宇崎ちゃん

Fair enough, thanks for your explanation.

First off, get rid of that SumoMe thing, it's very annoying. I didn't read through all of it (I admit, I'm a terrible reader), but I can see how a lot of the article is not original content, as if you've learnt your tips from other polyglots (Benny Lewis, Olly Richards, etc.) and re-phrased those for your guide. But that's OK, I can't say I've ever come up with my own ideas here neither.

Why so boring? Material is 1 part of the learning process, some of the other parts would be time, fun, practise and of course commitment. None of which a grammar book nor an institute can offer.

So you mean instead of (for example) Polish > English, you want them to teach them English from English? This is nothing more but immersive teaching and will only work if you motivate your students to use English as a part of their lives, instead of just part of their homework. My sister teaches business (wo)men English that way in Japan, she said it works really well for most people. She also told me you will have to be aware of some students who will just see learning English as a mere classroom subject (so they only learn English once a week or something), for them immersive learning won't work. You should watch this video, what this person says is nothing too different:

Or maybe this Jynx? Anyhow, welcome.

JLPT will start this Sunday all around the world. For this reason, I am currently collecting as many practise materials as possible. At this moment, I only have files for N5 and N4 from Goukaku Dekiru, but I expect to add more stuff by Sunday. Link: http://drive.cw-games.org/srv/index.php/s/LJMhX4ijpAoO4Ec

I only want to add that there's a difference between "hearing" and "listening", which is avoided by tons of people surprisingly. If you hear a language, you just hear it. If you listen to a language, you're actually converting this information into something that's meaningful to you.

Is that so?

Here's another one: Note the Dutch translation. For those who don't speak Dutch: "Here you go, the translation. I hope it's OK this time. Have a nice evening".

I disagree, Korean and Japanese have no tones, Chinese does. So they can't sound like Chinese. Additionally, Chinese characters in Japanese have multiple readings, they have only 1 reading in Chinese. Mostly. And they're rarely used in Korean at all.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.duolingo&hl=en https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/apps/duolingo-learn-languages-for-free/9wzdncrcv5xn See the URLs I just supplied. https://www.duolingo.com/courses

Not Duolingo per se, but I think almost every language learning app works better on a PC than on a phone. The only exception would be Memrise, because that one is equally divided on PC and phone. Memrise is like, you get explanation on PC and no time limit for every single question on phone. But other than that (WaniKani, iKnow, Renshuu, (LANGUAGE_HERE)Pod/Class101, etc.), I prefer PC over anything else.

Whether a language is fun and challenging or not depends on what language you prefer most. You gave us way too little information about yourself, so nobody will be able to determine which of the 7000+ languages you should learn.

Both are correct, although the second one sounds more friendly (the first one rather sounds like 2 people were fighting, then you come in and say "what exactly happened"?).

Whatever is fluency depends on how you define it. We may all agree that only knowing "bonjour" and "merci" is not the same as speaking French fluently. I often rate my fluency based on: 1. Can I understand the written sentence? 2. Can I understand the spoken sentence? 3. Can I write the language? 4. Can I speak the language? I don't need to answer all these questions with a "yes", as long as most of them are, I consider myself fluent.

Tip: your letter sounds friendly. But if it were a business letter, always omit words like "it's", "isn't", "it'd", etc. I don't know why, it's just the way it works.

Hey frankfurt (and of course Oscar too). Your tennis ball seems very blurry, it would be better if you would re-draw it to a bigger scale rather than simply upscaling it. Fortunately, I had nothing else to do and quickly did that for you:

Moved it to the right category.

This is not the way this section works, and I don't think Linguaholic will like this kind of discussions since they take away users from this forum to other places. Read the rules next time.

@cutiepie Yes, I learn languages myself, otherwise I use either professional translators (which costs money) or friends who speak a language I don't speak (which sometimes takes some effort unless they just need to translate stuff like "I am a banana" to/from their own language). If none of these work and the grammar isn't too different from the languages I already know, I use a dictionary and apply some common sense for the grammar. As for the keyboard question, I would first like to know what OS you are using (Windows, Mac, Linux) and what version or distribution. That way I can give you more precise instructions. Windows and OS X have support for typing Japanese characters (+ a whole lot more) already pre-installed, so you would likely only need to activate it. Same with all mobile OS's (Android, iOS, Windows 10). Linux and *BSD on the other hand require some installation and configuration though.

Since this topic serves no other purpose than advertising your own entirely irrelevant stuff, I'll just lock this topic. Expect a warning next time.

@VinayaSpeaks, when we usually say "the Chinese language", we're most likely referring to Mandarin.

I speak 5 languages fluently, so I'm multilingual.

I think we have a higher threshold when it comes to racism and odd comments. But don't worry about that, I have made jokes like these before with Americans. I didn't expect them to find it racist at all, since these kind of jokes are totally OK here (even though we understand that telling a joke involving Belgians won't harm a Belgian person, while jokes involving Moroccans could be very insulting for a Moroccan person).

I don't know if English has a general rule for double letters, but since we have lots of words with double letters in Dutch, our simple trick is: If the vowel before the constant is pronounced shortly (like "ah"), it's a double constant (like "schappen", meaning "products in a shop"). If the vowel before the constant is pronounced longer (like "aa"), it's a single constant (like "schapen", meaning "sheeps"). It doesn't end with "schappen" and "schapen", we have a whole lot more of this in Dutch, which is why it's so important here to keep that in mind. In English however I got used to it and I spell most words correctly without even thinking. (Perhaps a nice tip for @Trellum?)