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Language learning thread #1 - Share your progress, tips and questions
As discussed and suggested here.
What are you learning? How is it going? Share your progress, tips and tricks. Ask other learners questions.
Writing in non-English languages is welcome in this thread if you want to practice, but please at least include a Google Translate or Deepl translation in a foldable paragraph, using <details>[your translation]</details>
OK, so, I first want to share Olly Richards' playlist on the villains of language learning. Discussion here.
Like I mentioned in that thread, I'm trying out his method for Russian now. I can already see significant advantages to it. I will give it a bit more time and report back.
Some background on my learning: Russian is my fifth language, after French (Native), Greek (Native, but C1), English (Fluent) and Swedish (B2-C1). I studied Russian for two years in high school, 17 years ago, and it achieved fuck all, other than remembering how to read Cyrillic and maybe a couple of sentences.
I restarted Russian just under a month ago, with Russian Made Easy, 30 lessons in video-podcast format targeting beginners. I did an average of 3 lessons per day, with multiple sessions of Drops per day to amass lots of vocab quickly.
My current regimen is as follows:
I also signed up to a Russian Fluency 8-week camp starting in two weeks. We will see how that goes.
Edit: Oh, I almost forgot, my #1 rule when I start learning a language: All my devices are now in the target language, phones and computers alike. I sometimes have to fall back to English, and I immediately put it back in Russian.
I have seen folks do this before! I have a question: Is there a level of familiarity/fluency you get to before doing this, or is this one of the first steps you take? I’m trying to decide whether or not to do this (I just tried it on my iPad, everything is now right-to-left which is fun). One of the challenges I find myself facing with Hebrew is that, because written Hebrew doesn’t contain any vowel sounds, you can’t actually “sound out” Hebrew words. You can make educated guesses once you have more comfort than I currently have, but you more or less need to hear a word spoken in order to know how to pronounce it. I’m worried about guessing about pronunciations while mucking around on my devices and having to unlearn my incorrect guesses later on (but maybe this is true of all languages to some extent and I just shouldn’t worry about it?)
Aside from being able to read the script, it is one of the first steps I take. My fluency in this case is my familiarity with the device itself.
I’ll say there is probably a lot less value in doing this if you’re unfamiliar both with the language AND the device. It’s like Olly says: you need just enough that words popping up everywhere and repeating themselves will start sticking around.
Through this I’ve started recognising words for a variety of quick actions in Russian (copy, paste, cut, delete, move, …) but also I’m finding that error messages force me to try to actively understand what’s going on and push my learning forward.
I haven't found it to be very helpful for generally learning the language, but extremely helpful for learning UI terms. If you want to be able to explain to someone how to do something on a computer it's a must
I just started doing this; it's doing two things for me, I think. Firstly, it's encouraging me to think about Hebrew a lot more, which is valuable on its own for keeping me invested/on track. Secondly, it's teaching me about some colloquialisms that I haven't been exposed to yet, like using letters of the alpha bet as a shorthand for writing days of the week.
e.g. Wednesday
יום רביעי (fourth day)
יום ד (day "Dalet", or fourth day)
It's similar in Japanese, with the day of the week sometimes being shortened to the initial kanji. 木曜日-> 木, 木 on it's own is tree, so outside of the context of days it would not mean Thursday.
I think the Japanese is more similar to the English practice of abbreviating to the first letter. The Hebrew practice isn't abbreviating it to the first letter, but using letters in alphabetical order. It's like calling Wednesday "Day D".
I just finished reading the second chapter of the first book (I read the first chapter twice alone, and once with my ex's sister). I understood almost everything! Damn, this feels pretty nice.
I'm also reading slowly as I'm enunciating everything out loud.
I think this cements my level at around A2-B1 (the book's level) after studying for 4-5 weeks.
Timeline:
You can count 5 weeks total given that I had brushed up some flash cards last year, but nothing intensive. Plus the time to learn cyrillic.
Okay, my current goal is to finish the book. At my current pace I could have it done before the fluency camp starts, if I don't re-read chapters, but I do want to re-read them so I dunno. We'll see! After that, I have a second book to go through (B1-B2), and I feel like by then I will be ready to tackle media on my own.
Oh yeah, also, I started Unit 3 on Duolingo today. I'm almost finished with crowns in Unit 2 (all fully maxed out to legendary, except for 3 lessons).
Hi man, update us with your Russian learning journey, what things you tried so far that you feel they helped you ?
My last update was here: https://tildes.net/~humanities.languages/12ed/from_beginner_to_conversational_in_three_months_of_learning_russian_my_takeaways
Now it’s been a while so where I am now: I’m conversational in Russian though I don’t practice speaking much anymore so that suffers. But my reading, listening and comprehension are very strong which is what I wanted most. I have started learning Ukrainian, less intensely because of other time commitments.
