宇崎ちゃん

I used this DS Homebrew application to learn hiragana and katakana back in 2008. It's a shame I can't find anything similar to other alphabets, because Project JDS actually served me very well. So in 2015, I decided to make my own version for other alphabets. Give my application a try. It's free and super easy to use!

I learn kanji best when I encounter them in real life. When I see a certain kanji for the first time, I obviously don't know what it means, how you read it, etc. But then I look it up and the kanji gets stuck in my brain. Then the readings and meaning automatically get in my mind as I read the text. For example, I encounter the following sentence: 明日、私に来てください！ Now I know exactly what it all means, except for "来". So I first read it as "ashita, watashi ni ... te kudasai". Then I go to Jisho.org (a must-bookmark website for anyone learning Japanese!), try to find that kanji and there you go! Reading: "ku(ru)" or "ki". Meaning: "to come". I read it again: "ashita, watashi ni kite kudasai". (Please come to me tomorrow!). It's a slow way of learning, but it works best for me at least.

Do you even realise that native speakers learn their native languages FAR before they go to school? I always recommend people to learn like a native speaker learns his or her own language, which means speaking, listening and immersion, not with classrooms and textbooks. Besides, the amount of years you must go to school differs in every single country. Here in the Netherlands for example, you must go to school between the ages 4-18 (14 years), while in Belgium it's 2-18 (16 years). Even then, the Belgians already speak their native language about a whole year before they go to school and the Dutch know their native language about 3 years before going to school.

Keep in mind that K3 is a Belgian band, not Dutch. Therefore, accents and certain vocabulary will differ. But I know what you mean, since K3 is mostly popular among the little girls (< 12 year olds) here (and there).

Oh yeah, I had a subscription for JapanesePod101 before (same makers). Basically it works well for your listening exercises, but the big problem is that each episode includes 70% of English and the remaining 30% is Japanese. And the conversations don't feel like real world conversations neither (I felt like I was at my secondary school again).

Here in the Netherlands it's perfectly fine to swear on the radio. I was listening to an interview with a Canadian rapper at one point at work, so the presenter said "this is so fucking amazing", to which the rapper was shocked to hear you can freely swear on the radio here. The presenter on his turn was shocked to hear you can get fined for that in Canada, so then that rapper started to swear all he could in the next 15 minutes.

If I were to take that seriously, I would have been over-proud to speak the hardest language in the world from an English speakers' perspective. This table basically tells you the similarities with English, but it's not a mathematical formula to learn languages at all. To my experience I can say this: Language similarities are both easy and hard. Easy because you don't have to learn a lot of words. Hard because you don't learn a lot of words because you think you would know them any way. It works well for reading and listening, but you will have trouble while speaking or writing (and facepalm yourself when you re-discover it's a similar word to English).

The best language learning tool I have ever used (and I used a lot of different tools before) is Skype. Skype teachers aren't free, but they can still be as cheap as 8 dollars for a half hour (or even cheaper if you want to learn Latino Spanish instead of European Spanish). However, it's always best to use multiple software and not stick with just 1. At the moment I use Skype, Anki, Memrise, Japanese and Spanish music and written chat (practically over Skype too, but with different people).

One language can be harder to learn than the other language depending on the persons language background, but there really is no general rule to that. But if you want me to help you choose, I would need to ask you a favour: Make a list of what you love about the 3 languages you've mentioned, why you want to learn those, what makes you want to learn those, etc. and post it all here. That way we are better able to help you choose the right target language.

To say it in a nutshell: the price. Really, language apps simply don't work well unless they're made by actual native speakers, preferably those with a language teaching background. And besides, not even one application I've seen uses the most important thing in language learning: speaking with a real person. Not saying you shouldn't use language apps at all. You actually should use them together with other materials, tools and methods, just don't use those exclusively.

True. I phoned dev support at Nintendo of America once and I had to spell my last name. So I said "es zed", then he was like "............oh, you mean zea". But it's not typically British, we use it in a lot of languages here in Europe. The only time I pronounce "Z" as a "zea" is when I say "Dragonball Z", just because I'm much more used to that.

A phonetic alphabet is a series of characters that make a sound. Chinese characters for example is no phonetic alphabet, since each character has its own meaning and are pronounced differently in all languages it uses (in some cases, one language even has multiple pronunciations for a single character). Latin, Cyrillic (lots of Slavic languages), Hangul (Korean), Hiragana and Katakana (Japanese), Arabic, and Hebrew (and many more) on the other hand are phonetic alphabets, since these characters have a sound. Let's say "A" is pronounced differently in English than it is in the rest of the world, "V" on the other hand has 2 pronunciations in Spanish, but neither of those have a direct meaning. Sometimes they do, like in Dutch: "ei" is a phonetic sound similar to the English "I" sound, but it also means "egg". Or "ui", which is hard to explain in English what sound it makes, but it also means "onion". But it doesn't mean that "huis" has anything to do with onions, it just means "house".

One question: what do "introvert" and "extrovert" mean? I have never heard of these words until now.

