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Learning a new language

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Starting to learn Spanish, any ideas estibador?

Yeah, give up! Even when you think you know the words you can't understand them with their machine gun rapid talking style.

I've got this multimedia program which is pretty good...

http://www.eurekamultimedia.com.au/products.php?cat=Language&pid=DV9446

...lets you record yourself speaking and then breaks it down in various ways to compare how you sound with a native speaker.

A fellow Freo fan put me onto this poster he designed which is pretty handy for remembering all the different variations of verbs, which I always found bloody confusing.

http://linguaposta.com/products/spanish-regular-verbs/

SBS is useful with all their foreign movies too. I record the Spanish ones and am slowly building up a library. Hopefully one day I'll be able to watch them with the subtitles covered up and be able to understand what's going on.

I'm pretty lazy though and pretty half-hearted about how much time I put in, so I'm still very much a rookie. Been thinking of taking a night class at TAFE if any of them offer it to kick my arse into gear.
 
Und ihr wisst, was es ist, es ist?.....

Another happy German tale.

Das ist Meeeeeeeein Teeeeeeeeeeeil. :thumbsu:

This busuu.com website is really great, thanks for the suggestion Ed_Gein. Wish these smart arse Germans would stop correcting my n00b writing though!

No problem. I think that's one of the best features of that site. :p At least you can get your own back and start correcting the English mistakes they make.
 
Yeah, give up! Even when you think you know the words you can't understand them with their machine gun rapid talking style....
That is a real problem I've noticed, no way around it but just to stick with it I suppose. I'll have a look at that program too, cheers mate. Just started using I think Rocket Spanish it's called.
 
Thought I'd bump this thread to save myself the Herculean effort of creating a new one.

Anyone here learning or learnt a new language? Just began self-teaching myself German, bought the Michel Thomas method audio CD's and a German dictionary and am enjoying it. I chose German because I have an unexplained affinity for German culture and I'll hopefully be doing exchange studies there within the next couple of years. It's also not overly difficult as it isn't too far removed from English to be overwhelming.

Anyone got any resources/advice for self-learners? Or anyone in Perth taken classes in a new language?

My ex was German, lived over there for 6 months. Didn't learn it myself, she spoke english, so kind of always got sucked in to speaking english together. Best thing for learing it is speaking (and the jigsaw puzzle type aspect to listening when you don't have direct verbatim translations), so if you get a chance, spend some time over there.

I found using books and recordings impractical, the books I had didn't really teach every day language, it was quite formal. I'm sure that might help if you're involved with business, politics etc etc, but for every day use it

But yeah, I always liked the language, even before I met my ex, no idea why though. From memory it's from the same root language as English, which explains the similarity.

Anyway, good luck with learning it :D
 

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I know an American girl who knows next to no German who is moving there and enrolled herself into language classes that are set up for people that don't know the language. (Germany has a high amount of Turkish immigrants as well) Anything further than that, it's going to be a bit of struggle i imagine, but because of the immersion factor, it wouldn't take too long before you can get away with a conversation on a basic level.

Edit: From personal experience i know maybe 100-150 German words or so. But the first time i went there i couldn't seperate one word from the next because it's spoken so quickly, but after a week i could make out the different words and spot a few of the ones i knew, then it turned into some basic sentences of spotting words i knew then putting 2+2 together to understand what they were meaning over the next 2 weeks or so....

Alot of Germans speak English, the yanks have a fair few army bases over there, and if you're living in a town that is loacted near one, you'll find half of the locals speak English fluently.
 
Alot of Germans speak English, the yanks have a fair few army bases over there, and if you're living in a town that is loacted near one, you'll find half of the locals speak English fluently.

Fair enough, i'm only going off what i experienced i guess. I didn't think every person i met was 'fluent' in it compared to what it would be like near the army bases. I found it a bit of mix, some people were fluent. Others were really broken and a majority of the other people could only get by with basic conversation at most.
 
That is a real problem I've noticed, no way around it but just to stick with it I suppose. I'll have a look at that program too, cheers mate. Just started using I think Rocket Spanish it's called.
Also trying to self teach myself with rocket spanish. It's actually pretty simple when you get used to the grammar and break sentences down. Would love to spend a month or two in South America though, would make it much easier.
 
Haven't read through the thread, but any love for livemocha? Use it to learn Portuguese myself

Is livemocha like busuu, a social networking site/language learning programme? I've heard good things but haven't tried it myself. Is it free?

Anyone have any experience with Rosetta Stone?
 
