The Language-Learning Thread

I may be wrong in this, but languages like Japanese, Chinese, Russian (in other words, languages that aren't on the GCSE syllabus, though there may be a GCSE exam in them, mind...) tend to start from scratch at degree level.

When I looked around, just for fun, at Chinese degrees, they all said that you only really had to be a beginner. Even then, that wasn't compulsory.

However, degrees called things like "Modern Foreign Languages" tend to be comprised of French, Spanish, German, Italian etc. and you usually need an A-level grade in those subjects to get on to them. My housemate was doing it and the modules were more about reading and analysing French literature or watching French film. By the time you get past A-level you're looking at "acquired fluency" anyway.

Just about to do some Japanese revision, as I've fallen quite far behind after making storming progress last year. Even my kana is quite rusty.

Though I can remember a fair bit just saying it off the top of my head - the opposite of Chinese, where I'm way, way, way better at reading.

Also, if Alpha is reading this, have you started learning Japanese yet?

I could type out a simple message for you to practise reading once you know the kana. It would be useful helping me revise as well.

I'm going to get hopelessly confused with Chinese though. On my count, I know about 300 characters in Chinese with about 200 of those I am able to speak off the top of my head.

I know quite a few of the 100 most common characters:

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

Though I find it hard to fathom that knowing the first 200 characters in that list gives me a 55% understanding of Chinese.

Gah, I still ended up doing Chinese.

To albear this topic further, for those doing either Japanese/Chinese, how much importance do you put on writing?

See, I probably spend too much time writing when I should really focus on speaking and listening a bit more. For example, I spend an awful lot of time copying out characters when I first learn them. As a result, without sounding arrogant, my stroke order - in both languages - is excellent.

All the characters I know - and I know between 200 and 300 in Chinese and, obviously, the kana in Japanese - I can write using the correct stroke order 100% of the time. As long as I don't start writing a character before I learn the stroke order, I can do this very easily, generally.

But is it that important? I'm not in either country and, even if I am, I probably will spend more time reading and speaking. One Japanese site just said to ignore writing completely. However, I find it useful, especially in Chinese where everything is a character, to continually write out sentences by hand on pieces of paper. I copy everything in my books - the symbols themselves, the example sentences, the dialogues, Heck, even the transcripts for the listening and the like.

The plus side is that if I know a sentence, I can write it, usually, flawlessly. My handwriting will probably be quite neat as well.

The down side is, I may spend a disproportionate amount of time simply copying, rather than actively thinking and speaking out the sentences.

Any advice? Specifically John Galt/Kinetic for the Chinese part, though any Japanese students will be able to help. I know StayDead seems to be the complete opposite and types a lot of his sentences out, when he isn't bombarding himself with audio.

With this being the language thread as well, I figure this'll be a good place to put it.. I recently read an interesting article (unfortunately, I can't find it now) about people that are growing up without a native level grasp of any language. Essentially, parents in countries like India and China are talking to their children in English right from them being born, despite them themselves not having a good enough grasp of the language to teach it to someone else. They mistakenly believe that by only speaking to their children in English, their children will have an advantage.

What they end up with is children that speak English like it's their second language, despite them not speaking anything else and this inability to converse with anyone on a native level adversely affects their relationships, their ability to pick up on non-verbal communication, etc.

It was quite interesting.

I can't even comprehend how that happens, scientifically-speaking.

I mean, everyone learns a second language by anchoring it to their native tongue. I've read some real pretentious waffle on some Japanese-learning forum by this guy saying he doesn't use his English to help him learning Japanese as that is a "false" and "un-Japanese" method.

You can't really learn any language like you do your first - even if you dropped me in say, Romania, now, I wouldn't learn it like a native. I'd learn it much differently to someone studying it in books or in classes over here, but I wouldn't pick it up like I did English.

You just can't form language like that once you all have a bedrock of it drilled into your head.

As it is, it sounds like those children are like the proverbial man building his house on sand - it must be really hard for them to anchor any further meaning to taught language. Though, saying that, rather weirdly, they'll probably be able to make sense of what they have learned and use it to learn further languages. It's remarkable how adaptable we all are in that respect.

They'll have a really warped, garbled meaning and method behind it, but they'll probably break through it all.

By the way, did you ever start with the Russian, Igor?

It's definitely a strange situation. Considering we use our mother tongue to formulate most of our internal thoughts, I can't imagine how someone without a competent grasp a single language could survive without learning difficulties, etc. I'll try and find the original article, I think you'll find it interesting.

And I started, then for no reason at all, stopped. I have my books, taunting me. I'll start up again once college has calmed down I think.

