>>4335
Pick up the dutch materials, and don't worry about memorizing gender endings.

>>4545
cool but don't use a determiner with an adjective
just say "je suis mince"

Frances solo es Espanol con un accento de un joto.

J'etais en francais class pour trois ans. Mon prof etais tres mal, et ma vocabulaire est petite.

Francais, je te deteste.

Um.... slowly.
I'm not the only one on here "studying" Scots Gaelic... I kinda put that on hold till I graduate. More free time and all. It's possible I'd build off that and try to conquer Welsh in the distant future, too.

Native American Languages.... I'd love to. My goal is to learn one language from every continent. Obviously I have Europe down. Both Americas are yet to be even investigated, though I loooooooove the Cherokee alphabet.

And why is every third person on here into Icelandic?

>>4560
>And why is every third person on here into Icelandic?

Because picture related.

>>4560 because its cool.

Simple OP, watch JDoramas. There's tons of them, and they're pretty good and you wont find any bullshit badass sounding people. (At least in the slice of life ones)

Def watch GTO and My Boss My Hero.

watch anime. it's fun and a good way of learning slangs. there's a lot of difference between how you (as a foreigner) is supposed to speak and how the locals speak. so we end up learning the most polite way of talkin and writing and it's so different from what the nihonjins use in their day to day exchanges that you feel like you havent learned anything at all.
my advice-keep reading books and keep watchin subbed videos.
>>4462 does have a point. dont go for the extreme anime.

i think you should watch old anime stuff. like galaxy express 999 or candy candy. They speak very clearly and their words are very polite. I think old animes are the best to start hearing japanese.

Да я бы с удовльствием, но мне лень.

da yar bi s uu-davlstuvuim, na mne len?


except for the da and the yar part the rest i dunno what they mean X.x

Are you people allergic to looking at the sticky or something? Download resources there, work through them, ask specific questions if they arise here, how hard is that?

...isn't the chinese supposed to say something like 中文? :/

Also, i'd be interested in a study group. Not a competition though, sorry OP.

>>4529

Yes. You'd be surprised how many hacks there are out there who think they can write Chinese (or Japanese) just because they know the characters. Then again, I wonder if there isn't an acceptable alternative. I remember getting a Christmas card last year with the word "peace" written in 6-7 different languages and the example for Japanese was 和平, which is not the common way of saying the word (平和), but if you look it up in a dictionary, it is a synonym/alternate spelling.

>>4530
中国語 by all means isn't acceptable, it is either 中国语 or 中國語 - there can't be one character simplified and one not.
then again, 中国语 is a very uncommon way to refer to chinese language, at least i've never seen it (although i have had encountered 中国话 once).

aside from going to FInland of course.

The sticky motherfucker, do you check it?

Go download as many Finnish resources as you can and start working through them, that'll be a decent place to start.

http://yle.fi/ulkomailla/index.php?selkouutiset

Yeah, but do the asian ESL students actually go out and try to talk to people? Probably not. From what I've heard they all just chill out in one room. From what I was talking about, so long as you make the slightest effort to actually hand out and talk to people then learning by immersion would work fine.

First of all, ESL = English as a Second Language, and is used to refer to the English education immigrants receive while in an English-speaking country. Much ESL education is "grammar-less" because most students are young children who can absorb the grammar faster themselves because they are already immersed. Most ESL at the college level and above is not taught this way. Grammar is taught explicitly.

EFL, English as a Foreign Language, is what's taught in foreign countries. Students are not expected to become fluent in a few years because most will not have the chance to use the language in their everyday lives. With young children, grammar is rarely taught, but lots of attention is often paid to grammatical structures. With middle through upper grades, grammar is usually taught, but rarely in more than the bare minimum detail required for comprehension.

Whether total immersion is the superior method is subjective and depends on the purpose for which a person is learning the foreign language. Obviously a person who wants to be conversational or enjoy media in its original language doesn't need to know grammar the same way a professor teaching in a foreign country does.

>>4449

It involves being completely immersed in the language you wish to learn 24/7 and learning sentences using a srs.

