Learning a new language?

[Jae102]

I'm learning Japanese.

 

[kjg1672]

I took 2 basic Spanish classes, and then I watched a lot of Spanish movies and spoke it with native speakers whenever I could. In about 2 years I was competent.

I should say native Spanish speakers could undertand me, maybe not quite competent.

 

[Tubes]

Find German skype contacts and converse with them in german, take german language courses in person or online (i reccomend livemocha), buy primary school level german books with lots of pictures. Buy/make word cards with the 100 most commonly used german words on them (with their english translation). Once you've learned them, add the next 100 most common words to the pile and keep increasing the number. Do the same with objects on picture cards. Browse german websites as often as you can. Hell, set up a german e-mail account, a german facebook account, and twitter account and start adding german speaking friends.

Change you're phone/computer language to german & listen to german music.

If you're thinking to yourself, try and think in german. Keep a dictionary on hand in-case you don't know a word and practice reading/writing in german.

Do this for 2-3 hours every night for 2-3 years and you'll be pretty much german. Congratz.

 

[ahme4]

Pimsleur for the basics and to learn to speak right away. Assimil goes good with it too.
Stay away from shitty rosetta stone. For the rest just watch as much tv as you can in german and read german newspapers online.

zdf.de, faz.net, welt.de, nzz.ch, spiegel.de

Also as mentioned above, speaking over skype with other germans or people learning helps a lot too, I try to do that once a week.

 

[fingercuffs]

[QUOTE=cintur

 

[Mountain Dew]

Find German skype contacts and converse with them in german, take german language courses in person or online (i reccomend livemocha), buy primary school level german books with lots of pictures. Buy/make word cards with the 100 most commonly used german words on them (with their english translation). Once you've learned them, add the next 100 most common words to the pile and keep increasing the number. Do the same with objects on picture cards. Browse german websites as often as you can. Hell, set up a german e-mail account, a german facebook account, and twitter account and start adding german speaking friends.

Change you're phone/computer language to german & listen to german music.

If you're thinking to yourself, try and think in german. Keep a dictionary on hand in-case you don't know a word and practice reading/writing in german.

Do this for 2-3 hours every night for 2-3 years and you'll be pretty much german. Congratz.

Thank you so much for this advice, very good information.

Pimsleur for the basics and to learn to speak right away. Assimil goes good with it too.
Stay away from shitty rosetta stone. For the rest just watch as much tv as you can in german and read german newspapers online.

zdf.de, faz.net, welt.de, nzz.ch, spiegel.de

Also as mentioned above, speaking over skype with other germans or people learning helps a lot too, I try to do that once a week.

Thank you also and thanks to everyone else who gave advice, very helpful!

 

[Mountain Dew]

Yeah, there are quite a few German students here.

Haha, I went to UFC 99 in Cologne, got stupid drunk. Didn't harass anybody with my shouting though, but had an awesome time being there. Went to celebrate new years eve in Berlin a few years back, might have been a bit loud there though and left a nasty mess in the bathroom of our hotel room for the cleaning ladies to deal with, lmao. Foulest most sour stench I've ever smelled. Did my best to clean it myself, but it was futile.

Haha, I got proper fucked up at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. Drank like 4 litres of beer, never really did that before. Weirdly though, I never barfed which is unusual for me since I normally throw up at some point after a heavy night of drinking.

 

[Diktaattori]

Pick up Finnish, it's easy as in we don't really talk.

 

[new_mexico1]

So Rosetta Stone isn't good?

 

[SevenSamurai]

Learning German was much harder than Japanese for me -no kidding.

Even though English is a Germanic language -outside of structure, it has much more similarity to the romance/latin languages.

What's even more surprising for me is that some linguists agree that German is in the "difficult" category with Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese.

 

[Mountain Dew]

So Rosetta Stone isn't good?

Entschuldige for the bump, just want to see this answered.

 

[KoreanZawmbie]

The germans seem meticulous as fuck 1

 

[foucault]

Learning German was much harder than Japanese for me -no kidding.

Even though English is a Germanic language -outside of structure, it has much more similarity to the romance/latin languages.

What's even more surprising for me is that some linguists agree that German is in the "difficult" category with Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese.

Not sure what linguists you're referring to. The most commonly cited source in this discussion of "hardest languages to learn" (for English first language speakers) is the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. They categorize languages in stages according to hours needed to achieve general proficiency.

