Wanda Kaishin

Simple - you only talk to your child in your native tongue, as they recommend. Am I missing your point?

ALG is probably the most famous of the listen only approaches. But the OP repeats sentences, which isn't done with ALG. BTW, I don't like ALG in case anybody is wondering.

That's my conclusion from reading all the op's posts in this thread.

Although Pimsleur does involve repeating words and phrases, unless the OP left out some information about the method, this isn't the same. Pimsleur is mainly translation and repetition, and also includes some basic information about pronunciation and grammar. Here is more or less how Pimsleur goes: Recording: The woman says "how are you?"(in L1) Learner: How are you? (in L2) Recording: How are you? (in L2) Learner: How are you? (in L2) Recording: The man replies "I'm fine thanks"(in L1) Learner: I'm fine thanks. (in L2) Recording: I'm fine thanks. (in L2) Learner: I'm fine thanks. (in L2) etc.

sorry - it's restricted to people who are 110kg or less.

You're on the right path by learning the radicals first. But after that, I recommend learning characters in context. the following is my recommendation of the SRS/anki side of vocabulary study, but keep in mind that it's just one piece of the puzzle. Context is crucial for learning vocabulary, so reinforce by practicing all skills regularly, and this will work well. In your situation, I'd recommend doing a very basic audio based beginners course that has a transcript. I highly recommend Pimsleur (you will have to obtain the transcript elsewhere) and/or Michel Thomas. The program you choose is going to be your first source of vocabulary and characters. You do a lesson as prescribed, repeat as necessary, and when you feel pretty comfortable with it, it's time to learn the script. I recommend loading all the characters, words and sentences into anki as follows: Card 1Front = characterBack = pinyin, meaning(if you don't know either the pinyin or the meaning it's a fail)exampleFront = 你Back = ni3, youCard 2Front = compound (target character in pinyin, other characters in hanzi), meaningBack = character (If you can't write the character it's a fail. This card is where I recommend using the Heisig mnemonic if you get stuck.)exampleFront = ni3好, youBack = 你 Card 3 Front = word in hanziBack = pinyin, meaning(if you don't know either the pinyin or the meaning it's a fail) exampleFront = 你好Back = ni3hao3, hello Card 4Front = word in englishBack = word in hanzi, pinyin (if you don't know the pinyin it's a fail; to save time, I don't write these out. But if you aren't getting enough writing practice in the beginning, writing these is a good option.)exampleFront = youBack = 你好, ni3hao3 For sentences, use cards 3 and 4.

Here's the best thread I've ever seen on the subject. It's really long, but there are a wide variety of methods, so one's bound to appeal to you. I'll just make a few comments about what's been said already on this thread. The SRS (like Anki) is a godsend for people who like to keep all the vocabulary they've ever learned in lists, flashcards, etc. and periodically review them. Not everybody likes to learn that way, but if you do, you should consider it because logical spaced repetition reviews saves you a lot of time and effort. This is what Rosetta Stone would have you believe. I have never met anyone who reached a high level in a language and started with RS. Imo, the statement is clearly false. People have been successfully learning languages using translation for thousands of years, and RS can't change that. Mnemonics can be very useful. I don't use them unless I get stuck - why invent an association if I don't have to, right?

I've dreamt in all my languages, but as with dreaming in general, there's no rhyme or reason to it, and it's not a clear indicator of one's level.

Was that really necessary? I don’t doubt that you didn’t find them difficult. But understand that most westerners do, just as most find Japanese much harder than Spanish. Similar to Benny Lewis, you presented a list of 6 things that most learners find pretty easy about the language, and used it to try to convince people to learn the language. This is some good advice; you’ll notice that I didn’t criticize it in my post. Understand that this is a lot of study, and it probably gave you the base you needed to succeed with your more recent method. It’s very easy to underestimate what early studies have done for us. I wasn’t talking about your language learning, I was talking about posting incomplete information in order to convince people that a language is easy. I would say your learning method is closer to AJATT.

For me to give you a reasonably good evaluation I'd have to ask quite a few more questions, but I'll just jump to the main issue I have with it: too much out of context learning. Even with a fantastic memory, the way you've chosen is at the very least less efficient than a method where you learn more in context. For Chinese, the disadvantages of learning all the characters up front far outweigh the advantages imo. For Japanese you can make somewhat of a case, but not Chinese. I encourage learners to learn some vocabulary in context, then use mnemonics and SRS's to learn and review all the new characters/vocab/sentences(as needed). It works so much better when you have all that context to remember stuff with. Having a huge anki deck of isolated characters, even assuming you can stay on top of it really well, is of surprisingly little help when you actually get around to learning the language in context. So it's better not to do that huge out of context exercise in the first place. And considering how much time you'd save by instead only loading the characters you've already encountered, you'd progress much faster. And the second red flag for me is the lack of writing, as already pointed out by linguaholic.

