宇崎ちゃん

I don't know an exact number, but if I may guess it would be somewhere between 600 and 900 characters. I did realise knowing kanji makes the Japanese language easier to learn. And I've set the text in Pokémon Omega Ruby game for the Nintendo 3DS from "kana" to "kanji". Admitted, I still can't read everything with this option, but I can understand the text itself much better with kanji turned on. This is because lots of Japanese words have multiple meanings and kanji solves this problem for you. When speaking I can rely on pitch accent, since you can't hear written text.

Yes, that's the right order for most people. However, memorising a chart is rather a bad idea, that's rote memorisation and rote memorisation is like working against your brain. You should work WITH your brain, not AGAINST it. For hiragana and katakana, I made my own learning tool: http://076.wtf/index.php?mode=post&id=9 For kanji, I highly recommend this one: http://www.wanikani.com

It works with a lot of kanji, but it won't work with all of them. Look at this one: 口 + 玉 = 国 So a ball inside a mouth means "country"? Yeah right! I hear lots of people new to kanji ask me stuff like "why is there insect (虫) in wind (風)", or "why is there west (西) in wine (酒)"? There really is no connection between radicals and kanji, radicals are pretty much like "r" and "t" in "pretty much". That's why you'll need to work with mnemonics. In the case of "country", it could be something like: "I shot a BALL with my MOUTH widely open to your COUNTRY".

@lushlala As I already said, the reason why I said "reading Chinese is no different from reading English" is because both involves the same kind of reading, it just takes a longer time until you master enough Chinese characters. And 'it takes longer time' is not the same as 'it's impossible'. But as for Chinese as a language, if you find the English grammar easy, you'll find the Chinese grammar much easier. Chinese has a similar grammar to English, just a lot simpler. The real obstacle with Chinese however are the tones. While there are 4 or 5 tones (depends on how you want to count them), pronouncing a tone differently may turn the entire sentence into something completely else.

@rz3300 From my experience the Chinese script isn't too hard to learn once you've learnt all the radicals. However, you can't learn the Chinese script as quickly as the Arabic one due to the differences in the amount of characters (26 in Arabic vs ~3000 in Chinese). Quite funny you mention both of those scripts, because Arabic is the exact opposite of Chinese; you can learn the Arabic script in just a weekend, but memorising Arabic letters is much harder than memorising Chinese characters. Because unlike with Chinese, there are no radicals in Arabic you can rely on, not to mention that most Arabic letters have an additional 3 variations besides their isolated versions. And Arabic must be read from right to left, whereas Chinese can be read from left to right or top to bottom (although the latter one is just for nostalgic reasons).

I always play games in Japanese, that's part of one of my careers any way. But I'm recently looking into games with Spanish and Russian language options, lots of Nintendo games are localised into both languages, so it wouldn't be a problem. But it must be an RPG or another game with lots of text, Pokémon for example has a permanent language setting; once you chose a language, you can't change it unless you completely destroy your save data. Perhaps The Legend of Zelda or Star Fox games may help otherwise? I don't mind playing Final Fantasy neither though. But nonetheless, if you play games to learn languages, better avoid Super Mario games. Mario games generally come with a little amount of text and the voice acting is always in English, no matter the chosen language.

@Miya Note how I didn't say "all teachers". Outside Italki, I can barely think of any teachers I've ever met who would encourage you to use spaced repitition or mnemonics. Besides, I've hardly seen teachers who at least explain how to remember something (like "if the noun ends with an "a" in Spanish, the article is most likely "la"", but instead they tell you just to memorise it's "la playa" and not "el playa"). Generalising the problems on the other hand is bad too, there are still teachers who teach languages the right way, which is why I said 90% does it wrong.

I think it's more an issue to languages that don't have any variations, like Polish, Mandarin, etc. Because I don't see why an American and a Brit would misunderstand each other due to pronunciations (notable example: "can't" (as in "cannot"), Americans say something like "khent", while Brits say more like "kaahnt") and yet both understand each others "can't" perfectly fine.

@czarina84 I could perhaps recommend you to find random YouTube videos in your target language. They may perhaps not be intended to teach you languages, but real world videos are still the best way to learn the right pronunciation, as long as you 'shadow' their pronunciation. Each time I learn a new language, I make sure my pronunciation gets as close to a native speaker as I can get, I'm therefore very specific with this (I speak Australian English, so I try to copy an Australian person as closely as I can). Copying pronunciation correctly will be hard at first (especially since you hear yourself differently than other people hear you), but the good news is, you can get used to it pretty damn quick.

Honestly, I don't think learning English at an as young as possible age would be a great idea. I actually think it's a bad idea. Children typically have to concentrate on many more subjects like maths, grammar, history, geography, etc., and their brains are much smaller than our adult brains. Not to mention 90% of the teachers teach children languages the wrong way (books that overwhelm you with too many vocabs per chapter, lessons are provided too fast to remember, only a few days to prepare for a test, almost no review of previous materials, etc.).

