Learning another language...

Okay, I've been wanting to learn german for quite a while now and finally have some real time to actually devote to this cause. A couple months ago I bought this "Teach Yourself (series) Begginner's German" but its been on the shelf for awhile, I plan to start this week, but wonder if there's anything I should keep in mind or know before starting to teach myself this stuff.

Has anyone else here ever attempted or had success in learning a foriegn language by themselves? I'm sure there has to be a couple of you out there? Any adivce would be great!

Well, It depends on how you want to learn. If its just know words, and being able to read and write, then sure, it can be done. Before I came to US, I was studying English as school first, and then later on, by trying to read simple English books, playing and translating text in games, and spending alot of time with dictionary. I couldnt really speak well, but I did understand alot of written, and some of spoken dialog(if it was pronounced well).

If you want to learn how to pronounce words, and being able to actually speak the language, you will need to communicated with people who know said language, and can help and correct you.

Yeah - see thats where I might trip up on this... I would actually like to read (obviously write) and speak the language as well... I know that it wouldn't be a fluent way of speaking but enough to form coherent sentences in German. But I no absolutley no German people or people who speak the language - oh well, I'll still give it shot though. I hope to someday soon travel Europe and it'd be nice to be prepared.

While not yet a success at learning languages, I am making my way in Japanese and I'd like to learn Russian.

But as it is, if you need to learn, use Power Glide. Ignore the dumb name and high prices; this series works. They work you through languages as you learned them as a child.

You start by learning just the sounds and basic phrases. You know what they mean but you don't know much about them. And then you move on. It works really well.

station82o: You can definitely learn a language on your own.. and you can even learn to speak and comprehend fairly well on your own if you have to. Despair is correct in saying that it would be ideal to have another human around to learn from - but barring that there are other things you could do. I would recommend getting an interactive CD-Rom or at the very least some audio-cassettes. Theese will help you immeasurably getting the accent and comprehension down. For a popular language like German you should have no problems finding great resources! :)

If I can find Swedish CD-Roms, you can find a German one!

As for the books you got, I can tell you than in general the "Teach Yourself" series of language instruction books are not very well regarded in reviews I have read. I have used a few of them myself and my experience echoes what I have read. The Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian ones are pretty bad. But with a series like this some books are better than other and I don't know how good the German one is. I hope it's good.

Anyway, as for general advice. I am self taught to various levels in various languages. I am unfortunately not fluent in any of them yet though. In Swedish and Norwegian I am at an intermediate level. I can read and write it fairly well, and my comprehension is so-so. I like to watch movies with subtitles (that's another great way to practice your comprehension. There are plenty of great German films out there you can rent or buy). I really want to become fluent in Swedish, but I never have enough time to practice it seems. Lucky for me this is the one language I seem to pick up really fast and easily. :)

I have less knowledge of Icelandic and Czech. I can't really understand them but I know the basics so if I have some resources like a dictionary I can translate things sometimes. Icelandic is hard because it has incredibly complex grammar.. but luckily a lot of words are similar to Norwegian (since Icelandic is old Norse) so I can pick out a lot of vocab. I was shocked at how much I understood when I visited Iceland. Not grammar - just words. :)

I also took German (1 year) and French (1½ years) in uni. My French is pretty decent. It's close to Swedish for my best language but it comes a lot harder for me. Being in Montréal helps me a lot but I can't really have "normal conversations" with people. Luckily everyone here speaks English too. Normal conversations is really the mark of fluency. If you can express yourself easily in a language you're where you want to be. With French I basically order food and deeal with simple issues. No philosophical convos for me yet! :p

As for German, I am OK with it. The problem is I studied it in 1997 or so and I have not used it much since then. My impressions of the language are that it's not that hard. It's very easy to get the accent and pronunciation down because unlike English it is very consistent. If you know what the sounds are you (which you should learn right away) you will know how a word should sound. When I was taking German it didn't take long before I was able to read/translate German websites. When I went to Germany in 99 I faired ok and I probably learned more in that week than in my entire uni experience. Every time I'd hear someone say something "correctly" that I said wrong I could correct myself. It also helps a lot with accent.

