leosmith's recent posts

rinske.Visser wrote:

Hi all,
I've been using this site for about 3 weeks now and find it very convenient to practice texts that are several levels above my current reading abilities. Recently, I've been wanting to try out the listening function as well, but every time I try importing from youtube, instead of separating the sentences into words, every sentence is displayed as a separate word, which makes using the dictionary function rather difficult.
I don't know if I'm missing some steps, or this is an error in the program. Does someone know a solution for this? I usually use Chinese - other, since the Chinese - mandarin language selection doesn't detect traditional subtitles. I don't know if that is relevant.
Thanks,
Rinske

Hi Rinske,

I think we've got all the issues fixed now. Thanks for your patience!

Alvin.Parmar wrote:

add a dictionary for Ancient Greek?https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ is good because it also parses the grammatical forms.

Added.

I've never tried Cantonese, so I don't know the answer.  

Yay, I finally received my paper textbook from Amazon – first paper book purchase of any kind in many years! I still use the pdf to study with, but I wanted to do the right thing and purchase this excellent book (no kindle version available). I haven’t been making as much progress with it as I’d hoped for, because I’ve only been doing about 30 min/day. I’m on lesson 33 of 67, and that’s after skipping 5 lessons on the future tense (I’ll learn the future in the future). I looked through the table of contents and confirmed that the six basic tenses I posted about earlier are covered, plus two additional tenses.

 

I just hit 20 hours of conversation, and I’ve decided to start considering myself to be around A2. Two of my last three teachers, without any prompting, have told me I’m at “a good intermediate level”. I don’t kid myself – I know I’m not B1 yet. But I’m confident that I’m no longer A1, which is nice because some teachers refuse to teach students below A2. Italian italki tutors aren’t as picky as German ones though; there are more Germans that wouldn’t teach below B1 than Italians that won’t teach below A2. Not sure why, but I suspect it’s based on demand.

I had an intense teacher today. Harsh corrections, even though I asked her to keep it to a minimum. I complained, and she eased off a bit. Then we got stuck on a question she asked. I said something like “I review all of my languages” and she asked “why do you say ‘my’ languages?” I asked if it was wrong, because I actually had a German teacher who said it was a bit unnatural. However she said it was correct, but she wanted to know what I meant by “my” languages. We went back and forth a couple times:

Is it wrong?

No?

Why are you asking me if it’s not wrong?

Because I don’t know what you mean.

Is it wrong?

Etc., etc.

Finally, she elaborated that by saying “my” languages, I’m implying that I’ve already studied them. And I said of course I have; I’d thought that was obvious, but I guess it wasn’t. Maybe she heard my long list of languages and assumed it was a wish list or something. Then she listed her languages, three European plus Chinese, and I said “Really – did you live in China?” She said no, she’d learned it at Uni, and I was thinking to myself “yeah, right” because I’ve heard that before. Then she said she wanted to speak a little Chinese with me. I told her I didn’t want to get confused, but she could ask me again at the end of the hour. When we finally did speak it, I was pleasantly surprised at how good she was, especially her pronunciation (she pronounced United States (mei3guo2) as mei2guo2, but that was the only obvious error). She was surprised with my level too (we are both around B2 imo), and finally looked at the levels listed on my profile and was like “wow”. So the conversation ended on a positive note.

Sorry about that - ticket written.

Today I broke the 10 hours of conversation barrier. My first 5 lessons were 30 min each, and today was my 8th one hour lesson, so I have a total of 10.5 hours. I rate my teachers in my own little spreadsheet, because I use a lot of them and I’d hate to lose track of the ones I like the most. I use a 3 star system. 3 stars = repeat, 2 stars = maybe, 1 star = never again. I’m finding Italian teachers to be above average for my purposes, compared to other languages. Seven 3s, five 2s and only one 1(she’s an over-corrector who has done a lot of travelling and doesn’t like developing countries).

I consider the first 10 hours to be an important milestone, because it’s the hardest period of language learning for me, and I just want to get through it. It’s such an awkward feeling sometimes. All that struggling, and long pauses. But Italian wasn’t that bad, and needless to say, I’m much better now than I was in the first lesson. After my 11th lesson, I felt like I’d leveled up, but I held off on declaring myself A1-ish until today. I feel like my true level is actually A2-ish, but I need to catch up with my conversation. I’m guessing another 20 hours or so to get there.

Textbook wise, I decided to make a switch to the nicer Una Grammatica Italiana per Tutti. It’s a great book. My only complaint is that it has some vague exercises, meaning there can be more than one answer, but only about 10% of the time, so not a show stopper. My previous choice had more issues in addition to vague exercises: it was a bit hard to look at, used more vocabulary, had more mistakes, and even introduced some grammar points in the exercises. Still a relatively good text though, which tells you something about the quality of textbooks in general. Anyway, I’m on Lesson 19 of 67 in the new textbook. It’s going to be more time consuming than I thought – probably about 1 hour per lesson. That’s the biggest change to my daily routine, which is now:

1) 30-45 min Anki reviews.

2) 30-60 min read passages that have audio out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

3) 60 min conversation class. Curate a list of words/sentences for the next day's Anki reviews.

(60 min listen to audio stripped from easy youtube vlogs if I walk.)

(30 min watch Netflix series during lunch.)

4) 60 min textbook.

(30 min watch Netflix/YouTube videos.)

