Learning a New Language

[Secre]

So as an end of lockdown goal, I have set myself the task of going back to my much hated foreign language classes as a teenager and am using Duolingo to try to teach myself German.

I admit, it is slow, slow going. Foreign languages really don't come easily to me at all, but I am slowly but surely becoming more confident in the basics of the language and have even got the hang of present day tenses which always completely baffled me at school!

I've found Duolingo a really useful tool - I suspect it doesn't have the more complex lessons for when you are more fluent, but as a beginner it sets things out well and allows you to learn in bite sized chunks which is always helpful when you have the attention span of a demented cockroach to contend with!

My end goal for the moment is to be able to read the Harry Potter books in German... which is a stretch right now, but you never know, I might get there!

[CoconutDragon]

Learning a new language is a great goal! German is a good place to start as an English speaker too. If you want to supplement duolingo, I highly recommend LanguagePod101. It focuses more on conversation and comprehension than grammar, and I like to use both when I learn a new language. Good luck and keep us posted on how it goes!

[Secre]

10 minutes ago, CoconutDragon said:

Learning a new language is a great goal! German is a good place to start as an English speaker too. If you want to supplement duolingo, I highly recommend LanguagePod101. It focuses more on conversation and comprehension than grammar, and I like to use both when I learn a new language. Good luck and keep us posted on how it goes!

Thanks! I'll have to look into LanguagePod101. I've been looking for additional resources to supplement my Duo lessons! I've been using verbformen to help better understand conjugations and such like.

I had to do both German and French at school, but I was always slightly better at German as it's so much more logical in many ways than French seemed to be. I say slightly better - that is very much conditional - I was pretty poor at both of them!

My husband is using Duo for French and it baffles and annoys him in equal measure that he's so much more competant and yet I have so much more 'experience'. He doesn't quite get that the reason I have so much more experience is because everything takes me twice as long to learn!!

[CoconutDragon]

3 minutes ago, Secre said:

Thanks! I'll have to look into LanguagePod101. I've been looking for additional resources to supplement my Duo lessons! I've been using verbformen to help better understand conjugations and such like.

I had to do both German and French at school, but I was always slightly better at German as it's so much more logical in many ways than French seemed to be. I say slightly better - that is very much conditional - I was pretty poor at both of them!

My husband is using Duo for French and it baffles and annoys him in equal measure that he's so much more competant and yet I have so much more 'experience'. He doesn't quite get that the reason I have so much more experience is because everything takes me twice as long to learn!!

I know the feeling about taking more time than others to learn a language! Some people pick it up so easily and they sound like a native speaker and I can't help but be jealous! 

In English-speaking Canada, French is mandatory throughout grade school; nowadays they start in kindergarten but for my age group it was only from grade 7 onward. Even if I can carry a decent conversation in Quebec, I still think it makes absolutely no sense as a language! You don't pronounce 90% of the letters and the entire language seems to be made up of unrelated homophones  

With both of you learning at the same time, it might be interesting to try to hold conversations in your respective languages to see what your weak spots are!

[iheartsaku]

I was actually trying to learn Italian with Duolingo....but I felt the progress was so slow and I lost interest (which is horrible, I know....I lose motivation so easily).
I speak English and French (I am from Quebec, Canada haha so I was forced to know french but it is a great thing. I wish I knew more languages).

Good luck with learning German! I hope you stay motivated and get to master it.  

 

[queen_hatshepset]

That is awesome! I took spanish in school and unfortunately learned more spanish when I went to the work field than I did the two years of schooling. I have always wanted to learn Japanese and I found livemocha was a  really great tool. I haven't used the app in years so I don't know if it is still the same curriculum but I was able to read and write a few words in Japanese not to mention count to 100 and ask for specific words within three weeks of learning. I'll have to check out Duolingo because I would like to refresh my memory on Japanese. 

[Secre]

1 hour ago, CoconutDragon said:

I know the feeling about taking more time than others to learn a language! Some people pick it up so easily and they sound like a native speaker and I can't help but be jealous! 

In English-speaking Canada, French is mandatory throughout grade school; nowadays they start in kindergarten but for my age group it was only from grade 7 onward. Even if I can carry a decent conversation in Quebec, I still think it makes absolutely no sense as a language! You don't pronounce 90% of the letters and the entire language seems to be made up of unrelated homophones  

With both of you learning at the same time, it might be interesting to try to hold conversations in your respective languages to see what your weak spots are!

And I am definitely one of the slow ones! Every new lesson I have a moment of panic when I have no clue what is going on because of random new words that have been introduced. I end up having to practice well past the level 5 to actually master a lesson!

