Learning a new language.

[hermes]

If you want to learn another language just because, I would advice you to learn any language that has a similar root than yours. In the case of English, it includes many Scandinavian languages and even German (up to a point). It makes learning it fairly easier because the syntax constructions are similar and many words have the same root.

For example, my main language is Spanish, and because of that I am fairly decent at reading and understanding Portuguese if they speak slowly to me, even when I never learned that language formally.

In terms of learning tools, the base is the same for everything. Practice, practice, practice, and don't be afraid to make mistakes. Try watching a foreign movie without subtitles, or chat with someone on their native language (making sure they know you are just learning their language). As I said, don't be afraid of making mistakes, consider than the person you speak with probably has the same difficulties with your home language as you do with his, or perhaps more...

 

[TheArcaneThinker]

The best way to study a language is from textbooks and guides if you plan on spending less but if you want to learn it quick , i suggest you join a crash course or a class.

Experience-Can speak 5 languages

And never stop after you finish one , just keep learning new ones , just get to experience different cultures as you go through their literature.

 

[AnarchistFish]

Try pimsleur, gets you immersed in the language, giving you the "feel" for it.

Then use duolingo to build up your vocab.

Two very different tools but they're both excellent and I've learnt a shitload of portuguese with them.

i decided to learn french

I was taught a little bit of french at school and its so hard. I didnt (and still dont) understand why they give everything a gender.

Every Romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) assigns a gender to every word. To us it's equally weird that English doesn't.

But its an inanimate object. How do you know which is which? Its so much less confusing to say the door or a door than trying to remember the gender of an inanimate object which has no gender

you just remember it naturally when you know the language, in the same way that you'd remember what the actual word is

 

[Aedes]

i decided to learn french

I was taught a little bit of french at school and its so hard. I didnt (and still dont) understand why they give everything a gender.

Every Romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) assigns a gender to every word. To us it's equally weird that English doesn't.

But its an inanimate object. How do you know which is which? Its so much less confusing to say the door or a door than trying to remember the gender of an inanimate object which has no gender

You know, I would say that it's probably because on the so called Romance languages, we don't have such a thing as gender neutral article.
While english has "The thing" and "A thing", the others have something like O, A, le, la and these articles already carry with themselves the gender. I agree with Johnny that this gender neutral thing is an alien concept for us because there's no direct correlation of it to our native languages.

 

[hermes]

i decided to learn french

I was taught a little bit of french at school and its so hard. I didnt (and still dont) understand why they give everything a gender.

Every Romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) assigns a gender to every word. To us it's equally weird that English doesn't.

But its an inanimate object. How do you know which is which? Its so much less confusing to say the door or a door than trying to remember the gender of an inanimate object which has no gender

Well as far as I know gender remains the same across all Romance languages. Doors and windows are female (la ventana, la finestra, la fenetre), books are male (el libro, il libro, le libre), weapons are male but guns are female (el arma, la pistola) etc. It's not something you "have to remember", you learn it along with every word.

German also distinguishes gender in every word, but to muck things further it adds a third "gender neutral" pronoun, "das".

Not exactly. Some objects have their genders swapped in Spanish and French (for example). There are some rules of thumb that people use to "guess" the gender (words ending with "a" are mostly feminine: la silla, la mesa, la espada, etc; while words ending with "o" are mostly masculine: el libro, el cuerpo, el ojo), but, for the most part, it is something people learn with practice.

We also have a neutral gender, which we use mostly for adjectives and abstract notions ("the dark" is "lo oscuro"). Besides, there are some objects that could use several genders ("el mar" and "la mar" are both accepted, although one is more common). Finally, we have some objects that swap genders whether we are talking about the singular and the plural)...

Yes, its a mess. Just writing about it makes me wonder how we ever function with all that. And people then say Spanish is an "easy" language.

 

[happyninja42]

Hi all, first, apologies for any bad spelling or grammar you encounter in here. On to the topic!

