/lit/ - Literature

I'm learning German. I have got a B1 level. God willing I'll finish B2 this year, it is my goal.

>go on Youtube
>listen to some German video about literally anything
>understand isolated words
>feel like I know nothing at all

>>21492913
Hello friends, I am a Georgian anon who went to a Russian kindergarden and studied English, Georgian and Russian all at once there.
One half of my family speaks almost exclusively Russian as well, and this helps me remember how to speak and such, but since I'm growing up, I'll see them less and less and my command of the language will slowly deteriorate. I already have trouble reading, especially out loud, and writing without a keyboard or a screen is quite hard as well. Thankfully pronunciation is supposedly native-tier and so is the vocabulary.
What do I do, anons? I wish to read Lermontov and Lev Tolstoy in Russian and I need your help.

>>21492913
My German is pretty good by now, so I'm aiming at French. Not really sure what resources to use.

For German deutsche welle was good, and easy german on youtube

mostly ancient Greek and Latin today and those are better fit for /clg/, but I also learned some German and I'm in that twilight zone of not needing any more grammar but just inpoot and outpoot
I'm reading the Harry Potter series since I'm familiar with the topic, easy to find, etc....

>Using a French by natural method playlist
>Lesson 1/50: 46k views, people saying they can't wait to master the language soon, talk of new year's resolutions, etc
>Lesson 14/15: 1500 views, crickets
Remember to practice at least a little bit every day bros, the key to success is consistency.

One more for German.
What are the best resources to learn this language while still being /lit/? I'm "reading" (more like trying/struggling) the Grimm Brothers' Tales, but those are not easy at all.

>>21492913
I'm learning Irish because I make odd decisions but my fiancee has Japanese blood and some family still in Japan. I'm thinking that would be a nice language to at least be conversational in if/when we visit.
For Irish I'm using Dublin City University and I plan on buying audio from Bonn University that has a lot of the western dialect. I think it's $30. Some beginner textbooks as well.
Japanese I don't know where or how to start.

>>21492913
Native English speaker here. I’m considering learning a second and maybe third language. One to read lit in its native tongue and another to communicate in another country (not sure where yet, but I’m thinking baltics or Eastern Europe. Which is the most valuable language to learn for these purposes?

What are some good books in Spanish that I can read if my Spanish is mediocre at best? Novels, short stories, poems, essays, whatever.

>>21493316
Russian has by far the most speakers of any language in Eastern Europe. Even outside Russia, many people in ex-Soviet countries and to a lesser extent the rest of the former Eastern Bloc speak Russian. It also has by far the best literary tradition in that region.

>>21493316
Learn Polish and you've basically learnt like 10 languages
>>21492939
dnr

>>21493263
Erich Kaestner? Sueskind? Hesse?

>>21493352
>Learn Polish and you've basically learnt like 10 languages
What does this mean?

>>21493419
>What does this mean?
Slavic languages are all connected, and the Polish one is almost like a bridge to them. Taking influences from East Slavs as a West Slavic language. Probably related closely to Yugoslavs as well.

>>21493441
Your opinion is a very utilitarian view that pays more attention to how languages are related than to what people are actually likely to be interested in. I'm pretty sure that most people who are interested in more than one Slavic language would be more interested in learning a language from each branch like Russian, Polish, & Serbo-Croatian, as opposed to learning a bunch of Western Slavic languages and maybe one Eastern.

>>21493477
Indeed it is Utilitarian, I'd imagine that deciding to learn a language for most people is a pragmatic decision, rather than a natural one.

>>21492913
unrelated but i love the comic from where that image is from.
http://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=1

>>21493670
should have used this one

>>21493067
>>21493263
>>21493410
Best resource will always be das Literarische Quartett. For the unenlightened, Marcel Reich-Ranicki is Germany's Bloom, but more of a contemporary critic, and able to make writers seethe so much that they have to write novels where they brutallly murder him (Tod eines Kritikers). Excellent discussions, good way to get to know postwar German lit, and surprisingly fiery for only involving Germans and Austrians, who otherwise are too polite and distant in this kind of stuffy programs. The libtard Swiss copycat and whatever they did when MRR died should be avoided like the plague.

is it objectively true that learning spanish opens up the most geographic area you can cover with one language?

Im learning afrikaans

>>21493818
Yes, but you are better off not understanding what south americans say. Trust me

.t Spanish speaker

>>21493810
I did this too, and can recommend it. Lots online and probably some reviews of something you've read.