I think that makes much more sense in teaching children young - I started in yr 7 so at about 11 years old and never got the hang of it. Whereas my foster father who is Dutch speaks four languages fluently and another three with varying degrees of aptitude, but they start them young over in Holland!!

The only problem with having both of us trying to converse in our languages is that I don't speak a whit of French and my husband doesn't speak a whit of German!!

8 minutes ago, iheartsaku said:

I was actually trying to learn Italian with Duolingo....but I felt the progress was so slow and I lost interest (which is horrible, I know....I lose motivation so easily).
I speak English and French (I am from Quebec, Canada haha so I was forced to know french but it is a great thing. I wish I knew more languages).

Good luck with learning German! I hope you stay motivated and get to master it.  

 

Duo recently re-mastered the German board and I very nearly gave up as all my initial levels had been lost and I had to 'relearn' Brot, Wasser, Mutter and Vater ten million times before I could get onto anything even resembling my actual level. Which isn't great, as I said... but has thankfully progressed beyond that point at least!!

I think if we can get to the point where my husband can do all the talking in France and I can do all the talking in Germany, we'll be on a winner!

If I ever get reasonably decent in German, I might have a look at trying another language... I love the idea of speaking Russian... but the whole learning a new alphabet thing puts me clean off!!

1 minute ago, queen_hatshepset said:

That is awesome! I took spanish in school and unfortunately learned more spanish when I went to the work field than I did the two years of schooling. I have always wanted to learn Japanese and I found livemocha was a  really great tool. I haven't used the app in years so I don't know if it is still the same curriculum but I was able to read and write a few words in Japanese not to mention count to 100 and ask for specific words within three weeks of learning. I'll have to check out Duolingo because I would like to refresh my memory on Japanese. 

Japanese would be really cool to speak... but again, the whole, learning a new alphabet thing would really put me off!!!

I like Duo because it's free - you can pay to remove the hearts and the ads, but you don't have to pay anything to get full usage out of it!

[queen_hatshepset]

Surprisingly spoken Japanese is relatively easy to master compared with other languages, partly because it has only 5 vowels and 13 consonants. The English language has 12 vowels and 24 consonants so I would catch myself using the English vowels when speaking Japanese and I would have to really try to focus on the only 5.

[Secre]

Just now, queen_hatshepset said:

Surprisingly spoken Japanese is relatively easy to master compared with other languages, partly because it has only 5 vowels and 13 consonants. The English language has 12 vowels and 24 consonants so I would catch myself using the English vowels when speaking Japanese and I would have to really try to focus on the only 5.

I didn't know that! You learn something new every day!

One of my biggest motivators though is being able to read in the language I am trying to learn - once I'm more confident, I'm going to start with Harry Potter in German as I know that book inside and out already!! My party trick as a teenager was to be able to recite the first three pages from memory. I could get to five pages just about, but nobody ever stood still to listen for that long!!

[CoconutDragon]

27 minutes ago, iheartsaku said:

I speak English and French (I am from Quebec, Canada haha so I was forced to know french but it is a great thing. I wish I knew more languages).

Ooh! Mind if I ask whereabouts? I lived in Saint-Marcel for a year ^^

17 minutes ago, queen_hatshepset said:

That is awesome! I took spanish in school and unfortunately learned more spanish when I went to the work field than I did the two years of schooling. I have always wanted to learn Japanese and I found livemocha was a  really great tool. I haven't used the app in years so I don't know if it is still the same curriculum but I was able to read and write a few words in Japanese not to mention count to 100 and ask for specific words within three weeks of learning. I'll have to check out Duolingo because I would like to refresh my memory on Japanese. 

I liked using livemocha too! If you're still looking to learn Japanese, I loved Smile Nihongo Academy. It's a paid course, but the teacher is really great!

7 minutes ago, Secre said:

My party trick as a teenager was to be able to recite the first three pages from memory. I could get to five pages just about, but nobody ever stood still to listen for that long!!

That's pretty fantastic! I wish I had a memory that good, even as a teen! I feel like even at 5 pages you could run a one-person spex or something  

[Nielo]

4 hours ago, Secre said:

So as an end of lockdown goal, I have set myself the task of going back to my much hated foreign language classes as a teenager and am using Duolingo to try to teach myself German.

I admit, it is slow, slow going. Foreign languages really don't come easily to me at all, but I am slowly but surely becoming more confident in the basics of the language and have even got the hang of present day tenses which always completely baffled me at school!

I've found Duolingo a really useful tool - I suspect it doesn't have the more complex lessons for when you are more fluent, but as a beginner it sets things out well and allows you to learn in bite sized chunks which is always helpful when you have the attention span of a demented cockroach to contend with!