It amounts to about 3 hrs of full concentration study, with up to an additional 2 hrs of partial attention listening/watching (in parentheses above)

 

I haven't observed it myself, but I've heard it before.

I hit another milestone, and it’s a big one – did my first conversation on italki! It went well; much better than my first German (my last language) one. I decided to do 30 min lessons for a week or so, then increase it to 60 minutes. I got 25 anki notes in that 30 min, so I’m glad it wasn’t any longer. One nice thing about Italian is that, for me, the vocabulary is familiar enough so that drilling whole sentences is sufficient. I rarely feel the need to break out single words. Anyway, I didn’t embarrass myself too bad. I only used google a few times, and I understood most of what the teacher said.

My grammar was pretty good too, and that old theory about only needing 6 of the 21 “tenses” for the majority of colloquial speech seems to be holding up. The short list I was given by a helpful native was:

Presente semplice (mangio, bevo, ecc...)

Passato prossimo (Ho mangiato, ho bevuto)

Stare + gerundio (sto mangiando, sto bevendo)

Imperativo (mangia! bevi!)

Condizionale presente (mangerei, berrei)

Imperfetto (mangiavo, bevevo)

I used the first 3 frequently. I don’t know, but didn’t need, the 3rd and 4th. I don’t know but needed the 6th, so I studied it right after the class.

About a week ago I was in somewhat of a panic over grammar. I had finished creating all my conversation-primer sentences, which turned out to be 40, and wanted to start TY. Well, TY Italian is crap – one of the worst textbooks I’ve ever used. It covered very little, had way too much English, too much formal register, lot’s of mistakes, etc. So I did some serious searching for textbooks/grammars. I read a ton of reviews on Amazon and Reddit, then checked out any free samples I could get my hands on. I eliminated all of the English based ones. There was one that sounded good, recommended by Lucrezia; GP. Grammatica pratica della lingua italiana. Livello A1-C1: Grammatica - for English Speakers. But I couldn’t take a look at it, and there is no e-book version. Other than that, the best English based one I could find was Italian made Simple. The content was really good, although quite heavy (too much vocab imo). But it’s really dense; they split the page vertically and write in two columns. There is no e-book, but I was looking at a pdf, and it moves really slowly. The other thing is that it’s from 1960. The runner up was Complete Italian Step-by-Step. Fully functional e-book, so I thought I’d struck gold, but it turns out they took an older version, chopped it up and made it into an e-book. It’s basically a very dry grammar with some exercises inserted in strategic places. It’s probably ok to function as a grammar, but I find it difficult to work through those types of text books. I checked out 5 or 6 more of the most popular English based books, but won’t bother to list them here.

Now if you’re looking for a good, free, English based Italian text book, and don’t mind that most of it’s exercises are based on audio and video (also free), then you might want to check out WellesleyX: Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2023-2024). But I don’t want to be juggling audio and video in my text books. I get enough audio and video elsewhere; I just want good, digestible grammar.

The reason I eliminated all the English based books is that I discovered I can handle monolingual ones, and they are much better overall. I can do this because I completed Language Transfer and have done a fair amount of reading already. So I’d recommend this to others that are in the same boat. The first ones I checked out are the ones they always recommend on Reddit. Nuovissimo Progetto Italiano and Nuovo Espresso are both designed for classroom, are heavily dependent on audio/video, and don’t have normal e-books. Nuovo Espresso claims to have an e-book, but I’ve heard that it is only accessible on their site, and only for 1 month. Anyway, I want a self-study text book that doesn’t have audio/video, so I checked out some more of Lucrezia’s suggestions.

I was able to check out Parla e Scrivi, Grammatica pratica della lingua italiana and Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana. Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana looked good, but there was no e-book and the pdf I was looking at was really slow. So I had to choose between the other two, which were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. No official e-books, but the pdfs I checked out moved fast enough. I selected Parla e Scrivi, maybe because it was the first one Lucrezia recommended.

The only other thing I wanted to mention here was that my reading has improved a lot. I can now tolerate reading any subtitles I want to import from Youtube. By that I mean, I know enough of the vocabulary so it doesn’t burn me out to read it. Keep in mind that I’m using a reading tool, which gives me a great advantage. But this has made it possible to read a lot more variety; a lot more stuff that interests me. Another thing that really helps is that I can put sloppy auto-generated subs into Chat GPT and make them much more readable by adding punctuation and capitalization without changing any words.

In closing, here is my current daily routine:
1) Anki reviews.

2) 30 min conversation class (soon to increase to 60)

3) Watch Netflix series during breakfast

4) Review my 40 conversation-starter sentences (this will be dropped before the end of the month)

5) Read passages that have audio for 60 min out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

6) 30-60 min textbook

7) Listen to pod101 if I walk. Watch Netflix/YouTube 30-60 min.

I am finally back home from my 6 month annual trip, and it feels good. In my last post, I talked about reviewing one language per day over the course of my 1 month in Tanzania and 2 months in the Philippines. But I only did it for 2 weeks in Tanzania, and 2 weeks in the Philippines. The rest of the time, I just did my Anki cards in the morning (about 30 min). This was due to poor internet, and me wanting a break. I feel nicely rested now, and ready to start Italian.

