Learning & Observing

I've got a passion for words, whether they are in my mother tongue or an entirely different language. One day I hope to be a polyglot by speaking German, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, and French fluently. I have dabbled a bit in each language through personal experiences, musical interests, and school. 

[asianhistory-blog]

General:

Lang-8 (Journal in another language, be corrected by native speakers. Do the same for others by correcting them.)

Livemocha 

Polyglot Link

FSI Language

BBC Languages

I Kinda Like Languages

GLOSS (Foreign Language Institute)

My Language Exchange

So You Want to Learn a Language

Mango Languages

Forvo

Learning with Texts

LingQ

South Asian Linguistics

F*ckyeahsouthasia #Language

Open Culture: Free Language Lessons (another masterlist)

Reddit Threads:

Arabic Language

Chinese / Chinese Language

Indonesian

Japanese / Learn Japanese

Korean

Hmong

Learn Vietnamese

Tagalog

Language Learning General

All in Chinese

Asian Dramas

SRS  (Spaced Repetition flashcards): 

Memrise (Iphone/pad app available)

Anki (droid/i-app avail)

Skritter (Paid: Japanese/Chinese; i-app avail.)

Mnemosyne

Arabic:

Books to Learn Arabic (Blogs list page)

Al3Arabiya

Mandinah Arabic (Free Printable E-books)

Bengali:

Fuckyeahsouthasia - Bengali .zips

So You Want to Learn…Bengali

Learning Bengali

Uchicago - Bengali

Peace Corps Bengali download

Bengala Instructional Materials

Learn to read Bengali

BBC Bengala

Bengali Podcasts

Burmese/Myanmar:

Burmese By Ear or, Essential Myanmar

Burmese Language

Chinese (Mostly/All Mandarin):

Chinese Grammar Wiki

Fluent Flix

Chinese Hacks

Social Mandarin

Hao Hao Report

Hacking Chinese

Reddit Resource List

MDBG

Why Chinese is so damn hard

sugoideas, Taiwanese dramas

Baidu radio, PRC radio stations

Mac TV, Taiwan TV

中文字譜, site for making mnemonics

Chinesepod

Reviewing the Hanzi

Perapera Chinese Firefox add on

Better Chinese (Paid)

China Sprout online retail

Chinese Grammar (eh, looks dull)

More Manhua

Chinese Rage Comics

English Slang in Chinese

Sentence Structure / Particles / Modals

Sinosplice

Pleco for iPhone

Chinese with Serge (he’s pretty clear)

Review the Hanzi forum thread

eStroke

Nciku (search characters by drawing them)

QQ international version / Weibo (Chinese “twitter”) / renren

Apps: Mindsnacks Mandarin ($5, personal recommendation), Manhua Reader App, Pleco, Word Tracer Learn Chinese, Chinese with Pengyou Pal

Books I own: (Far East) Illustrated 300 Chinese Character Dictionary, Reading and Writing Chinese (Tuttle), Chinese Link (favorite textbook so far), Integrated Chinese (Not as good as Chinese Link imho. Less organized/structured in a good format), Basic Spoken Chinese (Tuttle), Schaum’s Chinese Grammar

Gujarati:

Pronunciator

So You want to Learn… [Resource Masterlist]

Eye of India- Alphabet

Another masterlist

Gujarati Learner

Hindi:

Learning-Hindi

NYU - Virtual Hindi

Hindi-Urdu Flagship Resources (pdfs, textbooks, audio, etc)

A Door into Hindi

Indonesian - Bhasa Indonesian:

Indonesian-Online

Korean:

Hangul Type Attack

Seemile (Also learn Chinese)

Talk to Me in Korean

My Korean 1 & 2

Hangul

Busy Atom

Korean Wiki - Hangul

Dictionary

Grammar Dictionary

Radio Korea

Songang Korean Program

Hulu Kdramas

Airang “I Love Korean”

Seoul National University Korean Crash Course

Apps: Korean Letters Lite App (Free/Paid available), Korean Study Buddy App, Learn Sounds of Korean App (currently free)

Korean Champ

Korean Class 101

Hangukdrama and Korean

Learn Korean

Resource List (Also Japanese)

Books: Integrated Korean (Common textbook, friends used/liked it for class), Learn Korean for Beginner’s (Tuttle), Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook.