Current version is pretty bad, the rival (Lesenswert) is better, but its host is a pseud.

>>21492939
Чypкa :(

>>21492913
>Afrikaans
>Dutch
>Flemish
Flemish is not seperate from Dutch. It's just a colloquial name for the Dutch spoken in Belgium which differs only slightly from Netherlandic Dutch (compare American English vs. British English)

Any recommendations for Spanish lit?

>>21493823
How are you studying it?

>>21492913
Did she live or grown up in a spanish speaking country? Her spanish is excellent, like 10x better than mine.

>>21493712
Any Danish people in here? I wanna learn Danish, so I can read Jens Peter Jacobsen. What are you opinions on him?

>>21495945
She is 20x better than me, but she said 'logar' instead of 'lugar' at around 3:20

>>21492939
Can't help you mate but you might find this funny: I could speak spanish fluently when I was young, but then visited family less and less while beginning to study it in school. My pronunciation and vocabulary are abysmal but I can read and write very well (with the help of an english-spanish dictionary), so basically I have the exact opposite problem.

>>21493271
I don't speak japanese at all but I've started studying a bit. This guy has good tips and he speaks like a native:
https://www.youtube.com/@mattvsjapan
One other youtuber adjacent to him also speaks like a native and his method was simply: watch an episode of his favorite anime (One Piece) with subtitles, then rewatch without subtitles. Both him and the above mentioned guy subscribe to the principle of "comprehensible input". Anyway, a little bit of grammar learning always speeds things up, and I recommend pic related. I got it for like $13 used.

>>21495966
I feel like she kinda mixed up hogar and lugar, and she occasionally puts in "ch" sounds in places I wouldn't expect (which could be the dialect of spanish she knows like chilean spanish or I don't know what), but she still speaks way, way better than I ever will be able to since I'm never going to dedicate myself that much to speaking a language well that I can already read.

>study french for 6 years
>don't take it seriously
>now really want to be able to speak and write in French and can only function on the most basic level
I wish I tried at school fuck me.
>>21492915
Tried this actually but it was playing fucking Assassins Creed Unity and having the language in French and the subtitles in English. Subtitles would vanish almost instantly and I could never line up the two so it was pointless.

>>21493271
Actual irishfag here, if you're learning Irish try your best to learn the Ulster (Donegal) dialect. It's not that much of a difference but it has less French influence in it.

>>21495966
As an example, at about 3:26 she says "chama" instead of "llama". No idea if that's normal for some common variety of spanish but it's certainly aberrant for the one I know.

>>21496286
sounds like argentine spanish otherwise known as retard spanish

>>21492913
What other languages that are similar to English have a lot of translated literature?

>>21496275
Most dialects are going to be as influenced by French, Latin, Greek etc to about the same extent. The problem is he's probably not learning any accent, but standard Irish which nobody speaks and is highly anglicised. He's probably talking about buying accent tapes from Connemara or Donegal with his Bonn comment.

>>21496388
I knew they went around to the Aran Islands and Connemara but not Donegal strangely enough seeing how I'm from there. From my own little research I've concluded that the latin alphabet reached Ireland before Old French appeared anyway because our July is very closely related to the original latin which lacked the "J". The Donegal dialect then lacks a lot of those Norman influences due to the Normans never reaching us up here: búachaill vs gasúr etc. I think the standard form of Irish which is taught is heavily anglicised as you said. I feel like it's learning wanting learn Ancient Greek and then studying Koine over Attic, much, much closer in structure and vocabularly than those however, obviously.

I need to learn hue Portuguese, what is the best way? My wife is Brazilian so I can practice with her. I guess I want a B1 level by the end of the year. I just need some structure.
Are there any other boards with large language generals?

