Cave Bear

I learned hiragana with Memrise, and I use the Obenkyo app as a daily refresher as I'm riding the bus to work.

After watching the anime, I've become a huge fan of Watashi ga Motenai no wa Do Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!, or Watamote. I bought the complete set of manga a while back, and I keep coming back to them every once in a while to try and read them. It's been a slow process though, as my Japanese reading skills are still very basic.

ありがとうございます！I've been through the Kansai briefly, when I made a brief train stop in Kobe to check out the earthquake museum and get dinner. I'd love to go back some time and use these useful phrases. Thanks again, Dmitry!

This is relevant to my interests! The Japanese section has links to a few resources I didn't know about already. Thank you.

Memrise is an excellent resource. I've found it to be quite helpful for learning the kanji. I haven't found it to be as useful for learning grammar though.

I use phone apps to study whenever I'm riding on the bus or train back and forth between work and home, and whenever I have a minute or two free. That accounts for about an hour of study per day. I watch one hour of TV per day in the language I am trying to learn. I try to work in about five hours of immersion per week; I used to do language exchanges every week.

The thing about introverts is that they may behave in an extroverted manner in certain contexts. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, is famous for leading the Indian independence movement, even though he lived his private life as an introvert. Introverts don't necessarily always keep to themselves.

Thank you very much, Ania. I am looking forward to using this site more. There seem to be a lot of wonderful resources for language learning here.

I've had a lot of success with games that involve a lot of talking. Settlers of Catan, for example, involves a lot of negotiation and back and forth between players. That's a good opportunity to practice conversational skills. The rules themselves can be a tool for language learning. There are a lot of Magic: the Gathering players in Seoul, including a fair number of native English speakers. The English speakers often play with cards printed in Korean, even if they don't speak much of the language. The cards use a lot of very specific, technical language with reoccurring terminology; the English speaking players tend to pick up on the Korean words for 'tap' and 'attack' after a certain point.

Bananagrams is good too; it's like Scrabble, but without the board.

The hangeul alphabet is easy, to be fair. It's mostly the grammar and pronunciation that I have trouble with.

Anime and manga is a good place to start, but eventually you want to graduate up from that. It's important to keep on challenging yourself. Anime will teach you some commonly used words and phrases, and learning to sing the theme songs can help you with the overall flow and stress of the language, but it's not as helpful if you want to speak to real Japanese people. Real Japanese people do not talk like anime characters!

It seems easy and intuitive to native speakers. English is not easy though; it's German, and Latin and smatterings of other languages jammed together and hammered into a funny shape. Just look at all the irregular verbs, for example.

Maybe it would be possible to learn a language that fast if we lived in the Matrix. You can learn hangeul (Korean) fairly quickly though. Here's a link: http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

The most difficult language I ever tried to learn was Korean. It's even harder than learning Japanese. They both have the same grammatical structure, but the pronunciation in Korean is much more complicated, and Koreans are a lot more particular about correct pronunciation. On the other hand, I did learn hangeul fairly quickly, whereas I still have a lot of kanji to memorize.

Does anybody here use board games, card games, or role-playing games (like Dungeons & Dragons) for learning or teaching languages? When I was an ESL teacher in South Korea I had a lot of fun teaching English and learning a little Korean along the way by playing D&D with my ten-year-old students. I figured that I built up an impressive vocabulary as a precious youth from Gary Gygax's AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, so maybe my students would benefit from it as well! If you are interested, maybe I can tell you some cool stories about it.

Hello! I was teaching English in South Korea for five years. I'm back in the USA right now, but I'm looking at going to China to teach for a year or two starting in January or early February. After that, I'd like to teach in Vietnam. I wish my Korean skills were better though... It's a tough language to learn. They say that Japanese starts easy (because of the simple pronunciation, and ease of access) but gets harder as you go along (due to the complex grammar) while Chinese starts hard (because of the characters and the intonation) but gets easier as you work at it (because the grammar is surprisingly similar to English), but then Korean starts off difficult, and stays difficult!

I learn languages through a combination of immersion and frequent study. It's not enough to either crack open a book or live among a culture where the language is spoken; you have to do both. Plenty of foreigners live in Seoul, South Korea for years (even decades!) but they never bother to learn the language, even while they are surrounded by it. Likewise, many Korean students spend their entire childhoods from kindergarten to university studying English from books, but never really learn how to put it into practice. I knew a Korean English teacher with a degree in English who could tell you anything you wanted to know about English grammar... in Korean. She couldn't form simple English sentences though, even to tell you what she had for breakfast! You have to immerse yourself in a language, and crack the books!

It's possible. You'll want to learn your radicals first. Those are the more basic kanji that all the other kanji are assembled from. Once you know those, you can learn the more complicated kanji by looking for the radicals inside them and making the connections. It helps if you have regular exposure to kanji, and frequent opportunities to practice. When I was living in Seoul I would read the signs inside the train (Korea with smaller English, Japanese, and Chinese translated noted below it) and practice my Kanji on a phone app during the ride.

I taught English in South Korea for five years. I found that table-top roleplaying games, like Dungeons & Dragons (of all things) are actually fantastic tools for teaching languages. My ten-year old students loved it! Children love games, so any way that you can 'game-ify' your lessons is sure to get a positive response from them.

Let's all list out which apps we have on our phones for learning languages, and discuss their merits! I have Obenko for Japanese and DuoLingo for Japanese. Obenkyo is this great little app I use for memorizing kanji and vocabulary, and for maintaining my hiragana and katakana skills. I like to use it when I'm sitting on the bus or subway train on my way back and forth between work and home. I use DuoLingo for studying Spanish, since I was told that Spanish speakers tend to have the best Japanese pronunciation for some reason. I've heard things about DuoLingo supporting Japanese though. I may start using that, but I may continue using Obenkyo if I do, just because I like it so much.