Now, I've been wanting to learn a new language since coming home from a two month trip to Europe, and something a German girl i met said, 'There is no downside to learning a new language'

That made me think, there really is no downside to it, and it could open up so many new possibilities, job wise, social life wise, travel wise. Anyway, i decided to learn french, mainly because it's just a euro star trip away,(I'm English) and I've always wanted to go to Canada, and i know not all Canadians speak french, but it couldn't hurt to know it when i go, right?

Anyway enough rambling, my questions are, what are some great learning tools you guys and girls can recommend? Has anyone learnt a new language other than their native tongue, and has it ever come in handy? (New job, love interest, anything!)

Thanks

My personal suggestion for learning a new language is immersion. It seems trite and cliche I know, but it really does work exceptionally well. Being around people speaking in the new language forces you to pay attention to it and learn it quickly.

Also, the best phrase in my opinion to learn first is "how do you say?" or roughly "what do you call this?" The biggest part of a language, in most cases is simply building up the vocabulary, and being comfortable with asking the person how to properly say some new thing is very handy. I used it all the time, and would hold up whatever object I didn't know how to describe (like a screwdriver for example) and say "how do you say this?" and point to it. They would then inform me, and poof! my vocab was increased by a word. It was also useful in conjunction with doing pantomimes to explain something, or drawing it out.

Figuring out the verbs and stuff usually isn't too difficult, it's linking those up with other words that always gave me trouble personally. Now my grammar and structure were atrocious, and would make them laugh a lot when I screwed something up. But they got the gist of what I was trying to say, and were very happy with me for making the effort. They were more than willing to forgive my errors, as it was clear I was trying to improve, and they were very helpful to correct my mistakes when they popped up.

 

[DoPo]

German also distinguishes gender in every word, but to muck things further it adds a third "gender neutral" pronoun, "das".

Erm, it's not gender neutral - it's neuter, that's a grammatical gender. There are three of them. Same as in English (he, she, it) and other languages.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

German also distinguishes gender in every word, but to muck things further it adds a third "gender neutral" pronoun, "das".

Erm, it's not gender neutral - it's neuter, that's a grammatical gender. There are three of them. Same as in English (he, she, it) and other languages.

But you don't say "it boat", you say "das boot".

 

[Longing]

Do you know anyone who speaks the language you want to learn?
My english was adequate before, but since I've been working with someone who fluently speaks english, my skills have gone through the roof.

There's no better way to learn a language than to immerse yourself in it. If you do go to Canada, make sure to spend a little while in Quebec and you should get there in no time!

 

[DoPo]

German also distinguishes gender in every word, but to muck things further it adds a third "gender neutral" pronoun, "das".

Erm, it's not gender neutral - it's neuter, that's a grammatical gender. There are three of them. Same as in English (he, she, it) and other languages.

But you don't say "it boat", you say "das boot".

Flawed analogy - English doesn't have gendered articles. Neither proves anything, nor...does anything, really, I wonder why even have it - surely "es Boot" would be the exact equivalent of "it boat".

In English any noun can have a definite or indefinite article and that's it: "an apple", "a bus", "a girl", "a boy", "the man", "the woman", "the boat", "the answer to the life universe and everything", etc. English language, however, does have neuter gender, as does German. It is not a gender neutral when it is related to gender. Because it a gender.

I don't even know why we need to have this discussion in the first place neuter is a gender [http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/WhatIsNeuterGender.htm]. Why do you want it to not be one?

 

[cathou]

i decided to learn french

I was taught a little bit of french at school and its so hard. I didnt (and still dont) understand why they give everything a gender.

Every Romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) assigns a gender to every word. To us it's equally weird that English doesn't.

But its an inanimate object. How do you know which is which? Its so much less confusing to say the door or a door than trying to remember the gender of an inanimate object which has no gender

Well as far as I know gender remains the same across all Romance languages. Doors and windows are female (la ventana, la finestra, la fenetre), books are male (el libro, il libro, le libre), weapons are male but guns are female (el arma, la pistola) etc. It's not something you "have to remember", you learn it along with every word.