>>21494660
https://wizchan.org/hob/res/63358.html

>>21496780
yeah /int/
>>21493316
Prague and Budapest seem to be the most popular with Anglo expats so maybe Czech or Hungarian.
Russian is clearly the most useful in terms of sheer number of speakers, although Turkish (technically Eastern European too, and mutual intelligibility with other Turkics is high) might be close
>>21493263
I used to read a lot of newspapers when starting out, but quality has declined and they're super woke nowadays. I also read a lot of Heinrich Heine which wasn't too hard
>>21493271
>how do I learn Japanese
itazuraneko.neocities.org
I find that monolingual English speakers really struggle with Japanese in particular for some reason
My personal take is:
>rōmaji bad, learn kana asap
>Heisig very bad
>upfront grammar learning from a textbook good
>Anki ymmv
>inpoot good
>Jap-Eng dictionaries sometimes misleading, always check example sentences

>>21495945
>>21495966
She's a Russian KGB operative. It's all literally a Psy-op to get degenerates who like underage girls to support Russia.
I'm being 100% serious. ( I fell for it)

>>21496286
It's argentine Spanish.
"LL" is pronounce as "SH" rather than "LI"

>liama -> shama
>liuvia -> shuvia
>io -> sho

>>21497282
I mean it's not like she's unbearably gorgeous. A little too pointy-faced for my tastes.

>>21497290
Disgusting.

>>21496275
>>21496388
Ulster was where I was leaning actually, yeah. The Bonn Uni recordings are Conamara (same as Connacht?) but it says they're from 1964. I don't know if that lapse in time will be good or bad.
Also, fuck me this language is beautiful sounding.
>>21496000
I appreciate it. I'll be bookmarking that channel and checking out that book as well. Also, checked.
>>21497243
Yeah, I figured this would be difficult, at least more so than anything I'm become familiar with over the years. Thanks for the help, though. Just wrote down your suggestions.

>>21497370
>Conamara (same as Connacht?)
Yeah. Ireland has four Provinces (Ulster, Connaught, Leinster and Munster) made up of 32 counties (26 are part of the Republic of Ireland). Connemara is a region in the county of Galway and is where a large amount of Irish speakers held out. The recordings were done because it was fully believed the language was dead.

FYI for any noobs we already have a long-running sister general on /int/ as already mentioned ITT: >>>/int/176209014

>What languages is /lit/ learning and what resources do you use?

French. Mostly I am using Duolingo + shitposting on /int/ and I got the book English Grammar for Students of French but haven't read it yet. It is supposedly good for monolingual EFLs because it teaches you French by teaching you more about your own language in the process. There are books like this for Russian etc. too.

Also you can listen to my wife's music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuptOEL_Rc

>>21493330
2666

>>21492939
Imagine learning Russian in 2023

>>21497454
it's not like they're going to ban reading russian literature (r-right?)

>>21497243
>Heisig very bad
why? not learning japanese but I've read it's intended to familiarize yourself with kanji before starting to learn vocab

>>21492913
English
Downloaded some advanced grammar books and trying to figure out tenses, stuff like trying to describe stuff that happened in the past, or how to describe someone who spoke in the past about stuff that happened before that. It's not easy bros.

>>21497494
people says English is easy because is has almost no morphology (and it may be at a basic level) but I feel it's easier to grasp grammar rules when they're indicated by inflection instead of pure word order autism. chinese must be insane in this respect

>>21497380
Go raibh maith agat. Well I've been enjoying myself so far. I didn't know the Dublin City Uni. free course timed out after four weeks so I only finished about 60% of it. Now it's $44 if I want to continue.

>>21497524
DCU charge for that stuff? What mongs lol. I'm sure there will be something somewhere. From my memory the dulingo was quite decent. By decent I mean you will be more fluent than most natives by the time it's finished.

>>21497516
chinese language is truly insane in the membrane and imo it is the greatest language out there for artistic expression. in fact the shit is so sophisticated and autistic that chinese people are basically dumping it for english at this point. they simplified their characters and learn pinyin in school before chinese while the boomers rage about their dying language. each character is essentially an artwork on its own and you can go down an autistic rabbit hole for every single one of the thousands of characters.

the east asian way of writing and thinking was originally spawned by china and turned me into a
>cheeb
so /lit/ needs to take the changpill yesterday. hellochinese has been an S tier app for me so far and better than duolingo but
>$20/mo for the highest tier

also i feel like this post has manic stimulants energy but whatever i'm not editing it takes too long

>>21493271
Irish speaker here, at this point in time there's no real reason to learn one specific dialect as the language is more or less homogenised via the education system teaching the standard variety. People from Donegal will have been exposed to plenty of Connachtisms and vic versa. Really the only reason to specifically try to learn a single dialect is LARPing and most speakers will find you quite daft for doing that as an outsider. Also there's very little difference in grammar between the dialects, the difference is more in accent/pronunciation and a handful of dialect specific vocabulary. Gaeilge Gan Stró is a very good series of intro textbooks and you should also get an irish-english dictionary and a grammar reference book.

