Which language are you learning right now?

German

I should be doing some assignments right now since I have an exam on it Friday, but I am completely unmotivated.

German. Goal is to read Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and of course Goethe and Arno Schmidt.

Using duolingo, but not satisfied with it. Will probably try to L-R, but I'm pretty busy and don't know what text to use. I've been reading all Greeks and I kinda want to stick to that for at least another few months. Anyone know any good German audio books of Hesiod or something?

Go get your shit done

Don't wait til the last minute

I believe in you, I really do

the method so far i found worked best for me was:
-i got the basics from duolingo, most basic, essencial words, sentence structure etc

-after reaching a certain level, i started reading newspapers, journals, blogs, etc on that certain language; started watching series/movies with both english voice + 'X' language subtitles or 'X' language voice + english subtitles; started listening to some podcasts, and finally, started writing in that language. everyday I would write around 200~500 words in the language, about anything really (but i kept going to duolingo)

-after a good while on the previous step, i finally tried to read a good book on that language.

French

Duolingo, Lingvist, grammar books stolen off /int/, French films

Proust of course

Learning Jap right now, reading some ikkyuu-san stories.

any books in specific? À la recherche du temps perdu? i was looking for a good french classic

Latin and Ancient Greek right now. I'm pretty much just using rote memorization to get vocab, declensions, conjugations, etc.

Im also improving my French, mostly by reading.

I've been interested in Japanese for a while now. How are you learning? Genki or something like that or just various sources cobbled together?

hi josh

Learning Arabic.
It's my parents native tongue, so I'm learning it from them and my grandfather, along with various books.
Hoping to read the Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine.

I'm learning with Genki+Wanikani. It's working out pretty well, it's only been a year and I can read stories and chat with Japs.

I'm currently learning french since I will go to Paris for 2 months. I don't know what to expect yet.

Taking classes on Spanish and German; I'm fairly proficient in Spanish at this point, and I may try tackling el Quijote in a year or two. Unfortunately my German teacher is a bit dodgy and I'm really in a class that's below my level, so that's going pretty slowly. The Latin I've decided to take up on my own; I'm using the free Elements of Latin text to be found on the Internet Archive. It was written in the early 1920s, when I suppose the Latin School philosophy was really dying out, so in order to compensate and portray Latin as an all-American activity it has sprinkled throughout quotes from various American heroes and presidents praising a classical education, which is somewhat amusing. Latin is a lovely language though; I wish I had taken it up when I was much younger. I'm also dabbling in Hebrew.

I'm sort of a pseudo-polyglot, speak French and German, and some Japanese and Spanish, along with little bits of many other languages. Currently trying to learn Russian, and it's a bitch. Not as bad as German, though.

>Ancient Greek
>combination of Athenaze, grammar lessons and Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek
>goal is to read the New Testament and the Homeric epics (I plan to learn Homeric dialect after having a good grasp of Koine and Attic)

Learning Japanese, cause I'm a weab I guess. In a year or so I plan to start learning Latin as well.

Learning Deutsche

>Soon, Faust. Soon.

I'm halfway through a year stay in Japan and am pretty disheartened at how poor my Japanese still is. I can understand Japanese people when they speak easy sentences to me, but I can't put a decent sentence together to save my life. Almost done with Tae Kim's guide, and I've been learning vocabulary through Memrise JLPT vocab courses and Kanji through Heisig.

I'm pretty good at Spanish, the last book I read was El Tunel by Ernesto Sabato, but I tried speaking Spanish to a half Spanish half Japanese lady who might have been a dude at a bar last weekend and it didn't go well. If I can get my tablet working this weekend I'll probably start La Horjarasca. I hope to read Borges and Cortazar soon.

In college I also studied Old English and Latin, but I've forgotten most of it I'm afraid.

Try learning with Michael Thomas, I find the courses helpful, just using duolingo for German will leave you with close to nothing.

Also grammar books, for example the basic grammar by Schenke and Seago to start with.

French Canadian fag here.

I recommend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Super easy French, and I think he's a good writer.

Vol de Nuit is one of my favorite novel.

Terre des hommes is pretty good too.

Doulingo is a bad service anyway, its the equivalent of MyMathLabs for language learning. There were multiple times when I was sure I got something right but it was marked as wrong because I didn't use the exact right cadence or the string of words they wanted me to use.

Careful with mixing Koine and Attic at the same time

Try JACT 2nd ed. or Hansen & Quinn if you don't like Athenaze

Are they really that different? I'm just starting, so perhaps I don't see the differences clearly enough. Could you tell me some of them, or what I should be careful with more specifically?

They are pretty different - Koine is very simplified, it's like a babby version of Attic. Attic is obnoxiously complex morphologically. The entire first year of learning in college is pretty much JUST learning morphology. So many things, and then so many things that are complex exceptions to those things.

I remember when we were learning, albeit in an intensive course that was really short, it was a palpable feeling of struggling to tread water. You barely had last week's new 6 conjugations in your head, and 20 new vocabulary items with 6 principal parts each, all with weird-ass exceptions of their own, and then suddenly the next chapter introduces an entire new CLASS of verbs that are exceptions to an existing class, with bizarre arcane internal logics to them. When we got to the athematic verbs, everybody in the class wanted to commit suicide. In the Latin class, there were always some fraction of students for whom it simply clicked, and everything was a breeze. But Greek was brutal.