Here is my rough plan for Italian:

1st month

Alphabet/pronunciation

Pimsleur

Italianpod 101 (background noise only)

 

2nd - 6th months

Conversation

Read and Listen

Language Transfer Italian/Teach Yourself Italian

Watch videos/series

 

Actually, I have already started. I study/review pronunciation daily using the tool I made here. I’m on Pimsleur lesson 4, and I play italianpod101 when I walk. 

I watch some Italian Netflix too. For example, Lidia Poët, a sexy female lawyer in the days before females were allowed to do such work, who does her own detective work too. I don’t understand well without subtitles, but that’s to be expected at this point.

I’ll probably start Language Transfer early, just so I have grammar a better grammar base before beginning conversation.

This is, in theory, my last language, so it’s an exciting time!

I’ve reached a bit of a milestone in Italian, so I though I’d post about it. Regarding the old list, I finished the Alphabet/pronunciation step, and continue to listen to Italianpod 101 when I do my walks, every other day. Even though it was supposed to be in the second month, I started watching videos/series already. My comprehension isn’t great, but that’s normal at this stage. I also started reading/listening. It was a rough start, but now I’m up to about 30 min/day, and it’s surprisingly smooth. More on that later.

And surprisingly enough, I got interested in grammar and finished Language Transfer already. It was only an introductory course; 45 lessons, or about 7 hours total audio. I did 5 lessons per day, so it took 9 days. It was somewhat challenging, but very well put together, so I got a lot out of it. I would listen to a lesson, answer as well as I could, and write down the things that I wanted to review later in Anki. I got most answers right, but still want to review a lot of stuff in Anki. What a superb free resource; it makes me consider creating something similar. Being an introductory course, it lacks some important stuff – like the imperative. But it’s a great start. My next step, grammar wise, will be Teach Yourself.

All this time I’ve been doing Pimsleur, but today I decided to stop for the same reason I stopped Pimsleur German. The language they use is too formal and not colloquial. They use the formal form of you (lei) 100% of the time, for example. Of course, they will eventually get to the informal (tu). But I, along with most people, will use the informal almost all the time, so I want to start with it. I’d prefer starting with tu 100% of the time, then add in lei later. I’d even accept 50/50, but 100% lei is ridiculous.

Pimsleur is great for pronunciation, chunking, and preparing one to speak, but I think I’ve gotten enough out of it. No need to learn a bunch of stuff that I will not use. I wouldn’t be wasting my time, but it wouldn’t be the best use of it either. So what will I do instead? Build islands. This is a concept explained in How to Improve your Foreign Language Immediately. Basically, I’ll write and memorize little monologues for many separate topics.

The more such monologues the speaker knows, the more such “island” are available when the need arises, the easier it is for him/her to speak/swim. In essence, even a native speaker has a number of such islands. These are the speeches in which the speaker sounds more effective and articulate than usual. These are stories which, as the result of much repetition, are more polished and impressive. These are formulas for expressing certain positions or conceptions about which the speaker has thought and spoken often. These are the speaker’s speeches, lectures, “opening lines”, and remnants from earlier training. The use of such islands helps the native speaker to express him/herself more precisely and eloquently. If islands can be so helpful to native speakers, what can we conclude about foreign speakers? For the foreign speaker, an island is salvation: it provides a chance for improving communication contact, it affords a desirable break, it attracts the attention of the native speaker. I would say that the confidence of the foreigner in speaking is directly dependent upon the number of islands he/she has in his/her command. It is not possible to overstate the communicative value or importance of islands for speech.

Actually, I’ll start out by memorizing single sentences. I’ll make a list of sentence I think I’ll use often, memorize them, and review them daily until they are automatic. I’m not going to put these in Anki – I’ll benefit by the context of leaving them in list form and reviewing them all every day. I’ll post them so native speakers can correct them. I think audio would be helpful, so I may post them as a tool on my website, since I can add audio to them there. Eventually I’ll grow these single sentences into longer monologues, or islands. It may have to wait until I start conversation though; I haven’t decided yet.

This is the new routine I’ll start tomorrow, some of which is continuation of what I’ve already been doing:

1)    Anki reviews.

2)    Write out 10 sentences that I will need for my conversation classes per day, memorize them, review the old ones. These range from really simple stuff (How do you say X in Italian, etc.) to more personalized stuff (I don’t like to dive, but I like to snorkel, etc.).

3)    Read passages that have audio for 60 min out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text. Put 20 words per day from the reading into Anki, and start reviewing them the next day. I’ve been using Learn Italian with Lucrezia for this, since it’s comprehensible and has real subtitles in YouTube (not auto-generated).

After 5 days or so, I’ll probably have enough sentences, so number 2 above will become Teach Yourself. A week or two after that, the sentences will probably be really solid, so it will be time to start conversation. I’m thinking that will be around June 1, exactly 1 month after starting. That’s early – I messed up by starting too early with German, but I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with Italian; I seem to be making pretty fast progress.

Ok, we'll put that suggestion on the backlog. Locking this topic.

fyi - it's back to where it was before. Since there will be far fewer breaks now, the sentence break issue will be less common. So we'll save budget for now and delay this possible improvement.

There's a ticket on this already - we were trying to fix the slowness some users were experiencing.

bbyj wrote:

Can we have any decision on when it gets broken/vs not or in what part it gets broken up? Or at least at the end of a sentence? Just curious on your thoughts.

I didn't know about the end of the sentence issue. Size wise, I think it's a bit short now. It's based on amount of text. I'd like it to allow at least as much text as the longest "LC Conversation" passages. They are 6-min conversations, but probably speak faster than most videos, so I’m guessing it would be roughly equivalent to a 10 min video. What do you think?