Warning: I’m not a Benny Lewis fan. I try to present people with all pertinent facts about a language learning topic when I post, and leave it at that. It’s not my job to encourage or discourage you from learning; that’s entirely up to you. If you decide to be discouraged by the facts, that’s your choice; I’m not going to sugar coat it. I hate that. I always say that if one has the motivation, time and resources, one can learn a language, and that means any language. When I decide to learn a language, I like to research it a little first. I often hear about difficulties, and I take this as useful information, not discouragement. Fair enough. Each time I see a post meant to encourage someone to learn a language by emphasizing the easy points and obscuring the hard ones I feel the same way. Not a myth. I’ve learned several languages. All of them were hard, but Japanese was the hardest. Your whole post is about the difficulty of Japanese, but you seemed to focus on grammar and pronunciation for this first “Myth”, so I will too. Here are some things people find especially difficult with grammar/pronunciation: Politeness levels Homonyms Particles Numbers/Counting Not a myth. They are extremely difficult to learn. You advise the OP to learn 22 kanji per day for 3 months, but you don’t say how; you just say to use the right tools and methods. It sounds to me like your talking about RTK. I’d like to remind you that RTK only scratches the surface of kanji learning. Sure it’s a good start, but it takes hundreds if not thousands of hours to learn all the compounds and readings. Also, there are 214 traditional kanji radicals. I’m not sure what you meant by 250 particles. One last point – what do you mean by “1945 (NOT 2000!)”? There are 2136 joyo kanji, but you will need about 3000 to reach C1/C2. It depends. What level do you want to reach? 2700 hours is probably enough to reach B1. For C1/C2 you’ll need a lot more; probably in the neighborhood of 10,000 hours. I think you are quoting this FSI article (see Table 2., page 78). Some things you should keep in mind about this chart. These are classroom hours for intensive courses at the US Foreign Service Institute. Typically they spend many hours outside of classes studying too. Also, students are usually experienced language learners and native English speakers. So these numbers are good for determining the approximate relative difficulty of different languages for a native English speaker. In other words, these numbers aren’t equal to the amount of time it will take you to get fluent, but you can approximate that learning Japanese will take a native English speaker 3-4 times as long as learning Spanish. My personal experience jibes with that. You, on the other hand, can’t make such a judgment because you’re not a native English speaker and your Spanish isn’t far enough along to compare it with your Japanese, according to your profile. Sorry, where did that come from? I didn’t see the post that makes this suggestion. Good luck with that.

Based on what I've read, if it were me I'd have the parents only speak their native languages to the child. If I was worried about an imbalance, I'd try to make up for it using media, or nannies if that was an option.

Yeah, isn't it great? For me, it's so much easier to look something up quickly than in my grammar books, and the explanations are often simpler.

I'm glad you liked it linguaholic. And thanks very much for creating this forum! The post is actually an excerpt from a book I was writing.

Excellent article. It appears to be written for native English speakers.

Here's a great grammar resource: Chinese Grammar Wiki

I wrote this a while back... Step 1 – Isolated pronunciation Goals: Correctly repeat any single pinyin syllable after hearing it. Read single pinyin syllables out loud with correct pronunciation. Do all this with correct tones and know which tones are being used when you hear them. Expansion: Pronunciation requires special attention in Mandarin because it’s a tonal language, with tone changes (sandhi), and a few sounds westerners aren’t normally accustomed to. I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again here – tones are crucial. If you don’t make a serious effort to get them right before you start conversing, you will probably not be understood. Tones are more important than initials and finals (consonant and vowel sounds); there are regional variations in pronunciation of initials and finals, so natives are used to that fact and will give you some leeway with them. But tones are consistent, meaning there is very little leeway, so it’s more important to get them right. How to do it - working with a pinyin table. There are many available - I’ve picked one at random to work with. Pinyin is made up of initials and finals. Initial + final = syllable. You’ll find out later that each Chinese character (hanzi) has a one syllable pronunciation. The table has all possible syllables; there are about 400. If you click one of the syllables, you get a pop-up with audio for the four different tones. The goal in working with the pinyin table is to be able to pronounce all the syllables correctly in all four tones. There are many ways to do this, so it’s ok to experiment, but always listen to the audio before trying to pronounce a syllable for the first time. Here’s the method I suggest: 1) Select the 1st syllable in the 1st column (a), select the 1st tone, listen, repeat; select the 2nd tone, listen repeat; select the 3rd tone, listen, repeat; select the 4th tone, listen, repeat; pronounce the 1st tone, listen, repeat; pronounce the 2nd tone, listen, repeat; pronounce the 3rd tone, listen, repeat; pronounce the 4th tone, listen, repeat. 2) Select 2nd syllable in the 1st column (ba), and repeat step 1. After completing the first column, do them over, but only pronounce, listen, repeat. 3) Repeat for the 2nd column. Keep it up for 30min – 2hrs per day. 4) The next day, do it by row instead of columns. You will need to work through the entire table by columns and rows several times to get comfortable reading pinyin. It takes some time to get comfortable reading the pinyin table, probably 10+ hrs. Spreading it out over a couple weeks makes it sink in much better. Reading about and studying pronunciation. After you have finished your dose of pinyin table work for the day, do some reading. First, read this pronunciation guide in Sinosplice. There is a lot to Chinese pronunciation. It’s best to practice it, read about it, and practice it some more, each time trying to incorporate the things you’ve read about. You will always be checking your pronunciation by listening to the table, so try to pay attention and pick out the things that you read about too. After finishing Sinosplice, work your way through the pronunciation module for FSI. This might sound like overkill, but there are actually some things in FSI that aren’t in Sinosplice. Note – for this stage, focus on single syllables; leave multiple syllables and tone rules for later. Practice recognizing tones. After you feel like you are reading single pinyin syllables correctly, it’s time get good at recognizing tones. I recommend using Pinyin Practice. At this stage, just do the single syllable drills. You can come back to combinations later.