Japanese:

All Japanese All the Time (AJATT method; perhaps worth a read for other languages)

So You Want to Learn Japanese…

Perapera Firefox add on

Reviewing the Kanji

Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese / The app

Beginner’s Guide

Kanji Damage

Tofugu / Textfugu (Some-Paid)

Rikaichan FF/Chrome

Gakuu

Subs2SRS

Hiragana42

Lingualift (Paid)

I Know! (Paid)

Nihon Shock ($25)

Tagorin Dictionary

Read the Kanji

Nihongo Dekimasu

Before Breakfast

Kotodama Typing Game

Real Kana

The Japanese Page

All Kana Aesop’s Fables (Practice translating)

Manga RAWs

Apps: Kana iphone/ipad app (all Japanese game), Ninja worlds (free/paid $3 app), Human Japanese (Free/$10)

How to Read Manga/Watch anime (and understand) in 2 years

Pastebin Reddit Resources

Pera Pera Penguin

Nihongo e na

Jbox Study items

Other Books: Remembering the Kanji

Malay:

Learn Malay

Tamil

F-ckyeahsouthasia’s Tamil

UPenn Tamil

Thai:

Learn Thai

Learning Thai

TV Method Thai (Immersion oral learning)

Learning Thai

Thai-Language

Women Learn Thai — Check the detailed Resources Page.

So You Want to Learn… List:

Ainu, Arabic, Azerbaijani (Azeri), Balinese, Bengali, Burmese (Myanmar), Cantonese (Yue), Cebuano, Fuzhou (Foochow), Gujarati, Hakka, Hindi, Hmong, Indonesian, Japanese, Javanese (Basa Jawa/Jawi), Kannada, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Khmer (Cambodian), Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Malay (Melayu), Malayalam. Mandarin (Chinese), Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Oriya, Pashto, Persian (Farsi, Dari, Tajik/Tajiki), Punjabi (Panjabi), Shanghainese (Wu), Sindhi, Sinhala (Singhalese), Tagalog (Filipino, Pilipino)  Taiwanese (Minnan, Southern Min, Hokkien), Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur (Uighur), Uzbek, Vietnamese

Other:

Tumblr tags: #learning _________ 

Can I become Fluent in ______ in ______ months/weeks/days?  No. You can’t. 

Can I learn Japanese from just watching Anime/Korean from Kpop/Chinese from Wuxia films? Not on your life. Do you only speak the english you know from Spongebob? N’SYNC? The 300? Didn’t think so.

What about Rosetta Stone? For $180-$399 dollars? Are you insane? The program is built to teach you the Romantic languages.  If you buy Rosetta stone for $400, and pass up every free resource on this list, I doubt your desire to actually learn anything. Don’t do it to yourself. That is a lot of money you probably won’t get back.

But I heard that Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Arabic/etc is really difficult: Well if over a billion Chinese people can speak Chinese, why can’t you? No really, don’t let something like this bother you. No, this is not the ease of moving from a English to a Romance language or German, but hey, if you wanted to learn German (and all those ridiculous cases) you’d be doing that. 

But what about ______? I have knowledge on resources mostly limited to JPN/CHI/KOR classes. This is a participatory list, which I am more than grateful to take submissions for.

[anotherlanguageblog]

I repost this every two weeks whether I need to or not. It too good not to and the original compiler deserves that much respect.

[linguisten]

Basic order typology, New York style

(Source)

[pr1nceshawn]

[mymodernmet]

Thrillophilia, an online marketplace for tours and activities, compiled a list of countries, cities, and destinations that many of us may have been say incorrectly all along. Each graphic features a side-by-side comparison of the common, incorrect pronunciation juxtaposed with how the locals say it.

[yamaharfang-deactivated20161227]

Americans will never be able to pronounce Worcestershire or Gloucestershire. (Also I’m sure some Québécois would rather that it be pronounced Montréal but w/e…)

[valerie-an]

You say that, but have you ever been to Massachusetts? We’ve got those -cester pronunciations down

[tipsforlanguagelearning-deactiv]

I absolutely hate posts like this

You don’t even have to read it, it’s so useless. Someone interviewed tons of people and that was the only “advice” they could think of to write down? Or, worse, that was the only advice any of those guys actually said?

1. If you learn the written language first, your spoken language is going to be a lot worse and going to be affected badly by it for a long time. Take me with Swedish - all the words and phrases I learnt through listening, I can say very well. Then all the words I learnt through reading I say like shit or are generally uncertain on how to say, and I forget the pronunciation because my brain focuses on the spelling. It’s because “what you think the text should say” or “how the word is spelled” interferes with your memory of how it should be said… something like that. What I mean is, if you can, learn the SPOKEN LANGUAGE FIRST or exactly alongside the written one (ex. using the Read-Listen method). They say it takes longer to un-learn the mistake that you learnt first - in this case, your mental pronunciation of the word is your mistake. (Writing is, however loosely, based on pronunciation. Even if you spell a word wrong, if you spell it according to pronunciation people will still understand you)

It can be really difficult when you go to class or learn from books because a lot of teachers will try to make you say or learn the full forms or textbook forms that no one actually uses. Most likely you already have an accent in this new language, adding “words that no one ever says” on top of that makes it more difficult for them to understand you. When I say “tjugofem (25)”, which is the form that textbooks teach you or what you might see in writing, often people don’t quite understand the first time or it takes them a bit. When I say “tjufem”, which is what I learnt from listening, they always understand on the first try even though I can’t say “tj” (a special sh sound) correctly.