Is livemocha like busuu, a social networking site/language learning programme? I've heard good things but haven't tried it myself. Is it free?

Anyone have any experience with Rosetta Stone?

Free up until a point IIRC. Signing up will get most of the stuff you need. But yeah, it is quite like a social network site. You do tasks in, say, Russian, and it'll be assessed by native speakers.

Rosetta Stone...heard it's outrageously expensive
 
Free up until a point IIRC. Signing up will get most of the stuff you need. But yeah, it is quite like a social network site. You do tasks in, say, Russian, and it'll be assessed by native speakers.

Rosetta Stone...heard it's outrageously expensive

Ah yes, just signed up to livemocha. It's very much like busuu.com but with a much cleaner layout.

I like that these sites allow you to assess your speaking through audio reviews too (though it'll be a while before I'm confident enough for that lol) No better way to get better at conversation than by conversing!
 
Did any of you guys "learn" a language at primary school? I just remember my old school teaching Italian so poorly, that it put me off and I honestly don't know why they bothered. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reason why mainland Europeans speak English so well compared to how we speak other languages. I remember it was literally the same thing every year, e.g. colours, numbers up to 50, how to say your name. They did not teach us verbs or anything, it was so bloody stupid. It wasn't until I picked it up again at uni that I've finally learned to string a few words together.

I did French throughout highschool and for a bit at uni but ended up dropping it because the subject content was just crap. I love the language though, but I find it bloody difficult to understand. Definitely a very handy language to have.

I have a massive interest in German but only did it for a year in school then dropped it because of timetable issues or something. Its a language I'm dying to learn though, one day...
 
I think Australian education should be focusing on our neighbours languages in the Asian Region. French & German are great and all, but we should be more acknowledging our asian links imo.
 

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I speak relatively good German and relatively poor French. I wish it was the other way around. It's much cooler to be able to speak a Romance language. If I could have my time over I would probably go for Spanish. It's more useful than any other European language.

Asian languages are probably the most useful but I have always found them a bit daunting due to how completely removed they are from English.

Incidentally I have a friend (Australian) who is fluent in Japanese and Spanish. He reckons that when he holds conversations in one, he will keep drifting into the other accidentally. Weird phenomenon.
 
I think Australian education should be focusing on our neighbours languages in the Asian Region. French & German are great and all, but we should be more acknowledging our asian links imo.

Did Indonesian when I first started high school. Got put off, probably largely due to my lack of interest in Asian culture and our teacher being the spawn of Satan.
 
Probably the other factor against "Eastern" languages is the fact that you have to memorise the rules and a set of characters that are similar yet distinct.

I'd like to be able to learn Chinese, but I think I'd send myself around the bend trying to learn the syntax and the correct characters
 
Probably the other factor against "Eastern" languages is the fact that you have to memorise the rules and a set of characters that are similar yet distinct.

I'd like to be able to learn Chinese, but I think I'd send myself around the bend trying to learn the syntax and the correct characters

Well Korean in comparison isnt too bad. Whilst Indonesian is rather easy once you get the hang of it, the prefixes and suffixes are easy to learn and make the language very accessible, plus of course it still uses latin characters. And it also makes a lot of sense, like german, whilst having the rolling 'r' sound like spanish. Also spelt exactly as it sounds.

Im actually learning Mandarin for uni over summer, looking forward to it.

I just think Asia is more of a part of our identity than the French & German, I dont see why these languages should be prioritised in schools. Every child should learn one asian language in their education, particularly one of Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese and maybe Korean.
 
The trouble with Asian languages is that whilst they may have a large number of native speakers, they are very geographically limited. Thanks to imperialism, many European languages are spoken all over the world. French and Spanish are each widely spoken in 20-30 different countries on multiple continents, Portuguese in about a dozen. Russian is spoken all over the FSU.

Arabic is the only non-European language that comes close.

Mandarin is great but it's not even the primary language everywhere in mainland China. It sort of limits your options a bit.
 

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I'm pretty fluent in another language other than english (Hebrew) and despite it only being spoken by about 7 million others in the world I find having it very very useful
 
Also trying to self teach myself with rocket spanish. It's actually pretty simple when you get used to the grammar and break sentences down. Would love to spend a month or two in South America though, would make it much easier.

Been learning Spanish for a few years. It's pretty straightforward, and much more logical and consistent than English. Plus far more phonetic.

I'd like to learn French, Russian, German and maybe Latin. That'll do for starters.
 

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