The thread i linked has all the things I tried that helped and worked. I think it’s what you’re looking for. If I were to learn another language quickly I would use the exact same method (but practice spoken production more, as I didn’t get to do it much and now suffer from that).
Less common activity that I really vouch for: once you can string a sentence together, start keeping a journal/diary in your target language. It has a lot of benefits:
I love this idea. As someone who struggles to keep a steady journal, the added motivation of practicing language could be the trick.
I'd love to start doing this... my Russian cursive handwriting is currently very, very, very slow so I think starting now will demoralize me more than encourage me; but I think maybe soon I will try?
For the record, this is my current handwriting (via exercises I'm currently doing with my ex's sister). It's not bad, and I'm rather proud of how "beautiful" it is compared to my latin cursive, but still needs a lot of work and every letter is painfully slow at the moment.
In the past, when I've just started a new language and I'm very slow to write, I just set very low daily goals to compensate: 1 paragraph or something like that. Even if I'm just logging basic facts, like did I go to the gym today, who I saw, did I do anything I'm trying to quit. As long as it's daily practice.
I learned English when my brain was young and malleable. It didn't take much effort. I needed English to advance in videogames, and to understand what Kurt Cobain and Marilyn Manson were saying. And then I sang along. I eventually bought an English dictionary to understand the in-game books from Alone in the Dark, which I played on a 100mhz 484 PC.
Then we got cable, and I was exposed to English speaking every day. One day I disabled the subtitles on CNN, and was surprised to see that I understood quite a bit. It was kinda magical. I started watching shows with English subtitles from time to time, and eventually switched to English subs entirely. And that's the story of how Seinfeld, Friends, and other 90s staples taught me English.
I could never do that nowadays, my brain is old and tired and I just don't have the time.
This is so interesting to me. It seems to be a not uncommon experience for folks that learn English as a second language (I understand this to be partly because English is such a common second language and partly because there’s so much popular English-language media). What I’m always curious about is: To what extent (if at all) were you trying to learn English when you were watching Friends and Seinfield? Were you intentionally trying to match sounds to captions as you watched, or is it just something your brain turned out to be tracking in the background?
Having learned English this way (except my series were MacGyver, Doctor Who and The Muppet Show), I can attest that personally I wasn’t trying. I was just watching and enjoying the show, understanding at first a little and then more and more. But this wasn’t the only thing I was doing and by the time I started watching I already had enough knowledge in the language to follow.
It is indeed one of the most common ways people learn English properly I think. Dubbing kills that drive … I sometimes wonder what we could do about it.
It was semi-intentional, I definitely loved English language and American culture and learning English was a way to further enjoy the music, movies, and TV shows I was fond of. I think if learning English was a goal in itself I wouldn't have learned it.
So after like two ish years of constantly consuming German news and other media, I did the Goethe B2 German Exam two or three weeks ago…and failed the writing and speaking modules by seven or so points each. Which sucks, but I’m retaking the failed modules in five or so weeks, and hopefully I can pass them this time. If I practice enough. I mainly use r/WriteStreakGerman, as well as a German language discord server to practice my writing and speaking skills.
Ooh 7 points is so close! Don't lose hope. B2 is a big jump.
Thanks for showing me r/WriteStreakGerman, I might make use of it myself now. I'm working up to the B1 exam myself and I think that practice would be good for me.
Thank you for the topic, @Adys!
In the summer is 2020, I set about taking Italian "lessons" on Duolingo. I kept it up for a good while, once reaching a streak of over 100 days. I managed to impress myself and my wife when I was able to translate a line of dialogue in a show we were watching. However, I became disenchanted with how Duolingo was monetizing (I'm not a subscriber). Getting five questions wrong in a day meant that I had to pay to continue learning, or else wait for my hearts to replenish. I've been signed up for Duolingo for nearly ten years, and I've seen their various attempts at bringing in funds from freeloaders like myself. Getting in the way of the very reason I'm there crossed a line, though.
This summer, I've decided that I would like to learn at least a little about the languages in our family: Irish and Arabic. I'm starting with Irish, and I picked up Duolingo again, because that's what I was familiar with. The same annoyances reminded me of why I stopped a couple of years ago, but I pushed through that. What's now getting in the way of my progress is the lack of pronunciation in the Irish lessons. Some questions are words are pronounced, but many are not, and consequently I have very little idea of the rules of t spoken language. Just last week, I found that the "bh" consonant cluster is pronounced like "v" in English, but yesterday I learned it could also be pronounced like "w". I get to hear the words so infrequently that it's almost just a guessing game as to how they're pronounced.
