宇崎ちゃん

The whole point of that blog is to push you through your language learning as quickly as possible. However, I even find learning ALL the kanji in 2 months too much. In fact, pretty much all kanji I learnt so far were out there in the real world. Like: 行、見、来　－　I was confused about those at first, but experience taught me these mean "to go", "to look" and "to come", and that they're pronounced "iku", "miru" and "kuru". I tried learning the rest of the kanji with flash cards, but I was rather overwhelmed with question marks. So many kanji mean nothing to me, some of those are like an entire sentence. Here's what I mean (copypasta from KanjiDamage): 丹a color called 'cinnibar,' which I didn't even know ENGLISH had a word for that color屯a garrison of 17th century troops under the command of a Shogun斤unit of measurement only used with bread loaves杉a specific kind of cedar后'dowager Empress', a word only used by retainers in the Imperial Court.

First language at school (English): 9 years old. First language to practise online (English): 12 years old. First language to study and fail (Japanese): 16 years old. First language to successfully learn (Japanese, German and Spanish): 23 years old. So I had a few milestones. I never realised I was practising and improving my English over so many years until recently. There are so many resources online that can't be found in any of my native languages and so many nice websites exclusively in English, this actually made me improve my English without noticing it.

Edit: after checking this video again, I realised it was a joke. My apologies. I'm not the only one to say that:

My sister moved to Japan a few months ago and took both of her children with her. She uses mainly English and Japanese at home there and as a result, the oldest child is slowly forgetting her native language. The younger one doesn't, but that's because he just started picking up any language at all. So native languages can be forgotten if not used for a long period of time, especially when one doesn't have much experience with their native language (like a 4 year old for example).

Some people here claim that classrooms are the best places to learn a language, but I disagree. Let's assume you need to attend a classroom once a week, taking 1 hour each session, being taught to 30 students at the same time, and every student has an equal amount of practise. First you spend/waste a half hour on listening to boring grammar rules in your own language, then everyone has only 1 minute to speak! This equals 1 minute a week of practise! I learn best doing this: 1. Have 3 sessions of 30/45/60 minutes a week, spread over each week. 2. Go over my Anki decks on my phone when I wake up, when I stand in a queue, when I go out for a walk, you name it. 3. Hunt down new vocabulary and grammar on web blogs, news websites, forums, etc. and take them to my language sessions on Skype. 4. Listen to music in the language and watch videos in the language, ACTIVELY! (I only listen/watch passively in my free time or while doing my job.) My overall costs are much lower and my learning is much more effective than if I would go to a classroom. Out of the entire classroom thing, I especially believe exams are a bad invention nowadays. Instead of having its original purpose (testing your current skills), exams nowadays only stop you from gaining skills. This is because exams normally come with too difficult questions and you may either fail or pass. When I do an exam, I prefer to see what I do right and where I need to improve on, not seeing if I can continue doing what I want or not!

In my order: Polish: Kłamstwa i pomówienia! Dutch: Leugens en laster! English: Lies and slander! Japanese: 嘘と誹謗！　（うそとひぼう） (Uso to hibou) German: Lügen und Verleumdungen! I only don't know Spanish as decently enough to provide an accurate translation though. Most of these languages have already been translated any way. But very interesting words to use on a birthday.

It's fine for a free translation tool, but I wouldn't use it as a serious learning tool. While it's OK for Indo-European languages for the most of the time, I wouldn't use it for languages that fall outside this category. Just try translating the word "funny" to Japanese: おかしいです (okashii desu) It might mean "funny", but in the sense like "he's crazy/strange". And this dictionary confirms it. The more correct word would be 面白い (omoshiroi). Google Translate might translate it to "interesting" because it's true, "omoshiroi" means both "interesting" and "funny". But you will never learn that with Google Translate! Not saying that dictionaries are better, because at the other hand, it gives you too much information. Looking up "receipt" for example will give you a lot of different words that mean that, but out of all, only レシート (reshiito) is used in the real world Japanese shops. And that's the big thing you will never learn with dictionaries.

It's clear your favourite out of the 2 is Norwegian, reading how you describe both (friends vs anime/manga, loving the language and culture vs being a member of something, etc.). Ideally you could learn both, but don't do it at the same time or you will be overwhelmed, no matter if the struggle point would be Norwegian or Japanese. Admitted, I'm currently learning Japanese and Spanish at the same time, but: 1. I started learning Japanese since May 2015 and I could speak it quite well by the time I started learning Spanish. 2. Spanish shares similar vocabulary with English here and there, which is both good and bad. Good because I would know those words immediately. Bad because I always tend to ignore learning words I find similar to English, Dutch or Polish, assuming I will be fine any way.