Here's a link http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com

Well, for me it is a bit odd. The first language I learned (German), I learned because I lived there for two years (when I was a kid: Dad was in the military) and took two years of in high school. The oddest thing is that the language has, except for mostly vocab, stayed with me and faded very little in the 12 years since. I can still read/listen/speak at about the same level as I did back then with only the occasional thought to the language. Maybe because I learned some of it as a kid? I dunno.

The second language I learned (russian) was through no-shit immersion for a year. I mean 8 hours a day with several hours of homework and memorization a night for a full year. That shit is beaten into my brain. I don't study it, but I do read (novels) or listen (satellite channels) to it for at least 30 minutes a day.

Japanese I 'study' at about the same level as I do Russian, but my skills aren't really increasing. It is more maintaining.

My recommendation: If you wish to maintain your level in a language, at least 30 minutes a day 'exposure' to it (music, reading, movies, general conversation). That will lead to an increase in proficiency over a looong time, but is a slow way to learn. Add a half-hour of actual study (vocab lists, memorizing phrases, looking up the words you don't know from the earlier exercises to memorize them) is a decent place to start. A full hour of the language a day is a good pace that most people can handle day-to-day and will give you a steady, if slow, increase in the language. Without dedicated instruction and someone to go over your work and teach you each day, it is also a good level to set yourself without getting overwhelmed. You can see improvement every day, building on your previous knowledge steadily and it is hard to find excuses to NOT just spend that little time for self-improvement.

Above and beyond the hour a day... I would only attempt it by yourself if you know you can stick with it ahead of time or you might find yourself a little frustrated. Otherwise, I would recommend some sort of instruction or a partner to help guide you along. It is very easy to give yourself too much to learn. Its like working ou

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Well I read in my L2 everyday on the internet, including message boards, e-books and subtitled movies/video games, as well as occasionally watching a film in the language. I don't really study grammar or vocab anymore as I think I've gotten past that point.

>>4318
When people say "Gaelic" 95% of the time they mean "Scots Gaelic", Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic are usually just callled Irish and Manx.

I've been learning Scottish - Gaelic for a while now. Lathamath!

Celtic Languages (Goidelic): Scottish-Gaelic (Gàidhlig, about 70k native speakers) and Irish (Gaeilge, over 50k native speakers) are the two primary branches of Gaelic that 99% of the people out there think of when they think Gaelic. They are alsothe two most widely spoken Goidelic languages. In fact, at least in Ireland (not sure about Scotland), there are still a few communities and schools that are primarily in the native tongue. I would love to learn either one of these more in-depth and, as they are are very similar to each other (like english in rural America versus rural England, if we were to write how we spoke, trust me), it would be possible to do a little cross-learning later on. Manx (Gaelg) was mentioned and is the last of the actual Gaelic languages, but good luck finding someone to learn that from. There are probably only 1 or 2k of them left.

Celtic Languages (Brythonic): Welsh is a close cousin to Gaelic, much like Spanish to Portuguese and has the largest speaking population (3/4 of a million). It would probably be the easiest of em all to learn because of this, but there would be more difficulty in cross-learning. Welsh also has two smaller sister languages: Cornish (about the size of Manx, dying), and Breton. Breton is spoken in the top left corner of France, in a place called Brittany, and has a very interesting history if you have the time to Wikipedia it. It is also the second largest language (~200k) of all we have mentioned here. I think it would be cool to learn a bit of it, personally.

If you want to learn Gaelic, try to get a listen to what they sound like spoken by various people. I find if you don't like the sound of a language, you tend to lose interest in it pretty quickly. Scottish-Gaelic is harsher sounding than Irish, but, at least spoken-wise, the main difference is accent and pronunciation. The words are almost all the same. Seriously, go try and take a listen to people from Ireland (both speaking English and Irish, you can probably find it on youtube) and do the same with people from Scotland.

I would offer my service to help people learn Gaelic, but I am a novice myself and it has taken a back seat to my other languages. Trying to learn mor

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