German also distinguishes gender in every word, but to muck things further it adds a third "gender neutral" pronoun, "das".

a sword is female, a saber is male, a gun is male. well actually, a firearm is female but a gun is male (une arme a feu, un pistolet), a machine gun is female. you cannot generalize like this, it's really something you learn with practice. even for a native french speaker some words are difficult to remember, like a plane and a car...

and yes for us, it's very wierd to understand the "it" gender. for years i've said things like, my three is very big, he need to be cut.

one of our famous comedian made a really good standup about that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7CdnPkdXII

but it's kind of hard to understand if you dont know well french, so be carefull. (at 4:30 he speak about the gender of words)

 

[viscomica]

Hi all, first, apologies for any bad spelling or grammar you encounter in here. On to the topic!

Now, I've been wanting to learn a new language since coming home from a two month trip to Europe, and something a German girl i met said, 'There is no downside to learning a new language'

That made me think, there really is no downside to it, and it could open up so many new possibilities, job wise, social life wise, travel wise. Anyway, i decided to learn french, mainly because it's just a euro star trip away,(I'm English) and I've always wanted to go to Canada, and i know not all Canadians speak french, but it couldn't hurt to know it when i go, right?

Anyway enough rambling, my questions are, what are some great learning tools you guys and girls can recommend? Has anyone learnt a new language other than their native tongue, and has it ever come in handy? (New job, love interest, anything!)

Thanks

I'm fluent in Spanish, English and French and use all of those languages for work so yes, they have proven handy. Other than that, it always irks me not understanding what people are saying because of language barriers so I plan on learning German or Portuguese soon. My advice if you're learning French would be to go to a french institute. They make things fun because they try to teach in a french environment.
Other than that, take it easy, don't feel discouraged because you "don't understand everything from the get go" and try to be persistant about it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

i decided to learn french

I was taught a little bit of french at school and its so hard. I didnt (and still dont) understand why they give everything a gender.

Every Romance language (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian) assigns a gender to every word. To us it's equally weird that English doesn't.

But its an inanimate object. How do you know which is which? Its so much less confusing to say the door or a door than trying to remember the gender of an inanimate object which has no gender

Well as far as I know gender remains the same across all Romance languages. Doors and windows are female (la ventana, la finestra, la fenetre), books are male (el libro, il libro, le libre), weapons are male but guns are female (el arma, la pistola) etc. It's not something you "have to remember", you learn it along with every word.

German also distinguishes gender in every word, but to muck things further it adds a third "gender neutral" pronoun, "das".

a sword is female, a saber is male, a gun is male. well actually, a firearm is female but a gun is male (une arme a feu, un pistolet), a machine gun is female. you cannot generalize like this, it's really something you learn with practice. even for a native french speaker some words are difficult to remember, like a plane and a car...

and yes for us, it's very wierd to understand the "it" gender. for years i've said things like, my three is very big, he need to be cut.

one of our famous comedian made a really good standup about that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7CdnPkdXII

but it's kind of hard to understand if you dont know well french, so be carefull. (at 4:30 he speak about the gender of words)

Man I thought you were going to link back to Eddie Izzard

 

[DirgeNovak]

French is my native language. I'd be happy to help you out if you want.
I started learning English in the fourth grade and was fluent by the end of high school.
I studied Russian in university for two years. I think I can handle myself fairly well. And it was a blast to learn.
I also took a Spanish class before Russian, but I never practiced it afterwards and now whenever I try to say a sentence in Spanish, half the words come out in Russian. And yes, it's a really weird thing to hear.

I would advise taking at least one actual class to learn the grammar and a vocabulary base, then move on to media - music, movies/TV/Youtube videos, newspapers, books... to learn more vocabulary. It's easy to learn new words on your own, but teaching yourself the grammar with just a textbook is a very bad idea.

i think a good way to learn other languages is to Watch movies with french dubs and English sub, especially if it's a movie you already know.

you dont have to really understand how to write the language, you only want to speak it, so dont bother onthe very complicated french grammar, you need vocabulary

Strongly disagreeing on that last part. If you "don't bother" with the grammar, you can't be understood properly. Things like sentence structure and verb tenses are absolutely necessary, and if you can't write, you likely can't read, either. Assimilating new words is much harder if you can't visualize them in written form.

As for the movie tip, I'd argue that watching with both audio and subtitles in French would be more useful to learn vocabulary. With English subtitles, OP's brain would just read the subtitles and forget about the voices.

