Any anons that have self taught a 2nd language?

>>1027122

Hey! I taught my self English in my teens, with the use of flash cards and watching lots of television. It was mostly stuff aimed at kids in the beginning. I also read a lot which helped me grasp grammar, spelling, and pronunciation. Pbs , scholastic books and radio where my best friends. There was a point where everything just clicked and that made me learn a lot faster. Try duolingo its a great app im using to learn my fourth language.

>>1027122
Hey same anon from first reply. Spanish is my first language so I can give you some pointers. Pretty much all Spanish is the same except for some slang and colloquialism. For the most part most spanish you will hear everywhere outside of Europe will be Mexican Spanish. South and Central American Spanish is the same only they call certain things a different name but they all adapt Mexican names for those few things in America. Think mundane things like In Mexico a blanket is a covija but in Guatemala a covija is a jacket. In either case they will know what you mean with Mexican Spanish since Mexican Media reaches so far.

>>1027153
continued from >>1027153


If you want to learn Spanish then I would start with Immersion, Watch Spanish movies with English subtitle. Most movies have Spanish dubbed into them as a second language. Get Duolingo and use it Everyday, as a Spanish native speaker I can honestly say the Spanish portion is very good, once you have been using the app or something else for a few weeks start watching movies with Spanish subtitles on. Also get some Spanish Audio books Start with children's books then progress into novels. Start watching Spanish tv too, Stuff like Discovery channel in Spanish is great and you can probably get a kick out of watching novelas.

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+ Korean

1. Rural South Korea - No English speakers
2. Use elementary dictionary
3. Speak like a retard - learn from mistakes
4. Sometimes very frustrating - want to kill self
5. First year: I'm getting good
6. Second year: fluent

A) The trick is not caring about how you look. You WILL look retarded.

B) Pocket dictionary = God

C) Learn from your mistakes

D) Do it till you learn it.

Supposing you know English (obviously), Spanish is a cake-walk.

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I'm currently using duolingo on my phone to learn German. It's quite good actually.

I wont say that I completely taught myself english, but I can confidently say that more than 75% of the process was done by watching videos, listening to music and reading. Those 3 things will boost your learning quite significantly.

>>1027151
Thankyou very much anon for all the details. will definitely have to do everything you said.

>>1027122
Currently teaching myself (Brazilian) Portuguese in preparation for a trip to the Olympics next month.

I do the following:
>use Anki flashcard program
>use Duolingo website
>used Pimsleur audio-tapes, all 90 episodes available for my target language. Some languages don't have that many.
>Expose self to natively-produced target language media online (mostly youtube channels I like)
>used interpals.net to find a language exchange partner, who I've been chatting with on the site via text for a few months and who I've recently begun having regular skype conversations with

After about a year of various combinations of this, and kinda being intermittent about it in the beginning, I think I'm solidly level A2 or B1 level, depending on the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels

>>1027232
good luck on that trip

>>1027122
take a look at /int/s wiki, it has a lot of stuff and the spanish part is pretty fleshed out.

i began with spanish after 3 years in Highschool and a break of 5 years and i found that it still helped a lot. Its a really easy to learn language in my opinion, at least if you want to get to a basic conversational level

>>1027316
that is an awesome resource! thanks anon

>>1027122
I learned arabic with rosettastone.com its pretty easy an makes fun. Lots of languages available.

>>1027935
I doubt you're fluent though.

>>1027947
Sure I am.
Ahlan anon labace? Kul'chi bykhayr?
Muk!

>>1027122
It may be worth a shot to learn a language completely by watching youtube videos. Many videos have subtitle functionality. You can mix between transtranslated subtitles and subtitles in the native language. If the alphabet is different its probably worth learning that first.

I was thinking about self learning a third language, my first two ideas were russian and whatever language those fucking terrorists speak (arabic I guess). Does anyone have any good ideas what to learn? I want something edgy and cool.

>>1028049
that is what I'm interpreting from the other anons. I have actually started to watch the kids subtitled learning videos.
you do make a good point that i probably wouldnt have realized, to watch any youtube video with subtitles. i think ill just have to pretty much seclude all my media into the language so i'm kind of forced to learn it at a faster pace. thanks anon!

