Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ggamer]

I have an issue, which happens to be the issue plagueing most high school students in the summer; I have too much time on my hands.

I've sort of solved this by getting a part time job, and re-taking a pre-calculas class to get a broader understanding of calculus, but I really want to learn a new language.

I've narrowed my choices down to two languages: Russian and Japanese. Both languages have a separate speaking language and alphabet (Japanese moreso), and would be very challenging to learn. I don't want to become a master, just to get a good understanding of the grammar structure of either language.

So my question is; are there any online services I can use to accomplish this goal? A free service would be ideal, but i don't mind paying for it as long as the cost is minimal.

[LordSlowpoke]

I actually have some resources for Japanese on hand since a friend decided that now that they are learning it, everyone should. Everyone forever. I'll link them up for you as soon as I get to an actual computer.


disregard that they're basically worthless

i guess i can throw this your way though

the whole site seems pretty nice

[Lectorog]

Check out Namasensei's Fuckin Japanese Lessons. Incomplete, but a good start. Entertaining and supposedly a very good teacher.

[LordBucket]

I've narrowed my choices down to two languages: Russian and Japanese.

So my question is; are there any online services I can use to accomplish this goal?
A free service would be ideal, but i don't mind paying for it as long as the cost is minimal.

Yes, and google will happily provide you with lots of them. However, from personal experience...both web-based and interactive computer CD language learning tools are very difficult to learn a language from. They might be helpful memorization tools simply for learning lots of words, but it's difficult to learn grammar and pronunciation this way. Also, with Japanese and Russian both, the sounds of these languages are not precisely the same as they are in english. And with Japanese, the cadence is different.

Of the two, Russian is easier to learn. If you want to learn Japanese, I highly recommend that you at least start with personal instruction of some kind. Take a class, get a Japanese girlfriend, go to a meetup group...something. I don't recommend trying to learn Japanese by starting out with youtube videos, books and instant immersion / rosetta stone type CDs. For Japanese it will help immensely to have a foundation to start with before you try learning from these kinds of materials.

Whichever you choose, if you do want an inexpensive language learning experience that you can do on your own without classes or people to help you, I'd recommend you torrent the Pimsleur language courses. They're purely-audio CDs with half-hour lessons that very slowly and gradually introduce you to grammar, then drill you hard with complete sentences that you're then expected to reply to with complete sentences.

Here's lesson 1 Pimsleur Russian on youtube

Give it a try. Note that while Pimsleur courses are notorious for teaching very little vocabularly, they're awesome for grammar and for teaching you to be able to speak at conversation speeds without having to sit and think in english then convert to another language. Pimsleur courses are not enough on their own, but they provide very good foundational material from which you can then move on to other materials, and I've never seen any solo learning method that gives better results.

[ggamer]

thank you all very much!

I'll check these links out tomorrow, when it's no longer 3AM

[Bdthemag]

I'll give the answer I give to anyone looking for free stuff.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pirate the Rosetta Stone series of software, you have to jump through a few hoops, but it's super damn easy.

Also, even with an online-tool to help you, you won't really retain much. You need to actively engage yourself in the language, mainly by reading books and whatnot according to your skill level. Luckily for you, you narrowed the two languages you wanted down to the two most fucking annoying languages to learn. I'd pick Russian, because there's no way in hell you'd see any progress in learning Japanese unless you were extremely dedicated to it over a long period of time.

[Tellemurius]

I'll give the answer I give to anyone looking for free stuff.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pirate the Rosetta Stone series of software, you have to jump through a few hoops, but it's super damn easy.

Also, even with an online-tool to help you, you won't really retain much. You need to actively engage yourself in the language, mainly by reading books and whatnot according to your skill level. Luckily for you, you narrowed the two languages you wanted down to the two most fucking annoying languages to learn. I'd pick Russian, because there's no way in hell you'd see any progress in learning Japanese unless you were extremely dedicated to it over a long period of time.

ironically enough japanese is stupid easy, my reasoning behind this is to do not look at the japanese alphabets yet, start from romaji and it would make sense to a english speaker.

[Lectorog]

You're saying the alphabet is not easy. What about Japanese is easy, then? The grammatical structure?

And hiragana is just one step away from romaji. 48 characters to represent every sound in the Japanese language; you can learn them perfectly in under a month. Of course, hiragana isn't what's actually used, but you're going to have to learn it at some point.