If you want to learn another language just because, I would advice you to learn any language that has a similar root than yours. In the case of English, it includes many Scandinavian languages and even German (up to a point). It makes learning it fairly easier because the syntax constructions are similar and many words have the same root.

I'd say that's boring, but maybe I'm just insane. I stopped Spanish after one course and moved on to Russian specifically because there wasn't any challenge in it for me as a French speaker. About half the words were basically the same as in French but with a less retarded orthography and o's and a's at the end of words.
I say if you're going to learn a new language, learn a new language.

 

[fenrizz]

Try Duolingo [https://www.duolingo.com/]. It tries to gamify the experience of learning a new language, and it's actually pretty good. In addition to the website, they have mobile apps for Android and iPhone. Check it out. (It's a little light on teaching the grammar, at least at first, but it's great if you're just starting out.)

Oh man, that is pretty neat.
Finally I can catch up on my very, very rusty German.
Thank you, Sir!

OT:
I'm a native Norwegian speaker, and I started learning English in the 2nd grade (if my memory serves).

I took a year of German in 8th Grade, and it's still serving me well actually.
Although I could never have a real conversation, I can still understand a lot (especially if someone speaks a little slow) and I can make myself understood.
But 1/3 of Norwegian words a "borrowed" from German and the structure is pretty similar, so maybe that's not very surprising after all.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Of course it's great to learn multiple languages. But the downside is that you need to spend a lot of time on it and need some serious motivation to pull through.

The only way to really learn a language is to read and speak it a lot imo. Just giving you bunches of vocabulary and grammar to learn by heart is not going to work, which is something many schools where I live don't get.

Being part of a multilingual country, everyone in Flanders needs to learn French in school (along with English and other languages like German or Spanish). After almost 10 years of French education I still didn't speak it well, because the only thing they focused on was grammar grammar grammar and "vocabulaire". The same goes for most of my friends.

By contrast, two short years of Spanish education in college where the focus was speaking, speaking and more speaking, brought my level of Spanish up to be almost on par with my French. Admittedly, I didn't do much with it, so I've forgotten a lot at this point.

People in Québec don't speak French, they speak some bastardized hybrid between French and English Though ofc they themselves will claim to speak "the real French"

 

[K-lusive]

Arabic is just a bunch of squiggly lines. Unless you are native to the arabic world its just so confusing

If you're not native to a country that uses roman alphabet, does the alphabet not look like a bunch of squiggly lines as well? Being native to one such country, all other alphabets from Russian to Arabic to hieroglyphs all look like squiggly lines to me..

 

[Lethos]

I think consistency is really important. I've been taking Japanese classes for around 3 years now, and I'd say I'm at a good conversational level. I found that when I got into the habit of practicing an hour everyday, I started picking up the language a lot faster than I did when I was doing maybe 2 hours one day, and an hour 4 days later. Basically I would recommend putting a bit of time into the language everyday, rather than a lot of time every so-and-so day.

I'm also of the opinion that it's simply impossible to become fluent in a language without being in a place where it's spoken for an extended period of time. I don't have any evidence to back that up though.

Edit: Also make some friends who's first language is the language you want to learn. My Japanese skyrocketed once I went to uni because I made loads of Japanese friends who I talk to in Japanese.

 

[shootthebandit]

Arabic is just a bunch of squiggly lines. Unless you are native to the arabic world its just so confusing

If you're not native to a country that uses roman alphabet, does the alphabet not look like a bunch of squiggly lines as well? Being native to one such country, all other alphabets from Russian to Arabic to hieroglyphs all look like squiggly lines to me..

Roman alphabet would probably be equally confusing I suppose

 

[lee1287]

Thanks for all your great input people! I've Downloaded Duolingo, and ive recorded myself speaking a few phrases in french, and play it back to help it sink in and see if I understand it, seems to be working quite well for me

Another language I'd love to learn is swedish, but I feel that is way to hard for me at the moment, not saying french isnt hard, but I seem to be picking it up, no doubt with atrocious pronunciation though, aha. Keep em coming guys!