People who learned (or currently learning) another language by themselves, how did you do it? Where did you start...

People who learned (or currently learning) another language by themselves, how did you do it? Where did you start, how did you practice, what did you use for guidance (study book, internet), etc? Any tips?

Other urls found in this thread:

japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/379/why-are-the-particles-は-ha⇒wa-へ-he⇒e-and-を-wo⇒o-not-spelled-phonet
newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/bilingual-advantage-aging-brain
dana.org/Cerebrum/2012/The_Cognitive_Benefits_of_Being_Bilingual/
supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal_fricative
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

learn basic grammer, grind vocabulary with Anki and start to read as fast as possible, once you get a feel for the basics add listening/watching movies to your daily routine.

remember, learning a language is all about immersion (which can done by means of the internet) in your target language as wel as repetition.

getting some exercise books might help but personally I dont find them necissary as you will eventually get a natural feeling for the grammer of your target language.

good luck OP, remember the rapidity of your progress depends solely on your own motivation so always keep reminding yourself why you wanted to learn the language in the first place.

i think duolingo works
its way better than most other software
i did the italian duolingo course sparsely for about a monthand i can understand most written italian i see, not counting all the nouns

I taught myself two languages to complete fluency—I teach one of them as a living—and another one to business level. You should give up every software minus Anki, and you should keep it as a starting point. Don't rely too much on it, don't add too much fields and don't download a deck. Creating and teaching is itself the best way to remember an information. Find a nice textbook—two are fine but don't pointlessly accumulate learning material—and a complete dictionary, both physicial, and once you've progressed enough trade your dictionary with a native one. Give it all in grammar while learning vocabulary on a steady rythme. Try to speak with people engaged in academics in the target language, or who are proven to have a excellent command, and avoid natives and current learners. Read, read, read, take notes, rewrite them, read and eventually teach out what you found. That's the best way to progress.

The lazy way? Google some shit and try to memorise basics.

Submerge in the media. Browse krautchan/dvatirech/2chan/whatever the fuck. Read comics in the language, then news. Watch some movies.

Find translations for everything you don't understand. You'll remember a grammatical rule after googling it fifteen times and the next one is a lot easier because you'll know how annoying it is and that gives you the motivation to learn it in fewer tries.

Currently learning Spanish and French. I started learning Spanish a few years ago using a website called LiveMocha, gave up, and then picked it up again using Duolingo and Memrise. I'm fairly competent now, and can have a reasonably interesting conversation provided the other person speaks very slowly. Duolingo took me about as far as it was going to, so I'm now trying to improve by translating random articles from Spanish to English. I might also try finding a penfriend on Interpals or something like that, so I can have more conversation practice.

I've only started learning French a week or two ago (or re-learning, seeing as I learned it at school - but British schools are very shit at teaching languages), using only Duolingo. I'm slowly getting better, but I think it would have been more useful to use something else to help me understand the rule of the grammar first. Duolingo and Memrise are perfect for learning vocabulary, but they don't really explain any of the rules of the language or the confusing idiosyncracies.

Duolingo has the discussion section. There are a couple of very active French people who help out. Getting that bit of discussion can be very helpful.

The grammar is actually pretty good but you need to know what it's testing first. So you can look up the grammar concept first and then put it into practice.

For everyone: a lot of the advice above is not great. I would suggest going as quickly as possible to a country where they speak the language and using it. It's also a good idea to get a pulpy fiction book to read. Then do what you want.

Look, there's basically a recipe to it:

>get frequency dictionary
>add 500 most common words to Anki
>when you're done with it, download Lingoes and some translator add-on to your browser
>start reading newspapers and trying to make sense of phrases' structure on your own
>learn some grammar, don't bother with textbooks, just find something online that goes straight to the point
>start watching TV with subs on, use subs on the same language so you can start training your vocal understanding of the language
>get a podcast, listen to it every day

And then start writing it and speaking it, which is the most difficult part and will probably take you years before you're able to utter a sentence without confusing the shit out of people

About the many websites, apps and programs out there, I think there's value to all of them. Try consciously practicing a language at least three times a day through any type of exercise or activity (Rosetta Stone, Anki, Duolingo, a grammar book, whatever) and try implementing as many methods as possible, because you only need to try them a couple of times before you realise if they're really helping or not.

But remember that there's no substitute for immersion, and you should really always be finding new bands, podcasts, comedians, writers, movies, youtubers, tv shows, websites, whatever suits your taste. This is, IMO, not only the best exercise but the best part of the entire experience, and learning new languages has genuinely revitalized my interest in arts and culture.