The key to learning language on your own is comprehension I think. I have read a lot of linguistic theory books and it is my opinion that the most important thing is simple understanding. Grammar should come second because it will come naturally to you once you start learning more and more. Don't be afraid of using the wrong gender or spelling things wrong. Many books will/classes will focus far too much on anal things like this, where you can easily get bogged down and frustrated. I say do your best and always try to improve your grammar but don't let it slow you down. Concentrate more on putting sentences together that people will understand. Once you become more familiar with the language and get more experience with it, the grammar problems you may have will correct themselves because they will just seem wrong. Sort of like how if you said "a apple" instead of "an apple" in English it would just sound wrong. That will come with any language you study if you stick with it.

Oh one more thing... look for kids books! Don't be embarassed. If your level is low there is no shame buying kiddie books. They'll help you understand.

Also, there is a series of language learning books called "Learn (Language) In 10 Minutes a Day". They're grrrreat! They focus on understanding not on grammar and they have nice illustrations. They seem like books for kids but they're superb and have a great reputation. I have the Norwegian one and it helped me much more than most other language books I have used. I highly recommend getting the German one - if it exists (it probably does).

Anyway, good luck with your learning. If there are any other questions I can answer I will. Linguistics is one of my favourite hobbies. :)

German is relatively easy, in terms of sentence structure and pronunciation. Very similar to english, but since english is derived from gemanic language, that's to be expected. :) Biggest thing to remember is practice. The hardest thing about learning a new language is sticking with it. That's the main reason I haven't gotten too far with Japanese.

Depends on you. If you're really dedicated, sure you can learn from books and on your own. But I find that memorizing vocabulary from a dictionary to be boring, which is where watching shows and listening to stuff and reading books comes in. Also, I find that having a real-life teacher or buddy to at least teach you the basics and/or intricacies of grammar is useful, vocab you'll pick up word by word.

But if you really want to learn it well, you gotta be immersed in it. The 3 months I spent in Japan earlier this year did wonders for my Japanese.

The books I like the most for learning languages (I have varying levels of proficiency in four languages) are workbooks that require you to do a lot of writing and story books. I steer well clear of tourist guides or other books that concentrate on ordering food and asking for a hotel room. I enjoy learning verbs and basic nouns first, then writing them out in sentences over and over - in different configurations of course.

Look for a book with shorter chapters and a lot of lines to practice writing things out. After a while, you can progress to beginner-level readers that have footnotes and definitions on the page to help you along.

One of the great joys I felt teaching myself a foreign language came upon reading an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' "The Brave Little Tailor" in French. It was exhilirating. I hope you feel that joy relatively soon in your study of German.

Take a lingustic class.. prefable Anthropology.. Well We invented lingustics any was..

Morphology, stucutrem of phonemes, and morphemes, generative strucutre and such.. are more helpfull, and learn faster. once your know these.. Then taking class and reapting youself, every day..

A foumos Linguist said, once you know the morpology of any langauge.. You can learn ANY LANGUAGE in the World, in six weeks..

In a class.. for 1 hr.. a week... I learned a little hindi.. Hell, if i was in a regualr hindi class.. what i learned in quarter.. would have taken a year. Jata Hah...

sggg: Thanks for the information - I'll have to check out those series of books you recommended (I work at a bookstore, so I think I may remember what you're talking about) - I neglected to mention that my Teach Yourself German came with two audio cassetes...so I'm not just going dry from a book. By the way - what is your take or opinion on the Finnish language - is it relatively hard or easy, and do you need to understand Swedish to understand Finnish (I hear the two are somewhat closely related because ppl in Finland either speak Finnish or Swedish)? Finnish is the language I'd like to tackle next if I succeed at German.

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Originally posted by station82o
sggg: Thanks for the information - I'll have to check out those series of books you recommended (I work at a bookstore, so I think I may remember what you're talking about) - I neglected to mention that my Teach Yourself German came with two audio cassetes...so I'm not just going dry from a book. By the way - what is your take or opinion on the Finnish language - is it relatively hard or easy, and do you need to understand Swedish to understand Finnish (I hear the two are somewhat closely related because ppl in Finland either speak Finnish or Swedish)? Finnish is the language I'd like to tackle next if I succeed at German.