All of that feels like prologue to wanting to dive into other methods of learning, notably Olly Richards' books. I feel kind of silly that I got so wrapped up in using an app that I didn't truly consider other forms of learning. I like to think I'm better than that! So, thanks again Adys for starting this topic of conversation.
My best tip is this ... you don't explicitly need "immersion", but overall, the more time you can devote to a language daily, the faster (exponentially faster) you will learn.
So, if you study 2 hours a day for 2 months, you will learn much more than if you study 1 hour/day for 4 months. And if you can invest 4 hrs/day for 1 month, you'll learn even more.
And not all at once. 2-4 30-40 minute "real" study sessions, plus as many little extras (Duolingo, Anki, watch a show in target lang or w/subtitles, have a radio station on in the background, etc. all the kind of tips other posters are describing) all sprinkled in t/out the day.
But I actually wanted to offer up this guy's method for consideration. Nutshell is, 80-90%, just read in your target language. Read material that is hard enough that you only understand 60-70% of it, and then read each selection (article, page, chapter, whatever) 4-5 times, all in the same study session.
And that's it. Just keep doing that daily, keep graduating to harder material when you need to.
It's an interesting approach; I started to try it, and I did feel like it had real potential, but I got burnt out (Life-stuff) and quit after only a few weeks.
Thanks for posting this @Adys!
For being a reddit mod, reddit gifted me a years subscription to Duolingo a month or so ago. I initially started Italian as my partner is fluent in it, but eventually my interest started wavering. After making some Ukrainian friends online, I looked around for Ukrainian language courses and noticed quite a few that were free!
"Чи не хотіли би ви пообідати?"
This section - хотіли би ви - really messes me up. When I read it, I try too hard to enunciate each word but in reality, it should kind of flow seamlessly. When I encountered this phrase listening to the lesson, I forgot about it so when they said it again and I tried to repeat it out loud, I couldn't. So I may have to spend some time re-listening to a few of these lessons.
Duolingo - this is great at reinforcing the Cyrillic alphabet that I taught along with some anki cards. I'm getting some good, basic vocabulary down, but it really lacks the repetition of saying words out loud like I do with Pimsleur.
LingQ - this is my resource for expanding my vocabulary and just reading stories and other media in Cyrillic. I messed up with my first few lessons by highlighting every single word that I saw, instead of doing them in chunks so I could memorize a few, then move onto the next chunk, but I think I'm making great progress so far.
Read Ukrainian - this is my fix for language theory and getting a look into the "Why" on how some of these sentences are formed.
UkrainianLessons.com Podcast - just another resource to listen to as there are hundreds of lessons to hear. I do want to buy the lesson notes at some point, but I think I'm going to wait if it all sticks.
Italki - I booked a lesson with a Ukrainian teacher for tomorrow. I'm interested to see how this goes and maybe this will help fill in some of the gaps and also provide some structure for me.
Что ты понимаешь, когда я пишу по-русски?
I'm very curious about the divergence between UK and RU. I learned early on that they were quite further apart than most people think; something like French to Italian. But I can (I think, lol) understand what you wrote, even though I would have written it slightly differently (Ты хочешь пообедать?; or rather, to match your tone, Вы не хотите пообедать?).
It's rather weird for me at this stage because I can never quite tell, when I read Ukrainian, whether the words
and structures I don't understand are merely missing from my vocab or just too different to Russian. The і is one of very few markers helping me recognize I'm not reading Russian. With more experience I'm sure I'll be able to tell much quicker, just as I now am able to immediately recognize Swedish from Danish from Norwegian (and not just via the few different letters).
Not very much! I'm still really early on but I do know "What" :D
I think I read somewhere that Russian and Ukraine is similar ~60% but that is purely anecdotal. Ґ, Є and Ї, are unique to Ukrainian.
I was on and off with Pimsleur because of the cost until I realized they released largely the same courses on cassette and CD for decades. If you want Pimsleur without a monthly subscription, I highly recommend picking those up. It really is a good course--I just don't use it consistently enough to justify how much I end up paying in rent when I could own a used copy outright.
Fortunately, the Ukrainian course is 100% free right now! I can really see the progress so far from it.
Years ago I used a Pimsleur course borrowed from the local library and found it really useful as a kickstart for language learning. You’re certainly not fluent after completing the courses (I did levels 1,2 and 3), but I distinctly remember the feeling of arriving in my target language country and thinking “holy cow, I can actually hold conversations (albeit rudimentary) with people!”
Edit: I know nothing about the Pimsleur subscription model. When I used it, it was a big case full of CDs or cassette tapes. Maybe the material has changed with the publishing model now?
This is great, thank you @Adys!
I’ve been working on Hebrew fairly regularly for the past few weeks. This is attempt number two for me (if you don’t count Hebrew school as a kid, which… I don’t), but the fact that my fiancée has also started it up gives me some more confidence that we’ll be able to stick to it.
