Hello everyone, I would like to learn a language since I only speak English and I don’t really know how to go about it.
is it really useful to learn the alphabet for a language like Italian or German?
should I just learn vocabulary or should I learn ready-made sentences?
should I learn grammar from the beginning?
If you have any advice for me, I’d love to hear it.
Ok, so, I’m from Brazil, so I speak Portuguese. But I learn Spanish and English with tv shows. First, you need to find a “child” tv show from the language you want to learn, like Gravity Falls, Voltron, Avatar, etc. And you need to watch 3 times the same chapter. And make that with all the chapters.
1° time - you will watch the chapter in the language you want to learn, like English, with subtitles in your native language
2° time - you will watch the chapter in English with subtitles in English
3° time - you will watch that chapter in English without subtitles.
So when you find a new word and you don’t know the meaning then you will make mnemonic to learn this new word.
You don’t need to lean grammar now, that is the least thing you will do.
I’m a native German and English speaker and I am learning French at the moment. Started in school a long time ago, but after a long hiatus, have only recently become serious about it.
What worked (works) best for me is:
Vocabulary first, starting with nouns. Learning the French words for everything closest to me gave me already a good feeling for the language. Before long, I wanted to learn verbs and adjectives.
Short sentences. Along the way, I learned short sentences. Doing that, I couldn’t help but learn something about the structure of sentences and some grammar, too.
I took some time before I learned grammar and I only started doing so when I felt I wanted to do it. I want this to be a fun experience, not a chore. And only once I felt a certain urge to put up with grammar, I looked deeper into it.
What helped me tremendously in starting off this journey was getting me a dictionary / tourist guide with all the basic vocabulary recommended. This dictionary has vocab and senctences by topic, so I could start in a field that interests me (again: fun factor).
Almost forgot: I read and talk out loud. In the beginning, I didn’t watch TV or YT-videos in French. Well, that’s not quite correct: When I did, I was shocked by how little I understood! But the more vocab I got under my belt, the more I started to understand and now I watch French videos again. Even though I have to rewind some parts again and again, it feels good and teaches me a lot.
I also hear Chansons from the 60s, 70s and later. I sense that French music is much different to German or English music and brings me the French culture nearer. It’s fun to hum along to a French tune, too, even with all the tongue twisters 
I have recently started to read my first novel in French and feel immensely enriched! (mind you, I still have to look up a lot of words and sometimes have to think hard about the meaning of the sentence. But as long as I find pleasure in doing it, I will keep on).
Hope this helps and wish you a lot of success!
There is a way to just learn vocabulary instead of learning ready-made sentences by dint of reading even if you only have vocabulary you can understand how to make a sentence, right?
Do you think learning 3000-5000 words is enough?
How do you go about learning Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Hebrew characters?
You might want to visit https://forum.language-learners.org where there are huge amounts of people who are learning hundreds of languages. I am the administrator of that forum, so I’ll take a stab at answering some of your questions. Firstly on that forum we have never seen a monolingual learner learn more than one language at a time. So I would advise you to pick a language you want to learn. One that you want to learn more than life itself, because you’re going to be stuck with it for years.
Construct sentence with only vocabulary can do but poorly. But learning grammar would have helped this sentence become “You can construct sentences with only vocabulary, but poorly.” So, no, memorisation of only vocabulary will not help. You need to know how to construct a sentence properly. For example, in Italian adjectives come after the noun. “The car red” not “the red car”, like in English.
Korean is an Alphabet, Chinese is a character set. You’d need different methods to learn them. Typically, alphabets are easier.
To learn a language, the first thing to learn is to learn how you go about learning a language. It is different for everyone, and until you’ve learned your first one, you’ll not know what works best for you.
Just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary.
So how do you learn characters?
If I learn grammar completely and then I only learn vocabulary, I would know how to build a sentence, right?
Depends on how much prior knowledge you have. If you spend some time learning the approx. 200 radicals in Chinese first, you’ll be much faster learning the characters as combinations of a couple of radicals rather than 20 odd strokes.
If you learn Japanese with knowledge of Chinese, you won’t have much difficulty with the Kanji. The Hiragana is also derived from old Kanji.
Korean has some basic CV, CVC structures to build up the characters and is probably the easiest you could learn amongst the three
Hebrew and Greek are pretty similar to the Latin alphabet as it is.
So learning characters on Anki is a bad idea if you don’t understand how they work?
Probably because people pick strange combinations if they don’t know what they’re doing. If English is your only language, you can certainly learn French and Italian at the same time
A) English is a Germanic language with tons of Romance vocabulary. 30% is basically French cognates and about half the vocabulary is either French or Latin
B) French and Italian have 89% lexical similarity. The grammar is practically the same with just a few minor exceptions.