Gug.27 wrote:

Your android app is really good too, thanks for your hard work.

Thanks!

bbyj wrote:

I think this got fixed now

Thanks!

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

X doesn't make a word ignored.

Is this a shortcut suggestion?

wrote:

Arrow keys don't move to the next word.

Arrow keys on the phone? They change page.

wrote:

I can't play a sentence with audio. I don't see a TTS option (004 Greek language passage).

Works for me. TTS is under the 3 dots (reading preferences).

wrote:

Highlighting a word blocks the page buttons on the bottom on a small screen (good that it doesn't on a big screen).

We tried the pop-up definition in several locations, and everyone preferred this one. Just touch a blank area to clear it.

wrote:

Please add shortcuts for navigation based on a modifier key (shift etc.) and another key.

On the phone?

wrote:

I'd want to import books. Is this possible?

Yes. Convert them to text first, and make them private (if they are not public domain). The app will break them up into multiple passages if there is too much text.

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

Known, ignore and next page (stop hiding the controls).

What do you mean by hiding the controls? Can you provide a screenshot?

wrote:

A shortcut for "next highlighted" word would help.

Known words are skipped now by the right and left arrow keys. Is that what you mean?

wrote:

I can't see dark green highlighted text on some screens so changing it would help.

It's ok for me - can you provide a screenshot?

wrote:

Working better on android would be great.

Can you be more specific?

wrote:

There are some half-shortcuts.

What do you mean?

wrote:

SOMETIMES right and enter goes to the next page. Not when a word is highlighted. Please make it always work (ideally using control right or page down).

Is this on android?

Gug.27 wrote:

I agree this would be very useful to be able to zoom through texts using the keyboard only working on my unknown and learning words. I can't wait for this update to get implemented, it will be amazing!

Hi Gug - this should be working now. Can you confirm?

Ok, I added this to your other list, and we will discuss them. 

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

You updated the app but didn't add these. That's worrying.

Note how old this thread is. The other change was out before you posted, but delayed in a migration issue. We solved the migration issue. Please be patient; we haven't discussed your requests yet, and it takes time to release stuff.

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

No. Stop it. sdfdasfasdfadsfdsf asdfdsfdsfdsf

Please use the quote button and elaborate so that we know who you are opposing and why. 

ok, we'll discuss it

ok - thanks for the info!

Jori wrote:

Hi there, I've experienced the same bug
In my case, if I create a French passage with the text "Brandon avait péri à l’âge de vingt ans", it switches péri (to die) to prié (to pray)
This can be a game changer in terms of the story events, hope the devs kill Brandon once and for all (joke)

We can't get to the bottom of this. Do you see this very often?

The ticket is in work.

They do seem to talk a bit slower in this passage. Total words 900s for this one, 1200s for the previous. Hmm...

Hi All - it should be fixed now.

There is a known issue involving passages with audio. We're sorry about that. We have a ticket in work, and will post here when it's fixed.

abdozokani wrote:

The best dictionary for swedish
https://lexin.nada.kth.se/lexin/

Done!

Elbourn wrote:

Could you add dict.cc for Norwegian to German (https://deno.dict.cc), please?

Done!

leosmith wrote:

Joseph.Adams wrote:

The Playlist on the Android App is not working for me.

Sorry about that. Ticket written.

We think this is fixed - can you please confirm?

bbyj wrote:

leosmith wrote:

Hi b - just to clarify, join/split are not available on the app, so we are looking into adding them. That's what you are requesting here, right?

Yes, correct.

Added - thanks for your patience!

Jori wrote:

Hi, I've noticed that in the Android app, the japanese characters (kanji) are treated as chinese (hanzi)

Fixed - thanks for your patience!

Mery wrote:

Hi, could you add these dictionaries for italian to spanish?
https://context.reverso.net/translation/italian-spanish/
https://www.wordreference.com/ites/
Thanks!

Done!

bbyj wrote:

When I do this on larger passages, sometimes I am just given the loading symbol and it never loads. Then, if I leave the page and return, my whole passage disappears. However, when I go to edit it, it is all there again. Then, when I save, it doesn't save which words I have linked together. Do you have a workaround for this?

You are talking about desktop now, right? Because join/split has not been implemented for the app yet (still in work). Can you give me a link to a passage where it happens, because I haven't been able to recreate it.

rinske.Visser wrote:

Is this a bug or a feature?

A bug. Sorry about that - we will start working on this in a couple weeks. It was brought up first here; ticket already created.

 

Hu can also mean habitual, as it does here. It depends on context.

Tesse wrote:

One feature that I think is missing is a "night theme" both for the app and the site.

Hi Tesse. That was discussed here.

I have no idea, because it's not our passage. Titled vocational school, with header vocational schools; inconsistent perhaps, but not grammatically incorrect

ya is singular and za is plural

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

Please have it above the goals. Words known and words read are nearly the only stats i care about. The words known isn't going up. Is it broken?

We'll consider putting it above the goals. Regarding "The words known isn't going up", can you provide more detail? For example "when I change a word from green to white in a passage, the known words number below the goals doesn't go up". We have some known issues with stats, so I want to make sure this is something new.