Make sure you keep ticking over the stuff you've done - I've let my Japanese wane in comparison to Chinese and now it'll probably just be easier if I do every lesson again.

I'm not sure how much you've done, but I even have to look at Hiragana again, as it's been quite a while since I was reading it frequently.

Igor wrote:It's definitely a strange situation. Considering we use our mother tongue to formulate most of our internal thoughts, I can't imagine how someone without a competent grasp a single language could survive without learning difficulties, etc. I'll try and find the original article, I think you'll find it interesting.

And I started, then for no reason at all, stopped. I have my books, taunting me. I'll start up again once college has calmed down I think.

That's something you can change if you really try to. Maybe it's why my English is slowly getting worse. When I think of anything I started trying to do it in Japanese and it slowly become natural to do it. I also started by trying to translate from English to Japanese quickly when just talking to someone in English. Obviously that's still a work in progress as I'm not fantastic, but that to me really helped learn faster at least.

You need to be at a certain proficiency level to be able to do that though. It's useful, as it's not always easy to think of a sentence in English and then translate it wholesale into a language - much better to just know how to say the equivalent, especially with Japanese where the order is totally different.

Anyway, I need help with the following passage, particularly the bolded bit (as the first sentence is just so you know what it's about):

我天天喝中国茶，可是我很少吃中国饭，因为我不会做. 我很想学，可是没有老师。我的有中文老师也不会做， 她说她家她先生做饭，她只会吃， 不会。

I'll try and translate the non-bolded bit first.

"I drink Chinese tea everyday, but I rarely/seldom eat Chinese food, because I can't make(do/produce) it. I really like to study, but I don't have a teacher".

That's easy. I presume the "I like to study" is more "I would like to study it (Chinese cooking), but I don't have a teacher". As he mentions his language teacher next.

But the bolded bit is a bit confusing, as it drops words out that are implied, though seems to overdose on 她 at the same time . Here's what I get:

"My Chinese teacher also cannot make (Chinese food). She says her family her husband (?) can make it, she can only eat it, she cannot make it".

The "她家她先生" (her family her husband) bit confuses me. Does it just mean her family (and) her husband can both cook Chinese food or kind of her family (meaning) her husband can cook it and she is just going into detail?

StayDead wrote:

Igor wrote:It's definitely a strange situation. Considering we use our mother tongue to formulate most of our internal thoughts, I can't imagine how someone without a competent grasp a single language could survive without learning difficulties, etc. I'll try and find the original article, I think you'll find it interesting.

And I started, then for no reason at all, stopped. I have my books, taunting me. I'll start up again once college has calmed down I think.

That's something you can change if you really try to. Maybe it's why my English is slowly getting worse. When I think of anything I started trying to do it in Japanese and it slowly become natural to do it..

Bullshit.

Zenigame wrote:

StayDead wrote:

Igor wrote:It's definitely a strange situation. Considering we use our mother tongue to formulate most of our internal thoughts, I can't imagine how someone without a competent grasp a single language could survive without learning difficulties, etc. I'll try and find the original article, I think you'll find it interesting.

And I started, then for no reason at all, stopped. I have my books, taunting me. I'll start up again once college has calmed down I think.

That's something you can change if you really try to. Maybe it's why my English is slowly getting worse. When I think of anything I started trying to do it in Japanese and it slowly become natural to do it..

Bullshit.

Not bullshit at all. Yeah I can't do it with everything yet, but it's a very good way of forcing yourself to remember things. It's not hard to think about what you're doing in a language which isn't native to your own when it comes to thinking. Of course your sub, sub concious manouvers like moving is completely different. I just mean if I'm thinking to myself I seem to do it a lot more than I used to as I've been learning more.

Zenigame wrote:

StayDead wrote:

Igor wrote:It's definitely a strange situation. Considering we use our mother tongue to formulate most of our internal thoughts, I can't imagine how someone without a competent grasp a single language could survive without learning difficulties, etc. I'll try and find the original article, I think you'll find it interesting.

And I started, then for no reason at all, stopped. I have my books, taunting me. I'll start up again once college has calmed down I think.

That's something you can change if you really try to. Maybe it's why my English is slowly getting worse. When I think of anything I started trying to do it in Japanese and it slowly become natural to do it..

Bullshit.

Ahem, this is the FOREIGN Language Thread, not the FOUL Language Thread, you cheeky little scamp.

For that, Zeni, I want an apology written out in Italian in my inbox by 3PM tomorrow. And no Babelfish, as that will just mess it up.

Parksey wrote:Gah, I still ended up doing Chinese.

To albear this topic further, for those doing either Japanese/Chinese, how much importance do you put on writing?