>>21497570
Anon what are /lit/ shows or really anything to watch or read while one is learning Chinese? I'm almost intermediate but there's still nothing for me to do besides grinding through textbooks and other heroically boring stuff.

>>21497865
my taste is really gay lmao but:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2WvTaqe9zU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPDBIpG5iDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BCaiZjFds

>>21497516
I don't know, my own language has extensive morphology so I am sort of more familiar with the concept, it would probably be easier for me learn another morphologically complex language than for an English speaker. That said probably most if not languages can be easily learned to a basic level (just like English is) but anything above that will be much harder. I hate it when people who don't even have advanced English skills shit on the English language because it's easy/simple (and their own native langiage is the most complex lol). If it's so easy, why do you speak like a retard.

>>21493263
I just want to know whose asshole's idea was to recommend Grimm for German learners. That shit is literally undiluted 19th century German which is way too complex for any learner or anyone who doesn't study Germanistik.

>>21497849
>at this point in time there's no real reason to learn one specific dialect as the language is more or less homogenised via the education system teaching the standard variety. People from Donegal will have been exposed to plenty of Connachtisms and vic versa
Most of standard Irish isn't intelligible if you speak a dialect, and there's plenty of dialect words and forms where people who only speak one dialect would be lost if presented with another dialect. Schools actually try to teach a mix of local dialect and caighdean so it can give the impression that you're learning caighdean when two counties over the word means nothing or is spelt wrong if you use it because it's actually dialect. That's why in a lot of honours Irish the piece that people lose the most points is the aural because you need to be able to understand all dialects and the accent alone can throw people.

>>21497989
it was nobody's fault, just my own autism
I'll keep slowly and painfully grinding through it while alternating it with easier stuff

>>21497531
>From my memory the dulingo was quite decent. By decent I mean you will be more fluent than most natives by the time it's finished.
Is it really this bad in Ireland?

>>21498285
What level are you on?

>>21498292
The only places you'll find a lot of genuine C2 speakers are in little pockets of the country: Dongeal and Connemara being the main spots. In 1847 the vast majority of the 8 million (although rapidly declining due to the famine) people in the country spoke English but as the years went on English became basically a requirment for any proper job among other factors and by 1922 (Free State formed) it was basically a dead language. It's sad but as a speaker of it myself I don't find it a very nice language, perhaps due to familiarity but it's quite sparse compared to English in the same way French is when it comes to vocabularly and it just doesn't sound as nice as most languages either. As I said though that's probably me just being bored and familair of it. I find English much more fascinating, Old English especially but I digress.

>>21497989
19th century german is usually way more lucid and clear than modern german though

>>21498337
How did that happen? It usually goes the other way doesn't it?

>>21498337
Still, it's something that shouldn't be recommended for language learning as 80% of Grimm's vocabulary isn't even used in modern German. An average German learner might easily be discouraged with such stuff.

>>21497494
You seem like you have a pretty good grasp already.
>or how to describe someone who spoke in the past about stuff that happened before that
>He spoke about what had happened to that filthy e-whore, Kayla.
Past perfect, I believe is the term?

>>21492939
WTF, no one has responded to me yet reee
I'll copy this to the /int/ one then

>>21498402
t. (You) hoarder

>>21498292
It's pretty bad. I don't know if Duolingo is any good, because most ways of learning Irish are pretty bad. It's generally a second language for most people, to the point where official translations are often garbage.
You get a lot of people who go through Irish medium education and end up with a view like >>21498332 because access to natural speech is so restricted. It was deeply unfashionable to speak Irish for a long time and all centres of power kept English as their main medium, so it's not just English oppression but also the continuing class system which saw Irish as "country" and low class that killed it off. Flann O'Brien's Béal Bocht/Poor Mouth is about early nationalist hipsters going to an Irish speaking area to hear their beloved native tongue, only to find out they don't like any of the people or their way of thinking once they get there because they're all peasants. There's more depth to it than anon makes out, but a lot of phrases are related to a way of life that assumed nature and very different way of living than an Anglosphere lifestyle, so there would be no way to get a deep understanding of the language if you didn't have cows or talk about rocks a lot.