Currently, I just use Rosetta Stone for about 30 minutes every day. Sometimes I push it to more like an hour. Rosetta Stone has been really great; from what I’ve seen some of you all say about Olly’s Story method, I think there are some similarities. I really like Rosetta Stone: it interleaves several variations on the basic model of associating words and phrases directly with images, and the phrases and sentences ramped up in complexity fairly quickly, but still feel manageable. There are also periodic milestones with mock spoken conversations, and there’s an emphasis on speaking and pronunciation that I really appreciate.
I’m definitely at a little bit of a head start here because I am already very familiar with the Hebrew alphabet, but I never really learned any proper pronunciation, and the Hebrew “ר” sound (IPA: [ʀ]) is proving to be super challenging. It’s also very satisfying to hear myself improving over time, though!!
EDIT: Apparently, standardized modern Hebrew mostly uses [ʁ̞], not [ʀ]! Rosetta Stone speakers are split on the pronunciation. This is making me realize the value of @Adys’s practice of consuming large amounts of target-language spoken media; it would be helpful to understand better how modern Hebrew is pronounced by a variation of actual speakers!
.. I’ll probably still keep practicing the uvular trill, though. I really enjoy being able to do it :D
My uvula was surgically removed a few years ago 😒
Rolling R’s is more difficult, I can’t do it the way I used to, but thankfully most European languages roll them with the tip of the tongue.
Have you tried Tandem? https://www.tandem.net/
It’s a language exchange app allowing you to communicate with natives. My Russian coach is recommending it and I’ve seen Olly recommend it as well.
I made a profile on it but haven’t had success finding someone to communicate with, I think partly because I am not yet interested in expanding my russophone circle.
I haven’t heard of Tandem, but I’ll check it out! I’m going to try to find some Hebrew TV shows to watch, too (or maybe just any shows with Hebrew dubs, which… might not be so common but we’ll see!)
So my last college class was Japanese. The class was built around the popular Genki textbook and I thought I was doing fairly well at first until the last bit where I realized that we weren't focusing on some really important aspects which made learning the last bits of grammar we covered extremely difficult, to the point where I actually got almost all of those questions wrong when I took the final exam. Though to be fair to the professor she wasn't terribly used to teaching it online.
I mentioned in the past that I was working on wanikani before taking this class. It's been on hiatus but now that I'm no longer bound by schedule I will have to start again. The only problem is that I think I may have forgotten a lot of the details, so I'm probably going to be in studying limbo for a while while I catch up to where I was before I stopped.
I think what I'll do after I catch up is that I'll supplement it with the rest of the Genki I textbook. I think the part I am lacking the most in is in grammar. Although I mostly want to be able to read the language, I do want to have the ability to communicate as well.
But just as a bit of reflection as to where I am right now, I feel a whole lot more confident with the language than I ever have been before. I even went a bit further and picked up some Childrens' books so I can practice the language - though realistically I'm not at a point where I can get very far. I think I should have probably started with manga instead, where the terse short lines and visual context clues make it more beginner-friendly.
More than anything, I just need to get back on the bike; the longer I stay off the harder it's going to be to get going again.
I wouldn't recommend starting out with children's books or manga. Children's books use a lot of onomatopoeia which isn't very easy to remember and also isn't that helpful for other content. It takes a lot of time to look up words you don't know from manga, and whatever you start with, you'll be doing that a lot, so it's a big concern.
I'd recommend starting with an easy, slice of life anime with JP subtitles and a texthooker (instructions here). The anime I had the most success with at the beginning was Shoujo shuumatsu ryokou, most of it is just a dialogue between two characters and it's pretty easy to understand, while also being very interesting. Whatever native content you start with will be tough.
I'm studying Japanese, and I just hit 2000 kanji in my anki deck today!
I'm pretty much just using the method at https://learnjapanese.moe. At this point my daily routine is to do my anki reviews, and then read visual and light novels, looking up words and grammar that I don't know (the later is pretty rare), and making anki cards from it.
When I started learning Japanese I thought I'd be watching more anime, but now I don't watch it as much as I used to. It's uncomfortable to pause and look up words, and I've found that difference in enjoyment between original Japanese version and translated version is much bigger for novels compared to anime, which does make sense.
I practice output on Japanese message boards and chat rooms, but I hadn't really spoken at all until recently, when I found a Japanese person who wanted to play video games with me. Surprisingly they can understand me relatively well, but even I can hear how bad I sound, so I've started shadowing. I don't do it every day though.
I've been trying to learn Hungarian for some time now. I can't say it's going great, but I think that's mostly just due to lack of commitment and the fact that I'm now an old.
On the plus side, if I were to travel to Hungary tomorrow I could definitely say "Hello" and "Thank you" with ease.