>Learning resources First and foremost check the Sup Forums Wiki. Please contribute to the wiki as you learn a new language. Many pages need updates. Some pages are completely absent (Hungarian for example)
Check """pastebin.com/ACEmVqua (embed)"""; for plenty of language resources as well as some nice image guides.
/Lang/ is currently short on those image guides, so if you can pitch in to help create one for a given language, don't hesitate to do so!
Torrents with more resources than you'll ever need for 30 plus languages: Google Drive folder with books for all kinds of languages: drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9QDHej9UGAdcDhWVEllMzJBSEk# (Links to the other folders, apparently it was taken down from the original drive)
I've been learning Japanese but am honestly tempted to start learning Mandarin. I don't want to stop leaning Japanese though.
Is it possible to learn both at the same time? Or is that a stupid idea?
Jacob Reyes
concentrate on one at the time
Jaxon Miller
I might end up living in China soon (slim chance), so I might end up swapping to Mandarin then. But otherwise I guess I will just stick with boring ol' Japanese
James James
Yeah, Its better that way. Or there is a risk that you'll end up mixing the two that can create rather unpleasant situations.
Anthony Ortiz
(more difficult) xd
Ian Myers
I am studying ancient Greek and those verbs man
Jayden Butler
They will never be able to understand us
Juan Allen
Guys, I'm graduating this year and I'll go to China for a masters degree (full scholarship). The thing is, I'll be 25 at the beginning of the program and I've never had a job or money. I'm feeling old and useless.
Do you think I'm wasting my time? Can I find a job or something to do while I'm there? I want to start doing something, I'm feeling like a piece of shit to be quite honest.
Btw I'll do 1 year of mandarin (also in China) before my masters. Could you recommend me some good material?
Kevin Thomas
Good. I don't want no niggers pretending they were kalevipoegs and shit.
Caleb Garcia
Both languages and pretty hard...unless you're a savant you're probably best off picking one.
Logan Adams
>Romanian is easier than French t. a dude studying Romanian but with no knowledge of French
Josiah Davis
Learning russian. My vocabulary is progressing at a snail pace. I hope i'll eventually learn it quicker.
Luis Mitchell
Yeah I also found that weird this language seems like a clusterfuck to learn
>36 weaks Yeah maybe in germany. Good luck understanding austrians or Swiss. Even germans struggle with understanding us
Dylan Jenkins
ahhh but the table does have future in the past besides those 3 future mods
Lincoln Turner
I like Romanian's spelling (almost 1 letter = 1 sound), which French obviously doesn't have, but the grammar of Romanian is relatively complicated and inconsistent.
James Ortiz
They're equivalent, future 1 is standard 2 & 3 are sometimes referred to as "viitor popular" which basically means less formal, but it's all vague as shit anyway The second one is usually the most common in casual conversation
Ayden Howard
Isn't austrian fairly similar to standard german? Moreso than Swiss german anyway.
I know there are some vocab changes like erdapfel instead of kartoffel ... what else is different in austrian german?
Dylan Collins
>gave up Fuck
Lucas Thomas
Is Faroese harder or easier than Icelandic?
Josiah Long
bump
William Long
I feel you, the non-latin writing system adds an extra hurdle to word recognition and they like to use really long words
I find that using handwritten flashcards helps me a lot
Liam Allen
What app, textbook, website, etc. is your primary resource for learning a language?
I personally am using a textbook called Reading for German. Though the main thing I use now is a website called lingq. I also use duolingo just because I want to finish the damn tree but otherwise it's not very useful anymore. Once I finish the tree I'll probably try out memrise for a bit so I can study on my phone while I'm out and about.
Brody Morgan
I use duolingo, a grammar book, and I try to read news in the target language, handwriting flashcards for new words. I'm doing Russian so I do a few examples of different cases for some of the words as well as I learn them.
Bentley Hughes
Anyone?
Jaxson Adams
I use duolingo+memrise together, have a book called Comprehensive Russian Grammar that I use as a grammar reference whenever I don't understand why a word is conjugated or declined a certain way or a sentence is structured how it is, and I follow a few Russian people on social media and youtube and read their posts and watch them talk in videos between studying
Really need to consume more media and get off my ass and do the Pushkin online courses
Liam Ross
Why are you learning Russian?
For material check the wiki... I think the chinese one gets spammed by advertisers though.