>>21498441
I should say that I was raised in the Gaeltacht and never really minded the teaching of Irish like most of the non-gaeltacht speakers did or the fags on leddit. I am very much in belief of the whole Celtic chloroform thing Gogarty described and that includes the strange obsession over the langauge as anything more than what it is: a language.

>>21498397
If I want to talk about a person whom I met yesterday and retell the story that he told me, about what he had (has?) done two weeks ago. Understanding where each tense needs to be used is hard, even if I understand it somewhat, using it in sentence is still very hard, using correctly while talking is even harder.

Also the past/presest perfect continous tenses are really hard to use naturally in speech. My language does not have them and my brain simply is not trained that way. Easy sentences are relatively easy, but more complex sentences are very difficult. If I think about describing some event, sometimes it feels like I almost have to start from the middle or the end of that thought (and then there are past and present tenses!). Not shitting on the language or anything just saying it's not easy for me.

>>21498481
It's probably not as bad in the Gaeltacht but a lot of teachers are coping with a few weeks placement during their hdip and fluency in any language kind of demands you speak about a lot of stuff that you would never be casually interested in. So you have people who are fluent so long as they stick to the course work, some who are not fluent enough to discern mistakes in the standard course, and kids who only use it for a couple hours of mandatory study about shit they're not really interested in, so even the ones with academic pressure to get 600+ have learnt enough to get through the exam and no more. I don't think many people have the same perspective as me because the only reason I scraped through my LC was I could speak Irish. I know a lot of people who got diagnosed with dyslexia rather than take the Irish test to secure their points even though they could pass French or German or whatever.
For me there's still things where the English doesn't make any kind of intuitive sense to use, but that's pretty rare because most people have enough access to English they won't be stunted in English.

>>21498507
>about what he had (has?) done two weeks ago
had. If it happened in the past, it'll be some form of past tense, the only question is if it'll be normal past tense or some kind of perfect past tense using a conjugated form of "have" or "will" or something. Notice how you didn't wonder whether it is "did" or "done" since it's a completed action: your instincts are already good. I guess there are some weird edge cases in the subjunctive tense where you might say something like "I would have gone to the party but I have to prepare for tomorrow's meeting" where the tenses are a bit here and there, but it seems like you've got it, you're just second-guessing yourself. As far as learning to talk, just watch movies and tv in english and you'll assimilate it at that unconscious level. Studying is theory clear up misunderstandings, but real understanding comes from having a sense of what just sounds weird, and what sounds weird is a sense you pick up from listening to native speakers. English is weird about tenses and word order. The only way you'll get it to feel natural is listening to a lot of it. Luckily, there's more media in english than just about any other language.

>>21498681
>about what he had done two weeks ago
>about what he did two weeks ago
Frankly, these two sentences mean pretty much the same thing to me. I have been studying continous tenses for a while now so I used the first example but in speech when I have no time to think (and sort of determine if it's sentence where different tense is needed) I use "did" and almost immediately realize that it's wrong, but then it's too late. Such is life of ESL

>>21498551
>>21498481
I'll admit that it's a bummer to hear all of this, but I still do want to learn, that's for sure. It's been fun so far.

>>21498804
Both of those are perfectly fine. And in fact, almost no one will say "he had done" in spoken english, they'll say "he did". I imagine this is true in your native language as well, but english speakers almost categorically use worse grammar in speech than in writing. Just never say "he had did"; no native would say that and it is unambiguously wrong.
>Frankly, these two sentences mean pretty much the same thing to me.
The difference in meaning is so small is basically a difference in connotation, not denotation.

>>21498804
English verbs inflect for tense, that is WHEN they took place, but (with very few exceptions) NOT ASPECT. Aspect is the action's completion. Compare.

>I loved her(, and still do)
>I loved her(, and do not lover her anymore)
vs
>A la amaba
>A la amabé

All "loved" indicates is that the action took place in the past. Periphrasis (other words) are needed to make this construction indicate aspect. I'm not going to copypasta the entirety of it, but tl;dr English has 12 total tense+aspect combinations based on four aspects (simple, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous) and three times (past, present, future). However, it's more accurate to say that English has 4 aspects (as stated) and 4 times, past, present, future, subjunctive, with the subjunctive being "could, might, may, should" and IN SOME USES "will".


