I highly recommend trying a Duolingo language, especially if there is a country you want to visit. If you set your daily goal for 10 points (maybe 5 - 10 minutes) and build a 10 day streak there is a pretty good chance you will be hooked on it. (Dutch level 16, French level 7).
How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
51–60 of 148 posts
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#52Shameless plug: I made a small webapp to memorize Japanese vocabulary through spaced repetition and a Tinder-like interface: https://core.cards/
I made it for myself, but someone else might find it useful. It is the alternative of carrying a huge stack of cards as I used to do. Requires Github login though to syncronize through devices.
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#53From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.
I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :( Currently my favorite app is "Decipher Chinese". I read one story a day, save words I want to remember and get quizzed on them periodically.
> I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :(
What kind of Chinese? Mandarin?
Linguistically Chinese is not a language, but a family of languages that is united by a (mostly) common writing system. The reason that these Chinese languages are called "dialects" is mostly political.
A language geek I know, who taught himself various Chinese dialects and in particular Cantonese up to a very high level told me that Mandarin, though referred to as the "official" Chinese language that is used in TV, it is in his opinion rather an artificial language (he compared it with Esperanto).
So when learning some of the Chinese languages he recommended that at least after some time learning the ropes (writing system, tones, common words), one should really consider for what purpose one is learning Chinese and learn the appropriate language of the respective province (he was really into electronics, so he continued his study in particular into Cantonese).
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#54I've been learning japanese (and living in japan) for the past few months, and tried out duolingos new course when they released it yesterday. I've used quite a few different apps and books, and I must say I was pretty unimpressed. Their lessons give very little info on what you're learning, and with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning. I will experiment with it a bit more, but I've al…
I second this and add Satori Reader (by the makers of Human Japanese, I think) for learning to read and grammar by example. I would also strongly recommend WaniKani for anyone learning kanji.
There's no substitute for immersion and classroom time, though.
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#55I'm not criticizing Duolingo, but I'm wondering if language apps are like gym memberships -- people sign up enthusiastically but after the first month, 90% don't or can't continue. Learning a new language as an adult is an incredibly difficult undertaking; much more so than persevering with the gym. The dropout rate must be huge.
I tried Duolingo for French and Russian, and dropped both after a week. Part of it is that I have nothing invested in either language and was just curious, but I also think Duolingo itself is a bit flawed; it repeats way too much material and makes you jump through too many hoops. I was busy and it was a hassle. I think if you're going to study a language, a textbook + Anki is the way to go. If you tell Anki you know…
Duolingo uses spaced repetition. It's like Anki, except that Duolingo will give you some time after you successfully remembered a word or expression in an answer.
Don't know if that is your case, but if you get the "the cat is black" sentence and translate it wrongly, it assumes you are having difficulty with this expression and repeats until you get it right.
When you come to the point of commiting some words to you memory, it uses them to incrementally build grammatical concepts over there (like adjectives and verbs).
It's a pretty complex system going on behind that simple interface.
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#56As the they say in the article, Japanese is classified among the most difficult languages for English speakers by Foreign Service Institute and this is widely cited as a fact. But interestingly, no research data on this was ever published. (The institute presented the facts as based on their internal research, but no methods, results or anything was ever published. Nowadays the original page has disappeared from the…
Anecdotally, it seems true, even if only because learning Kanji is a gargantuan task.
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#57I started learning Japanese around 8 years ago, and I've never been a fan of saying it's "the most difficult language to learn." It's like learning anything else, if you enjoy learning it and are motivated enough, you'll get better. Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway…
> Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes." That makes speaking the language easier, but it makes understanding sentences harder in the beginning, because you get a bucket of word soup dumped on your head and have to figure out what is supposed to go whe…
Yes, the grammar of Japanese has a very simple internal logic and is easy to learn, although quite different from European languages.
The problem is all the words, and there are no cognates.
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#58"To show just how complex this can get, let’s take a simple English phrase – “I love you” – and dissect the many ways in which it can be said in Japanese. Spoiler alert: it’s not such a simple phrase in Japanese. One of our course contributors, Sho, estimated and found that there can actually be as many as 248,026 ways to say “I love you” in Japanese!"
These kind statistics are a kind of lie in themselves. You can say something like "omae wo aishiteimasu", but that's no more a normal way to say "I love you" than "I'm bonkers for that shithead". That has nothing to do with the grammar, it's lexical. "omae wo aishiteimasu" has a different meaning from "anata ga suki da yo".
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#59One thing about learning languages that works for me. Don't look at them as a bunch of rules to memorise. The article is talking about thousands of ways of saying "I love you" to indicate how complicated Japanese is. In reality, this complexity is somewhat artificial because you are considering way too many rules and variations, the vast majority of these combinations are almost never actually used. To use an crude analogy HN might be comfortable with, a Japanese language compiler could optimise away most of the language.
I'm glad the course seems designed around this consideration. It's goal-oriented: talk about everyday human things, clothes, weather, food, family. It's never been helpful for me to memorise vocabulary lists without a context to say them in. Instead, putting myself into situations where certain things must be said or understood greatly improved my competence.
After a while, your language instinct kicks in and you start to generate your own internal rules for the language, which will approximate or match the rules that native speakers have internalised.
I suppose this is can all summarised as, well duh, of course immersion works, but I wanted to say it anyway.
Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
#60I took Japanese in college, and the worst thing wasn't the writing system, vocabulary or grammar. They were hard mind you, but far from impossible, nothing flash cards couldn't fix.
What was (and is) very hard for me is how (in general) the bulk of Japanese communication happens in what is unsaid. Even trying to work through patio11's Stockfighter course, I found it very hard to 'read between the lines' in what he was saying to find out what I was supposed to do. I also have zero low-level programming experience, so that probably didn't help.
I hope Duolingo mentions this and has training for "what do they really mean", as trusting what they say at face value seems like a good way to cause an incident. This may also be useful in understanding American Southerners or cop dramas, where direct communication is strictly verboten.