[Tellemurius]

You're saying the alphabet is not easy. What about Japanese is easy, then? The grammatical structure?

And hiragana is just one step away from romaji. 48 characters to represent every sound in the Japanese language; you can learn them perfectly in under a month. Of course, hiragana isn't what's actually used, but you're going to have to learn it at some point.

depending on the words phrase and grammar you will be using a combination of hiragana and katakana with kanji alot. The language in sense is easy just assigning them to the correct character will you need to memorize alot.

[GiglameshDespair]

The answer is obvious: google translate. Type in each word, translate, and memorise. Simple and certain to work.

[Lectorog]

Or, y'know, use a dictionary.

[Tellemurius]

here some japanese stuff to help you (brought to you by a person around here who doesn't seem active anymore)

http://www.tagaini.net/
http://ankisrs.net/
http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html

[Owlbread]

There are countless online services for learning Russian and its grammar isn't all that complicated once you get the hang of it. I found it always makes sense, a bit like German or something but more natural. I would recommend using Rosetta Stone, backed up with youtube-based lessons with sites like Allatek and so forth.

Ideally though you should have some kind of a tutor/teacher to carry you through.

[Gervassen]

Learning is pointless without use. You can spin your wheels doing worthless feel-good "learning" for a long time without actually getting useable skills. If you want to have a second language that can be used? Get a tutor for the basic sounds. Get hooked up to a native speaker as a penpal, perhaps later do skype sessions. Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone are the pointless wheel-spinning that I mentioned earlier.

Try Lang-8 as a penpal match-making service. You'll find the website is full of people wanting to study english for some odd reason, consider yourself lucky that your language is basically the modern lingua franca.

Which is a good point... maybe your efforts are best placed in becoming even more skilled at English. How is your knowledge of English grammar? Do you know what a gerund is? A dangling participle? Do you speak with panache and elocution, my dear sir?

Also, since we're talking about egocentric "self-improvement" one of the best tools for improving your communication in real life is a full-length mirror. Your body language speaks volumes. Expressively communicating is key to getting past other people's barriers on a subconscious level. Start focusing on the communication that you really need in everyday life. I might suggest old classics such as Andrew Carnegie and other books on selling your image. Until you are effective in the world's most influential language, there's no reason to learn another.

[Owlbread]

Learning is pointless without use. You can spin your wheels doing worthless feel-good "learning" for a long time without actually getting useable skills. If you want to have a second language that can be used? Get a tutor for the basic sounds. Get hooked up to a native speaker as a penpal, perhaps later do skype sessions. Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone are the pointless wheel-spinning that I mentioned earlier.

Try Lang-8 as a penpal match-making service. You'll find the website is full of people wanting to study english for some odd reason, consider yourself lucky that your language is basically the modern lingua franca.

Which is a good point... maybe your efforts are best placed in becoming even more skilled at English. How is your knowledge of English grammar? Do you know what a gerund is? A dangling participle? Do you speak with panache and elocution, my dear sir?

Also, since we're talking about egocentric "self-improvement" one of the best tools for improving your communication in real life is a full-length mirror. Your body language speaks volumes. Expressively communicating is key to getting past other people's barriers on a subconscious level. Start focusing on the communication that you really need in everyday life. I might suggest old classics such as Andrew Carnegie and other books on selling your image. Until you are effective in the world's most influential language, there's no reason to learn another.

That was a very ignorant post, I'm sorry. There are infinite benefits to learning new languages, vastly outweighing training yourself to speak and convey yourself like Roald Dahl.

Firstly, let's talk about the cognitive benefits. Research has shown that you will be able to assimilate information far more efficiently after learning new languages, meaning that you will find it easier to learn new things. That will come in handy in the future for ggamer as he studies. He will also develop new techniques for assimilating large quantities of information like vocabulary; skills that can be applied to other things that he has to memorise. I can quote book after book, paper after paper on the subject of the cognitive benefits for learning languages - this post isn't enough.

English is the modern lingua franca and it will continue to be such. There are more people learning English in China than there are native speakers of English, I have heard. However - compare speaking to a Chinese person on the street who has learned some English in High School with speaking to them in their native tongue. The fluency, the sharpness, I don't know - it's just not comparable. So much is lost in translation and in stumbling over words. The works of the great Russian authors, writers and poets like Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gorki and Grossman just can't be fully appreciated in English. Basically, if there's one reason to learn Russian it's so you can read these authors.