Learning a new language. Struggles, any hints?

Slippery said:

Mazdax605 said:

3 Months later I'm still plugging away, but also still struggling. I'm not sure I'm doing it correctly. Maybe I need to up my game, and do something harder than using this app. I have been conversing a bit with a German friend on Google Hangouts, but it's tough especially if he sends video with him speaking. It is just too fast for me. Maybe a second language isn't for me? Still having trouble with the Die/Der/Das thing.

Whomever tells you learning a new language is easy, either is under 10 years old or is bsing you. 

Keep at it. Dont give up. Buy a bunch of magazines and read them front to back. 

Nobody told me it was easy, but I just feel like I am struggling more than I should be. 

Knurled. said:

For German, what seems to happen (according to everyone I know who has spent time in Germany) is that, no matter how fluent you are auf Deutsch, they will hear your American accent and reply to you in English...

Exactly.

Same with speaking Japanese.  If you don't LOOK Japanese, they tend to be impressed that you're speaking Japanese at all.

Former sweetie was Japanese.  She's still Japanese, just not my sweetie anymore.

Slippery said:

Mazdax605 said:

3 Months later I'm still plugging away, but also still struggling. I'm not sure I'm doing it correctly. Maybe I need to up my game, and do something harder than using this app. I have been conversing a bit with a German friend on Google Hangouts, but it's tough especially if he sends video with him speaking. It is just too fast for me. Maybe a second language isn't for me? Still having trouble with the Die/Der/Das thing.

Whomever tells you learning a new language is easy, either is under 10 years old or is bsing you. 

Keep at it. Dont give up. Buy a bunch of magazines and read them front to back. 

This is so true.

Just keep plugging away at it, and things will eventually just start to click for you.

From my personal experience, I studied German in high school and two years of college before I went there.  I was relatively confident in my abilities- until I landed in Zürich.  And then Travelled to Freiburg.

I honestly wondered if I had been taught the wrong language.  In reality, I wasn’t prepared for the dialects I encountered- they are no joke!  But it eventually started to make sense.  And eventually Germans I encountered could tell I wasn’t a native speaker, but they couldn’t tell where I was from.  That was a big compliment.

Streetwiseguy said:

About 45 years ago, I learned that the French think a chair is feminine and a door is masculine, or some such bullE36 M3.  I couldn't make myself care much about French class after that.

I thought I wanted to learn German, until I discovered they had the same foolishness.

Maybe I'll try Greek, so I can understand what the guys in the kitchen are yelling about.

Bad news, languages with gratuitous genders for inanimate objects are EVERYWHERE, only about half of all languages are free from the scourge. The good news is that you can learn to reverse-engineer a word to figure out its gender, it's very easy in Spanish for example.

What bothers me about French is the massive disconnect between how words are written and how they're pronounced, English is actually relatively bad in that area but French has it REALLY bad. Silent letters are everywhere and they almost have silent words.

In reply to paranoid_android :

Learning "Hochdeutsch" (high German, ie the official written version) and then starting in Zürich of all places is like jumping into the deep end of the shark pool with a couple of hams tied to your ankle. Kudos .

IME it's usually immersion that works best for me. For example, my French used to get up to passable level when I got to spend time regularly in France. Right now it's horrible even on the passive (listening) side. Heck, even my German is getting rusty because I'm speaking and writing English 95% of the time.

That said, Netflix has a ton of foreign language movies and series. Maybe make that part of the language learning experience?

In reply to BoxheadTim :

My time in Zürich was brief, but I came away with a life-long love of Rösti.

From there I lived in Baden with Schwäbische friends. On the rare occasion German comes out of my mouth these days it is an interesting mashup of all three 

BoxheadTim said:

That said, Netflix has a ton of foreign language movies and series. Maybe make that part of the language learning experience?

This!!

Watch “Dark”. Damn good German show, you have three seasons worth of episodes!

paranoid_android said:

In reply to BoxheadTim :

My time in Zürich was brief, but I came away with a life-long love of Rösti.

That reminds me - I need to make some soon. I grew up on Lake Konstanz so we went to Switzerland pretty often. In fact, my mum lives in Switzerland these days. And yes, the Rösti addiction is real .