Unless you really like to be corrected often & face-to-face, I wouldn't recommend this. I think most would have better success learning pinyin on their own. There are so many excellent audio programs available now, and they are so much lower pressure than a teacher, it's hard for me to imagine not taking advantage of it.

I used Thai for Beginners. Excellent textbook imo.

Harder shows? Even if you understand less than 60-70%, if you're trying to improve your listening you are better off without subtitles. If you're mostly trying to improve your reading, or if you care about understanding the show more than language studies, use subtitles. Remember that when you read subs you're getting very little listening practice; it's almost a pure reading exercise unless you just occasionally read them or something. It requires about 2000 hours of active (no sub) listening to adequately parse a language at the C1/C2 level. Reading doesn't require nearly as much of an effort, so take this into account when you decide what you need to be doing. The 2000 hour figure comes from a nice little free ebook called The Word Brain. It's full of other helpful information, much of which I agree with. From my personal experience, I agree with the 2000 hr number.

@FlagOnce - It puzzles me why a French native speaker would start a thread about the difficulties of gender in English; French is much more anal about it than English. That would be like me starting a thread to discuss the difficulties of Spanish orthography Back on topic - Mandarin native speakers really struggle with he/she/it when they speak English. That's because the words for them in Mandarin all have the same pronunciation: he = 他 = ta1 she = 她 = ta1 it (animate) = 牠 = ta1 it (inanimate) = 它 = ta1

Sorry for repeating myself, but there are 7 "skills" I think of when learning a language: reading, writing, conversation, listening, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. They all reinforce each other. If you're trying to reach an intermediate level or above, even if writing isn't one of your goals, you should write. Working on all the skills activates more of your mind than if you neglect any. So you should write, because it's more efficient than not writing. That being said, I want to make it clear that I'm not saying to spend equal time on all skills. I'm mearly saying you shouldn't neglect any of them.

I could probably write books on this but I'll try to keep it short and not torture you. If you ask around and do a little research, as you've done with this post, you should find that most serious learners will strongly recommend that you start using the phonetic Japanese scripts, hiragana and katakana, or kana for both of those, from the very beginning. Although using romanized script, romaji, in the beginning might seem like a good shortcut, in the long run it can really cause some problems. So if you choose to use kana, I would say this is the biggest hurdle in the very beginning. This is a comparison that I often see made between Chinese and Japanese: Chinese starts out hard and gets easier; Japanese starts out easy and gets harder. I find this to be pretty accurate. For initial study materials, I'd recommend just sitting down and memorizing the script. You should use a resource that has audio. You do this in the very beginning because when you hear a sound you want to picture it's kana, not romaji. This might not seem important to you right now, but I assure you it is. So just some little resource that teaches you all the kana and has audio should do.

I'm glad to see this topic brought up, and I think it would be nice if this info was included in our profile page, rather than just saying "I'm fluent". I'll just mention how long ago I started, since I consider most to be works in progress. English - Native (53 years) Spanish - C1 (42 years but rarely use it) Swahili - B1 (16 years, but haven't used it the last 13) Thai - B2 (12 years) Japanese - B2 (10 years) Mandarin - B1 (8 years) French - B1 (6 years) Russian - B2 (5 years) Korean, Portuguese, Italian, German - not started

Statistics show that the first language listed in posts like yours will be the one you go for. Good luck with Japanese!