Michael Ortiz
Romance languages are boring and I have very little interest in their cultures or media, and Japanese is a bit too intimidating for me with their logographic writing system, so I decided Russian is a nice middle ground, I'm kind of a russiaboo anyway and want to at least visit Petersburg and Moscow sometime, considering trying to get a TEFL position over there within a couple years
Don't try to talk me out of this either btw because I already know it's kind of a shithole and there are objectively better places I could go for money or living standards, but I'm a broke loser here already so if I'm going to be a broke loser either way I want to try doing it in a foreign country I'm fascinated by for a while, make some interesting experiences before my youth is up
Nicholas Smith
Why is Suomi so difficult? Do the Finns want to keep the memes to themselves?
Jacob Peterson
Wtf are you talking about. Its actually really easy and logical to learn. I have a german guy who came here to work and in 3 months he spoke bad romanian just by listening to us.
Mason Long
How is French any more difficult than any of the other Romance languages?
Caleb Sanchez
Spelling and Pronunciation i guess
Joshua Sanders
Doubt it.
Realistically, French spelling is similar-ish to English, and Pronunciation would be harder for both Portuguese and Romanian than French (at least based on the number of sounds).
Wyatt Robinson
haha, i'd like to see you speak russian with me in person after 44 weeks of learning it
Asher Rodriguez
French has a lot more hard rules accents and quorcs then any other romance language. t. Guy who took 4 years of french in school
>at least based on the number of sounds The only strange sounds we have are
Ă (like a long pause in "aaaa what?") Â (Like when you are desgusted "aaaa what is that?!") Ș (like the S in Shampoo) Ț (like the T in "Tzar of Russia")
Jackson Lee
Nothing wrong with learning Russian. As a native English speaker, it really comes down to personal interest since you already know the most important language.
Jayden Price
I'm learning Russian because pretty much 0 Americans learn any language much less Russian and it is applicable to the field I work in so it seems it would give me an edge in hyper competitive Government jobs. That's the justification, really I just have fun with it and putting my energy into it is helping me shift away from hobbies that don't contribute to personal growth, like video games etc.
Charles Gutierrez
Is learning Ukrainian because I like Taras Shevchenko a bad reason? I'm not even 1/59344 Ukrainian.
Carter Long
Yeah no I agree, having a personal interest in it is what keeps me disciplined enough to keep up my daily studies, I just noticed that for some reason whenever I tell anyone I'm studying Russian they're skeptical, like nobody ever asks "Why are you learning Spanish"
Kinda makes you feel like you have to defend your choice
Ukrainian and Belarussian are more dialects of Russian than their own languages, it's pretty much the same language but with a few regional words and quirks
If you have any kind of interest in the language/culture that's enough, anything is better than "It's easy/a practice language", as long as you think that's enough to keep you motivated to keep up with studying it though, but if you actually get into it you might find you like more aspects of the culture anyway
Lucas Long
Russian seemed intimidating to me, though I love Russian literature. Went with German instead because I also didn't want to learn a roamance language.
It's for diplomats that spend 4 hours in class per day learning. Difficulty is based on pass rates or something like that. French was initially a level 1 but had a lower pass rate than the other level 1 languages so they bumped it up.
Jose Cooper
This should put it into perspective. The hours spent learning is about 4 per day for each level.
Logan Turner
Umm sweetie, English is the hardest language in the world. Just ask Oxford.
And every retard on this planet can master it in 3 weeks, except for the British.
Benjamin Ward
Every native speaker believes their own language is harder than it actually is as some kind of pride thing
Brayden Russell
Yeah, but it's pretty funny when it comes from an English speaker. Which is a notoriously easy language, just like Spanish and Swedish.
And I'm pretty sure most Dutch speakers know that German and French are quite a bit more difficult than our own language as we had in it school.
Aaron Watson
bump
Daniel Peterson
what is it with German language that makes it so impossible to actually learn. I watch their TV, read their news and have been learning it in school for years, yet I can't string together like two sentences without taking 5 minutes to try and remember all the words and correct order.
Leo Clark
Maybe you just hate 'em?
Jack Garcia
Using random.org to pick a language
Gabriel Stewart
why not pick a language which comes from a culture you'd like to experience, or has literature you want to read, etc. Seems like you're bound to fail picking a random language
Jaxon Cook
Isn't ancient Greek almost exactly the same as modern Greek?