German is in Category 1 (relatively 'easy' - and I use that term loosely because all people learn languages differently) while languages like Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese), Korean, & Japanese are Category 3 (the most difficult, which require almost 3 times as much time to achieve basic proficiency as Category 1 languages, like German).

(Modern) German and English both derive from a similar source: West Germanic - so aside from the fact they are different languages, they share a lot of similarities in a variety of ways.

 

[ahme4]

So Rosetta Stone isn't good?

If you can get it for free, maybe helps as a suppliment.
Overall I think it sucks though.
Assimil is 10x better.

 

[orgulhodopara]

Find German skype contacts and converse with them in german, take german language courses in person or online (i reccomend livemocha), buy primary school level german books with lots of pictures. Buy/make word cards with the 100 most commonly used german words on them (with their english translation). Once you've learned them, add the next 100 most common words to the pile and keep increasing the number. Do the same with objects on picture cards. Browse german websites as often as you can. Hell, set up a german e-mail account, a german facebook account, and twitter account and start adding german speaking friends.

Change you're phone/computer language to german & listen to german music.

If you're thinking to yourself, try and think in german. Keep a dictionary on hand in-case you don't know a word and practice reading/writing in german.

Do this for 2-3 hours every night for 2-3 years and you'll be pretty much german. Congratz.

very nice advices!

 

[Rhood]

The best way to psychology brain wash yourself is through repetition.
That being said, the best way to learn new languages is to expose yourself to the dialect 24/7

 

[Space]

Not sure what linguists you're referring to. The most commonly cited source in this discussion of "hardest languages to learn" (for English first language speakers) is the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. They categorize languages in stages according to hours needed to achieve general proficiency.

German is in Category 1 (relatively 'easy' - and I use that term loosely because all people learn languages differently) while languages like Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese), Korean, & Japanese are Category 3 (the most difficult, which require almost 3 times as much time to achieve basic proficiency as Category 1 languages, like German).

(Modern) German and English both derive from a similar source: West Germanic - so aside from the fact they are different languages, they share a lot of similarities in a variety of ways.

I have to agree with this.

I took German in high school and have visited Germany three times and it's extremely easy to learn. I have some problems with pronunciation, mainly because my German sounds like Spanish. I have an issue with debasing my voice to such a guttural level.

On the other hand Mandarin is much harder to get certain pronunciations (saying "day" is a constant struggle, woe is I), plus distinguishing tones on the fly and not to mention that it's easy to forget less commonly used characters at times.

I can't see how anybody would classify German as one of the most difficult languages. You don't have to learn a new writing system if you know a Western language, everything is pronounced how it's spelled (and vice versa), the compound words aren't that intimidating once you break them down, I don't remember many exceptions, relatively few homonyms, no funky tones, etc. There are irregular verbs though and the aforementioned pronunciations challenges.

 

[Mountain Dew]

Really appreciate everybody's advice. I'll just throw in, that the Android app I'm using to learn some basic words has been pretty helpful. Just going over it every day is helping a great deal.

If you can get it for free, maybe helps as a suppliment.
Overall I think it sucks though.
Assimil is 10x better.

Tell me more about this Assimil?

 

[Francis Rossi]

Tell me more about this Assimil?

http://www.assimil.com/descriptionProduitAbreg.do

 

[SevenSamurai]

Not sure what linguists you're referring to. The most commonly cited source in this discussion of "hardest languages to learn" (for English first language speakers) is the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. They categorize languages in stages according to hours needed to achieve general proficiency.

German is in Category 1 (relatively 'easy' - and I use that term loosely because all people learn languages differently) while languages like Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese), Korean, & Japanese are Category 3 (the most difficult, which require almost 3 times as much time to achieve basic proficiency as Category 1 languages, like German).

(Modern) German and English both derive from a similar source: West Germanic - so aside from the fact they are different languages, they share a lot of similarities in a variety of ways.

I did some googles and German is considered one of the hardest to learn from an overall rating to other languages respectively. For native english speakers it is not rated as hard. my mistake. That said -I did not find it simple like Romance languages (Spanish and French were easy IMO). German pronunciation was easy but the rules were challenging. It did not click for me and I found it hard to get excited about.

For me Japanese was pretty easy. Consistent rules and the Asian sentence structure (verb and affirmation at the end) makes logical sense and requires everyone to pay attention when communicating. Kanjii and radicals takes a lot of time but with immerison software or socialization it comes quickly. Informal Japanese can be a tough follow at first but Japanese is a language that I was extaordinarily interested in.