After spending two months here, tomorrow is my last day in Thailand. This leg of my trip went much better than the last one. I accomplished most of what I was shooting for, spent time with old and new friends, went swimming a lot, enjoyed the local food, and had tons of fun in general.

I ended my eight month German spurt today, after my 103rd lesson. This only translates to roughly 93 hours of conversation, since about 20 of these lessons were half-hour. I was shooting for 100 hours of conversation, so I almost made it. I’m still B1ish imo, although noticeably better than I was before Thailand. I feel I’m lacking too much vocabulary to consider myself B2. And I’m still improving my word-endings; it’s been a struggle, but considering the progress I’ve been making recently, I think if I were to put in another 50 hours or so they would be quite good. The rest of my grammar is in pretty good shape. Anyway, I will put German on hold with the rest of my languages, and see how it goes. I will start out putting it in the rotation twice. In other words, there are 11 languages, but German gets put in twice, so the rotation is 12 days, every language gets reviewed once in the rotation except German, which is reviewed twice in the rotation, or once every 6 days. Final stats on the German spurt: 8 months, 750 hours, roughly B1.5.

Tomorrow night I fly to Tanzania to start my third leg of the trip. I’ll be there for one month. I’ll visit the school at least once, and travel a bit around the country. I’ll stay in Arusha the first two weeks, but have no set plan for the rest of the time. I’ll go to Zanzibar at some point, and maybe make some new friends and visit some areas where I’ve never been.

I plan on only reviewing my languages from now until I go back home at the end of April. That’s a three month rest, and my brain could sure use it. The idea of only spending a couple hours on them every morning sounds really appealing to me. I remember the old days when I used to consider an hour a day an almost insurmountable chore. My how things have changed!

Animefangirl wrote:

I hadn't thought in detail about how it would behave, just something along the lines of Anki or Memrise that helps you remember words by showing them to you often. The option for exporting vocabulary right now doesn't come with audio, just a text file, which isn't too useful for Cantonese. But if there's a better way to export to Anki, I'd love to know that. I'm not sure what a TTS is or what the TTS addon does, since I usually use Memrise.

TTS is text to speech - that's what the audio is when you select a word or sentence in a passage. If you export the text to anki using the export tool, you can install the Awesome TTS addon in your Anki, and tell this addon to automatically create TTS (audio) files in you anki cards. I don't know how Memrise works. Here is a video on how to export. 

Animefangirl wrote:

Thanks. Then since I'm already asking for a lot, I might as well ask for more: an inbuilt SRS to help with learning vocabulary. Exporting vocabulary is handy, but it doesn't export audio files. Also I'm lazy so it's nice to have everything in one place :p

Sorry, I forgot to answer this. We've considered this in the past, and felt it would be too expensive. I can bring it up again, but how would you like it to behave exactly?

bbyj wrote:

there is an option to export cards in a format that is easy for uploading to anki

True, and one can add TTS using the Anki Awesome TTS addon.

It is in work. I don't have an estimated time of completion, but the app designer is back and working all the app tickets.

Tallman wrote:

How would you go about learning a language that has a different writing script such as japanese?

I won’t go through the whole “How to learn Japanese” spiel because it’s pretty long. But I’ll summarize the way I’d learn the writing system if I was to start all over again today.

 

Kana

Start by learning Kana, which is made up of Hiragana (Japanese native words) and Katakana (loan words). These are phonetic scripts. Here is a summary of the general way I learn scripts:

1.    Find a list of all the letters, that includes audio. Listen to the audio for the first letter a few times then repeat it while writing the letter. Keep doing this until you've written the letter a few times. Do the same thing for the next 3 letters.

2.    Go back to the first letter and read it out loud without listening to the audio. Play the audio. If your pronunciation matches, go on to the next letter. If not, repeat step 1 for that letter, then try to do step 2 for the next letter. Keep doing this until you are able to pronounce all 4 letters correctly before listening to audio.

3.    Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you finish the whole list of letters. You should be able to quickly read all of them with correct pronunciation.

4.    Now that you've got the most basic grunt-work done, you can find and use a beginner's program for reading and pronunciation. A good program should teach you all the basics of spelling and pronunciation. I find beginner alphabet type books, with lots of simple reading and writing exercises, to be helpful at this point. Youtube is also an option.

You might be able to find a good beginner course that does everything on this list, and if so you can just do that instead. I included the detailed description so that you can see what needs to be done; some beginner courses are incomplete, or don’t give enough instructions. You might also be wondering why I didn’t recommend using a Youtube video from the beginning. That’s because I don’t think they stick very well by themselves. It’s good to combine grunt work with Youtube imo.

 

Kanji

The third Japanese script is Kanji, which is composed of Chinese characters. There are thousands of these, but most of the important ones are contained in the Joyo Kanji, 2136 common use kanji. Some are quite complicated. You should wait until you have a decent mastery of kana before starting kanji. And it is a good idea to have a decent base in the language in general before starting. A few months is probably sufficient.

 

Many people do not learn kanji explicitly these days. Due to tech, few people need to actually be able to write, and that has made the language much more accessible. It is quite possible to learn how to read without being able to write. If that is what you want to do, I recommend you learn characters via a combination of a ton of reading and memorizing new vocabulary items. But I’m going to assume you want to explicitly learn how to both read and write characters. 