From there I lived in Baden with Schwäbische friends. On the rare occasion German comes out of my mouth these days it is an interesting mashup of all three 

I can imagine!

In reply to Slippery :

Babylon Berlin is supposed to be rather good, too. Haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

Slippery said:

BoxheadTim said:

That said, Netflix has a ton of foreign language movies and series. Maybe make that part of the language learning experience?

This!!

Watch “Dark”. Damn good German show, you have three seasons worth of episodes!

Been meaning to watch this, now I wonder if I'd be wasting an opportunity to learn German

Slippery said:

BoxheadTim said:

That said, Netflix has a ton of foreign language movies and series. Maybe make that part of the language learning experience?

This!!

Watch “Dark”. Damn good German show, you have three seasons worth of episodes!

Do you think a novice in the language could follow along with a German TV show? Basically think of me as a 2 year old with this language. 

In reply to Mazdax605 :

No, you probably will not but you have to start somewhere. Watch an episode in English and then watch it again in German? 

I would say watch it in German with English subtitles but then again halfway through you will be just reading and ignoring the sound. 

Slippery said:

In reply to Mazdax605 :

No, you probably will not but you have to start somewhere. Watch an episode in English and then watch it again in German? 

I would say watch it in German with English subtitles but then again halfway through you will be just reading and ignoring the sound. 

This.  Subtitles are training wheels for your brain.  You didn't learn to ride a bike until your training wheels broke.

Confession:  I have watched probably 100+ complete cours of anime, plus a few movies in Japanese both animated and live-action.  Understanding never progressed very far beyond numbers (thanks, Initial D!) and common phrases, because subtitles are much easier.

Knurled. said:

Slippery said:

In reply to Mazdax605 :

No, you probably will not but you have to start somewhere. Watch an episode in English and then watch it again in German? 

I would say watch it in German with English subtitles but then again halfway through you will be just reading and ignoring the sound. 

This.  Subtitles are training wheels for your brain.  You didn't learn to ride a bike until your training wheels broke.

 

Confession:  I have watched probably 100+ complete cours of anime, plus a few movies in Japanese both animated and live-action.  Understanding never progressed very far beyond numbers (thanks, Initial D!) and common phrases, because subtitles are much easier.

Our 17 year old watches tons of Anime as well, and has picked up a few things, but mostly he relies on the subtitles. 

In reply to Mazdax605 :

My late grandmother that immigrated from Germany after WW2 claimed she learned English from watching TV. I'm sure it helped, but I suspect sheer necessity and total immersion is the main contributing factor to her learning English.

In reply to Mazdax605 :

In high school I “ learned” French. I took it in college, and even some post grad courses.  Usually got pretty decent grades.  

Yet every class was like starting all over again.  I went up to Canada, Quebec and try as hard as I could I recognized an occasional word and stammered and stuttered until someone took pity and broke into English.  

I went to Europe  and did the same thing. Driving from Spain to Paris. 

However in Japan in three weeks I became semi fluent, enough to be in charge of temporary dock workers  and get required tasks done.  

In San Diego I picked up enough Spanish to be able to communicate with most Hispanic workers.  

Academic learning just doesn’t work for me.  I put countless hours of study and get no place.  Yet Japanese dock workers or Mexican upholster’s and I were able to achieve everything I wanted. 

Even though I took 10 hours of Spanish in college, the only couple of phrases I remember are from Pulp Fiction. 

Ah, German articles. Somewhere I have a list of rules that most nouns follow when it comes to gender, but it's about 1,000 miles away currently. Here's an easy one, though: nouns that end in an 'e'? Feminine. '-chen'? is neuter, I believe. 

Then you have to deal with the article cases: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. So, subject, direct object, indirect object, and possessive. 

Here's a mnemonic device that helps me: 

RESE (Die Maschine ist kaputt.)

NESE (Ich habe für meinem Vater die Maschine repariert.)

MRMNn(plus an 'n' at the end of the noun) - (Ich habe für den Kindern die Schokolade gekauft.)

SsRSsR (add an 's' to the end of masculine/neuter nouns) - (Das ist der Hund des Mannes.)

Mercifully, genitiv is not as common in everyday German. 

