Learning a language? Come share your progress here!

Started by Legend, Dec 20, 2016, 06:31 AM

previous topic - next topic

0 Members and 4 Guests are viewing this topic.

Go Down

Legend

Lots of us are multilingual or trying to be. Why not have a thread for this?

I'm a native English speaker and was near fluent in Spanish but now I'm rusty. I've been wanting refresh myself and for a while tried Duolingo for a bit.

I'd like to learn Japanese before going there one day.

I'd also like to learn American sign language. I live next to a huge blind community so it's not like this would be practical in day to day life but basic sign language feels nice to know. Plus I'm a nerd and sign languages have interesting grammar.

the-pi-guy

Use to know Spanish, to some extent.  

Learning Japanese.  Can introduce myself, get directions and stuff.

the-pi-guy

Japanese is a very cool language.  

They started out with a spoken language with no writing system.  They borrowed a lot of Chinese characters.  Kanji.  
From these they developed their own writing systema. Katakana which they use to write foreign words that kind of thing.  And Hiragana which they use to write Japanese words.  
Hiragana and Katakana have 46 characters, which all have one specific sound.  Kanji sounds very on context.  And some words use the same kanji for very different sounds.  
Sunday is nichiyoubi.  The kanji for bi and the kanji for nichi are the same in this context.  

Japanese is also SOV sentence structure.  
In English. We might day "Mike threw ball"
In Japanese, instead it'd be "Mike ball threw"  
I study Japanese.  
Becomes :
I Japanese study.  

Xbro

I'm learning C++. It ain't easy
3 people like this

nnodley

I took french in high school.  But it never really stuck with me.  I can tell someone what my name is though and still know how to say most of the alphabet.

the-pi-guy

Dec 27, 2016, 03:31 AM Last Edit: Dec 27, 2016, 03:33 AM by the-pi-guy
I took french in high school.  But it never really stuck with me.  I can tell someone what my name is though and still know how to say most of the alphabet.
In high school I took 3 years of spanish, didn't stick with me very much.  :P

One thing I didn't really like about class in high school, is that we had to pick a Spanish name. 
Whereas in my Japanese class, we were shown how to write our actual names in Japanese.  Which I really appreciated.  Did not have to pretend to be Timoteo or something... like I did in Spanish class. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I usually had like a list of like 10 languages I would like to learn in my lifetime.  Wasn't always the same list, but usually was like:
Japanese
German
French
Chinese
Russian
Spanish
Latin
Greek
Italian

Well there's 9 at least.
Arabic would probably be pretty useful.
---------------------------------------
On my plane ride, there was a gentlemen next to me who was Chinese and he was reading a Chinese book.  I thought it was pretty cool because I recognized a handful of symbols.  (I could tell it wasn't Japanese, there weren't any Hiragana/Katakana.) 
It is actually making me pretty interested in learning Chinese now.  More than before.  There are a lot of similarities with the writing. 

I'd like to learn Japanese before going there one day.
The Japanese major at my school uses the Genki books. There are 2 books + a supplement for each, and that basically covers the introductory Japanese (actually the first 5 classes).  And then Tobira is the book they use next.  Tobira has 2 supplementary books.  But those books cover the language learning at the University here. 

Don't know if that interests you at all, but I thought I'd mention it.  :D

--------------------------
On like a fourth note, I think my fiance will be learning Japanese with me.  Also at least one of my friends will be as well. 
Pretty cool. 

the-pi-guy

I wish there was more software for language learning.

I've posted a couple times already, but imagine Skyrim for language learning.  
A huge world where you get to explore and are able to make conversations with characters.  
You could have the game start with English and progressively go to some other language as the player learns more vocab and grammar.  Etc.  

I bet it would be the best language learning software ever.  

Legend

I've started learning Dutch. Sentence structure seems very easy for an English speaker but they have a few odd words compared to us. Has a third neutral gender unlike Spanish which is fun to get used to.

I wish there was more software for language learning.

I've posted a couple times already, but imagine Skyrim for language learning.  
A huge world where you get to explore and are able to make conversations with characters.  
You could have the game start with English and progressively go to some other language as the player learns more vocab and grammar.  Etc.  

I bet it would be the best language learning software ever.  
Would be really hard to make it have a good learning curve.

the-pi-guy

I've started learning Dutch. Sentence structure seems very easy for an English speaker but they have a few odd words compared to us. Has a third neutral gender unlike Spanish which is fun to get used to.
Language Difficulty Ranking | Effective Language Learning

Dutch seems to be a fairly easy language.  

This is interesting:
Frisian languages - Wikipedia

Would be really hard to make it have a good learning curve.
There are tons of aspects to it, that really would need to be figured out.  

How to teach:
I could imagine some sort of classroom experience.  You have to go somewhere and get taught by a character.  
I could imagine language options in a menu.  Where you could go to the menu and be taught a lesson, and enable/disable grammar lessons.  
Or find books along the way, that you'd read as you go along that would unlock those things.  

I think the second option would probably be optimal for learning curve.  Let the player set the curve, but if they are too aggressive, they might get frustrated.

There's a few function decisions right there, and those don't cover how to handle the game switching over to another language. Vocabulary would also need a functional decision on how to be taken care of.  And those are completely disregarding the rest of the game.  

I just think there's a crazy amount of potential for a game like that.  So much of language software, I think it's very difficult for the average person to sit down for an hour even.  

What other medium do people sit down and consume for hours and hours at a time.  Plus there's no very little comparison for the amount of immersion you could pull off, without actually going to a certain place.  

Difficult, but at the same time there just feels like there's a crazy amount of potential there.

Legend

Language Difficulty Ranking | Effective Language Learning

Dutch seems to be a fairly easy language.  