Of course, German and Italian together doesn’t have that. Also, probably best to stick to Latin script language when learning a foreign language for the first time.
Another possible combination would be Spanish and Portuguese.
Chinese Characters are logogram or logograph which is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Therefore, you have to memorise each character individually in order to know the meaning. There are a number of different ways to learn, using memory techniques, Anki Spaced Repetition Software, you can write them out repeatedly. There are a lot of different methods.
Not only do you need to know the meaning, you also need to know the pronunciation. So unlike a language with an alphabet, where the sound is represented by a symbol, and you just combine them into the sound of the word. For a language like Chinese, you need to also memorise the sound of the word.
Your question is difficult to answer, because you have made some assumptions. The main problem is your thinking. IF THEN THAT. But it doesn’t really work that way. You need to do all of these things at the same time.
Learning enough vocabulary to allow you to construct basic sentences in the present tense. Then learning a bit of vocabulary and some grammar exceptions to the rule you just learned with the basic stuff from before. So you start to build up your language from the basics toward fluency. For example in English.
See Spot run.
See Jack run.
See spot run with Jack
I see both jack and spot run over the hill.
I saw Jack run.
I will see spot run.
So you’re not going to “completely learn grammar”, because even if you know all the rules, you need to know how to apply the rule in the situation you’re in. Same with driving, you might know the rule book by heart, but can you apply the rule in a real situation on the motorway while driving?
Also, people don’t tend to work with individual words as they become more fluent. They tend to operate in “chunks”. Things like “You wouldn’t believe …” Three words, but they are typically used as a “chunk”.
The best advice I can give you is to pick the language you want to learn first. Make sure there is something about the language or the culture associated with it you want, or there is some economic or social benefit from learning it. To know a language well takes years, not months or days. Don’t believe all the hype from publishers or people on YouTube who say you can learn a language in a month. It isn’t going to happen.
No, it is more often that they pick multiple languages, like 3-4. But even with only romance languages, there are problems with code switching, false friends, and other problems. However, the primary cause of failure is most monolinguals underestimate the sheer amount of time, energy and study it actually takes in order to learn a language.
It is funny you mention French and Italian, because these were the first two languages I learned. I started Italian a few years before French, but even so, I immediately ran into issues with word confusion between the two languages. I would be using Italian words in French sentences and the other way as well. Of course this can be overcome with work, but it is one of the reasons I always tell people to pick one language, learn it well. After that you can try to learn multiple languages, because at that point you know if you learn best from books, or audio, or TV, or grammar. You’ll know your weaknesses when learning a language and be able to compensate for those weaknesses.
No reason the OP shouldn’t try to learn a lot of languages, but most of the polyglots I know recommend doing the “Language+1” approach. Learn a language to B2 level, then add another, get that to B2 level, then add another. This is because once you get a language to a B2 level on Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) you’re not going to have as many problems with language interference when adding another.
Normally on the language learners forum we recommend if you’re going to learn 2 languages at the same time make them as different from each other as possible. Spanish and Korean, for example, because you’re not going to have problems around interference.
There is a superb website refold.la which gives a complete roadmap to learning a language using he immersion method.
A very high-level overview of the method would be to learn 1,500 words or so of the most frequently used vocabulary, and then to move straight into reading and listening to native content and doing as much of that as possible.
They recommend strategically sticking to one particular topic or domain (e.g. environmental issues) and focusing on the vocabulary for that domain until you have mastered it, because 500 words on one topic means you will understand the vast majority of that topic whereas 500 words of random vocabulary from a novel will not give you the same sense of improvement in comprehension.
Good luck.
When I read or listen to the words I recognize them but unfortunately I have to translate them into my first language. How can I stop translating in my head and let the words come to me naturally?
Since it’s only been a few days since you asked about learning a second language, let’s go with it’ll come naturally.
What language did you pick then?
I chose Spanish
So I have to continue to read and watch videos under title in language read and hear without understanding?
Start with the pdf-file that I’ve posted here…
Also have a look here for a detailed approach overall:
ps: click the links to read the entire thread
Just learn the onomatopoeia and use booklets for children. Try to communicate with children and slowly try to communicate with older kids. Finally you will be capable to communicate with adults. In Japan, you are totally lost if you do not know the vocabulary of kids and theirs onomatopoeia. Build up a huge vocabulary and learn the basic grammar.
If you have any tips on how to learn Asian or even Russian language characters I’m interested.
But on Anki how do I get Anki to pronounce the words in my deck that I built?
As far as Russian, it’s ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet and so is the Latin alphabet you are currently writing in, so it’s not that big a deal really. Maybe this might help: https://learnrussian.rt.com/alphabet/index.html
…as for “Asian” characters… what is that supposed to be?
Use a better SRS 