>>1028228
dude, i would love to learn russian. but learning a brand new alphabet, (cyrillic), seems like such a daunting task.
that i would pay the money to attend class for.

Community college class it's hella cheap at least around here it is

>>1027122
I learn english from movies and tv. Then reading in internet, But now i'm trying to improve with Duolingo, i don't know if it's good, but it keepme practicing.
The cool thing about knowing english is that i can watch tons of movies and series without waiting for subtitles and or translations.

I will love to learn german, russian and maybe italian.

>>1027195

Make sure you use the mobile website in browser instead of the app. The website has notes and isn't based on matching, but moreso on spelling if that makes sense.

>>1028254
I pulled japanese, it isn't a hard thing to do if you commit. For me I learned hiragana and katakana, changed all the names in my phone to their katakana equivalents. Probably would work the same

>>1028254
Cyrillic isn't that hard, and Russian has the benefit that a bunch of words are actually pretty close to a western European word (E.g. "Stop" in Russian is, er, "Stop"). So you can literally read around half the letters and make a good guess at the word in a lot of cases.

I've learnt enough Cyrillic to read some basic words, and I'm not even learning Russian: I just wanted to learn Cyrillic. I just practice by making an effort to read something when I see it in Cyrillic; you'd be surprised how often you come across it on the internet & television.

>>1028254
Cyrillic is the same concept as the latin Alphabet, just with other symbols (actually a lot of them the same). You read it from left to right and the letter (or letter combinations) symbolise sounds. Back when i had a russian course we spent maybe an hour or so on the Alphabet and moved straight on because everybody understood it.

Rosetta Stone is great for basic languages from English like Spanish and French.

If you already collected basic vocabulary its highly recommended to watch movies and news in the particular language. That given you an easy passive training

Video games, books (by which I mean, anything that has at least some words written on a page), and dictionary. It can take many years, and it doesn't help with pronunciation, but it's a way.
I don't think you'll be able to learn the spanish rolled R by yourself. And without it, you'll sound like a retard when speaking.

So why are you wanting to learn spanish anyway? For the lels? Aren't there other ways to accomplish your ultimate goals?

>>1028254
I don't think so, we learned ancient Greek in my school, and learning new words was relatively easy after we knew the alphabet, it should be the same with Russian.

Duolingo ftw, as was already mentioned. It was the only thing that actually helped me make progress with my german.

>>1028379
>>1028395

Really? I guess I just took a quick glance at it and was alienated so much that I did the give it more thought. Definitely will attempt that after Spanish

>>1028370
That's awesome! What is hiragana and katakana? Are they the equivalent to Chinese mandarin and Cantonese?

>>1028853
Yea I'll just have to get with a foreign exchange student or something and have them help me with the pronunciation. Especially the rolling Rs.
I'm a premed student and live in the south about 2 hours from Houston, TX. So as you can imagine, there is a pretty dense Spanish speaking population. Figured it would aid my ability to properly communicate and help those patients.
Plus, how amazing would it be to be multilingual?

>>1029255
Not him, hiragana/katakana are two versions of the same phonetic alphabet. Hiragana is traditionally used for japanese and chinese words, katakana for german/roman loan words. Most borrowed words get butchered over generations until they fit nicely in the consonant-vowel alphabet.
The alphabet is rarely used to spell out words, most of the time the kanji for the word is used, which is a chinese (Again butchered over generations) character, unless the kanji's rare enough that the writer believes the reader wouldn't know it, then it'd be written with furigana (alphabet above/below it) or just in hiragana/katakana
Their alphabet consists of five vowels, and those five vowels (a, i, u, e, o) attached to a consonant (k(g), s(z), t(d), n, h(p, b), m, y, r), some consonant-letters can be altered by marks in the corner to sound different (H to p or b), and the only consonant that can be used without a vowel after it is n.