My end goal for the moment is to be able to read the Harry Potter books in German... which is a stretch right now, but you never know, I might get there!

I've been using Duoling to learn some Italian during lockdown (I started out with Russian, as I took a few Russian lessons during high school, but realised that I was mostly guessing my Duolingo answers, so I switched to a language that's a little more familiar to me).

Reading the Harry Potter books in German is a great goal! I'm not just saying that - I used the Harry Potter books to learn/improve my English when I was a kid. I'd learned some English in school (I think I was around 10 when they started teaching us English), and we only dub movies/shows for children, everything else is subtitled, so I did pick up some English from just watching TV. But I was a huge Harry Potter fan, and had already read the first 2 or 3 books a couple of times, when I decided I wanted to read the English versions as well. (Part of this was motivated by me wanting the learn the "real names" of the characters, as most of the names had been translated as well - which makes sense, considering the names actually have meanings, but I still felt like their English names were their "real" names. XD)
I started out with reading one page in English, and then reading that same page in Dutch, to see if I understood everything. I also kept a dictionary on hand for the words I couldn't figure out through context clues. I moved on to reading two pages at a time, then chapters, and by the time the 4th book came out, I didn't really need the Dutch version to understand the English one, but I still remember bringing both books with me on holiday, just in case.

So yeah, I highly recommend reading them in German, even if you feel you haven't quite mastered the German language yet. Reading books you're already familiar with is a great way to improve your language skills!

[queen_hatshepset]

2 hours ago, Secre said:

I didn't know that! You learn something new every day!

One of my biggest motivators though is being able to read in the language I am trying to learn - once I'm more confident, I'm going to start with Harry Potter in German as I know that book inside and out already!! My party trick as a teenager was to be able to recite the first three pages from memory. I could get to five pages just about, but nobody ever stood still to listen for that long!!

Lol me and my little sister know the first book by heart. We would recite the movie word for word every night before bed too. Best of luck! I love that you have set a specific goal in achieving for learning a language. Doing this, especially with a topic that you are really interested in will help you accomplish this goal!

[queen_hatshepset]

1 hour ago, CoconutDragon said:

Ooh! Mind if I ask whereabouts? I lived in Saint-Marcel for a year ^^

I liked using livemocha too! If you're still looking to learn Japanese, I loved Smile Nihongo Academy. It's a paid course, but the teacher is really great!

That's pretty fantastic! I wish I had a memory that good, even as a teen! I feel like even at 5 pages you could run a one-person spex or something  

Thank you so much!! I will look into Smile Nihongo Academy. Now I am really excited to refresh my memory on Japanese! 

[iheartsaku]

22 hours ago, CoconutDragon said:

Ooh! Mind if I ask whereabouts? I lived in Saint-Marcel for a year ^^

I've bounced around from Montreal to a nearby city.  

[Duma]

I'm using duolingo too to learn Japanese. Once you get the hang out of reading the hiragana and katakana it's not that bad to learn it. The Kanji is a different story. I'm trying to learn Japanese for multiple reasons:

1. I would like to visit Japan one day, and not the touristic cities but travel through the countryside.

2. I want to be able to understand Japanese spoken anime without needing subs and to be able to read the little jokes/details that are sometimes hidden in the scenes.

I already speak Dutch, English and, if I brush up on it a bit, French. German is a different story, I can somewhat read enough to understand the basics and if they speak slowly enough I can understand it too, but I can not write or speak it myself. I never had any German at school. Maybe, in the far future, when I can speak Japanese well enough I might try and learn German too with Duolingo. I just don't want to confuse my brain now with 2 languages, learning them is hard for me too. I have a science brain, not a language brain

[Secre]

On 9/25/2020 at 5:08 PM, Nielo said:

I've been using Duoling to learn some Italian during lockdown (I started out with Russian, as I took a few Russian lessons during high school, but realised that I was mostly guessing my Duolingo answers, so I switched to a language that's a little more familiar to me).

Reading the Harry Potter books in German is a great goal! I'm not just saying that - I used the Harry Potter books to learn/improve my English when I was a kid. I'd learned some English in school (I think I was around 10 when they started teaching us English), and we only dub movies/shows for children, everything else is subtitled, so I did pick up some English from just watching TV. But I was a huge Harry Potter fan, and had already read the first 2 or 3 books a couple of times, when I decided I wanted to read the English versions as well. (Part of this was motivated by me wanting the learn the "real names" of the characters, as most of the names had been translated as well - which makes sense, considering the names actually have meanings, but I still felt like their English names were their "real" names. XD)
I started out with reading one page in English, and then reading that same page in Dutch, to see if I understood everything. I also kept a dictionary on hand for the words I couldn't figure out through context clues. I moved on to reading two pages at a time, then chapters, and by the time the 4th book came out, I didn't really need the Dutch version to understand the English one, but I still remember bringing both books with me on holiday, just in case.

