Czarownica

I must say that Thai script is a huge challenge for me. I've learnt hiragana and katakana in two days or so, I've learnt hangul in one afternoon, but Thai script remains a mystery to me. I just feel overwhelmed with all those characters and I don't understand this high-mid-low thing that I'm apparently supposed to memorize as well...

I really need to just sit down and learn it, I guess.

Anybody here wants to share their experiences?

You can find many useful phrases here:

Bear in mind that Thai is a tonal language. That means that depending on the tone used, the meaning of a word might change. This is why I linked you videos instead of a written site

I care way too much about everything, so... yeah Besides, I'm a college student, so my English (and my Japanese as well) is being judged on a daily basics and I have to care, since I need to take their feedback and improve.

Well, to nitpick, everybody has some kind of accent That being said, I come from the region of Poland that is rather lingustically unremarkable - so I don't have a strong/recognizable accent of any kind We're very average and maybe a bit boring

I started with hiragana, but it didn't really matter much, since I've learnt katakana maybe a day later. I think it's important to learn both of those as early as possible, but the order doesn't matter much.

I think that at the beginning, katakana lets you understand more, though.

Well, it's pretty much impossible not to learn them. They're everywhere.

Personally, I believe that we shouldn't be afraid of swear words. They can even be art sometimes. Either way, knowing at least the most popular ones is necessary, we have to know if somebody is trying to insult us  :angel:

By the way, recently I've learned that there is an expression "ワープロ馬鹿 " meaning  "someone whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to overreliance on the kana->kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text on a computer"... Harsh, but I guess it is a problem nowadays.

Aww, that's pretty sweet.

My reason is more boring: I was a slightly rebelious and stupid teenager who was fed up with learning German, so when I went to high school and got the chance I've chosen another language to learn. It just happened to be Italian.

Now I kinda regret it. Not because I dislike Italian, but because I wish I studied German more. Now I can barely remember anything from it

So... What is the best possible way to get started with Korean, from the very basics? I can read/write Hangul, but nothing else. Getting started is always the most difficult thing... x_X I'd be grateful for some website/textbook recommendations.

Well, I can think of one misconception native English speakers sometimes have  :angel: That English is the most difficult language in the world. I don't know where they're getting that from, but I've heard it many times.

I like that book as well czarownica, as well as all the other books be J.W Heisig. (Remebering the Kanji & Remembering the Hanzi).

Have you seen my PM Czarownica? :=)  :shy:

I don't like Remembering the Kanji nearly as much, to be honest. It's good for mnemonics, I guess, but as a kanji textbook it's just not sufficient - it has no readings, stroke order or example compounds.

No, I haven't seen your PM, actually. You sure you sent it? Because I don't see any new PMs at all

Definitely Harry Potter. When I was a child, waiting for a new Harry Potter book to be released and then translated was unbearable, so when I was 10 or 11 my mum got us a copy of Order of Phoenix in English.

I understood very, very little of it. But a few years later we got Half Blood Prince and I was way better, so I was able to read it and understand it, more or less. When Deathly Hallows was released, I was already (nearly?) fluent in English and had no problems  :angel:

Harry Potter books are great for learning English, because their language is not too difficult. Reading classics, like Sherlock Holmes, or, God forbid, Shakespeare is very hard for somebody whose English is not advanced yet.

I've learnt hiragana from "Remembering the Kana", a book recommended to me by my roommate. I keep advertising it on this forum, but it really is quite good

When I went to college we got some practice sheets that our teacher would later check.

Well... I'm pretty terrible with music. My sense of rhythm is not very good, I can't tell different notes apart and sometimes I confuse guitar with a drum (don't even ask)  :grin: Fortunately that does not mean that I'm terrible at languages.

The study's certainly interesting.