>don't add too much fields and don't download a deck.

Tbh, while building a deck yourself is more effective for vocabulary-building, some downloadable decks contain the benefit of having recorded audio for every word.

And if you learn the words while also getting the proper pronounciation (instead of making your own in your head) it's really going to help you speaking/understanding the language vocally later.

>and will probably take you years before you're able to utter a sentence without confusing the shit out of people
You should be able to speak really basic sentences (ie survival level language) well within a year of picking the thing up. If it takes years to utter a sentence you are doing something very wrong.

You can grab a recording off of wiki on are a lot of the time.

Also take into account that the way it's said in speaking isn't always the same as how it's said in isolation. You can sound robotic doing it like this.

>wiki on are
Wiktionary*

What if you are trying to learn Greek or Latin though?

A recorded audio is already a excessive field. The very first thing to do—no wonder it's in the first pages of most textbooks—is getting the grapheme/phoneme correspondence done, and got on a natural level with on pair audition/speaking exercises. Adding an audio file is painful and having downloaded is pretty much useless, except for the irregular ones. It depends on the language you're learning. It's not much necessary in German or French, and absolutely useless in Japanese. To be honest, English is the most irregular language I have heard of.

Greek, Latin, Hebrew etc are very different beasts to modern foreign language learning. Some approaches encourage such and such pronunciation but often are flawed in some way. It's quite useful in Greek because of how the diacritical marks work, but it's also a good exercise to forget pronunciation and just try to work it out visually.

>It's not much necessary in German or French, and absolutely useless in Japanese.
Japanese phonemes are sufficiently different to European phonemes in general that a recording is beyond useful. Also actual in the wild written Japanese has a large proportion of the text written non phonetically.

German is similar unless you want to Johann foreigner with your Ish bins and so on. Spoken German is also very variable by accent.

French pronunciation is about as crazy as English.

Then there's Russian where a big beginner hurdle with reading and speaking is knowing how words are not sounding as they're written.

I got your mom to teach me.

Ancient Greek (read Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle), Koine Greek (read New Testament), Biblical Hebrew (read Old Testament), Old and Middle English (read Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales), Latin (read Aeneid, Augustine, Aquinas). I want to learn Russian and Italian next.

What I used.

Greek: an intensive course
Speaking Greek
Learn New Testament Greek
Learn Biblical Hebrew
A Guide to Old English
A Book of Middle English
Wheelock's Latin
Workbook to Wheelock's Latin
Scribblers, sculptors, scribes
Wheelock's Latin Reader
latintutorials on YouTube

Starting Russian on Duolingo right now. I want to read the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in their original form. For Italian, I want to be able to read Alighieri.

REMINDER THAT LEARNING MULTIPLE LANGUAGES WILL BE COMPLETELY USELESS ONCE ACTIVE TRANSLATING DEVICES BECOME A THING, WHICH THEY WILL WITHIN 5-10 YEARS.

Well they've been saying that it's within 5-10 years for 30 years, so I think we're good

Keep waiting for that singularity bro.

Translation devices are also close to useless if you want to have a conversation.

>Japanese phonemes are sufficiently different to European phonemes in general that a recording is beyond useful
Japanese is perfectly regular. Its orthography is—technically—entirely transparent. Once you've learned its phonology a recording is beyond useless and more of a burden.

>also actual in the wild written Japanese has a large proportion of the text written non phonetically
What? You mean words written with ideograms? There's a cool stuff called okurigana to solve that.

>German is similar
>Then there's Russian
Nothing to do with pronunciation regularity. It doesn't change anything the pronunciation is actually exotic to an English speaker.

>French pronunciation is about as crazy as English
Not at all. English is highly irregular and have something like a thousand of graphemes for more than forty phonemes, and almost half of its vocabulary following no pronunciation rules. French has something like 9% and less than forty phonemes and graphemes. Not as easy as Italian, Japanese or Norwegian but absolutely manageable within a week and nothing to compare with English.

furigana*

Why are you making an unrelated point about orthography in response to a point about pronouncing phonemes? And Japanese (as is always the case) does have irregular pronunciations. Russian is often similarly held up as a "phonetic" written language, but frankly it's a joke. Spoken languages tend to have a decent correspondence to the written language at first but that quickly starts to break down.

>French has something like 9% and less than forty phonemes and graphemes.
I wouldn't rate the difficulty of French on that. The main issue is that the spoken language is fairly straightforward grammatically, but in its written form a lot of silent parts become apparent. The grammar of written French is frankly a PITA. And these silent parts often have some effect on how the language is spoken in fairly common situations. This sort of thing is apparent if you learn, not so much if you look up some statistics on Wikipedia.