Full usage
https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.htm:

>>21498804
>>21498835
"Do/does, did, done" is one of the few English verbs that inflects for aspect; "He did it" implies completion. "He had done it" and "he did it" are grammatically different but semantically the same. "He had did" is incorrect because the past perfect is "had" plus the PAST PARTICIPLE, which is identical to the simple past in weak verbs ("walk, walked, walked" vs "sing, sang, sung").

>>21498811
It's kind of just a warning that a lot of resources can have bad Irish or tap out at a certain level of Irish that doesn't reflect either its commonly spoken forms, or things that are useful outside high school literature exams under a kind of prussian education system.
The Irish language channels on radio and TV are better resources because they're designed for and by people who are native level speakers. But you'd probably have to surpass the level of someone who learned Irish to pass college entrance exams to understand some to most of those. It's like someone who is esl might be able to read or watch the news and understand what's being said mostly, having trouble with things understood by custom or some specialist terms, but they might have trouble understanding the guy at the bar trying to run football stats by him who is also being subtly racist. Most Irish people are at the basic FOB level where banking or reading the news or ordering something medium rare would be difficult for them, so you'll be functionally better than them with a few months of study, but to get better than them you have to drown out a lot of noise, kind of like you'd probably get better at English as a second language if didn't try to learn it off other immigrants solely who also spoke it poorly and with a bias towards your native tongue.
One of the important parts is don't necessarily trust that official standard Irish is good. It's often written by someone who is Irish second language because only people who learn it as a second language try to use the standard. Because of this there's lots of words where it's a technically perfectly legitimate to use the word, it will be in dictionaries as a viable alternative, and if you use it, every native speaker will know you're EFL.

>>21498835
This is another confusing thing, I am exposed to American and British English and British tend to use have/had a lot more often in speech compared to Americans. Hearing the same thing said in two slightly different ways (both correct) just creates more confusion.

>>21498880
this is very interesting, I will have a look at the link. I hate it when people say English is easy.

>>21497471
>Kanji are presented in an order unrelated to frequency, so benefit isn't front loaded
>Kanji meanings often don't map one-to-one to English words and some English word choices are just strange
>No readings, the book is entirely in English and you don't learn anything else than kanji to English mappings
>By not learning readings you lose the mnemonic benefit of on'yomi readings
>The method is a really big stretch for the minority of kanji that spell two-syllable Chinese words, which are totally meaningless in isolation
It's kind of like if there was a Japanese book explaining the meaning of every Latin and Greek root in English with a single word Japanese gloss, and the Japanese studied it by memorizing it in alphabetical order. Useful? Probably. Are there better and more time efficient ways? Probably.
Also if you really insist the method is good, kanjidamage.com does it better (but still not enough example sentences for my liking).

I'm learning Akkadian and Arabic (Fusha, Palestinian and Classical which is very similar to Fusha), Eastern Jewish Aramaic (it's a fancy way of saying I study the Talmud) I native Polish speaker and know English and Hebrew on a very good level.
I'd like to learn Chinese in the future, how hard is it to begin understanding sacred texts? And how long does it take?
Quran is way easier than the bible, and it took me only 1,5 year of studying Fusha to enjoy reading the Quran with the dictionary

What's a good way to learn a language according to lit? Just read book?

All this conversation about Irish reminds me the situation with the Basque here.
Only 2 generations ago basque was dying and yes, you should speak Spanish if you want to be a career. Basque was the mark of fishermen and farmers. But 2 generations later thanks to nationalist government, basque is fashionable as fuck and you should speak it even if it's pretty obvious with only 2 sentences you are a Spanish speaker and don't know the grammar nor essential words.
Dammit even ETA wrote their own documents in Spanish during the first decades because their own army men didn't understand basque.

>>21499676

It's going to be boring. You should get a little bit familiar first.

I usually get a beginners book like assimil and just go through it a little bit every day. It's important to not get too caught up in trying to learn or understand everything in it. The most important thing is to be consistent and that you finish it.
I'd also do a little bit of something else to build vocabulary, if the language you're trying to learn is popular even Duolingo can be good for that.

Assuming that the language you're learning is not too dissimilar to the ones you know, this will probably leave you with enough knowledge to consume media and understand a good amount of it in 6 months or less. From this point on everything is easier and fun, usually the rest just falls into place naturally with exposure.

Though, if you're trying to learn a very different language -like an american trying to learn japanese- it's going to take significantly more work and time.

>>21497469
>they
Who are they exactly?