Jason Morales
What would be the best thing to couple with Duolingo for me to start learning German? I'm trying to learn it because the robotics company I work for is based out of Germany, and I feel like it would be helpful if they decide to send me there for work.
Gabriel Stewart
I need to expand my French vocabulary and Duolingo doesn't seem to be working very well for that
Brody Murphy
Kial vi ne lernas Esperanton, Sup Forums?
Easton Fisher
I've heard both that it's almost exactly the same and that it's extremely different.
Mason Ward
>English is hard >Beacause there is no ham in hamburger. >Oxford Wow, why not just let China take over the planet, it's over for the Anglosphere. How can Oxford not know that this word comes from Hamburg the place, and not ham as in pork?
Nolan Adams
How do I get better at French listening lads This is the final hurdle If French people had French subtitles under them when they spoke I would be fluent right now
Juan Morgan
Anyone tried one of these?
Are they any good?
>inb4 use online resources I am for Deutsch and 日本語 but you can imagine how difficult it is with both going at the same time.
Xavier Richardson
Pronunciation is relatively hard compared to other Romance languages. Spelling is almost as bad as English.
Nolan Hall
Hello Anons. I'm studying French and next semester the class is almost entirely in French. Problem is I'm shit at remembering vocab. I study the words, but I'm just bad at remembering vocab. Do you guys use any useful mnemonics for vocab or is it just reading shit until the words become part of you? I've only had a semester.
Jack Richardson
Try duolingo, it's not that usefull by itself but it should definitely help your vocabulary.
Isaac Russell
modern Greek is Turkish with Greek alphabet
Sebastian Powell
Pals, I am really divided concerning what to study. I already learned French, and have dabbled in other languages over the years. I do not know what to learn next. I want to completely dedicated myself to a new language as I did for French, but I don't know which one. People tell me just to do the one I am most interested in, but I am interested in so many languages. The ones I narrowed it down to two:
Mandarin - I am interested in Chinese history, literature, and culture. I am interested in experiencing how foreign China and the rest of the sinosphere is, and accessing that foreign culture. Plus, it goes without saying that it will open up job opportunities in pretty much any field. One thing that holds me back is the 6000 characters I need to know to be able to read. I dabbled in Japanese for a bit, and memorising characters is tedious as heck.
Russian - Same reasons as Mandarin, plus I have a handful of online friends who know it. I hear the grammar is pretty rough.
Any suggestions, anecdotes? Looking for really any advice that would help my decision.
Gabriel Jones
pro ke me lernas ido, la vera internaciona linguo.
Jayden Campbell
It's just memorization. Use Anki
Caleb Lopez
It's the same in difficulty I'd say
Isaiah Rogers
this book
Zachary Moore
I disagree. "memorizing" words just means you're doing a micro-translation in your head. Vocab should be built though association to other words imo. This is why duolingo, lingvist, memerise, clozemaster are pretty effective apps. It's not just flashcards and word for word translations.
In German for example there are a bunch of words that can pretty much mean anything on their own. Their association to other words in the same sentence give their actual meaning. So you can't just "memorize" the word, you've got to see it used in dozens of ways.
Russian. You have a better chance of actually learning it desu. plus Russian literature is the best.
Jacob Parker
Reminder that persian is the real man's IndoEuropean Language of choice
Josiah Green
Why is french harder to an English speaker than other romance languages? The grammar rules are basically the same between all of them and English has a ton of French loanwords
Parker Phillips
Keep practising one day it just clicks. I used to hear audio files from my books, note everything and then would hear all of it again with the transcription. Did it 5-6 times per text or until I got everything right. Also been hearing a shit ton of french radio (radio.garden)
Adam Allen
>Turkish
Dylan Edwards
French people hold their language to a high standard. So you can't just speak it like non-anglos speak English (anyway they want). You have to have a good accent and the pronunciation is hard. Those r's are frustrating, and conjugation is a nightmare, and combining two words (one that ends in a consonant, followed by a word that starts with a vowel) makes listening pretty hard too.
It's only made somewhat easy by the shared vocabulary.
Liam Bell
what did you choose?
Jack Diaz
bump
Jaxon Parker
I didn't do it yet. I want to add a couple of dead languages on there too but im undecided which ones.