Also your English is not great m80.

It isn't unrelated. We're talking about pronounciation, and the introduction of an audio record into an Anki entry. In a language with a high regularity between its orthography and its pronounciation—the said phoneme/grapheme concordance—all you need to do is to learn the rules which tie each written part to each vocal part and it's done. An audio record is not only pointless, it's dangerous since you'll be lost once you encounter a written word you don't know. On the other hand, if you do learned that “ね” reads “ne” and “こ” reads “ko”, you can pronounce “ねこ”, “こねこ”, “こね” or “ここね” even without having heard them before. Orthography regularity is highly relevant, and unlike English, the said languages are all pretty much regular.

>and Japanese (as is always the case) does have irregular pronunciations
Oh really? Like…?

>I wouldn't rate the difficulty of French on that
Well this is how we rate its difficulty to be pronounced. English having an incredibly number of phonemes and graphemes and rules which apply to half the lexicon means you can find a word like “beath” and still have no idea how the hell it is read. French don't have this problem and much of the irregularity comes from old place names (like “Meaulx”).

>The grammar of written French is frankly a PITA
It may have a lot of different rules but they are pretty much logical and if you try to figure them out, instead of memorizing them—just like a strong phonological introduction versus audio records on each words—you can master them quickly.

>This sort of thing is apparent if you learn, not so much if you look up some statistics on Wikipedia
So we agree, this won't show up either on an audio record put on Anki.

>We're talking about pronounciation
Pronunciation involves learning the phonemes. This has nothing to do with written language, it's just production and listening of spoken language. Japanese phonemes are p disimilar to European languages, so rather than "it's like a r but also an l", you can just hear it.

>So we agree, this won't show up either on an audio record put on Anki.
No, we don't.

As for irregular Japanese pronunciation, google is your friend:
japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/379/why-are-the-particles-は-ha⇒wa-へ-he⇒e-and-を-wo⇒o-not-spelled-phonet

This is also not a very good discussion, you're p much just bullshitting and either deliberately or pathologically misinterpreting my points. Like a lot of what you just said doesn't follow from anything.

No, it involves getting the coordination between each phoneme and each grapheme, you can't “learn a phoneme”. Acquiring the right way to pronounce each word is done by learning consciously or unconsciously the link a group of letter ties with a vocal pattern. Speaking and listening to are merely a means, and a quite unproductive one since you can't guess how a new word is read. Someone who spent some time having this work done can pronounce whatever he comes across without caring about hearing it, at least in a language with a high degree of orthographical transparency.

>Japanese phonemes are p disimilar to European languages, so rather than "it's like a r but also an l", you can just hear it
Once again—for God sake do you even read what I write—it has nothing to do with ;the phoneme being familiar to an English ear. When you learn how to pronounce /ɺ/, and learn it is connect to the signs “ら”, “れ”, “り”, “ろ” and “る”, you don't have to bother hearing a audio recording whenever you encounter an entry which contains this sound. By the way, Japanese phonology is rather similar to many European language ones, and it's way easier for an Italian or a German locutor to learn to pronounce Japanese than English.

>No, we don't
Care to elaborate how an audio recording on a flashcard will magically teach you the modification a word takes in context?

>As for irregular Japanese pronunciation, google is your friend
/e/, Veeky Forums and /ɰa/ aren't irregular reading for “へ”, “を” and “は”. Do you even know what you're talking about? An irregular reading is like “ɔ̃” for “(お)ん”, which doesn't exist in regular speech and occurs in slang/dialects.

>This is also not a very good discussion, you're p much just bullshitting and either deliberately or pathologically misinterpreting my points. Like a lot of what you just said doesn't follow from anything
You wouldn't end up contradicting yourself if you made some sense in the first place. I'm pissed people like you come out of nowhere and start spitting whatever comes to their mind. I've studied three languages, with German and French for more than fifteen years, and what you try to bullshit just doesn't make any sense. The fact you randomly search and post results from Google you obviously didn't read yourself is enough to make you look like a complete idiot. Please never post again about this.

If you really want something practical like reading a text or talking to people in a foreign country, you can already translate the text and find someone who speaks english to talk to.

This isn't the point. We learn new languages to engage with their culture, art, find a new sense of style, improve our hability to articulate things, etc. Talk to anybody who speaks more than two languages and they will say to you that translations greatly limit this experience. And although you can communicate with people in english, there's no substitute for being able to sit down and genuinely have a conversation with a group. Also chicks dig accents.