>>1029258
So if you move away for whatever reason, you'll have wasted hundreds or thousands of hours for little or nothing of value? Keep in mind, spanish is almost never used to say or publish anything really interesting or worthwhile, except translations.
Being bilingual might make you "look cool" for all of three seconds. Are you quick enough to lay a girl in that time frame?

>>1027232
>anki
anki is amazing. I use it to learn Japanese (taking N3 this december) and it's a godsend. It feels good to just always be learning a little bit (and reviewing stuff you'd forget anyway)

>>1027122
Second?

Finnish and Swedish - Mother tongue
English - Books, games and teh internets (I played Larry 1 as a kid and asked dad to translate when I didn't understand. Sometimes he just laughed and didn't translate)
Norwegian and Danish - By reding books. I read them fluently but are a bit too hard to catch when spoken. This would be easy to remedy if I just spent some time with native speakers. And these are easy if you know one language in the group.
French - Learnt this in school, very rudimentary, I think learning by studying sucks balls.
Spanish - I used to work in Andalucia and the Balearics. You just need to sound silly and get a small dictionary.
Thai - VERY rudimentary. On my island where I worked the locals weren't locals, they were burmese! Thais are fucking racist.

First thing to learn is "What is this in XXX-language" in XXX-language. And then ask that. People will tell.

>>1027122
As a trilingual child and finding it effortless to learn any other language, I've found this:

Kiddie shows are the BEST for beginners. Stupid plot, but the language is as easy as the target group's knowledge, so simple.

Once you know how to do the basic sentences, play scenarios in your mind, e.g.:

>learn "How much does it cost?" in Italian
>imagine being in Rome, near the colloseum, and imagine an ice cream stand (or anything tasty) near it
>Hear the salesman shout "Ice-a Cream-a! Ice-a Cream-a! Come-a buy some!"
>You ask in Italian "Quanto costa?"
And that's it. Try to have more and more elaborate talks with the imaginary foreign people and make some seriously complex shit.

Go to the country to consolidate your knowledge. You'll come back with loads of stories and great slip-ups, e.g.:

>be in Italy
>see stand selling scarves
>suddenly, forget "how much does it cost"
>But still remember the sentence "How do you say... in Italian"
>tell the woman
>she tells me how to say it
>I repeat and ask how much the scarf costs
>she points at a HUGE label above them
>Laugh
>thank her
>all good

Seriously, EVERYONE other than an American or Englishman will be thrilled, excited and thankful for even the most broken speech. It usually gets you love from foreigners. That's why I learn languages. To blend in and make people happy.

Currently translating my third book. Ask me anything.

>>1027195
hey, I'm learning german on duolingo too!


Are you me?

>>1027151
This. I did this too but I don't think I could do it again as I did it before the age of 15.

I'm trying to leard Esperanto and Japanese. Progress is slow though.

1.English is global english, everyone speaks it, although it wasn't true - England has old and rich culture.
2.German is a language of Kant, Gothe, Hegel, Nietzshe, Marks - you may not to learn it, if you wanna be a plebs losing such a part of world culture.
3.French is language of Enlightenment, Jules Verne, Dumas, Sartr, at least Canada is not so far(if you're an american).
4.Latin is language of Roman philosphers and writers, this language lived at least on one thousand years more than Empire, it is a huge culture layer.
4 basic languages, and I can't find any reason to learn any other language except if you want to live there permanently.

>>1031445
Am I genetically deficient for not being able to roll the R sound? I looked up all kinds of articles and videos that felt like the "draw the owl" comic. For the most part my brain is fine with Italian, but my mouth fails me

>>1034120
Yes. So. Edgy.

Japanese: 1-1.5 hours per day, mostly flashcards with a little reading. I've read 3 visual novels and I'm halfway through my first light novel.

German: 5-15 minutes. Do a couple flashcards and read a little. About 3/4 through the first Harry Potter book on my Kindle. I'd barely classify it as reading though, it is mostly dictionary lookups and Bing Translate.

>>1034158
I'll tell you what worked for me. Say "puh" then "duh", keep repeating them and keep going faster. Eventually it should just happen.

>>1027232
I hope you come back alive