宇崎ちゃん

But you should also have a reason to use the camera and GPS in a language learning tool. Seems very pointless to me if I may be honest.

For those of you who have a New Nintendo 3DS and live in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand, I will publish the second video game I have developed (first game I made all myself, first game I made for a Nintendo handheld) on the 25th of August 2016 for only € 4.99! The game is simple, yet unique: You will need to collect all coins in each level to complete them. Every platform has a certain colour, each colour affects the player in some way (walk slower, run faster, jump higher, etc.). This game will be available for New Nintendo 3DS only, and only in the Nintendo eShop. An American release is still pending approval at the moment of typing.

My original post has never been a question @MissTe, it was meant as a guide. This topic is pinned for a reason.

Learning a language within 3 months is possible, but it's not going to make you fluent unless you cut out the languages you already know entirely. However, 10 days is indeed way too short to even understand the basics. But how long it took for me differs from language to language: English (school edition): 1 year, but my grammar was shit. English (online edition): 1 year, now with good grammar. Japanese (rote edition): 7 years, didn't get anywhere. Japanese (speak edition): 7 months, learnt a lot from native speakers. Japanese (Kanji edition): 6 months and ongoing. German (school edition): 2 years, never got anywhere. German (speak edition): 1 month, I became fluent at this point, but due to the lack of usage, my German skills have dropped back to beginner level.

I've stated it a lot here already: learning multiple languages at an early age is a bad idea. Children are always being forced to learn maths, history, literature in their own language, at least 1 foreign language, biology, geography, economy, etc. Then after school, parents are very likely to teach children how to play piano, how to use a computer, how to whatever else they don't learn at school. While we adults tend to forget the pain by the time we get our own children, I actually do remember this pain. This eventually resulted me in not learning most subjects at secondary school and failing nearly all exams. When I get children of my own, I will let them be kids until they really want to learn something new (programming, digital art, etc.) themselves.

I use English online all the time when I don't use Japanese. Dutch and Polish are my 'offline languages'.

Last year I hoped to improve my chances to get employed when I maybe move to Japan next year, but after 4 years of failing at getting a job here in the Netherlands, I think it'll be better to set up a company there instead. That would still require me to know Japanese (and maybe Korean and Chinese too, depending on my customers) on a fairly advanced level, so me giving up on finding employment doesn't mean I'll give up on learning the language. My purpose of learning language has never been job-related any way.

I already gave my 5 languages I already know. Now I will disclose the 5 languages I'd like to learn yet: Korean (not really useful, but still interesting to know). Mandarin Chinese (it's becoming more and more relevant to my daily life nowadays). Russian (got inspired by RT International). Spanish (this would allow me to communicate with 2/3 of the world, especially with those on the western hemisphere). Cantonese (to fill an important gap after learning Mandarin).

I learnt German in 30 days, since it's very close to one of my 2 native languages. But I haven't been using German since then, so I already dropped from fluency to beginner level. I can still understand written and spoken German to some extend, though.

It actually differs from language to language. It's true for Polish, Mandarin and (as you already said) French, because native speakers may have problems understanding you otherwise, but languages like Dutch, English and Spanish don't require you to have a perfect pronunciation, those people will understand you any way. There might be some pattern. Polish, Mandarin and French don't have nearly as many varieties of the same languages as Dutch, English and Spanish have. In the Netherlands alone we have around 27 dialects, then add the amount of dialects in Belgium and Surinam to the mix, I don't think I need to talk about English and Spanish ey? Because these 2 have far more dialects.

Question @Ernesto, why are both Japanese and Mandarin number 3? Not saying I disagree, it just seems strange to have 2 languages on the same spot on separate lines.

Welcome. Since you say you're living in South Africa right now, I would recommend you to grasp some knowledge to Afrikaans while being there. Afrikaans is generally easier to learn for English speakers than Dutch is, and they're mutually intelligible (so once you arrive here, you may have less difficulty learning Dutch). But if you want to skip that one and go straight to Dutch, that's fine too. There aren't so many learners of Dutch here other than @Trellum and @anna3101, but if you (or the 2 girls I just mentioned) are willing to, I can recommend you to join our Praatcafe meetup. I actually don't run it, but I'm there nearly each time this meetup gets organised.

@AExAVF Except that I would rather recommend to follow an order based on radicals when learning Kanji, rather than the simplicity of the Kanji. Becomes sometimes, simple Kanji tend to have way more readings and more complex meanings than their difficult counterparts.

Yes, I'm dreaming in Japanese a lot lately, though it's not frequent, since I dream in Dutch, Polish and English more often (I dream in English most for some odd reason).

Germany is strange when it comes to that in my experience. If you speak English to them right off the bat, they'll answer you in German. But if you try to speak German to them and they see it's quite broken, they'll reply in English. This is especially true in Cologne and Dusseldorf, those in smaller towns and those in the former 'East Germany' will speak German nonetheless, unless they're at least foreign-looking (like those with Turkish roots for example).