There will be other prizes that are not language-related, maybe an Amazon Voucher for 50 euros or something like that. Stay tuned ^^

My, my, aren't you rich

Those kanji posters are really amazing, I must say, but I wonder whether looking at one of those and thinking "oh my God, there are so many that I don't know yet" is not a source of suicidal thoughts in some people

There is something I don't get, though. One of those posters has "all the joyo kanji" - 1945 - and the other has "2024 joyo kanji"... It seems contradictory, or am I missing something?  :confused:

I'm a very conservative language learner and I think it's really necessary to know how to write and read it. I highly recommend learning at least hiragana and katakana. The best kana learning book is "Remembering the kana", in my opinion, but there are also many free resources online (for example, http://learnthekana.com/ but just googling "learn hiragana and katakana" will give you many more good results). It can be done in a day or less, seriously It's a fast way to start learning Japanese.

After that, I recommend checking out this thread: http://linguaholic.com/japanese-links/japanese-learning-websites/

It has many helpful resources.

My favorite Japanese writer is Natsuo Kirino. She writes psychological thrillers, very good ones, in my humble opinion. I especially recommend "Grotesque" (グロテスク).

I also like Murakami, but the other Murakami Ryuu Murakami also writes thrillers. He's well known in Japan, less so outside of it. He wrote "Audition", which was later adapted into a quite famous movie.

This seems very hardcore, but I found that living in Japan and forcing yourself out of your comfort zone of finding and making Japanese friends (compared to people who speak your native tongue). Whenever any of my friends learn a language and say they're spending time in that particular country I give them the same advice - mix with the locals.

Well, obviously. Going abroad to study the language is always great and lets you greatly improve in a very short time. However, it's not something a lot of people can do; it requires time and money. I'd say that it is something that's beyond reach for many language learners.

Just like everybody said, despite being similar, they are actually different languages. They have a lot of vocabulary in common and their grammar is similar - so if you know one of those languages, it'll be way easier for you to learn the other two, and also you might understand a bit of those languages even before you learn them

Those American spelling competitions always seemed weird to me

In Poland we have something called "dyktando": somebody reads a text aloud and people (children, most of the time, it can also be a test) are supposed to write it down correctly. It checks people's knowledge of ortography and interpunction.

I've seen multiple advertisements about it, and it looks quite shady. I remember in one ad it said. "Language professors hate him. Learn a new language in days!" I thought that the Pimsleur method was a scam from that day on. I'd honestly just use Rosetta Stone since i've heard some successful stories with it.

I don't think a language learning method can be a "scam". It's not a good method, in my opinion, but calling it a scam might be a bit much.

Rosetta Stone isn't all that wonderful, either. They mostly just have good and persistent advertising in the United States.

It's nothing too embarassing, I'm afraid It just means "woman". But it puzzles me, because why would a girl need a word "woman" tattooed on her? I mean, she wouldn't tattoo "woman" in English on herself, would she? 

I love this blog so much, I'm glad it became more active recently

I think it's really ridiculous when people who don't even know Chinese/Japanese get Chinese characters tattooed on them. I mean, what's the point of that? It's not deep, it's really stupid. And all those people believing that you can write your initials in kanji/hanzi make my inner linguist cry  :cry:

I knew a girl who had "女" tattooed on her. I just can't imagine a reason for that.

I haven't used the Rosetta Stone myself, but I know that it's quite expensive. Considering that the majority of people willing to learn a language never really starts seriously studying it, buying it might be a bad idea, unless you're really, really confident that you will use it

There's a lot of great free resources available, though.

I've never used it but in theory it sound good. Some people don't like the idea of not learning grammar but I think that it's good. Grammar is a fine detail which I would reserve for the experienced speakers, if you just want to learn to speak the language at a basic level then you can totally forget the grammar and learn conversational phrases.

That's not really "speaking the language" then, though. It's more like "memorizing phrases from a tourist's phasebook". It has nothing to do with knowing the language.

Grammar is in no way a "detail". Nobody expect people to master the entire grammar before starting to talk in their chosen language, but grammar really should be studied from the very beginning of language learning. Without knowing any grammar it's impossible to ever go beyond the phrasebook level. You won't be able to make the simplest sentence by yourself.

That's why I'm definitely not a fan of this method.