Natural Method or Assimil? I am also deciding whether to learn french or italian.

>>21492913
Been learning french for 2 years now. I've reached a point where i can understand almost anything i hear and reading in the language is a true pleasure . I both feel that im almost there but i understand how big the language is and that i'll need 2 or maybe 3 more years to reach that near native level. I had started my first year of learning with the french 5000 most frequent words anki deck and 6k sentences and after that started reading.The trick is to be consistent .I'll daily listen to french for at least an hour with youtube or podcasts and i'll also read both in the morning and at night. The hardest thing for me is to not get tempted into starting another language since i know it will stifle my progress in french. Maybe when i'll have reached my goal of reading 100 books in the language i'll move on to russian , or italian , or portueguese or german... There's too many languages bros

>>21500938
How did you start learning it?

>>21500938
with anki . Download 2 decks , one with 6000 french sentences and another with the 5000 most frequent words . Also listened daily to french youtube , all those beginner learn french podcasts , i remember a good one is innerfrench which in their site had for free both the 50 min epiodes and the transcript. After 9 months when i had finished both decks i started reading books , started with YA crap and Sally Rooney and now after 26 books i can say that i can pick up and start reading any book i want , some of course are easier than others . Look at the refold method and mattvsjapan's youtube channel. Good luck in your studies anon , if you do it right its gonna be fun but also frustrating at times

>>21496780
You literally can't fail granted you stay with your wife indefinitely. Just start inputting and make her converse solely in Portuguese with you and you'll be fluent in a year or two

>>21500993
Thanks anon, I studied french for six years at school but most of it has left my head now so hopefully I can pick up from where I was from. Would you reccomend writing in French? I've actually started doing that but my vocab is beyond awful so it's fairly limited.

>>21499684
Wow is Basque really that much of a meme?
I was happy knowing that the last Paleo-European language was alive and well

>>21501012
i actually wouldnt . It would only lead to you making some bad habits that you'd have to spend more time in the future to break.I'd say immerse in media and read as much as possible and you'll see that you'll reach a point where you'll be instinctively conjuring up sentences . But you know dont take my word for gospel , do anything you want to keep you engaged in the language . At this moment besides reading im watching documentaries on french asylums . Also know that french cinema is filled with gems , just yesterday watched un homme qui dort , pure kino . Recommend both the book and the film

Any good intro recs on linguistics in general for a stemcel with no formal background in the humanities? I have language unlimited and how language began.

>>21497570
>he doesn't have a cracked version of the app
actually idk if i have hellochinese or chineseskill fully unlocked cracked haven't practiced in months fuck me

is zhiyin or the other system that doesn't use english alphabets better than pinyin

I'm afraid I'll have to requisition a few French history channels and/or playlists from you fine Gentlemen. If you'd be so kind.

Good evening 友達s and greetings from djt

>>21492913
I'm learning polish, it's surprisingly easy. I don't know why people say otherwise.

>>21501702
zhuyin is actually good because they correspond better to chinese phonology, no comments on memeshit like cangjie, etc

>>21498991
thanks for answering, I'll remember this in case I decided to finally learn japanese at some point

>>21502198
>revealing yourself to be pole-brained

>>21497849
You are stupid as fuck. You know fuck all about learning Irish. You recommend horseshit books, and you try to pass yourself as mairtín ó fucking cadhain.

Every fucking Irish professor in the country drills it into their students heads from day one to pick one dialect and stick with it.

>>21502205
What's wrong with Cangjie? It's useful if your native variety doesn't have a broadly-known standardized Romanization; that's why so many Cantonese speakers use it.

We're here as well. I've stopped posting on /lang/ mostly because I got over the B2/C1 inpoot hump in my TL and lost interest in everything else.

>>21501702
It probably colors your accent less than pinyin or WG, but ultimately those other two options are better for China.

>>21493823
>>21494609
hoezit, tjomme?

do you know someone who learned a language with assimil?

>>21499669
> Eastern Jewish Aramaic (it's a fancy way of saying I study the Talmud) I native Polish speaker and know English and Hebrew on a very good level.
How hard are the Hebrew parts for someone who knows Biblical pretty well (not me... yet)?
> I'd like to learn Chinese in the future, how hard is it to begin understanding sacred texts?
Sacred texts means that you're talking about Classical Chinese. There's some discussion about that in /clg/, but you're probably already lurking there.
Fusha would also be on topic there, but sees little discussion for some reason.