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Uhoh.. bad news. :(

Finnish is known as the most difficult language in the world to learn. It has something like 14 cases and things like word-order don't matter because the words change so much depending on the case. It's ridiculous. It's a beautiful language.. but it's supposed to be crazy-hard to learn. Not impossible though! ;)

Finnish is a unique language and it is in the Finno-Ugric language family. The well known only language that is similar to it is Estonian. Barring that the only other major language in Europe that is even slightly related is Hungarian/Magyar (another anomoly), and even then it's only on an achedemic level and not a practical one. :eek:

Most of the other languages in Europe are in the Indo-European family which means that they are not that different from each-other. This includes Swedish, German, and English. So, Swedish and Finnish could not be more different in spite of their proximity and shared history (and yes, you are right that Swedish is an official language in Finland). A quick example in the difference between the two languages can be seen in the different place names in the two languages:

Finnish: Turku
Swedish: Åbo

Finnish: Helskini
Swedish: Helsingfors

Finnish: Ahvenanmaa
Swedish: Åland

Swedish is quite similar to Norwegian and Danish though - so much so that a Swedish speaker can pretty much understand the other two languages (and Norwegian Bokmål is practically Danish itself). Also, learning German would help a bit with Swedish.. (not that that helps you.. hehe). Swedish is more similar to German than English and having learned some German first helped me with Swedish. Swedish is much easier though because there is a lot less grammar to worry about and it's more informal.

Anyway, if you go for it I wish you luck! I'd love to learn Finnish one day myself because it's really cool and interesting.. but I'll just bee happy to get Swedish down pat! :p

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"Finnish is known as the most difficult language in the world to learn."

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..... :( .....thanks....

Oh yah.. German should be easy as hell.. Being English is a Germanic language..

I would say: There goes our hope of speaking to each other in Finnish. I will try to learn German with you... Swen at work can help me out a bit too I'm sure. I also want to learn more French :)

ºTracer

Same deal with Romance European languages...I've found that Spanish was pretty similar to English, and after that, the structure of Italian and French were even easier since I knew Spanish.

I would like to learn some of those Scandanavian languages though, since I know practically nothing about them.

Well I'll at least try to give Finnish a shot after German - I mean... why put the horse before the cart...or...wait...the cart before the horse?... Fuck it, you know what I mean.

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Originally posted by Yamcha
Same deal with Romance European languages...I've found that Spanish was pretty similar to English, and after that, the structure of Italian and French were even easier since I knew Spanish.

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This is definitely true as well. Anyone who speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian would have a much eeasier time learning one of the others listed because they are very similar and share many words as well as sentence structure.

English is not a "Romance" language though. It's a branch of the Germanic family. But.. English is the Germanic language most similar to the Romance languages, because it has borrowed so heavily from French over the years (due mainly to historical reasons where French was the language of the elite in England). Conversely, French has also borrowed a lot from English and is the most Germanic "Romantic" language.

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I would like to learn some of those Scandanavian languages though, since I know practically nothing about them.

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I can happily report to you that they are among the easist languages an English speaker can learn. Well, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish anyway. Icelandic and Faroese are quite difficult grammatically speaking. :)

Trivia:

The easiest language in the world is supposed to be Tagalog. The easiest European language is supposed to be Serbo-Croatian.

:)

Wow! sggg sure does know his languages. ;)

surely the official TNL language professor

The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the culture. Trying to learn the language the way you learned your first language is going to be difficult because you do not learn languages the same way the second time around. There's interference from your 1st language, cultural habits and nuances that are hard to get around, etc. In order to learn a new language, you have to let go of your culture and embrace the culture of that language, no matter how weird it seems to you.

Going to a foreign country isn't practical for many learners so you should try to immerse yourself as much as possible any way you can. I always tell my ESL students to read magazines such as Time, or National Geographic, to watch the news or channels such as the Discovery Channel, etc. That way, they can get a feel for how the language is spoken without having to worry about accents, slang, and anything else that is region-specific or unique to only one English-speaking culture.

Try getting literature in the language you want to learn (go to websites in that language), use tapes (it'll help only so far but it's good to actually hear a native speaker using the language correctly). If you can rent movies in that language, do so. You can learn the morphology of a language but your communicative competence will be too low to use that language correctly. Once you get the idea of how things are said, done, and thought in English out of your mind, you'll be amazed at how much easier learning the language will become.

Remember that not all languages are SVO (subject, verb, object) like English is. This can be pretty tricky to get around if you aren't ready to accept it.

Mark Twain was at a German play once. His friend got up to leave and asked if he was coming. "No," replied Twain, "I think I'll stick around for the verb." :lol:

Don't think of the language's culture as "inferior" or wrong. It's just different. Many Americans tend to adopt a superior attitude when it comes to languages, which doesn't really help at all.

Everything Melf said is very good advice.


Also, he reminded me of a joke that I once read in a lingistics book:


Q: What do you call someone who speaks 4 languages?
A: Quadrilingual.