 

I recommend developing a “just in time” philosophy when learning kanji so as not to be overwhelmed by large quantities and to actually have the associated vocab in use so characters stick better when you learn them. Only learn a kanji after you already know a word containing it pretty well; you should recognize the word when you hear it, and be able to use it. This being said, have all the radicals, the pieces that make up kanji, well memorized beforehand, since it is a such a valuable tool for learning characters, and relatively speaking, does not take a great effort. There are only 214 Japanese radicals, as compared to thousands of kanji.

Anyway, when you are comfortable with a word that has a new character in it, learn the character by making up a simple story or phrase that contains the meanings of the radicals, the meaning of the character and pronunciation. Heisig popularized this method in Remembering the Kanji, and you can find a free PDF for the first few hundred characters by googling, and is worth going through just to get used to the method. Mnemonics are your friends in this case – they are just memory hooks which fade away when you no longer need them.

To be able to write a character, put the meaning on one side of a flashcard/list, and the character + pronunciation on the other side. When you see the meaning, recall the story, and write out the character as you pronounce it.

To be able to read a character and know it’s meaning, put the character on one side, and the meaning + pronunciation on the other side. When you see character, recall the story, pronounce it and recall the meaning.

That’s about it for the specific instruction. From that point on, read and write a lot, and practice all other facets of the language so as to form a strong base and reinforce the script. Good luck!

 

I don't, but that might be because most of my early conversation teachers were female.

Animefangirl wrote:

Text is 99% English. Maybe it should be moved to the "No Knowledge" section.

done

Animefangirl wrote:

This text is in English. The wrong captions must have been imported.

thanks - fixed

Ok - we'll discuss making the list sortable by "studied" in our next meeting.

What we did is to add a "Studied" button at the bottom of the passage. Selecting it will make it show as studied in the passage list.

Animefangirl wrote:

Longest run-on sentence ever 😂

These auto-generated subs often lack punctuation. It drives me nuts.

Animefangirl wrote:

BTW what's the true function of "Add Comment"? Sometimes I comment because I have a problem, but often I don't have a problem and I just found the text really useful. What kind of comments are okay or not okay?

Anything you want to comment on is ok. Originally, I imagined people having discussions about the content, maybe asking each other questions about it. Most of the time people use it to point out errors, which is also fine.

Sorry - no plans atm.

Ok, thanks for your response. I double-checked, and there appears to be a couple problems.

1)    There are 198 entries in the vocabulary list, but only 190 make it to the export list

2)    Although word, definition and pinyin seem to be working correctly, sentences isn’t. The first sentence that contains the word is supposed to get exported, but as you mentioned, the sentence that is actually getting exported sometimes does not contain the word, and sometimes there is no sentence. (Just doing a random glance, the sentences for 寫道, 尋求 have sentences that don’t contain them and 姿態, 完了are missing sentences.)

Lukas wrote:

In the exported file there is one particular sentence that is added for a lot of different words (although not containing them). When I look for these words in the vocabulary list, they all seem to be missing the original sentence they were taken from.

Which sentence is this?

I see you don't have language, course or passage listed. Are you just trying to export your entire vocabulary list for Mandarin?

Hi Lukas, I couldn't reproduce it - could you please give me a screenshot of the entire export pop-up that gives you this result? We might have some sort of buffer related bug; you could try deleting export fields, checking/unchecking boxes, and running several times as a work around to see if it helps.

Sorry about that and thanks for the input - we have added it to the existing ticket on this, originally requested here.

Ah ok, I get it now. That is not per design, but I'll update the ticket.

ok, thanks for the clarification. I'll pass it on.

No. I think of "line by line" as an adverb rather than a verb. I understand you want the definitions to continue to show, and that is all. I also don't know when you, or if you ever, want them to disappear again.

Thanks for the explanation. I understood that part (which we don't have btw). I didn't understand "so we could refer back and line by line the text and translation".

Although I don't understand exactly what you are describing, I'm sure we don't have this. I'll put it in a ticket to see what the tech team makes of it, but I'll make no promises.

(Edit – this is 2 days old; I just forgot to post it)

Today is my last day in Korea, and I have to admit, I didn’t achieve the things I’d planned on. I had a lot of bad luck, tbh.

1)    Kakaotalk, the Korean Whatsapp that almost everyone here uses exclusively, didn’t work for me because of new restrictions against foreigners. Some foreigners have been able to get it to work, but after a couple hours of trying stuff suggested to me online, I gave up.

2)    The sim card that I purchased in advance was unable to give/receive phone calls or messages.

3)    Creating new Kakaotalk or Line (Japanese Whatsapp used by some people) accounts was impossible, because phone message confirmation is required, and as mentioned before, I couldn’t receive them.

4)    I couldn’t find any of the big language exchange meetings, which I depend on for meeting new partners to meet one-on-one with. They used to be listed in Meetup.com. In fact, many are still listed there, but I went to 3 different meeting locations at the appropriate time and there were no meetings. So I gave up on them.

5)    The language exchange websites that I’ve used in the past are really bad now. I was using 5 of them, and sent out literally hundreds of requests for exchanges, and only wound up with 2 language partners. I also had my friend from before, so 3 total. They are good partners, but not able to do the volume of exchanges that I was hoping for. I did about 15 exchanges; normal is around 50.

6)    The computer chair in my room is quite uncomfortable, preventing me from doing too much studying.

7)    The room is a bit depressing. It’s ground floor, but it may as well be a basement, judging from how the few windows are so covered up for privacy/noise insulation. It’s a nice little room, just depressing.