People scoff at stuff like using latin letters with Japanese. However it’s only a problem when the transliteration is bad. If you are using letters that actually show how the words are pronounced (ex. ん makes different sounds depending on which sounds are alongside it; the u and i in “ku, chi” like to disappear; oh and of course mark the intonation in the words and sentences using underlines and overlines or a similar method)

2. All languages can be broken down into parts. To learn a language, learn parts. Learn prefixes and suffixes, learn little grammatical words, learn conjunctions (“connecting words” for sentences that can change the whole meaning - and, but, despite that, however, unfortunately), learn the pronunciation of every sound (as in, learn how to pronounce all the vowels and consonants properly) and the pronunciation of the entire words and sentences will come with time… Learning a language through these parts is like trying to fill in the holes in a net with a machine, versus trying to fill in the holes in an empty void with your own two hands (which is how it is if you just sit around learning “doghouse” without knowing it’s made up of “dog + house”, or if you don’t know what the “-dom, -hood” in “brotherhood, kingdom” means when you learn those words).

3. In most cases, languages are not as set as textbooks or lessons or even native speakers would like you to believe. There may be new grammatical forms that popped up in the 90’s for example, that now are becoming customary everywhere and you need to know them but your textbook won’t teach them because it’s “improper”…. you get what I mean. You know the feeling of someone using “book language”, right? You know that in English, no one would ever speak (or, increasingly often, write) using “proper grammar”, right? That’s part of the reason why I don’t recommend using textbooks or lessons to learn the language as a whole. Learn GRAMMAR from a combination of textbooks/grammar compendiums and get familiar with it by seeing it used in “real life”. Learn a piece of grammar, then have a webpage where you collect sentences that use that grammar for example. You’ll likely learn it much faster than from your book alone. Learn WORDS and WAYS TO SAY THINGS entirely from “real life”.

However it can be really difficult finding lessons that actually teach which “rules” natives break, or which words they drop. You might even have to make them yourself as you come across things. For example, I’m not sure how many books teach that Swedes will say “I must to the train; I must to the job” and not “I must go to…”. Or that the pronunciation of räkor, gurkor etc. is actually räker, gurker (where I live anyway).

4. It’s very easy to improve your vocabulary further after you know the entire rest of the language (all the grammar and pronunciation for example). Vocabulary comes automatically with using the language - grammar doesn’t always. But to improve your vocabulary… simply read and watch and listen to things you never normally would, it’s that simple. Go read old books (100+ years old, 300+ years old!), read fiction, economics textbooks, whatever, just get far out of your comfort zone and you’ll learn more words. Often people get “content” after they reach conversational fluency but their vocabulary is lower than it could (or sometimes should) be just because they never go out of their comfort zone after that. I’m thinking about a lot of bilinguals-from-birth that I’ve met in my life in particular.

Misc. tip: Pay attention to natives’ handwriting. I don’t mean this just for, say, Japanese. In Sweden, if I don’t put a cross on my q then they think it’s a g…

[topplingmasonry-deactivated2020]

[facets-and-rainbows]

Japanese saying of the week!

一寸先は闇（いっすんさきはやみ） The future is a mystery

For situations when no one can even sort of predict what’s going to happen next.

一寸(いっすん/issun) one sun (old unit of measurement, about 3 cm)

先（さき/saki） just in front of

は(wa) marks the topic of a sentence (this sentence is about the space just in front of us)

闇（やみ/yami） darkness

So literally “It’s dark one inch in front of us”

[bernadettelogue]

Allow yourself to be a beginner. No one starts off being excellent.

[allthingseurope]

Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany (by Bernat Beata)

[word-passionate]

Me: *starts reading a paragraph in Spanish*

Me: *sees "não"*

Me: Wait

[learnbritishenglish]

Please see this excellent visual with colour showing word stress in British and U.S. pronunciation of English words:

http://www.learnbritishenglish.co.uk/british-vs-american-english-word-stress-visual/

[augustarambles]

For a second I though this was some odd list on what causes people the most stress in Britain versus America

[steddie-island]

Same.

[word-passionate]

Okay so...

It really has been a long time since I've used this blog. I tend to update my main blog more often: thediaryofeyes.tumblr.com. However, I do want to start updating this blog more frequently.

So some updates:

Next semester I am going to start taking Korean (finally!). 

Next year there's a strong possibility that I will be studying abroad in Tokyo. 

I have completely lost touch with German and Portuguese because I haven't studied either of them in months.

I switched my major from Journalism to Political Science. I'm going to be focusing on the International Relations discipline of Political Science, so obviously my polyglot desires will have some use.

Stress has really put a damper on my ability to focus on anything other than schoolwork but I want to get back to allowing myself some time to pay some attention to my interests. 

 So yeah~

[word-passionate]

Four months.

i'm back after the longest hiatus ever.

Oi!!

[word-passionate]

me: yes i speak that language

me: no not that part

[reblogthis-if]

[liebesdeutschland]

East Side Gallery

[kudou-kun]

貴重な一瞬 by (テ ツ)