Q: What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?
A: Trilingual.



Q: What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?
A: Bilingual.



Q: What do you call someone who speaks 1 language?
A: An American.



:lol:


When I told that joke in my French II class at university (in NJ) no-one laughed except for the professor, who laughed quite a bit. :p

from personal experience, I would say textbooks are the next best thing to a class. Be sure to get the corresponding workbook...if it's a good book to study from, chances are there will be a workbook and even an audio tape/disk to get.

I would love to learn a language, but I doubt I could apply myself hard enough to become fluent. Also, I have no idea what languagge I'd like to learn. Russian would be cool i guess, or Dutch...

What are the most common languages? If I remember correctly, its english, french, and mandarin, but I could be wrong.

Hey sggg, I remember in my earlier days, my french teacher said that "le" and "la"meant that something was masculine or feminine. What decides what gender is attributed to something is in french?

I don't know about French but in Spanish, "la" is feminine (singular) and "el" is masculine (singular). I'd imagine it's similar.

The gender article was something I found very tricky to learn in Spanish. My brother once told me that the majority of words ending in the letter "o" were masculine. When I learned Spanish, I found that this isn't always true.

Anyone know if it's similar in French?

My mother is French and my dad is English so i'm bilingual through this. I'm now doing a 4 year course for Japanese (~12 hours of lectures a week) and French (3 hours) at university so I do enjoy languages. I could never learn out of a book though, I need to be in the country or have classes. Incidently my brother is learning Korean, heh.

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Originally posted by arjue
What are the most common languages? If I remember correctly, its english, french, and mandarin, but I could be wrong.

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it's Manderin, English, and Hindustani: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html

French is #10.

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Hey sggg, I remember in my earlier days, my french teacher said that "le" and "la"meant that something was masculine or feminine. What decides what gender is attributed to something is in french?

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It's pretty much random and this goes for most languages with genders. Often times there are general rules or guidelines to help you remember.... but there is no reasoning behind why one thing is fem and another is masc, and I think that's what you are asking.

Some languages like German have a "neuter" gender as well. :o

hmmmm, so if I was to invent something called, say, a bort, would I get to choose if its "le bort" or "la bort"?

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Originally posted by sggg
Uhoh.. bad news. :(

Finnish is known as the most difficult language in the world to learn. It has something like 14 cases and things like word-order don't matter because the words change so much depending on the case. It's ridiculous. It's a beautiful language.. but it's supposed to be crazy-hard to learn. Not impossible though! ;)

Finnish is a unique language and it is in the Finno-Ugric language family. The well known only language that is similar to it is Estonian. Barring that the only other major language in Europe that is even slightly related is Hungarian/Magyar (another anomoly), and even then it's only on an achedemic level and not a practical one. :eek:

Most of the other languages in Europe are in the Indo-European family which means that they are not that different from each-other. This includes Swedish, German, and English. So, Swedish and Finnish could not be more different in spite of their proximity and shared history (and yes, you are right that Swedish is an official language in Finland). A quick example in the difference between the two languages can be seen in the different place names in the two languages:

Anyway, if you go for it I wish you luck! I'd love to learn Finnish one day myself because it's really cool and interesting.. but I'll just bee happy to get Swedish down pat! :p

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i'm 100% finnish and i went to salolampi, the concordia finnish language village for 3 years, once for two week twice for a month. the immersion factor really helped, i was thinking in finnish after a while. i was able to learn incredibly simplistic finnish, and how to use most of the cases for a lot of words.

suomi is finland
suomea is the finnish langauge
suomalainen is a finnish person
mina olen suomessa means i am in finland
mina menen suomalle means i am going to finland

there is also weird consonant gradation, such as:

helsinki is the city of helsinki
sina olet helsingissa means you are in finland

there are also weird endings like ko that make verbs a question

menemmeko helsingille? means we go to finland?

but a lot of words changed so much that i couldn't understand them. the concordia language villages are great places if you are 18> and want to learn a language, but finnish is pretty hard as far as learning languages go. don't let the difficulty scare you away from learning finnish, it's a great language. you can ask me things about it if you want, i forgot quite a bit but i still have all my old notes and worksheets.

German is not that hard to learn if English is your mother tongue. Both languages originate from the same family. When learning, I suggest you hang-out with the German community for a while, try reading German books. If you have the time and money, stay in Germany for a while (I'm sure the latter is a sure-fire way to learn).