;51093793]Decided to give Korean a go. Japanese still needs work so I'm going to forgo English on this one and hope for the best. A bit concerned I won't find a good language to ladder from Korean but I'll worry about that in a couple of years. Last time I took a look at Hangul I came up with the great (read: awful) idea of only using katakana to learn the sounds and I honestly can't think of a worse writing system to transcribe them in (오 and 어 are both オ, o and O respectively in latin). Don't have a particular goal with the language, just seems like the logical next step from Japanese (apart from an image in DAAS I said I'd translate eventually) - hopefully I find something to keep me interested. I did pick up まんがで韓国語がしゃべれる (Speak Korean Through Manga) while I was visiting my brother since there was a Japanese book store there, I'll have to give it another look once I learn Hangul.[/QUOTE] You know the difference between 오 and 어, right? 오 is like o in "so", and 어 is transliterated "eo" and sounds like "aw" in "saw" [editline]23rd September 2016[/editline] [url]http://www.aeriagloris.com/LearnKorean/[/url] do like, 200 of these per day. That's how I learned hangeul

[QUOTE=proboardslol;51093807]You know the difference between 오 and 어, right? 오 is like o in "so", and 어 is transliterated "eo" and sounds like "aw" in "saw" [editline]23rd September 2016[/editline] [url]http://www.aeriagloris.com/LearnKorean/[/url] do like, 200 of these per day. That's how I learned hangeul[/QUOTE] Yeah I knew that. Was just pointing out that in the Japanese way of writing it they don't bother to differentiate it. That site appears to be basically the Korean equivalent of realkana, I'll definitely use that.

Are you using any books? I need to get back into learning Korean...

polish and finnish are both going pretty well - enough to the point where I'm a regular in the polish thread and able to read a little finnish as well learning colloquial is fucking difficult though

Apart from that one in Japanese, no. Barely touched the Japanese grammar book I got so I probably won't bother. Tae Kim's guide covered basically everything so it might not work so well for Korean.

[QUOTE=Sobotnik;51093949] learning colloquial is fucking difficult though[/QUOTE] dont you mean "well 'ard"

[QUOTE=helifreak;51093957]Apart from that one in Japanese, no. Barely touched the Japanese grammar book I got so I probably won't bother. Tae Kim's guide covered basically everything so it might not work so well for Korean.[/QUOTE] reddit's /r/korean mostly uses [url=https://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Korean-Beginning-Textbooks-Language/dp/0824834402]This book[/url]. It's also the book that we used in my Korean 1 & 2 class in college.

[QUOTE=proboardslol;51094001]reddit's /r/korean mostly uses [url=https://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Korean-Beginning-Textbooks-Language/dp/0824834402]This book[/url]. It's also the book that we used in my Korean 1 & 2 class in college.[/QUOTE] Laddering Korean through Japanese so I'll have to import if I want to read something.

Go balls deep and go for a chinese language afterwards.

如果是这样的话，我就帮助你。我不要说我说得为了给你教中文教到一个很高的水平已经够了，但我以为还好。 因为汉语有声调，所以开始的时候汉语不太容易。要得到这样的观点，就是每一次你说一个词，也要想到那个词的声调。你要是说错声调的话，就要自杀。不让自己说错声调，那样真不行。 [editline]24th September 2016[/editline] Google translate really made this one interesting, it sounds exactly like a Chinese speaker of English without much real world experience. [quote] If this is the case , I'll help you . I do not say that I speak to you in order to teach in a high level of culture and education have been enough, but I thought okay.Because the Chinese tonal , so the beginning of the Chinese is not easy . To get this view , is that every time you say a word , but also think of the word tone . If you are wrong tone , then he would commit suicide . Not to wrong tone , so not really . [/quote] My Translation [quote] If you want to, I'll teach you. I don't want to say my Chinese is already good enough to teach you fully, but I think it's still alright. At the start Chinese is a bit difficult because of tones. You should take on this mindset, every time you pronounce a character also imagine the tone. If you say the tone wrong commit suicide, getting a tone wrong really not ok.[/quote] [editline]24th September 2016[/editline] I'm not at all confident about the Chinese I just wrote though, went a bit out of bounds, but that's how you learn.

I see you posted the damn translation after i'd had my online chinese dictionary open for the last ten minutes. Aww well, good for practice i guess. Serious question though, when should i use 中文 vs 汉语 vs 普通话? Not for just chinese either, e.g.英文 vs 英语 is something i've read/heard as well. Chinese grammar is actually pretty simple which was surprising. It's just everything else thats a pain. [editline]24th September 2016[/editline] You should get your rainy to check it for you dude

Um so 中文 is what I hear most people use, if you want to focus more on speaking use 汉语。 If you want to specify that it's the mandarin dialect you use 普通话。If you want to say it to someone that isn't from the mainland or sound nationalist in the mainland you say 国语。 英语 isn't used very often, again, it's more literary than 英文。 [editline]24th September 2016[/editline] Other than the difference between 文 and 语 differences are colloquial or have different origins. For example more people say 粤语 than 广东话 in my experience。 I think out of respect for 香港 also speaking Cantonese but I could be wrong. [editline]24th September 2016[/editline] Yeah grammar is ok, there are some trickier structures/particles though. And the past tense(that isn't actually past tense) 了 takes a long time to get the hang of, it's impossible to learn from textbooks. Just need to hear it a million times until you understand it. 我学了中文两年了，学得很认真，请把那本为科学新生的课本扔下一楼的那个小垃圾筒去吧， 我不用学那个了。好了，它被我扔掉了。你经常换专业，垃圾越来越多。

is there a place to read like really simple books, stories, etc in other languages? simple texts that would allow me to read on the level of preteen kids in poland/finland is what i'm aiming for before i tackle shit like the witcher or the kalevala

[QUOTE=Sobotnik;51123739]is there a place to read like really simple books, stories, etc in other languages? simple texts that would allow me to read on the level of preteen kids in poland/finland is what i'm aiming for before i tackle shit like the witcher or the kalevala[/QUOTE] Le petit prince is the book you're looking for. It's a beautiful story, and is one of the world's most widely translated books.

[QUOTE=Sobotnik;51123739]is there a place to read like really simple books, stories, etc in other languages? simple texts that would allow me to read on the level of preteen kids in poland/finland is what i'm aiming for before i tackle shit like the witcher or the kalevala[/QUOTE] You can also find a lot of their literary canons online too, with the added bonus that you'll have read the shit other young people were likely made to read while in school.