DancingLady

You sound like a very ambitious language learner.  I wish you all the best and hope you find lots of help and encouragement on this forum.

It will give you the general sense of what the text is saying, but the grammar might not come out quite right. I would not use it to translate into a foreign language because I would not be able to tell if they had gotten all the grammar correct and it might look bad/awkward. I use it from time to time just to check and see if I understood something.

Amazon is probably a good place to look for audio books as well as the paper version.  I don't know how many sellers there are of non-English material, but it's such a huge site there is likely something out there that might help you.

At this point I only write in English.  I do not have the level of mastery in German to write anything above very basic level.  I do not have the vocabulary or a good enough sense of flow to be able to write creatively without it being very awkward sounding.

Guten Morgen! I am glad to see another German on here as that is the language I am studying now.

I studied it in college.  I got to take the first year over the summer, then the second year over the school year.  My first year class was very aural based, they got us talking more than just reading which I found very helpful because I struggle with getting what I can read and understand on paper to work when I'm speaking because I am more of a visual learner than aural. It really helped to have that added emphasis in my area of weakness.

When I first graduated from HS and was looking for a summer job, I had a hard time finding anything because so many of the jobs I was otherwise qualified for you needed to speak some Spanish because so many of the workers were hispanic.  I actually found entire housekeeping ads entirely in Spanish, as if no one born and raised in this country, not speaking Spanish should bother to apply there.

It's really hard for a beginner to pick up on much because the words come too fast, but once you have a basic understanding of the grammar and a beginning vocabulary, I think it's a great way to develop your aural skills and learn more vocabulary.  Movies force you to hear natural conversation, at the pace people usually speak, so it gets you to think  in the language faster.

For most travlling it is not very necessary, it is convenient if you know some of the language though.  Most places in Europe you will not need to know the language because English is so common.  In Asia, China an Japan at least I know there is a lot of English spoken and most travelers do not have a problem even if they do not speak any of the language. 

I think I would enjoy my travels more if I knew some of the language because I could participate more in the culture going on around me, but if that was not a possibility that's ok with me too.

I have read about this in a couple of magazines. Apparently you can sign up to be an English tutor via skype, and you get paid for it.  Supposedly you just have a conversation with someone who needs a native speaker practice conversation.  Has anyone done this? 

That does not sound cheaper.  There are plenty of free resources online, and you can watch TV shows on Hulu or youtube videos to get familiar with listening to spoken English.  I think that would be much cheaper and even easier as it would get you familiar with more words faster.

German definitely was easier than French.  The German grammar seems much easier to me than French grammar because it is so similar to English in it's structure.  In French, I was never able to get comfortable with the adjective coming after the noun instead of before.  It just really through me off, as did all those unpronounced letters.

Hello and welcome.  I wish you all the best, that is certainly an impressive list of languages, but it looks like you have already learned a second language so you are well on your way.

Welcome to the site.  My sister is also into anime and has an interest in Japanese now. I think a lot of people have found the language through the art.

That's quite a good deal for a language learning course, thank you for sharing.

I studied German for 2 years in college, but that was 2007-2008.  I am very out of practice at this point but really would like to get back into it and maybe even reach a higher conversational level if I can find someone to talk to.

Can anyone recommend any books, especially ones available in ebook form that would be good for getting back into the language and working on my vocabulary?

I have heard that Polish is the most difficult, but I think it depends on how your mind works.  I think I would have more difficulty with a tonal language than Polish because I am not oriented to that way of speaking at all.

Yes, even if children are not very interested in it at that age, just learning how to learn language is so valuable, it will save them so much frustration later on.  I didn't get the opportunity to start learning a second language until high school, and it took until I was in college to feel like I had figured out how to learn language.  I wish I had learned a little of some other language earlier so I could have been more successful later on.

How old were you when you started studying a second language?

I was 14, I didn't get the opportunity to start studying a second language until High School, and then I didn't didn't get to study German until college because my high school only offered French and Spanish.  I really wish I had had the opportunity to start studying German much younger, I think I would have done much better.  I only had two years of HS French and remember very, very little from that now.

I tried Pimsleur CDs once, but was not very successful at all.  I am not sure exactly why, but probably just because I am fairly slow at learning language and it was going much to fast for me to pick up very much. I considered Rosetta Stone once but have not bought it yet.  Not sure if I'm going to anytime soon.

I think your grammar is fine.  I would not say a person's grammar is poor unless they made obvious mistakes in word order or tense, or some other issue that made it difficult to understand at first reading what they meant to say.  I see poor grammar a lot on Bubblews, where there are many people who are not native English speakers and are at many different levels in their English writing abilities.  Some of those people are beginners who are hard to understand, but what you have written seems perfectly clear to me.

Maybe you can try presenting it to them a storytelling on paper.  It doesn't have to be perfect form, or even perfect sentence structure all the time if something different tells the story better.  Help them by reading portions of works you feel are well written, good examples so they can get a general understanding of what creative writing is about.  Everyone's work will be different because it's an art, not a formal paper.

Besides English, in your opinion, what language is most valuable to learn? What are your reasons for choosing that one?

In my opinion, Spanish is probably the most valuable language to learn because it is so common in the US now.  In fact it is difficult to find a job in some industries if you do not know some Spanish. I even found advertisements for hotel housekeepers, entirely in Spanish!!! Obviously they do not think anyone who is not hispanic would bother applying there.

I remember a Wycliffe missionary saying there are over 6000 languages in the world.  I do not remember how many of those languages are currently written languages.  I think quite a lot of them are not even today. 

I think a small group class would be the most effective.  You get the benefit of lots of interaction with the teacher but you also get to listen a lot to others so you can practice speech comprehension.  I found that I was very good at learning to read in a new language, but understanding what I was hearing was very difficult so I would want more of that.