Koine is simplified and easier, but when I googled the same question way back and dug around for expert answers, the loose consensus I got was that it's smarter to start with the clusterfuck of Attic, and then treat Koine as a special case and walk in the park. I didn't see many votes for learning Koine first. If there's an argument to be made for it, maybe on grounds of being an easier starting point and therefore more likely to keep you engaged long enough to really learn it (?), I didn't see it.

I've heard one or two people express dislike for Athenaze, but take that with a grain of salt. Really, just go with what works for you. We used Hansen & Quinn in the aforementioned class, and while it was very effective when I had a teacher breathing down my neck, when I tried to pick it up again recently for self-study (forgotten half of what I know), I couldn't take it. Now I'm trying JACT.

Thanks for the reply, m8.

I think I'll follow your advice. Perhaps it would be better to go Attic > Homeric > Koine.

I had already downloaded the books you mentioned. I'll be sure to give them a look tomorrow.

No worries. I'm basically in the same boat as you at this point, so take it all with a grain of salt. I never really hit that high-level stride where you start reading real texts. My friend is there and I'm jealous as hell.

Also just make sure if you get JACT, you get JACT 2nd ed. The older one was criticised a lot. Not sure if it would be online for pirating yet (probably though).

Just for motivation: Greek IS actually pretty easy once you get the morphology down to a reasonable degree. At least prose often is. If you can somehow survive the textbook phase, you can hit the ground running and have a pretty good time with real authors after that. It's a very logical language, and at least in easier prose, you're not often left guessing at 47 possible meanings for a phrase/passage. I felt that more with Latin.

Also, it really helped me to write out paradigms for everything major, once per day. Regular verb conjugations, wonky noun declensions, shit like athematics. I'd do them in boring lectures or on the bus. It's tedious, but you tend to underestimate your brain's ability to remember shit in spite of itself, if you really burn it in there by rote. Same goes for principle parts of verbs - when I was doing Hansen and Quinn, every single day I'd run through the vocab of all the chapters I'd currently done, put one hand over the Greek words, and do all six principle parts from memory until I could do them easily. After a while, any time you see a verb you instantly know all its endings. This might be overkill in the longrun, but at least for the textbook phase it helps.

Also goes without saying: If you hit a wall, and you don't already have Latin, do Latin first. Doing Latin will make a lot of Greek basics (grammatical concepts + basic paradigms mostly) second nature. Latin is kinda like training wheels Greek.

I've taken German classes through the Goethe Institut up to level 2B or something. I plan to continue once I move to Munich at the end of next month. Have also been supplementing it with Duolinguo (which has worked out well for vocabulary, but I wouldn't recommend for learning straight off the bat).

Have read Kafka in English with the hopes to read him in German, as well as Goethe, Hesse and Jelinek; moving on to other classics later in life hopefully. My first German book will be Die Geheimnis Tochtor which I have in my possession for some reason.

Conversely to the above I started learning Danish on Duolinguo purely because it was only a click away once I'd done some German practice. Would like to continue with Danish once I'm good enough at German.

>which language are you learning right now?
Arabic

>which book is your main goal to be able to read in that language?
The noble Qur'an

>learning
French.
>how
Memrise/Anki for vocab, textbooks and websites for grammar, reading and mining unknown words into anki, to assimilate everything.
>good methods
Start with grammar first. Conjugation>tenses>idiom and phrases
>what book is your main goal
None really, I'm only learning because it's "important".

What beginner Spanish books are good?

>Dom Quixote
Now I want to write a book about a man who thinks he's a cold, smooth billionaire and goes on wild adventures "romancing" tired, middle aged Diner waitresses he thinks are college students.

German. Took classes at Goethe Insitut at home now living in Freiburg taking more classes. I use Babbel, Duolingo and Rosetta stone as well. It's pretty difficult but my goal is to read Steppenwolf and Faust.

Have you tried reading any books?
I've been taking lectures at a local french institute and achieved intermediate level but it seems I am still missing some essential vocabulary.

French. I am pretty decent at it, trying to learn some more obscure words to read novels (most eager to try Flaubert). I got a dual language edition of Le Fleurs du Mal and I am putting every word I don't know in Anki.
Also been using this site to find expressions and quotations of verbs: linternaute.com/dictionnaire/fr/

Duolingo is great for starting and getting the feel of a language, you really should go through all of it even if there are "bugs". But you can't truly progress in learning with just duolingo, you definitely need more.

Sanskrit guy here.

I started with Sanskrit about a year ago, on and off, but now I've put my other languages to the side and have taken up Sanskrit 'full time'.

Sanskrit is the most difficult language I've ever seen. I remember when i started ancient Greek and thought that was difficult, but Sanskrit is a whole new level; it's pretty much a lifetime of study.

I'm not sure about whether to leave my other languages to rot in the meantime.

Memed hard

What is some good German literature for beginners? Borges said in an interview that people who learn German start with Heine and those who learn English with Wilde.

Is Heine easy? Any other authors?

- French (B2.1) and German (A2.2)
- Alliance Française and Goethe Zentrum
As my mother language is Portuguese, French is not that difficult (aside from hellish its phonetics and those "en" and "y").
German is chaotic. Verbs with prefixes, not SVO phases, prepositions which can have multiple translations and A LOT of memorization (now that I'm managing to memorize the cases I'm finding a pain in the ass to memorize the genders).
To all languages it is a matter of immersion, but in the case of German, it worked for me to estimule muscle memory.

What's your opinion on Mastronade?

I'm learning japanese by watching lots of anime, it is going well so far, might take a trip to Japan soon.