8)    I got very sick one of my first nights. I woke up in the middle of the night with terrible nausea, similar to how I felt when I had amoebas in the Philippines one year ago, and spent about an hour on the bathroom floor. I recovered quickly; it clearly wasn’t amoebas, but it really scared me.

So those are my excuses. I wanted to do a hard 100hr+ spurt, but ended up doing less than 50. The good news is that my level hasn’t dropped much, if any, since the last time I was here. So even though I clearly need to do a long hard Korean spurt, I’m not going to change the order that I’ve been planning on. It will still be German, Italian, Japanese, then finally Korean. German, Italian and Japanese all have very clear, achievable goals imo. But when I get to Korean, in addition to freshening up my conversation, I’m going to really attack listening, and try some intensive listening tricks I’ve heard of.

I want to be able to watch (listen to) K-dramas effortlessly. Using some tool like Migaku or Language Reactor, I’ll watch the first episode of a drama line by line. If I don’t understand it, I’ll check the Korean subtitles, and if I still don’t understand, I’ll check the English subtitles. I may harvest unknown sentences for anki; I haven’t decided yet. I’ll do this for a fixed amount of time, or fixed amount of anki cards, every day. At the end of each episode, I’ll discuss it with a teacher who has seen it before. I’ll do this until I finish the K-drama, then start another one if necessary.

Tomorrow I go to Thailand, where I start my final German spurt. It will be warm. There will be sunlight. There will be lots of people eager to meet me. Wish me luck!

 

Sarah.H wrote:

After using this a bit, the only thing missing to me is that the left and right keys jump to the next word that is highlighted (so either unknown or learning words) and skipping every word that is either set to ignore or known. Thanks :) Otherwise this is already very good!

Hi Sarah - we couldn't reproduce this. Can you provide a link to a passage it happens on?

Chris.C wrote:

Ah!! Hey, at least it’s in the works. Can gladly wait for this feature as long as it makes it at some point. Love the project! Rough eta? 1 year or so?

Sorry, I really have no eta.

There is a ticket in work for this (originally requested here). We don't have an estimated time of completion, unfortunately. We are running behind.

We don't have an offline version. It was deemed to be too much work when we looked at this years ago. I'll mention it to the tech team again and see if anything has changed.

Sarah.H wrote:

After using this a bit, the only thing missing to me is that the left and right keys jump to the next word that is highlighted (so either unknown or learning words) and skipping every word that is either set to ignore or known. Thanks :) Otherwise this is already very good!

Thanks - I forwarded this to the tech team to see if there is anything they can do.

Animefangirl wrote:

It would also be nice to have a way to flag issues with the original creator so they can fix them.

This is the way - they get a notification. I just try to be pro-active with these because original creators have a history of not following up.

Not ours, but here are some tips. You can copy a passage and edit the text. You can re-create a passage from the youtube video, in case the creator edited it in a way that you don't like. 

I've added the list of which Chinese language of youtube subtitles should map to which Chinese language in Language Crush to the ticket. I was surprised to see that there are 5 different categories for Mandarin, 3 for Cantonese and 4 for Other in youtube subtitles.

Yup - it's a know "general" issue now, but thanks for pointing it out.

I know it's not optimal, but a work around that's not too intensive is:

1) create the youtube passage with the messed up, or missing, subtitles

2) use one of the many "download youtube subtitles free online" sites to obtain the correct subtitles

3) edit the passage with the correct subtitles

I did that with this one of yours.

One thing I forgot to address earlier - Chinese Mandarin can handle traditional characters; it's just not treated like a separate language. Regardless, we are still working on the ticket.

Thanks - ticket written

rinske.Visser wrote:

every time I try importing from youtube, instead of separating the sentences into words, every sentence is displayed as a separate word

Hi rinske. Sorry about that. Could you post a link to a video that does this?

I'm not sure. Ticket written.

Not mine, but I changed it to advanced. Judged on percentage of unknown words. The creator may disagree, and change it back if he wishes.

This is not one of ours, but I checked it out. The link they gave for the audio is an html file. I'll write a ticket to disallow non-audio files so that passages won't appear to have audio when they don't.

Happily, I finished my 50th hour of German conversation two days ago. After the 49th hour, I finally toggled my level over to B1! It feels really good finally being able to think of myself as intermediate. In two days I travel to Korea. I’ll be there for 1 month, and plan to learn German once every 3 mornings. I’ll be improving my Korean every day in the afternoon and evenings. Next, it’s two months in Thailand, where I’ll switch back to German every day. I hope to be B2 by the end of that.

I really like Seoul, because there is a very active language learning community there. I’ll go to several language exchange meetings, and might be able to practice all of my languages (well, maybe not Swahili). I’ll also try to do as many 1 on 1 exchanges, make friends and hang out. I have one friend in Korea, but we haven’t seen each other for 4 years, so I’m looking forward to our reunion. She got me to speak the informal language, and showed me a lot of different kinds of food. This trip should be great!

not my passage, but I fixed it

mahum.tofiq.6 wrote:

I am just starting out with this app/site and the only thing i see lacking is the ability to import passages via one click.

I'll discuss this with the tech team.

bbyj wrote:

Vietnamese - ~B1, on and off for 3 years, with month-long breaks.

Impressive! Do you have a family member who speaks it?

bbyj wrote:

Any news yet? I am loving this website and excited to be able to use it on Android this way.