So yeah, I highly recommend reading them in German, even if you feel you haven't quite mastered the German language yet. Reading books you're already familiar with is a great way to improve your language skills!

Duolingo also has sets of short stories to read through, so I think once I'm confident with those - which may take a while! - and will in turn give me far more time to get further up the Duo tree, I'll give the Potter books a shot... or at least the first three which are far more children's books than the later series! The idea of having the English version next to me is a great one though! Thanks!

I keep meaning to bring my German dictionary home from my parents and keep forgetting. I mean, it's been there since my GCSE years some fifteen years ago!

On 9/25/2020 at 5:54 PM, queen_hatshepset said:

Lol me and my little sister know the first book by heart. We would recite the movie word for word every night before bed too. Best of luck! I love that you have set a specific goal in achieving for learning a language. Doing this, especially with a topic that you are really interested in will help you accomplish this goal!

I never got the full book by heart...only those first few pages. I could probably still paraphrase the rest though!! I'm currently slowly writing a fanfic I started years ago - and I'm only in second year! I'm an absolute whizz at the Quizup Harry Potter questions though!

On 9/27/2020 at 7:36 AM, Duma said:

I'm using duolingo too to learn Japanese. Once you get the hang out of reading the hiragana and katakana it's not that bad to learn it. The Kanji is a different story. I'm trying to learn Japanese for multiple reasons:

1. I would like to visit Japan one day, and not the touristic cities but travel through the countryside.

2. I want to be able to understand Japanese spoken anime without needing subs and to be able to read the little jokes/details that are sometimes hidden in the scenes.

I already speak Dutch, English and if I brush up on it a bit French. German is a different story, I can somewhat read enough to understand the basics and if they speak slowly enough I can understand it too, but I can not write or speak it myself. I never had any German at school. Maybe, in the far future, when I can speak Japanese well enough I might try and learn German too with Duolingo. I just don't want to confuse my brain now with 2 languages, learning them is hard for me too. I have a science brain, not a language brain

I had a language brain, but only for English!! My science brain was ok... but really for biology and chemistry rather than the hard science in physics! Creative writing and reading was always where I excelled.

I get the not wanting to confuse the brain with two languages. I'd love to learn Russian at some point in the future - the country has always fascinated me and again, I'd love to be able to read materials in their native language rather than having to rely on translators!

Excellent reasons for learning Japanese though!!

[rsparkleshark]

The Duolingo Spanish podcast is pretty good for anyone learning Spanish. Its intermediate level. For more advanced level, I listen to El Hilo podcast which is a Spanish news podcast from NPR, but it is very fast!

[Zize55]

I want to learn French, it sounds very beautiful and I want to move to live in France

[Secre]

I've taken the Podcast advice on board more recently - I've started very simple with Coffee Break German just to back up my current knowledge and learn a few new words in the process. I suspect as the Podcast goes on it will get more complex and hopefully I'll be getting further in my Duolingo so be able to understand it relatively easily.

Once I get a little bit more confident I will look at  Slow German mit Annik Rubens, Warum nicht? and Easy German which are more of an intermediate level I think. It's also really good that I can listen to them whilst doing basic data entry at work and not feel guilty like I do if I'm watching something on NetFlix at the same time... or playing neopets of course.

[AndyCat]

Good luck learning!

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[Andriano20]

Learning foreign languages is great, and it's never too late to start. A few months ago my English was also at a bad level, but I thought about it when I was offered a great option to study in the USA. I realized it was a chance not to be missed. Although I can't say with certainty that I can read Harry Potter in English, my level is improving and I'm satisfied. Plus, when writing essays and papers, I use best editing site essays to improve my grammar. And I wish you good luck in learning languages. You will do well!

 

[Bodhi]

Ooo, Duolingo! 

I've been using that for a few years, but not frequently. I've been back at it recently, however, mainly to keep my daily streak going.

My main course is French, which I find pretty easy because I had to learn it in high school in the '90s.

Spanish, though I've not done it for a while.

Norwegian (Bokmal): apparently it's one of the easiest languages to learn, and I quite like it.

German: though I've not done it for a while.

Haitian Creole: similar to French in a lot of ways. Got a good way into it, but then longer phrases were thrown at me and I had a hard time keeping up.