If there's something Duolingo lacks, it's the ability to admit the mistakes they make. I'm a native Dutch speaker and I did their Dutch course to report errors and help them improve the course. I only started and I reported loads of mistakes already, but only 1 of those were taken seriously. "Jullie geven hun de hoed" obviously means "you guys give their the hat", not "you guys gave them a hat". I know every native speaker will go like "WTF?!" when they read "jullie geven hun de hoed" because it's grammatically wrong. And yet they told me I was wrong and THEY are right. WTF?! And even some sentences I answered correctly were counted as incorrect. I reported them all, but none of which were ever taken seriously. So that's how I lost my motivation to use Duolingo forever. I wouldn't even recommend it even if the moderators were dictating me to do so!

The only missing character I can think of is the "euro" sign. But I found it under the Alt + U key on the Polish keyboard earlier today.

Because you can't make letters like these with US-International: ą ę ć ś ł ż ń When I try it any way, I get the following letters instead: á é © ß ø æ ñ

That's the half part of the story you remind me to, also remember how I said I learnt almost nothing in those 7 years and how I started from scratch when I switched to this new way? To me "proficiency" means "are you able to initialise a conversation and keep it up", not "do you know how to study or learn for how long".

Either pretend you don't understand them when they speak English, or continue speaking in the local language to force them to speak their language too. I've had a Japanese language exchange partner before, to which I clearly stated the 'no English rule' applies throughout our entire chat. At one point the person suddenly switched to English to explain the meaning of a word I didn't understand, but then I reminded them about the 'no English rule' in Japanese and I kept speaking Japanese. The person gave up and continued the conversation in Japanese, until it was time to switch to Dutch (because that's what language exchanges are all about).

I have my own spreadsheet where I keep track of my language levels: As you may have noticed, I also aim on specific dialects where possible. The levels are based on the European framework, but I'm thinking of adding D and E levels to the level list. That's because now I can't get any higher than C2, but my English is much better than my German for example, and yet I classified myself as C2 for both.

The most useful keyboard I found for this is the US-International keyboard. It covers pretty much all western-European languages under the Alt-Gr key (right Alt key). The downside is, it doesn't cover any Slavic or Asian languages that use the Latin alphabet (like Czech, Polish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc.).

I've been subscribed to FluentIn3Months and IWillTeachYouALanguage for a long while now. Both often send me useful websites, apps, tips, tricks, etc. about language learning, but neither have ever suggested Polyglot Club before. But quickly looking at the front page, I suggest this is some kind of the language version of "meet new friends at an amusement park in the country we tell you to come to"-kind of organisation.

I suggest you take every single opportunity to learn. Even if the amount of free time is as little as 2 minutes, use it for language learning. 2 minutes sounds very few, but it all counts up. Let's say: Driving to work takes you 10 minutes. → Fire up some 'listen-and-repeat' exercises on your cars' radio (or on your phone if you travel by public transport). You're waiting in a queue at the local supermarket. → Go through a couple of flash cards on your phone. You go out for a walk. → Listen to an episode of Innovative Languages (in the case of Dutch, it's called DutchPod101). You're going to take a shower. → Listen to the music in your target language (YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play Music, it doesn't matter). You're waiting for your train to arrive. → Use Memrise, Duolingo or whatever else you use. You have lunch break at school. → Nice moment to get on Skype and ask your language teacher and/or native speaker some questions about your target language and/or practise the language with him or her. See? There are so many ways to utilise the very little amount of free time!

Listen to real world conversations multiple times over and over again. It'll take time and patience, but it's definitely worth it. Make sure the recording you listen to are real world examples. Listening to slowly spoken versions may be easier to understand, but there will be a time you will meet with a native speaker of your target language and you will go like "holy shit, I can't understand a thing"!

You should take that with a gain of salt really. Similarity to another language might give you some advantage, but this whole image conflicts with each other. The actual fact is: it takes practise to speak a language, not the time you hold your arse in a classroom or the amount of weeks that just bypass. To take a nice example: Japanese. I started learning Japanese 12 May 2015. I became proficient enough to use it every day since last month or so (let's say: 22 September 2015). This makes 18 weeks to become proficient in Japanese. Amount of hours of practise during those 18 months: 33 hours. Admitted, German took me way less: 4 weeks / 8 hours.

We tend to understand each other nonetheless. Not always, French people speaking English are the hardest to understand by a long shot. Spanish and Italian people tend to speak very unclear too, but not as much as French people. But it's not surprising, seeing how many people from these 3 countries speak English: not much. Not saying that all of south Europe has this problem, the English spoken by Greek people is actually very good (but perhaps it's because a lot of English is used in Greece, as I have experienced it in Crete last year). But at the other hand there is Germany, yet another country where their native language is used everywhere. I noticed not so many German people can speak English, but if they can, their English sounds really enjoyable (like they were hissing while speaking). I have never been in Norway, Sweden or Denmark myself before, but I heard their English is the best of whole Europe (not counting the UK or Ireland).