See, I probably spend too much time writing when I should really focus on speaking and listening a bit more. For example, I spend an awful lot of time copying out characters when I first learn them. As a result, without sounding arrogant, my stroke order - in both languages - is excellent.

All the characters I know - and I know between 200 and 300 in Chinese and, obviously, the kana in Japanese - I can write using the correct stroke order 100% of the time. As long as I don't start writing a character before I learn the stroke order, I can do this very easily, generally.

But is it that important? I'm not in either country and, even if I am, I probably will spend more time reading and speaking. One Japanese site just said to ignore writing completely. However, I find it useful, especially in Chinese where everything is a character, to continually write out sentences by hand on pieces of paper. I copy everything in my books - the symbols themselves, the example sentences, the dialogues, Heck, even the transcripts for the listening and the like.

The plus side is that if I know a sentence, I can write it, usually, flawlessly. My handwriting will probably be quite neat as well.

The down side is, I may spend a disproportionate amount of time simply copying, rather than actively thinking and speaking out the sentences.

Any advice? Specifically John Galt/Kinetic for the Chinese part, though any Japanese students will be able to help. I know StayDead seems to be the complete opposite and types a lot of his sentences out, when he isn't bombarding himself with audio.

I found that once I hit the ~300 mark with characters it became very easy to "guess" the stroke order of a new character, mainly because so many of them are just made up of common radicals.

As for practising, I only really write out characters the first time I learn them and then just practise reading from then on. I will occasionally try and write a massive list from memory but as writing plays arguably the smallest part in any language system, and especially since computers have made it so much easier, I try not to spend too much time on it.

I've lost count the amount of words related to earthquakes, danger, warnings and death I've learnt over the past few days from following what I could of the Japanese news. I really wish I didn't learn them the way I did though.

I havent read the last 17 pages, and im sure what i have to offer has been said before by some forumites.

basically, mandarin/cantonese is waaaay harder than japanese, both to speak and to write, and its not something you can learn well in a matter of a couple of years. Having said that, it will be very useful for the economy, personally i am pretty sure that you will need to go into a specialised industry if you want to use your Japanese.

Japanese is no where as difficuilt as people make out, it really is quite easy to learn to speak, and there are some great audio lessons out there. go check out 'pimsleurs japanese', truly excellent. teaches you speaking and writing at the same time, i did 2 hours a day for 3 weeks and could have a 10 minute conversation in japanese with my uncle who lived in Tokyo for 10 years.

Sure, in Japanese tehre are 3 alphebets, you will need to learn two of them throughly, and the third being Kanji which means Chinese symbols (or letters) which is difficuilt, you only need to learn a bit of that as you go. You need to have a pretty good understand of all three to read magazines in Japan which is a bit of a pain in the ass but they are really not THAT difficuilt to learn (except kanji, which is mostly memorising symbols that hold a few different meanings and knowing when to use them). The difficulty here doesn't compare to Chinese - that being my personal opinion based on quite a lot of experiences, obviously not ultimate truth or any shiz like that.

Good luck mayne!

Go me, only just discovered your initial post is 1 year old. So, hows your studys going :p

Out of interest Kazem, how much experience do you have with both languages? I have a fair with both (although I focus purely on Mandarin these days) and would argue that Japanese is the more difficult due to its insane grammar and the fact that to be able to read Japanese at a decent level you still need to know about 60% of the characters you would to read Chinese at that level; and unlike Chinese, the Japanese characters have multiple readings which increases the amount of memorisation required by a considerable amount.

True, for beginners Japanese is probably easier because the sounds have more in common with European languages than Chinese ones do, and the tonal system of Chinese takes a while for most people to get used to. Once you get past those things however (which doesn't long at all, especially if you're practising with a native speaker) it becomes a lot easier and the grammar is unbelievably simple in some places - almost like a logical computer language.

I used to do French Spainsh at GCSE and to be honest never used it since and can't remember it, so I'm looking to do that again as well as Italian and have begun learning Italian by myself using PDF's and Youtube videos just downloading a audiopack those as we speak

Any tips though guys on how to make it very fluent, and not lose what you've learnt? I'd love to be able to go into an Italian restaurant with my friends (and a date ) and come out with loads of italian with somebody

BUMP.


Currently working on improving my French (at A level level atm) and Spanish (GCSE-ish) as well as starting Mandarin, as opposed to Japanese, so thought some good software would help massively. This led to me acquiring Rosetta Stone, but I really don't like the software, I prefer a more explanation based course, so I've just started trying Fluenz, which seems much better, I really like it. The BBC site is brilliant, too, but I was just wondering what you use to help.

I'm thinking about going back to German (done it as GCSE) and starting Italian too, but I'll probably hold on and work on the other languages first, as five languages would probably lead to burnout.