* My German is rusty, but I *think* my examples are closeish. Also, I learned Sachsen German, so YMMV. 

Still plugging away at trying to learn this difficult language. Learned a new word today . Zebrastreifen=Crosswalk, or rather literal translation Zebra stripes. I love that the have such literal translations like this. Another one I learned a few months back is Gluhbirne( I don't know how to type umlauts over a letter). Which equals light bulb, or literal translation, glowing pear. Cool language, but oh so tough to learn.

In reply to Mazdax605 :

At least you know what umlauts are. My last name has unlauts and my son's teacher called me into a meeting with her because my son was "using the u in my last name as a smiley face". 
Not sure whether it was more mind blowing to her to learn that ü was an actual letter or that if ahe did not like it she could exchange it for "ue" ... 

My son doesn't use the umlaut anymore as he felt mocked ever since. 

For Spanish, the novella shows, Spanish soap operas, or radio stations are good.  You have to learn to hear it, before you can speak it.  Every language has its own tempo, so to speak.  Only problem with this is that instead of a gringo speaking Spanish, I sound like a Mexican used car salesman, according to my son.

Japanese is tough, a lot of things are opposite of what you expect, speaking western languages.  I took Japanese in college, and was fairly fluent in French after 4 years of it in HS. The French was handy in boot camp, as there was this coon ass guy who was homesick for speaking it.  I kept mixing Japanese and French up when I was trying to learn Japanese though.

Alcohol and Karaoke turns out to be a thing in language learning. ( Intel from daughter who is learning Korean) Not necessarily posted on the school curriculum, but adopted by some of the students.

She also teaches English on line to make $$$. People wil pay good $$$ to talk to a cute girl who is non threatening to their language skills and has some training in elevating the level of conversation in an organic way. I asked her how this was different than phone sex and her only reply was that it did not pay as well. Did NOT ask her how she knew that.

Take a street person to the bar and buy them drinks. They will tolerate your lousy skills all day as long as you are buying. Some of them are a lot more interesting than you would think. Merchant marine, alcohol and homeless seem to have some kind of common ground.

Some truth to that about alcohol and learning a language. Sometimes hard to get the accent right sober. I learned a lot of Korean language (Hangul) when I was stationed in Korea from a corner store owner. I lived behind the store and would bring some American beer over after closing and sit with him sharing the beer. He didn't speak any English. He would point to things in the store and say its name and I would repeat. After a few beers I started to get the accent right. Used to spend my days off with some of the ladies from the clubs teaching them English and they would teach me Korean. This last part was before I met my Korean wife so don't tell her. After meeting her I watched a lot of Korean TV and got to where I could understand what was going on. Couldn't understand every word but enough to get what was happening. Out of practice now and can't speak as much as I used to.

My Korean wife learned a lot of English by watching TV, mainly "I Love Lucy". Used to come home from work and she had to tell me what she learned watching I love Lucy.

Mazdax605 said:

Still plugging away at trying to learn this difficult language. Learned a new word today . Zebrastreifen=Crosswalk, or rather literal translation Zebra stripes. I love that the have such literal translations like this. Another one I learned a few months back is Gluhbirne( I don't know how to type umlauts over a letter). Which equals light bulb, or literal translation, glowing pear. Cool language, but oh so tough to learn.

That's a good one. Many Literal translations like.. 

Mittwoch

...mid week = Wednesday. Languages are fun but I can barely speak one. I've heard that Korean is pretty easy to pick up.  

OHSCrifle said:

Mazdax605 said:

Still plugging away at trying to learn this difficult language. Learned a new word today . Zebrastreifen=Crosswalk, or rather literal translation Zebra stripes. I love that the have such literal translations like this. Another one I learned a few months back is Gluhbirne( I don't know how to type umlauts over a letter). Which equals light bulb, or literal translation, glowing pear. Cool language, but oh so tough to learn.

That's a good one. Many Literal translations like.. 

Mittwoch

...mid week = Wednesday. Languages are fun but I can barely speak one. I've heard that Korean is pretty easy to pick up.  

My favorite I've learned so far is Schildkröte, or turtle. It literally translates to shield toad. I love that.