Learning a foreign language

[private joker]

They say it's easier to learn languages when you're a child, since your brain is more used to soaking in that kind of communication information. The only other language I ever picked up was a little Spanish in H.S. and college, but even that I couldn't carry on a very good conversation.

But I'm thinking about picking up another language now, and the problem is I don't have a whole lot of free time to, like, go to a class at a night school or anything (50-hr/wk job, 20-hr/wk poker, girlfriend, hobbies, etc.).

So I started looking at alternatives. There are audio CDs you can buy, and I found some websites that offer tutoring tools but they are expensive -- one has a premium account that's like $165/mo. for a telephone tutor and .pdf files to download, etc.

I'm just not sure what the most thorough, time-efficient, and cost-effective way of learning a new language is -- outside of moving to another country and living among the native speakers. Does anyone have experience studying on their own to learn, and what do you all recommend? Books? CDs? Website tutorials?

[Big Poppa Smurf]

PJ,

what language are you trying to learn? This will make a difference in how you study it.

[TheMetetron]

I swear we've done this thread about 5 times already (maybe not here, but OOT), but what the hell.

Usually, this is the point where people ask what language it is and what you want to be able to do with it. So, what language is it you want to learn and what do you want to do with it? How much work are you willing to put into it? How important is this to you?

You've mentioned not wanting to move to another country and learn it there so we can throw out the best option and only one that would likely lead to fluency or the closest approximation of it available.

[Kneel B4 Zod]

I believe there are podcast language lessons. listening/learning during your commute/playing poker/working out could be an efficient use of time, though would only be effective to a certain extent depending on how much free capacity your brain has.

listening and hanging out with native speakers is def. a good way. I hang with some French people, and I speak very little & understand just a bit more, but they say my accent is great! to that affect, perhaps renting foreign language movies with English subtitles could help you out.

in fact I think it's a large reason why Dutch and Swedish people speak English so much better than French and Italians - their TV is subtitled instead of being dubbed.

[private joker]

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.

[unbluffable]

I think you should watch tv in the language you want to learn. that is how i learned english. I would recommend watching the news and movies (especially ones you've already seen).

Btw, Chinese and Russian are extremely difficult to pick up, I'd go with Italian if I were you.

[JennFox]

Joker,

I went to school for opera at Johns Hopkins. They require us to learn Italian, French, German AND Russian as part of our degree. (Under the pretense that we will be performing in foreign countries with foreign peers, not to mention the music was sung in these languages.) I have a pretty solid background, and I still struggle to come up with ways to remember these languages, keep them separate, and keep them conversational in my mind.
It is fact that the easiest language to learn is ITALIAN. There are a couple reasons for this. First of all, the sounds required to form Italian speech are espeically simplified. There are only 5 phonetic vowels in Italian. So like we might have seven different way of saying the letter "a" in any given english word, in Italian there will always be ONLY one. 5 vowel sounds to learn, period. Thats about 20x simpler than any other language right there. On top of it, their sentence structures and verb conjugation are also strikingly familiar to our own sentence structures etc. There are few nuances and you will not struggle to form Italian words or pronounce them. Ever.

I learned all the languages through 2 hr. classes 3x a week. I hated it and it was absolutely a struggle. I am a pretty smart girl with an aptitude for language, but books are pretty difficult as tools for learning a foreign language IMHO. I know this sounds cliche, but the best tool I have EVER EVER found for languages is Rosetta Stone. It focuses more on learning through hearing the words, rather than seeing them on paper. Also they do word recognition where they equate each foreign word with an english word. I don't know why this works and it often makes me feel like a [censored] idiot. But.. It absolutely is everything they tell you it is. I bought the Rosetta Stone for italian after I had taken 3 years of Italian. It was insane how many holes in my comprehension it filled and how quickly I learned new vocabulary! I was shocked by how well it worked, especially since I have practice in picking up languages.

So try Italian. And try Rosetta Stone. It will be the easiest thing you have ever done. Cross my heart! xoxo

[private joker]

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]

[JennFox]

My friend Saisai is from Hong Kong. She says Cantonese is harder for English speaking people to pick up, and even the people who learn the words sound so different speaking it that most cantonese speaking people can't understand them anyway.
She says if you study Mandarin, you should find a native speaker whose second-language english is perfect, as the biggest struggle you will face is not learning the chinese so much, but actually sounding chinese and being intelligible.

[JennFox]

also watching foreign movies with subtitles is excellent suggestion and a method johns hopkins used in ALL language classes