And you can always take things like this into account

newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/bilingual-advantage-aging-brain
dana.org/Cerebrum/2012/The_Cognitive_Benefits_of_Being_Bilingual/

Duolingo
Memrise
Grammar book
Read news in the language
Watch TV or movies in the language
Talk to native speakers

>it involves getting the coordination between each phoneme and each grapheme
Just in case somebody thinks there's something to this and starts autistically learning rules, phonemes can change both subtley and substantially in production. Allophones are a thing. People who don't spend their time getting their mouth and ear around phonemes will sound as ludicurousry bad like stereotypical Japanese English students or Inspector Clueso from the Pink Panther. Being able to hear the difference between bomb and bum or shit and sheet or bitch and beach is an important skill and really has to come before you can map those sounds to written language.

A good way to do both is in fact to have flashcards with recorded pronunciation. Obviously not on its own, listen to radio and talk to people and all that too. I honestly wouldn't listen to je-peux-parler-francais-und-deutsch-auch-senpai here tho.

>a good way to do both is in fact to have flashcards with recorded pronunciation
This doesn't help getting the in-context and allophonic modifications since you record a single word you fucking monkey.

>being able to hear the difference between bomb and bum or shit and sheet or bitch and beach is an important skill
English hasn't a transparent orthography and by the way these words have different pronunciation, it has nothing to do with allophones or production deviations.

Recording the audio on a flashcard is a retarded idea. You'll probably stop paying attention and eventually drop from adding it to the new ones out of laziness. You don't need to flag an audio file on each word when you know how to read correctly what you see.

>Recording the audio on a flashcard is a retarded idea. You'll probably stop paying attention and eventually drop from adding it to the new ones out of laziness.

> flashcards are a bad idea because you might not use flashcards right
It gets better and better. Now do a vocaroo to show off the ol polyglautism

use the internet to find a comprehensive clunker of a textbook that is often used to teach postgrads intensively in hardcore "actually learn to read the fucking language"-style courses, or something similar, and go through it

use your own judgment for supplements. maybe an additional textbook, maybe a grammar supplement for areas where your chosen textbook is notoriously weak, etc.

read lots so you can keep your motivation up, but really just keep smashing through grammar. fudging is okay and is actually helpful, don't try to fudge things as your primary method of learning. learn the fucking grammar. drill vocab. do the work.

some cheatcodes: if you don't really care about reading or speaking it, you can relax about a lot of memorisation stuff. you can also relax about lots of vocab memorisation if you suck at it - if some other guy rules at it, and can just get it right from the textbook, great. but if you have to consult the dictionary 50% more than him later on, who gives a fuck. what you DON'T want to skimp on, again, is actual understanding. not having 4000% perfect recall of whether it's Den, Die, or Der is not so bad, but not knowing why the distinction matters is bad.

basically is right

memrise and duolingo and shit like that can be okay for review or whatever but honestly they're fucking useless

Flashcards don't work if you add 50 fields to each cards, idiot.

supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules

I've been using them for yonks. Pic related is from a Russian frequency deck I made a couple of years ago. Dunno what your 50 fields craziness is.

Good luck creating hundreds of flashcards with an example and a record for each.

I did. My frequency decks usually cover ~1000 words. If you're making flashcards the effort to get a recording from Wiktionary (if available) is very little but worth a lot. Less difficult than adding pictures to a card really.

I think Assimil is pretty good for starters.

Do the basic course; after the basics, go to the advanced one (if it is available in the selected language) and, finally, start reading books with their respective audios.

After all that i would say grammar.

Only my opinion tho. Best of luck.

serious question -- how do you pronounce 'ich' if not 'ish'?
I'm learning german more so I can read german, but it would be nice to be able to speak it without sounding like an ameripleb

It's a lot like ch in Loch or the ll sound you get in Welsh (Llandudno), but you don't connect your tongue to your palate (maybe in some accents you do? I can't recall it tho). I don't think anyone would really notice if you used the ch sound in Loch all the time. If you live somewhere with a lot of Mexicans it's also similar to how "j" and "g" are pronounced with that like hard h sound they do (horhay).

Another way to do it is to make a h sound and raise you tongue up to your palate gradually. And finally a wiki article: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal_fricative

Another one to look out for are the umlaut vowels. So a lot of beginners hit möchte early on for example and say something like "mushta", but within like a class setting it's hard to really correct this. The best way to get into ö for me was to try to say it like the ea in tear (as in crying, like tia). I don't know if that particular advice helps you.