Other ones I think are pretty good: Babbel is less gamey but very clean to use. Anki is really solid as a free SRS tool and there's tons of decks available, but this might be better to use as a maintenance tool. Duolingo is very gamey and definitely the most fun but missing the SRS functions and features
My plan is that once I have some very baseline competence and a bigger vocabulary I will be doing more conversational practice with real people instead of imaginary ones
"Marx could read all European languages and write in three: German, French and English, to the admiration of language experts. He liked to repeat the saying: “A foreign language is a weapon in the struggle of life.”
-Paul Lafargue
Then I found a tutor on a website called tutoroo and i was really shocked how low the going rate is for language tutors, it was cheaper than any of the classes i could find. We became friends and now I know some Mandarin.
The most important thing I was told was to stop freaking out about tones. Just say the words and maybe you fuck up the tones sometimes but context will save you 99% of the time, and if you ever learn enough so that you're saying sentences that are complex enough that they actually could be interpreted multiple ways depending on your tones, you'll be able to deal with it then.
It's been a really long time and I'm just about to finish HSK 3, which is just barely enough to say basic things about daily life, but I can translate things with the help of a dictionary (Pleco is the best dictionary app ever but it gets real expensive if you buy the add ons) and I'm gonna keep going.
str_el_boi posted:I too am learning Mandarin via HelloChinese + Anki flashcards + Pleco and I would recommend each one thus far. I also recently started using Perapera, a “popup dictionary” browser extension that allows you to instantly look up definitions of characters by hovering over the text. Very helpful for reading practice (and still works great despite having lost developer support long ago).
oh yeah I use LiuChan for that, same thing. extremely helpful and this one still has dev support. you can even make it look like Pleco if you want
I'm also using Human Japanese because people said it was good. It's pretty decent so far. I'm trying to read The Woman In The Dunes entirely in Japanese by the end of the year or I will ceremonially kill myself with a shortsword.
wheatdevil posted:I'm also using Human Japanese because people said it was good.
I'm learning Dog Japanese, limited applicability but it's much easier.
shriekingviolet posted:I'm learning Dog Japanese, limited applicability but it's much easier.
It's harder than I expected though, I bit off more than I could chew
I came to a valuable realization today after my umpteenth foray into the cringy blogs and slimy reddit threads that constitute the 'language learning' corner of the internet. That corner is really a sub-sub-corner of the liberal self-help edifice. Just as every douchebag with a million dollars or ten million subscribers wants to sell you their 'rags-to-riches' technique, every chump who learns a language above an intermediate level thinks it is his prerogative to tell you how he did it and to expound his pet linguistic theories. Of course, these blogs have their place; they can be useful as bibliographies and 'tips and trix' compendiums. The occasional boons are set in the same ambient field as the rest of the internet, though. Techno-fetishism and the subjectivity of 'content consumers' are taken for granted. Most preachers purport to be relaying 'neuroscience' and other such unreplicatable science fads. One of the most psychotic methods I have come across, replete with a time-cube CSS is All Japanese All The Time, which encourages you to spend every waking hour passively absorbing anime and other Japanese content in tandem with Anki (I confess to using Anki too, but I am still not 100% convinced it is much more than a fad). I have equal parts admiration and disgust for the lunatics of AJATT. At their best , they take the firehose of content channel a small portion of it to do useful work. At their worst, they are wallowing in entertainment jelly.
Contrast this with the biographies of Marx and Lenin. Admittedly, neither learned any language outside of the proto-euro-indo branch, but studying harder languages entails a difference of quantity, not quality -- what I say still applies. Marx and Lenin had excellent concentration and patience from long experience reading and writing in their native languages. That experience transferred well to their studies of other languages. Both would readily chat with old and new acquaintances in a variety of languages, Lenin even specifically going with his wife to practice English in London parks and squares. Marx got his tips and tricks from Hegel, who apparently advocated memorizing verses of poetry in languages you DIDN't read as a sort of memory-strengthening hack. Maybe it is not possible for us to study like the intellectuals in the old style, but I'm going to try.
I'm writing this for my fellow students who have the same obsessive tendency to turn to the internet as an oracle, following it's advice, getting burned, forgetting, and coming back for more. At the end of the day, what really counts is hard work and dedication, which, ironically, you will also find as a tenet in every one of the methods I criticize. What you won't find, though, is any sense of historical context or seriousness of thought like we do on the rhiz'. Before the age of mechanical reproduction and the complete desiccation of the oral tradition, lots of people where able to recite stories, songs, plays and religious texts verbatim. People managed to be polyglots before Anki and streaming video, and I see no evidence that the advent of those two things has caused any great advance.
If, like me, you must spend equal time studying and fiddling with techno-methodology, at least try and counter-balance the trend with some old-school methods.
Just read Gramsci on education. He does a good job of explaining the former 'educational principle' of Latin and Greek studies, and why it was actually good. Many of the problems he foresees with educational modernization and expansion are still with us. As a student, I feel I have to play catch-up with the shoddy study habits I learned in lax, 'creative' schooling.
sovnarkoman posted:name it "the society without spectacles"
lmao
sovnarkoman posted:name it "the society without spectacles"
well maybe he's got some demo lessons on his youtube channel
Belphegor posted:One of the most psychotic methods I have come across, replete with a time-cube CSS is All Japanese All The Time, which encourages you to spend every waking hour passively absorbing anime and other Japanese content in tandem with Anki (I confess to using Anki too, but I am still not 100% convinced it is much more than a fad). I have equal parts admiration and disgust for the lunatics of AJATT. At their best , they take the firehose of content channel a small portion of it to do useful work.
I've adapted AJATT to learn languages myself. I do love that it, for the first time in my life, emphasized the importance of reading and listening to that language before attempting to speak and write. I can't remember how many French classes I took in middle school where it would be such a shock doing oral exams because that would be the only time we were actually listening to a "native" speaker talk. And everyone carries this wrong way of learning into adulthood, where you think "language learning" has to be writing conjugations out in a colourful notebook, working through multiple textbooks, and only occasionally treating yourself to a movie or a TV show in your target language.
A couple practical things AJATT got me to do: switch my social media into TL - Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube- you have to actively put "not interested" under English videos, Like TL videos, and the algorithm will learn pretty quick. Watch movies, and TV in target language without subtitles - if you put subtitles in English its as if you're watching an English show, youll take the path of least resistance- you will slowly learn and pick up words, then phrases. I'm very proud how far I've come over the past few months, I feel like I have a much more intuitive sense of what sounds right and wrong, and I can improvise alot better using the new phrases I hear.