This is interesting:
Frisian languages - Wikipedia
It's also fun for me since this is my first second second language. Most dutch words are forms like English but the ones that aren't, well they tend to be close enough to spanish.

Language Difficulty Ranking | Effective Language Learning

There are tons of aspects to it, that really would need to be figured out.  

How to teach:
I could imagine some sort of classroom experience.  You have to go somewhere and get taught by a character.  
I could imagine language options in a menu.  Where you could go to the menu and be taught a lesson, and enable/disable grammar lessons.  
Or find books along the way, that you'd read as you go along that would unlock those things.  

I think the second option would probably be optimal for learning curve.  Let the player set the curve, but if they are too aggressive, they might get frustrated.

There's a few function decisions right there, and those don't cover how to handle the game switching over to another language. Vocabulary would also need a functional decision on how to be taken care of.  And those are completely disregarding the rest of the game.  

I just think there's a crazy amount of potential for a game like that.  So much of language software, I think it's very difficult for the average person to sit down for an hour even.  

What other medium do people sit down and consume for hours and hours at a time.  Plus there's no very little comparison for the amount of immersion you could pull off, without actually going to a certain place.  
It's fun to talk about this since I've had to do similar for VizionEck's language  :-X


With your skyrim example I think it'd work well with different cities speaking different languages. IE the closer you get to the capital city, the more common the new language is. Then have the game's quests align with this so that progression is always moving players closer and closer to the capital. Maybe have undercover missions where you're posing as people and if you can't respond correctly in their language, you're found out and forced into a fight. Also could have people talking in the language with you eavesdropping. If you understand what they said, it could lead you to a quest or save you from future danger.


Difficult, but at the same time there just feels like there's a crazy amount of potential there.
Games in general have a crazy amount of untapped potential and I'm shocked no one seems to be working on it. In the past I've posted about how great games can be for education by letting people learn through experience, but Life is Strange made me realise games can even reprogram the way we think.

After a long session of Life is Strange I had a very amusing feeling for about an hour where it still felt like I was mentally in the game. People asked me to do something for example and my brain jumped at the opportunity to increase my standing with them. I also made a joke that no one cared about and instinctively went to rewind time.

It's kinda like a few years ago when I played Sleeping Dogs. I remember driving after that game and for a few miles feeling a strong desire to drive in the left lane since that's how it worked in the game.

This video talks about the brain rewiring itself in general:




To some extent I think we experience things like this with all games, but imagine the potential here. It could be something simple like overwriting an addiction or it could be advanced inception like things that change our values as a person.

the-pi-guy

Jan 08, 2017, 11:53 PM Last Edit: Jan 09, 2017, 12:03 AM by the-pi-guy
With your skyrim example I think it'd work well with different cities speaking different languages. IE the closer you get to the capital city, the more common the new language is. Then have the game's quests align with this so that progression is always moving players closer and closer to the capital. Maybe have undercover missions where you're posing as people and if you can't respond correctly in their language, you're found out and forced into a fight. Also could have people talking in the language with you eavesdropping. If you understand what they said, it could lead you to a quest or save you from future danger.
I really like that idea.  Would really fit the language into the lore and stuff, and has some very awesome gameplay possibilities.  But I do feel the player would have to be somewhat constrained.  Throwing basically native language too soon at a player, because they get too close or something, would probably frustrated.  A lot of difficulty with setting the curve appropriately and open world gameplay would likely have to be constrained. 
But ridiculously awesome idea to think about. 

Alternatively we could have invaders, and as the player completes grammar lessons, the invaders would be more common.  Could even have the natives that were already there start learning the language.  Eventually the invaders and the natives are all speaking the same language.  That way the player could still be free to do whatever and basically set their own learning curve, and also keep the language as part of the lore without it being inconsistent.   

Games in general have a crazy amount of untapped potential and I'm shocked no one seems to be working on it. In the past I've posted about how great games can be for education by letting people learn through experience, but Life is Strange made me realise games can even reprogram the way we think.

After a long session of Life is Strange I had a very amusing feeling for about an hour where it still felt like I was mentally in the game. People asked me to do something for example and my brain jumped at the opportunity to increase my standing with them. I also made a joke that no one cared about and instinctively went to rewind time.

It's kinda like a few years ago when I played Sleeping Dogs. I remember driving after that game and for a few miles feeling a strong desire to drive in the left lane since that's how it worked in the game.

This video talks about the brain rewiring itself in general:




To some extent I think we experience things like this with all games, but imagine the potential here. It could be something simple like overwriting an addiction or it could be advanced inception like things that change our values as a person.
Yeah, I really like that video.  The brain fascinates me to no end.  It's so weird.  We take our memories for granted, but we forget things, our brains sometimes completely make things up. 
We take even common sense for granted, but it's probably not so different.  Our experiences make up way more of what we interpret of things and events than most people give them credit for. 

the-pi-guy

I bought 2 japanese courses on Udemy for 20$.
They seem pretty good.  

Legend

I've started to subconsciously understand Dutch spelling. It is really starting to screw me over with English spelling. I've made more typos in the past few days on the forum than all of last year.

Plus I'm tired so that can't be helping either.

the-pi-guy

I've started to subconsciously understand Dutch spelling. It is really starting to screw me over with English spelling. I've made more typos in the past few days on the forum than all of last year.

Plus I'm tired so that can't be helping either.
Better than Japanese typos.  

"What are all these characters?"  
"That says I love tacos."
"WTF"

the-pi-guy

Not a language I'm learning but Hindi has some interesting characters.

I think the straight horizontal line that is present in most of the characters is interesting.  
It leads to some interesting looking words with a horizontal bar across the whole thing.  

It's an interesting consistency to come about with the characters.  
Japanese Hiragana:



Go Up