My bad - the meeting was actually today (Saturday), and we just talked. They said it's probably a couple of weeks out. There have been a lot of changes made to flutter, so implementing this is more complicated than originally thought.

We have a meeting on Friday - I'll ask him then.

I finished my 27th German conversation today, making a total of 22 hours – the first 10 lessons were 30 min, and the rest have been 60 min. That leaves me with 28 to go to reach my goal of 50 hours before starting my travels on Nov. 1. About 10 lessons ago, I upgraded my level in italki to A2. I did this for two reasons. First, quite a few teachers won’t do conversations with learners below A2. Some have B1 cutoffs, and some even have B2 cutoffs! But those are somewhat rare. The second reason, I truly believe I’m A2. The first few hours of conversation were rough, as expected, and I thought German was going to be the only language where I never got any compliments from teachers. I’ve heard it’s a cultural thing, so I wasn’t worried. But since about the 15th hour I’ve gotten compliments in every lesson (except one, lol). The best compliment I received was that my A2 level was an underestimation and my actual level was B1. Of course I loved hearing that, but it’s not true. It give me hope though that I might actually be B1 before my travels. At this point I’ll say that it feels likely.

About that lesson where I didn’t get a compliment. It was with a teacher who talked really slowly and clearly, and corrected me brutally. It wasn’t fun, and being corrected for every little thing really slowed me down. It kept me from putting myself out there and taking risks. I decided to give it a chance because so many learners love to be corrected all the time. But I just confirmed that this really doesn’t work for me.

leosmith wrote:

bbyj wrote:

any update

No, but there is a meeting Saturday - I will try to find out the status.

He said "by next month".

I’m back to conversing daily again in German, and now it feels as expected. The bigger base, 3 months and probably about 250 hours, seems to have done the trick. I have 8 hours of conversation under my belt, and want to have 50 by the time I leave for Korea in November. I’ll be in Korea for 1 month, and I’ll probably drop down to 1 German lesson every 3 days. Then I’ll be in Thailand for 2 months, and back to Daily German conversation in the afternoon. When I hit 100 hours, I think that will be enough to wean it off slowly and put it on maintenance permanently. When I get back to the states in May, I should be in the clear to learn Italian for 6 months straight.   

bbyj wrote:

any update

No, but there is a meeting Saturday - I will try to find out the status.

I agree. This is one area that I hope will be greatly improved by AI in the future, but I'm not holding my breath.

Animefangirl wrote:

This isn't really advanced, though? More like intermediate, or upper-intermediate in a pinch.

It's not one of ours, but I changed it to Intermediate...hopefully the creator won't mind.

StewartLikesOPLingo wrote:

Left and Right arrow keys – move to the previous/next highlighted word k – mark the word as known x – "ignore" s – play the automatically generated text-to-speech audio On a unknown highlighted word: Up and Down arrow keys – move up or down in the list of hints and dictionaries Enter – select first recommended definition I'd also suggest that when selecting a definition for a new word, the red unknown highlighted word should turn green to signify you've seen it before and it's now a "Learning" word.

Sarah.H wrote:

Hello! Did any of this get implemented or are there any plans on doing so? Especially "k" for known would be extremely helpful to me :)

HolaIsabel wrote:

Totally agree with Stewart :) very needed

Ok, this is what we have now:

enter: use most popular definition

left, right to move left or right

space replay word definition audio

u → unknown

l → learning

k → known

i → ignore

Does it work for you?

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know that Edition 1 of Tagalog Lite is now released and available to use here for free. This edition is vastly improved. It is co-written by linguist MrGerbear (aka Gerard Avelino) of Reddit and other forum fame. We have incorporated all your input, including using the official pronunciation system. We have also designed the book on the colloquial language. Some grammar points that were in our Tagalog Conversations but not in the book got included, and other grammar points got fleshed out to reflect what native speakers actually use. If you would like to learn with the Grammar source that has the clearest explanations and doesn’t teach you a lot of stuff you won’t use, Tagalog Lite is for you.

Sincerely,

Leo

It means "I want mine". But looking at the context, it seems like the "mine" refers to samaki (fish), so I would have expected wangu. Cases are a weakness of mine; maybe changu is a general/sloppy way of saying "mine".

I changed it to Juma. Whoever made this course linked to html files instead of audio, unfortunately.

levi.taylor wrote:

Are there effective language-learning methods other than immersion? While immersion is often hailed, could well guided study with a tutor be more practical for certain learners?How do these approaches compare in terms of fluency development?

There are many effective language-learning methods, guided study with a tutor being one of them. It's hard to compare them in terms of fluency development - I don't know of any studies that do this, but would love to read some. Your best bet may be to try various methods and stick with the one that works best for you. To get a list of methods, you can google or ask chatgpt.

Alec.MacLean wrote:

Another question: In the last sentence, what does the word "sisi" do? It seems like the sentence would make perfect sense without it, and "sisi" just confuses things.

I agree that it's superfluous, but I'm not sure if it's grammatically incorrect. Notice that they say things like "Sisi tunatoka..." too. I'm sure this is grammatically correct, but sisi is not needed and usually dropped in colloquial speech.

Rildo.Ribaldo wrote:

This tool is absolute incredible

This dictionary is not a fit for the reading tool. Dictionaries must be of the type where you put a word in and get a definition out.

It's not one of ours, but I fixed it since it was an easy one.