edmundangelson

It's much easier to slowly look over a piece of text and become familiar than listen to spoken word. The internet also gives us ample opportunities for practice. I almost can't comprehend how someone can attain verbal fluency in another language. No one wants to have half a conversation with someone who can't even understand the reply. You can't whack out a dictionary mid conversation to get the meaning of words before you construct a reply.

Scots should definitely be considered a different language to English. I'm sure the difference is greater than between Swedish and Norwegian for example. On a spoken level, they are practically unintelligible. People rarely write in Scots, but Someone speaking Scots will not be understood even by other Brits who have frequently interacted with Scots speakers.

I often see things that knowing the X most common words will allow you to understand 80/90/98/99.5% of words in a text. However I think for newspapers this is a lot more skewed. Despite having a relatively large vocabulary for a beginner I still struggle with newspaper articles, even getting the jist of it. I think these statistics are far more accurate for everyday conversation and perhaps novels, but newspapers are still out of reach even with intermediate vocabulary it seems.

Hi everyone.

I am a 24 year old man from England. I study Mandarin currently, and I hope to acquire HSK Certification by the end of the year, ideally level 3. I've studied a few other languages, and am particularly interested in writing systems also. I am comfortable with Latin, Cyrilic, Arabic, Devangari and Greek in that regard.

11 hours ago, Blaveloper said:

Name 1 app that teaches you grammar AND works.
As far as I've seen, they're all focused towards vocabulary only.
If an app teaches you grammar, it's either bad or with no explanation.

Conjugations, Genders, Number etc can be memorised through apps, although there is usually little or no explanation. I'm pretty sure Duolingo has basic grammar, even memrise can teach you conjugations/genders etc, although they are more lacking in things like word order and higher grammatical features.

Apps often give sentence examples teaching you grammar through exercise and example, although for an explanation and better understanding you need other sources apart from apps.

I'd say Devanagari personally. Chinese can be nice when done well, but often in newspapers and online it looks terrible. Sometimes literally unreadable. Devanagari too is most aesthetic in books, but even on low resolution web pages it still maintains is ordered exoticness. I think Arabic works the best in digital form. Overall Devanagari wins.

For the written/reading side yes. They are not good for attaining fluency so their usefulness decreases over time, but there is no better way to learn vocabulary. Grammar is also best learned through apps in the beginning, although explanations and examples can be poor at more complex levels. In terms of pure time invested, apps should be your number one, unless you specifically prefer having a physical book.

I aim for 15 new words per day (one level) on my Mandarin course at the moment, which is just the top 1,000 most common words. I'm currently getting about 75 per day to review too on average and rising as my 'learned words' bank grows.

How many do you learn per day on memrise?