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#11
06-08-2007, 05:41 PM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
[ QUOTE ]
Thanks Jenn -- I'm definitely going with Chinese for now, and I've found some Rosetta Stone sets on eBay. Hopefully that will work out... I can tell Italian would be easy to learn, and I think I have a handle on French too (my mom is fluent). Unfortunately, I'm stuck with wanting to learn one of the hardest languages there is. [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img] [/ QUOTE ] Rosetta Stone really is a piece of crap piece of software. You will learn almost nothing useful in actually visiting China or watching Chinese movies. I'm not sure why your goal is to learn Chinese, but that's fine. What are you going to use it for? This really makes a big difference. 
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#12
06-08-2007, 05:58 PM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
PJ,
Chinese is extremely hard to learn but if you only want to learn conversational it shouldn't be that bad, especially from having watched so many Chinese films you should have a knack of "listening" to Chinese already (though not understanding). Are you going to pick up Mandarin or Cantonese? I can help you if you're going to learn Mandarin.
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#14
06-08-2007, 06:20 PM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
i dont understand rosette stone maybe i misunderstood how to use it but it was terrible. i listen to alot of spanish music it helps a lot. get chinese music and then download the lyrics
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#15
06-08-2007, 07:46 PM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
[ QUOTE ]
I was thinking about taking up Chinese, but I was hoping the thread could be more inclusive to all languages. I mean I would love to know Danish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Hebrew as well. But I just don't have time. But for Chinese, I certainly don't need to learn how to write it. I'm thinking of conversational Mandarin or Shanghainese; enough vocabulary and pronunciation to get by. I'm not really sure how different Cantonese is from Mandarin, but judging from the Chinese films I see, it sounds pretty different. [/ QUOTE ] My wife speaks Mandarin, Shanghainese fluently and a bit of Japanese. She has a very hard time following Cantonese and says that the differences are fairly large. She also says that Shanghainese pronounciation makes picking up Japanese (fairly) easy afterwards. Best of luck.
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#17
06-09-2007, 12:42 AM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
[ QUOTE ]
I know French pretty well, but am looking to learn Spanish for business purposes (basically telling Spanish speaking employees what to do). Any good tips on that? [/ QUOTE ] My summer job is working at a supermarket. I have a seven years of spanish through school. I have learned the most in the last couple months by simply talking to the latino workers. Learn the basic vocab and verbs, you will become the most comfortable by talking to native speakers. You can learn all the verbs but if you can not think and organize your ideas in another language it is useless. The best way to learn is talking about daily stuff in your second language.
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#18
06-09-2007, 12:52 AM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
get on oink or whatever.
Download Pimsleur for whatever language you want to learn; the way it is taught won't quickly teach you grammar but it will teach you basically perfect pronunciation which will give you the confidence you need to speak to random people when you realise they speak that language. This will allow you to get real life practice speaking the language, which is really the most important thing. Eventually if you're serious about it, you will probably need to buy some books or take a course at a college to learn grammar, which is significantly harder. But your grammar will be perfect in every day conversation taking pimsleur lessons; you just won't be able to write an essay... Btw the pimsleur lessons are designed to be done 30 minutes a day, but done every day. They are VERY good. Martin
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#19
06-09-2007, 02:41 AM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
i was actually going to suggest not doing chinese, or any other tonal language for that matter, if you are doing independent study. i've taken chinese for a couple of years and i feel that you need to have an instructor to be able to use it in a conversational manner. otherwise, i think it will be extremely difficult to learn to pronounce and recognize the spoken tones.
edit: if you stick w/it feel free to hit me up if you want some supplementary tools.
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#20
06-09-2007, 03:02 AM
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Re: Learning a foreign language
We've definitely done the foreign language discussion before.
Chinese seems kind of random to want to learn just out of nowhere. I can only begin to imagine how hard this would be. At least the romance languages bare SOME resemblance to english. Taiwanese friend of mine I used to work with taught me how to count to 10 in Chinese. Don't remember which type of Chinese it was nor do I remember how to count to 10. Even very simple single syllable words like numbers I was still getting wrong though and she was trying to help me pronounce them better. I tried really hard and generally am half-decent at incorporating the accent of a foreign-language but on these I don't think I was even close. Basically, she admitted that if I counted to 10 as I was saying it then a Chinese person would be able to tell what I was trying to do. But a few of the words I was so far off that if I wasn't saying all the numbers in order (was just saying the single word) there is no way a Chinese person would understand what I was trying to say. She also was trying to show me some written stuff and how it worked but it seemed way too different for me to comprehend. Based on my very limited experience of trying to count from 1-10 in one of the Chinese dialects I have concluded there is a 100% chance that I would never have a prayer of understanding or being able to speak that language.
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