宇崎ちゃん

I have merged your 5 topics into 1, having 5 identical titles looked really spammy to me.

I guess you're an Italki fan? Because your site is like a copy/paste of Italki, but with blue as the main colour instead of pink.

Come on ladies, don't fight:

"If I tell you to shut up, keep your mouth locked". "If I told you to shut up, you should lock your mouth". I don't know how to explain it, I just say what I feel is correct. But I think JasleenKaur nailed it out accurately already.

It used to be possible, but now you have to pay Google for using their API. You could instead use Bing Translator API, which is still free and less accurate than Google. It's possible to do it, but I think it'll be too much work for something you can easily do with Google Translate or Bing Translator directly.

It differs on every forum actually. As far as I can tell, there's no restriction to that here, but it would be nice if you could keep stuff in 1 post instead of 2+, that saves a lot on pagination (page numbers).

My own attempt to create Blafundo: http://www.blafundo.com/ It's a mix of Dutch, German and English vocabulary and Hiragana (Japanese) script. I actually believe every language has been constructed at some point in time, so it shouldn't be strange everyone knows at least 1. After all, speaking languages is something only humans can do (and perhaps parrots too, but let's put that one aside). If it would have been a natural thing, then why animals can't speak any language (except for parrots)?

@anna3101 It should be "Gefeliciteerd met het behalen van je examen". Other than that, it's correct.

I have been travelling a lot, but I never used it to learn languages. I didn't have many opportunities for this any way.

Actually, that's not true: And according to the Oxford Dictionaries, both are OK.

Don't expect any help with piracy, not from me at least. As most others here already said, search engines will be your only help for pirated content.

That's not always the case @capuchin. When I phoned to Nintendo of America for the first time to get development support, we could barely understand each others accents. But I guess we both got used to it over time.

It works sometimes, but I did a language exchange with a specific person once and it didn't work. This is because the bloke on the other side wanted to learn Dutch and I wanted to learn Japanese, but we were both able to speak English, so we ended up talking in English for about 70% of the time. So in other words, we wasted a lot of time and decided to not schedule a second session. However, I did the same kind of exchange over LINE multiple times and that worked fine enough. That has some flows too, like the time the guy in Japan started telling me that 'he wants to lick a dick of a foreigner' in Japanese; blocked him since then.

Comparing HelloTalk to Duolingo is like comparing a pear to an apple; while Duolingo is a self-learning aid, HelloTalk is a chat application designed for language learning. So see it like a kind of WhatsApp for foreign languages.

That's a hard one, especially since it's more like a saying than a 'normal' sentence. Polish: Nie mogę życ żadnego dnia bez ćiebie. (literally: I can't live a single day without you.) Dutch: Ik kan me geen dag zonder jou veroorloven. (literally: I can't afford a single day without you.) English: (no translation needed, it's in the title ey?) Japanese: あなたとなし住まれないと思いません。 (literally: I don't think I can live without you.) German: Ich kann keine Tag ohne Sie leben. (literally: I can't live a single day without you.) I tried to stay as close as possible, but as you can see, this is the most problematic for Japanese.

I've heard lots of success stories on other forums, but I can't speak for them because I have never used it myself. I can easily get around with a few dollars, yens or euros for a couple of materials a month for each language, but paying over 100 US dollars for 1 material is something I would rather not do.

That reminds me to a language I created a couple of months ago and totally forgot about its existence (I even had to look the domain name up with my domain supplier to see how it went again): http://www.blafundo.com/ It's a mix of Dutch, English, German and Hiragana. It's useless, but still funny to see how far a custom language can get.

In the case of Cuba, it's because of communism. Communists hate English, so yeah. Speaking of the Caribbean, did you know that some islands there are still part of the USA, UK, France or the Kingdom of the Netherlands?

@takibari To be honest, I sometimes enjoy this endless "hard" vs "easy" discussion. When I hear or read how other people say language X is hard and language Y is easy, I always get excited to learn language X. The more they agree that language X is hard, the better. The harder they rate it, the more likely it is I want to learn that language. People all around me are like: "I know Dutch" = "that's obvious". "I know Polish" = "oh, OK". "I know English" = "everybody knows". "I know German" = "too easy". "I know Japanese" = "WTF?! ARE YOU SERIOUS?! IT'S THE HARDEST LANGUAGE EVER"! "I'm currently learning Chinese" = "YOU'RE INSANE! NOBODY CAN EVER LEARN CHINESE"! And at that moment I feel very proud on what I have achieved, even though I don't believe in the whole "hard" vs "easy" discussion.

@pesic87 and also @lushlala, I get your points. This is also why I quit school 3 years ago: immature people laughing at you because your qualities are lower than theirs. And this is why I enjoy Skype sessions through Italki so much, because you get to speak with only 1 person (preferably a professional teacher) who gives you feedback in a professional way. If you're on low budget, informal teachers do their jobs well too for people of up to B1 level. However, I had 1 informal teacher who has been in a very loud environment himself and 1 informal teacher with a really poor microphone. Professional teachers rarely have problems like these. I don't want to recommend teachers here, because each learner fits better with a different teacher. But keep in mind that not all professional teachers aren't arseholes. I didn't have any prior problems with this category of teachers, but I have read a story somewhere from someone who wanted to learn Russian. She contacted a handful of teachers, many of which openly said they get annoyed with beginners very easily. Russians are very open minded when it comes to this, but if you want to learn languages like Chinese, Cantonese, Korean or Japanese, they won't tell you it but they may still be annoyed.

Depends. If you have absolutely no knowledge to Kanji, going up to level 3 may give you a nice entry point to the rest of the Kanji. If you already know basic Kanji, you may rather be wasting your time. As for KanjiDamage, it's doable and maybe even faster if you set your app to 50 new flash cards a day. But be cautious about that, it may either overwhelm you or bore you out, especially when you set the review cards to anything higher than 100 cards a day as well. Learning all the Kanji can be a pain, but once you know them it always feels rewarding. 全部学ぶことになっていましたか？ (Did you already decide to learn all of them?) チャレンジをとると思いますか？ (Do you think you can take the challenge?) (Just to demonstrate some more advanced grammar here, lol.)

@keslersan After you get passed level 3 on WaniKani, you'll need to pay 10 dollar a month, 100 dollar a year or 199 dollar for a lifetime (which is currently a discount, it's 299 normally). KanjiDamage is free of charge and so is the Anki flashcard app (except for the iOS version).

I would say immersion first, rules later. There is no way to abandon one of the 2, both have to be utilised. But immersing first makes learning rules easier later on. Doing the other way around is rather a license to give up.

I'm currently using WaniKani, which works like a charm. I memorise more and more Kanji AND vocabulary every single day! Before I used WaniKani, I tried some flashcards from KanjiDamage and even though they have everything you want and need to know, KD also has some Kanji that are meaningless to me. It's almost like you're required to have a PhD to understand the meaning of a particular Kanji, because they won't explain you any synonyms. By the way, KanjiDamage has an awesome page filled with Kanji facts. I highly recommend you to read it: http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts

I know some people who moved from the Netherlands to the USA or Canada, made kids there and their kids never learnt Dutch. So it might be the geographical location which decides whether or not you will learn another language?