Finally finished volume 1. On to volume 2. It's just a fuck load of i + 1 sentences. Good shit to read and learn kanji.

>>21501714
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC4siPTFsziR7xycGUCHB7_rVOaX5EdiD
Here is something that should keep you busy !!!
CAPTCHA: V8 DAWN

Best way to start Italian? Lots of shit I can intuit based on fuzzy high school Spanish and latin roots that are overlapping with English. But where to really start absorbing new words? I'll start small and do grammar, I don't really know shit about language learning. I tried and kinda got jaded after 2 yrs with Japanese. It was a lot harder than what I've started with Italian though. That and I wanna read more literature and not just manga. Anyway duolingo is obviously only good for very basic vocab but I need something else. Should I just read kid's books and figure out grammar by patterns?

>>21503702
Talmud (both Yerushalmi and Bavli) consist of Mishna written in Mishnaic Hebrew which is older and can be read independently, and Gmara which is 98% Aramaic. Mishnaic Hebrew is similar to Biblical Hebrew, but has some differences, and a lot of unique words. Do you know Modern Hebrew by any chance? It helps a lot because Ben Yehuda based modern Hebrew on the language of both Mishna and Tanach. Especially constructions like אף על פי כן or לו are very popular in the Mishna. I've never learned Mishnaic Hebrew, I was learning Modern and Biblical Hebrew, then I opened the Mishna and I realized that I understand pretty much every word (still had some problems with understanding the text, because it is not literature, but more of an oral discussion written during the debate on paper with all the disadvantages of it).

>>21503702
Also, I strongly recommend learning Modern Israeli Hebrew as fast as you can. Having a living, relatively similar dialect enhances your learning because there is plenty of material out there. Also, there are amazing Biblical Hebrew courses in Israel which are thaought in Modern Hebrew. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them, I've reached Hebrew C1/C2 in only 5 years, so I can give you some advices.

>>21504323
try anki for vocabulary

lingq for more sentence stuff

>>21504464
I fucking hate flashcards now. I will go back to it maybe but they never did much for me with Japanese. Thanks for the recs.

>>21504545
i used to hate them as well since we used to a lot at school but once i got out of my ADD phase as a teenager i found them very useful in university and for learning languages

>>21504662
At some point I just dreaded doing them and phoned them in, it got exhausting. Best thing for me was to talk with people in Japanese but that's tiresome too given the 12 hr timezone difference and real life eventually got in the way.

>>21492939
Speaking with your family is free verbal practice. For reading, just start by reading simpler works, Russian is easy for this since there's so much pulpy, easy to read bullshit like those time traveling hitler books. Can't help you with writing since I never learned how to write in Russian in the first place
>ჩემი სახე როცა იგივე პრობლემა მაქ, მარა ქართულთან

Reminder that every second you spend studying grammar is a waste of your time, and input is literally the only thing that matters for language acquisition.

>>21504766
different person here.
just do 3 months of relatively intense anki (3000-5000 words), then drop it and just start reading with some light grammar study.

>>21505318
This.

>>21504409
> I've never learned Mishnaic Hebrew, I was learning Modern and Biblical Hebrew, then I opened the Mishna and I realized that I understand pretty much every word
Thanks, that's exactly what I hoped to hear. I haven't studied Modern yet, but its grammar seems to be a strict simplification of Biblical, so vocabulary will be the biggest obstacle. Good to know that I get Mishnaic almost for free this way.

>>21493670
Shame about the author joining a church and going insane. And I say that as a Christian myself.

>>21498337
how so?
>>21498366
did this language change so much since the 19th century?

>>21505780
> did this language change so much since the 19th century?
Absolutely not, no idea where the ridiculous 80% number comes from.
It's very much like Victorian English to Modern, so maybe not the best idea when first learning the language, but also not impossibly hard.

>>21505620
Any grammatical feature that will sound new to you eg. של meaning of (you can use it instead of status constructus) appeared for the first time in Biblical Poetry, but was widely popularized by Mishna, it originates from the phrase אשר ל eg. כלב אשר ליוסי - a dog that belongs to Yosi, כלב של יוסי dog of Yosi. I'd like to ask which pronunciation have you learned, is it some traditional pronunciation like Mizrachi or Ashkenazi, or do you learn some reconstructed spelling?