Not really. I can read hiragana and katakana, in addition to around 300 kanji. And before I started to speak Japanese, the amount of kanji I knew was around a mere 50-ish kanji. I don't see how knowing all the kanji would help you speak Japanese. It's not like Japanese children first learn to read and write before they can open their mouth and say "daddy" and "mummy" (ちち、はは), just this idea alone is very unrealistic.

Maybe you'll recognise them: Cyrillic: доброе утро (dobroe utro) Hiragana: おはようございます (ohayou gozaimasu) Katakana: オハヨウゴザイマス (ohayou gozaimasu) In all cases it means "good morning", in case you were wondering. But if you don't recognise those scripts, then I know for sure you have never heard of those.

I actually have a mixed feeling about my language learning. German and Spanish are/were for fun. Japanese is for fun too, but I also have a business reason behind it. I'm a web developer, game developer and YouTuber, I need to know a good amount of Japanese for the latter 2, since I mainly upload gameplay of Japanese games and I will possibly get in touch with the Japanese Nintendo department at one point (at the moment I only contact the American and European departments). And as for Spanish, I'll need it on my trip to Spain in May 2016 too. I have been to Spain (sorry, Catalonia) last summer, I was surprised how many people didn't speak English there. The only exceptions were a few shop clerks, 1 security woman, 1 taxi and the person who owns the apartment I have been to. Other than that I had to communicate through Google Translate on my phone, which was quite embarrassing.

If you don't mind incorrect translations here and there, Duolingo works quite well for your short term memory.But for your long term memory, I would rather recommend you to use Anki decks (find new vocabs, grammar and sentences, store them in your decks and go over them every day).And while not going over your flash cards, turn your vocabulary into full sentences and shout them out of you on a daily basis (preferably to a native speaker, but a rubber duck works too if you don't care about pronunciation yet) (and try thinking of new sentences every day, or you'll end up only being able to say that one sentence ).

Filtering out the bullshit from the following quote: I can only remember I was talking about the language, not just about the grammar. Of course I'm aware of the politeness levels, particles and counting systems, but out of the 3, only the counting system is actually difficult. The particles are mostly straight forward and the politeness levels were also easy to understand. I only didn't understand what you meant by "homonyms". No, I'm actually not referring to RTK, I found it quite boring. Instead, I used KanjiDamage. KanjiDamage has slightly less kanji due to the lack of like they call it "bullshit kanji". And I never said there were exactly 250 particles, I said there were around 250 radicals. What you said about me being unable to judge what's easier to learn for an English speaker is outright wrong. For reference: I have 2 native Indo-European languages, one of which is relatively close to English AND super similar to German. Dutch, German and English are all Germanic languages and therefore more similar to each other than English, Italian and Czech would be. And about the last one: I studied Japanese for 7 years intensively with little to no results. When I started learning Japanese by speaking it, listening to it and immersing into it since May 2015, I finally made a huge progress in Japanese, and I didn't even open a study book since then. So as you can see now, I didn't use Benny as my answer to the universe (in fact, I also used to be against his advices until I tried it). But of course I can't think of any advices on my own without proof, so I always take things to the test to verify if it's true or not, and in this case it is. I discovered the exact same thing with programming, designing and whatever else: the key isn't to read books and doing small exercises, the key is all about doing it! And language learning is nothing different in this case.

いよいよ日本語のフォーラム見つけた！ デービッドだて、２３さいです。 ポーランド人だし、オランダに住んでし、今スペイン語を勉強します。 あなたたちの日本語は上手ですね？　(・∀・)