Short answer: no, not at all. Long answer: this is perhaps only going to work with mono-lingual people, since they generally are unaware of the fact that languages are more different from each other than just vocabulary. Machines are equally unaware of this, so even now you should take translation technology with a grain of salt. Recently I've been travelling by train and I've been sitting next to somebody who only speaks Spanish. He asked me how to get to Schiedam central station (which we already passed back then, as he asked it while we were at Rotterdam central station). Even Google Translate on my phone was of no help, since it translated our dialogues very strangely both ways. We were both glad a Spanish speaking American showed up and told him all the details. So as you can see, even now language learning is much more beneficial than technology.

This part needs some fixing. Not all Slavic languages use the Cyrillic script, just the orthodox ones (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, etc.) do. Slavic languages like Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, etc. use the Latin script instead. As for the Asian language part, neither they all use different characters. Vietnamese and Indonesian for example use the Latin script as well (although Vietnamese uses a more tonal version of it).

You should know that reading is only a fraction of the whole package we call "language". I agree that in terms of reading Korean might be the easiest, just because it has 1 phonetic script. In terms of spoken language, I think Japanese and Korean might be on the same level, since both share a good amount of Chinese and English loanwords, both are non-tonal languages and both are SOV languages. But as a learner of Japanese, I actually find having a mixed script very convenient. Unlike here in the west, they never use any spaces in the orient, so having 4 different scripts can pretty much replace spaces really well. Not to mention that Japanese vocabulary solely written in Hiragana can be confusing, since a single word can have a fuckload of meanings. Consider: きをりかいするな。 This can be read as "I understand your spirit", "I understand the tree", "I understand the/your machine", etc. 気を理解するな。 This is the exact same sentence, except that this can only be read as "I understand your spirit".

Yes, it's possible to learn through manga. But you should keep attention to: 1. They use Kanji, so it's better you learn at least 600 to prevent yourself from digging into dictionaries for every single word you encounter. 2. They often come with lots of slang, I never recommend you to learn slang as a beginner in any language, since they will just confuse you as you learn.

I never use shortcuts. I hate them, they make the whole SMS unreadable.

Welcome. What do you actually mean by "trying to learn"? For most people, it's either "I learnt" or "I didn't learn". I just replied to another topic of yours regarding that, so I hope it works for you.

If you have a bit of cash handy, I surely recommend you to get professional one-on-one lessons at Italki. I can't stress enough the importance of speaking exercises in language learning, and professional teachers are here to help you out (and they are much cheaper than physical classes, and far more effective too). But it's best to get at least master Hiragana and Katakana first, which can be done in just one weekend if you show full commitment. Once you know these and started your Italki lessons, you will need to learn at least 2136 Kanji characters, most of which can be learnt on WaniKani or KanjiDamage (note: neither methods will teach you all 2136 characters). KD is nice if you learn through humour and want to do it for free, but WK is better if you want to learn more and if you want to prevent stress. Both will teach you vocabulary too. You may get some grammar practise on Renshuu and vocab training on iKnow, although being someone who doesn't like to read books, I have to admit that actual textbooks are the best sources for grammar, preferably those with a lot of dialogues and those that come with an audio CD. I hope this helps. Edit: Just wanted to quickly add: learning Japanese online is almost impossible without spending money on something, unless you want to rely on Memrise, yet another nice online platform to learn Japanese (and a whole lot more).

Good job! I'm surprised to see this fact too, I never knew we could understand Ukrainians a bit, considering Polish belongs to the west-Slavonic family and Ukrainian belongs to the east-Slavonic family.

It's possible to learn both languages at the same time, since they're hardly related to each other. However, I would still recommend you learn 1 language at a time, no matter the language. Chinese has a more similar grammar system to the English system, while Japanese is totally different (though seeing your native language is Turkish, I don't think you'll have much trouble with Japanese's SOV word order). Kanji and Hanzi pronunciations are different indeed, though the ON-yomi in Kanji is pretty much similar to Hanzi (since it's derived from Hanzi), but they're not entirely the same. I would recommend you to read through this topic. Additionally, I would recommend you to check out this video, which goes quite deep into this topic:

Off topic: I just removed your second topic, which was exactly the same as this one. On topic: I don't believe Chinese is the language you can use the most often, despite the amount of speakers. Out of the 1,164,755,000 native speakers, almost all of them live in China (or Singapore, Taiwan or Vietnam?). Although we do have lots of Chinese people living in the Netherlands, they will almost always speak Dutch to you, assuming you won't understand Chinese anyway. When I travelled back from my JLPT test, I was actually sorry I didn't bother to learn Spanish beyond the very basics, since I had to use Google Translate to make ourselves at least a bit understandable to each other. At least I'm glad a random American appeared who spoke Spanish.