Questions: 1. When you say "paper coursebooks", do you mean multiple books per language or just one? 2. Do you think it's important the author is different for each language, or do you prefer the same author for multiple languages? 3. Do you find it important the book includes an audio CD, so you can practise listening? I'll let you answer those questions however you want to, but my answers: 1. At least 2 per language, because then you can fact check if you're unsure, and you can switch when you get tired with one. 2. I prefer different authors, because then you may know for sure he or she is specialised with that particular language. 3. Yes, my goal is to speak the language, so listening is a necessary fact. I ask these questions because I'm currently experimenting with Study Spanish, Russian for Everyone and Learn Russian at RT. None of these are perfect, though. Study Spanish is specialised with Spanish and their method is very straight forward, but includes no audio unless you pay much more. RT is maybe specialised with Russian, but I'm not sure and it includes audio, plus it's free. But the doing the exercises can be a real pain (especially where you need to type yourself, since I'm unable to type a few letters with my Russian mnemonic keyboard). Russian for Everyone is currently on hold, so I don't know about this one yet.

It's not possible to even get a very rough estimate on your vocabulary size. In every language (even my native ones!) I keep discovering new words each day and besides that, not even one resource got every single word for any language. If you really want to test it, you could find news articles in the language you want to test and keep reading until you find a word you have likely never heard about. My rule of thumb is, once you can understand nearly everything (like 8 out of 10 articles or more/less, depending on the difficulty of the articles), you're good to go. But don't go with anything too easy, because you could only trick yourself. And don't go with anything too hard, because most native speakers don't understand super advanced stuff any way.

That's not entirely true though. While it's a well known fact that both languages have a totally different grammar (Chinese is similar to English, Japanese is similar to Korean), the Chinese have simplified their characters differently from the Japanese too (like 飲 (Japanese) vs 喝 (Chinese), both mean "to drink"). Not to mention that many of the same characters have a different meaning in both languages (like 勉強, which is "study" (benkyou) in Japanese and "reluctanly" (miǎnqiǎng) in Chinese).

@dbon721, perhaps you'd like FluentU too. I really liked their system, but I never had the motivation to watch videos on their site, because they were mostly either too hard or too easy. FluentU is a comparable service, but instead of re-uploading others videos with subtitles, they use the original source and add subtitles outside the video (while still being in-sync) (and you can enable/disable any subtitle you want). And they offer a flash card system too. It would look like this:

In my opinion that would only work for your short term memory. You'd need to review it (or in your case, rewrite it) at least 7 times before it's all (semi-)permanent. Just try it, write a totally new word now and never write it down the second time again. Let's see if you would still know that one word a month later. Side note: I would like to ask you to use the "enter" button more frequently, that makes reading posts a whole lot easier. The bigger the block of text is, the more likely anyone else will misread it.

At the moment I'm only learning kanji on Wanikani. It works really great, especially because they combine it with lots of vocabulary too. I'll train my listening abilities too, but I want to go through at least 1200 kanji before I do so. It's not that I need kanji to listen, but it appears that listening while you read the transcription is better than listening alone.

Italki, blogs, apps, flash cards and most importantly: the right mindset (passion, goals, motivation, etc.).

I made a major change again (and hopefully it's the last change). I decided to save Chinese for last and learn Russian + Spanish now. The main reason is because I'm already learning Kanji and once I know all the necessary Kanji, Chinese will become much more accessible to me (especially since all real world learning materials are written in Hanzi (Chinese characters), while I already know the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets). I used to say I would concentrate on the spoken language only, but now I prefer to concentrate on both spoken and written language.

The good news is: lots of Japanese TV shows are subtitled in Japanese (many of which include kanji with furigana). I nice reality-comedy I enjoyed was Razor Ramon HG (or "Hard Gay" for short). The show has nothing to do with sex, it's just someone pretending to be gay while helping other people. Best is to find episodes on YouTube by the Japanese name of the show: "ハードゲイ". If you look it up by the English name, you may get better quality video, but you will also get ones with both English and Japanese subtitles. The first episode I've seen was about a ramen store.

Teaching people a language you're learning can boost your language skills a lot. But on the other hand, it's really difficult to create material you don't master yet. Best is to find a friend willing to learn the language you're learning (Korean in your case) and teach them what you already know. I remember doing that to someone willing to learn Japanese and it really helped me a lot, and at the same time it helped him too. So that's a win-win situation.

@lushlala Japanese is an example of using both alphabets AND characters. I can say reading new letters and/or characters will be slow at first, but things speed up automatically as you read more in Japanese. It's nothing specific, I experienced the exact same thing with Russian recently. Russian currently takes me forever to read, but I feel like it's getting faster now. And the same thing with our Latin alphabet back when I was young: it was slow at first, but now I can read things instantly. So reading Chinese is no different from reading English, it just takes much longer to learn all the characters you need to know in order to read Chinese. While the Latin alphabet, Japanese alphabets, Russian/slavic alphabet, etc. can all be learnt in a weekend, Chinese characters require much more time.

It doesn't matter, they're all correct indeed. The only differences are: 1. Mein name ist = my name is. 2. Ich bin = I am. 3. Ich heiße = I am called.

No @lushlala, I don't speak Esperanto. Learning some basic Esperanto would be interesting though.

@lushlala I meant it both seriously and jokingly at the same time. In my opinion, languages aren't anything natural, they have all been constructed at some point in history. And the worst part is, nobody knows who constructed nearly all languages (although we know who constructed Esperanto).

I had a nice experience recently. My mum can speak Dutch and Polish, but no English, her childhood friend can speak Polish and English, but no Dutch, and her childhood friends boyfriend can speak Dutch and English, but no Polish. This made explaining stuff to all 3 of them at once impossible, I often had to explain things twice until the message came to all 3 of them, while 1 of the 3 would always hear the message twice. And I functioned as a translator too, since I was the only one that could speak all 3 languages.