Each time I see discussions about how many hours you need to study, how difficult one language is over the other, etc., I would roll my eyes under I get dizzy. Allow me to clear up a couple of mythes: Myth 1: Japanese is very difficult I actually found learning Japanese much easier than learning Spanish, especially because: 1. No tones or accented letters (like "ą", "é", "ü", etc.). 2. Strict grammar rules. 3. Almost no irregular verbs. 4. No articles. 5. Limited amount of possible sounds. 6. No gendered verbs or nouns. Myth 2: Learning all 1945 (NOT 2000!) Kanji letters is a pain A bit of an agreement here, but not too much. If you have the right tools and methods, you can easily learn those things in 3 months. You can break it down to: 1945 Kanji / 90 days = ~22 Kanji to learn every day. And there are only around 250 particles used in all 1945 Kanji, so these are not the abstract characters many westerners think. Myth 3: You need 2700 hours of intense study for Japanese (and 600 hours for French) Good luck with that. If you really think intensively writing down vocabulary for 12 hours a day straight is going to work, I'm sure you'll give up the next day. Learning should remain fun and effective, not intense and discouraging! What really helps are 30 minute conversations every day (use Italki, there is no such an excuse as "I can't"), active listening to the language (YouTube, anyone?), immersion (movies, music, comics, system language of your PC and phone, etc.), flash cards (Anki) and whatnot? There! This way you can easily convert your 10 years of study to 6 months of learning! The most important tool: motivation! You seem to have much more motivation for Japanese, so that's the language you want to go for. I hope that helps.

I have been developing my own tool to learn scripts. As far as I am, the ones used in the middle-east are among the hardest scripts I've ever seen. Hangul is not bad, but the idea of having letters in a letter freaks me out a bit. But I think Cyrillic, Hiragana and Katakana are the easiest scripts to learn. Got these 3 nailed in no-time.

It's been a while since I last used IP.Board. Since I became very convenient with PHP and MySQL, I started making my own web apps and never looked back at 3rd party applications again (with only one exception). But I like IP.Board more than SMF at least.

I would actually suggest to save grammar for later (except for the most basic ones). Start with the alphabet (if different from a language you already know), then on speaking AND vocabulary (yes, at the same time!), then grammar after you become conversational (end B1/start B2). It's much more effective than the other way around.

My reasons: - I can localise my games myself, rather than relying on others. - It's so close to Dutch, it's almost like I'm learning a new dialect, rather than a new language. - I visit Gamescom in Germany every year and eventually other huge tech-related events (all based in Germany).

Skype and Anki (flash cards app). Talk to native Russian speakers on Skype for 2 or 3 times a week for 1 hour a day max. During each session, record all new words into flash cards (or otherwise: note down all the new vocabulary somewhere and put them in your Anki deck afterwards). Outside your speaking sessions, try reading 1 page of any Russian book each day, visit 1 Russian blog post or anything else and take any new words you read to your flash card deck and practise your decks every day. Practise your self-made decks for 5 minutes per session. Take a 15 minute break, continue your session and repeat. I personally found this the most effective way by far. Those textbooks, apps, games, etc. have been a waste of my 7 years of Japanese studying. Changing my methods to speaking and flash card exercises helped me to succeed in as short as 4 months. PS: For the ones who don't learn Russian but learn something else, just change the word "Russian" to any other language you're learning.

I used to use Duolingo in the past, learning many languages at once. But then I decided to see how well the Dutch course was done (curious). I couldn't facepalm enough when I saw so many mistakes during the course. I reported most of them, but only got a decent response once. Other than that, those moderators were complete arseholes. They think they know Dutch better than a native speaker.

It depends on how you want to learn a language. My preference is to speak the language first and foremost, then learning how to write will become much easier. However, I combine speaking with flash cards, so I can remember new vocabs much better. In that case I do write. It's not poetry, but I still write down new words on flash cards (in the first weeks I do this the entire time, but it gets fewer over time). When I feel like I can recognise the new word without translating it in my head, I delete that word from my Anki decks (because I like splitting them into smaller decks). I did this a very lot with Japanese, now those learnt words randomly pop up in my brain by just looking at the object. Like: I see a bicycle and I automatically think: じてんしゃ (jitensha). So long story short: writing does make sense in learning a new language, but don't go for poetry yet. Speaking is much more important.

It's a bit complicated. I'm an indie game developer on the 3DS and Wii U, web developer on (just guess it ) and I'm as well considering to start app development (Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android). And I'm a well known YouTuber too. And no, I hate maths. But more relevant to this website: I'm a big fan of language learning, especially the techniques behind it. My only annoyance about this are those retarded discussions with people who have never learned a language and claim they know better how to learn those (category: facepalm). I am born and raised by Polish people in the Netherlands, which provides me 2 native languages. And other than that, I recently started a blog where I share my language learning progress on: http://blog.076.wtf Then I hope I can help others and others can help me.