Spanish. Though I am making half a year pause by now due to increased workload.
I tried (as an experiment) small group lessons taught by a native speaker, and it really bumped forward my communication skills. Though I have been slowed down a lot by a lack of accessible Spanish language TV. I plan on investigating habssvpvny fngryyvgr cnl GI erprcgvba.
Out of curiosity and because of the interest of my brother who has gift for languages we started to learn E-minimal. As its name suggests it is a quite minimal artificial language suitable for studying language properties. Above all it is small enough to aquire it quickly for real use.
I have created an Anki deck for E-minimal to learn the
language and succeeded to aquire the complete vocabulary and grammar within about 50 hours (according to Anki). I’m relatively fluent in writing by now (I exchange mails with my brother in it).
E-minimal looks interesting. Can you estimate how many speaker the language has at the moment? Are there websites or mailing lists in which people use the language to communicate with each other?
What made you decide for E-minimal? Esperanto is the most commonly used constructed language and even if you don’t like it for many sloppy design issues, Interlingua seems well designed and has actual speaker and therefore even it’s own Wikipedia.
My aim is not the learn a spoken language and to use it for significant communication. e-minimal is interesting precisely because of its minimalistic and compositional nature. Building on ‘primitives’ founded in science.
I have an interest in computer linguistics and having a toy language exposes some of the difficulties of aquiring a language more clearly than a real natural language does.
I don’t want to invest lots of days in learning a real language. E-minmal being small but sufficiently complete allowed me to get away with minimal effort.
I speak (some) Chinese, but I’ve always had a problem with remembering tones. So I found a list of characters sorted by frequency, wrote a python script to parse it and massage it a bit to generate an anki deck of “character → pronunciation (definition)” mappings (and for characters that have several pronunciation, it’s “character (definition) → pronunciation”; so far I’ve been reviewing that deck for the past couple of months, but as it has several thousand entries it’ll be years before I’m done with it (if I feel like it’s getting old I’ll stop reviewing it). When I encounter a character I don’t know how to write I also add it back as a separate entry in another deck.
For studying German and Japanese, I have a Grooveshark playlist with a few Disney songs, and I also have some google docs with the lyrics which I occasionally read/try to translate (I haven’t put much time in this apart from listening to the songs while I work; I haven’t entered anything into Anki yet).
We used to have a regular German lunch on thursday at work, but the organizers quit and nobody picked up; I would usually add a few entries to Anki each time (and I still review them). I might organize a Japanese lunch eventually.
I have a “Mafalda” comic book in Spanish in the restroom, along with a Spanish-French dictionary, and usually read one strip (looking up unknown words) each time. Nothing in Anki, and I don’t study any Spanish outside of that.
You might be interested in Remembering the Kanji, a guide to using mnemonics to systematically memorise the meaning of all the kanji. I found it helpful while reinforcing it with flashcards + going to high school Japanese class. Wikipedia page for Remembering the Kanji
Along the lines of Remembering the Kanji, but significantly more entertaining is KanjiDamage, which features more yo momma jokes than necessary for learning Japanese, but is moderately entertaining and also provides example compound words and usage.
It also has a premade deck for Anki, if you wish to overcome the initial overwhelming barrier of having to make them. Inferior to making them yourself, as the cards tend to be too dense, but better than loafing around.
Incidentally, even if you do not end up using it, check out the Dupes Appendix which disambiguate homonyms which are also synonyms.
If you plan to practice by reading web pages, I highly recommend Rikaisama for Firefox and Rikaikun for Chrome.
These extensions automatically give definitions upon mousing over Japanese text. Highly useful as a way of eliminating the trivial inconvenience of lookup. I will warn you that EDICT translations (the default back end to rikai) tends to give a very incomplete and sometimes misleading definition of a word (seldom used meanings of a word are presented alongside the common ones without differentiation) but it’s still better than nothing. I would advise moving onto a Japanese-Japanese dictionary as soon as possible (probably a year or so down the line depending on commitment).
Nick Winter’s skritter is optimised spaced repetition learning for kanjis. In contrast to using an Anki deck skritter also teaches you how to draw the characters.
Native Dutch speaker here. Hit me up if you need to practice or have questions. My girlfriend just graduated as a high school teacher (with Dutch as one of her specialties ) and I’m sure she’d help me out with any question I’m unable to answer.
I’m interested in learning German and Russian to translate technical literature. I started working through an old German book I bought in high school while simultaneously going through a large Anki deck, but I had to stop due to lack of time. Still reviewing what I covered, though.
Languages
Learning German atm via Duolingo + Anki, already speak Esperanto and am reasonably good at Japanese.
Spanish. Though I am making half a year pause by now due to increased workload. I tried (as an experiment) small group lessons taught by a native speaker, and it really bumped forward my communication skills. Though I have been slowed down a lot by a lack of accessible Spanish language TV. I plan on investigating habssvpvny fngryyvgr cnl GI erprcgvba.
I’m learning French via Duolingo, Anki and UnlockYourBrain.
Out of curiosity and because of the interest of my brother who has gift for languages we started to learn E-minimal. As its name suggests it is a quite minimal artificial language suitable for studying language properties. Above all it is small enough to aquire it quickly for real use.
I have created an Anki deck for E-minimal to learn the language and succeeded to aquire the complete vocabulary and grammar within about 50 hours (according to Anki). I’m relatively fluent in writing by now (I exchange mails with my brother in it).
E-minimal looks interesting. Can you estimate how many speaker the language has at the moment? Are there websites or mailing lists in which people use the language to communicate with each other?
There are no speakers that I know of. I tried to contact the author to get permission to distribute the Anki-deck but didn’t get a reply.
I is mentioned some places on the web, so it is not completely dead, e.g.
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=60182
http://archive.today/1O4fq
What made you decide for E-minimal? Esperanto is the most commonly used constructed language and even if you don’t like it for many sloppy design issues, Interlingua seems well designed and has actual speaker and therefore even it’s own Wikipedia.
My aim is not the learn a spoken language and to use it for significant communication. e-minimal is interesting precisely because of its minimalistic and compositional nature. Building on ‘primitives’ founded in science.
I have an interest in computer linguistics and having a toy language exposes some of the difficulties of aquiring a language more clearly than a real natural language does.
I don’t want to invest lots of days in learning a real language. E-minmal being small but sufficiently complete allowed me to get away with minimal effort.
I speak (some) Chinese, but I’ve always had a problem with remembering tones. So I found a list of characters sorted by frequency, wrote a python script to parse it and massage it a bit to generate an anki deck of “character → pronunciation (definition)” mappings (and for characters that have several pronunciation, it’s “character (definition) → pronunciation”; so far I’ve been reviewing that deck for the past couple of months, but as it has several thousand entries it’ll be years before I’m done with it (if I feel like it’s getting old I’ll stop reviewing it). When I encounter a character I don’t know how to write I also add it back as a separate entry in another deck.
For studying German and Japanese, I have a Grooveshark playlist with a few Disney songs, and I also have some google docs with the lyrics which I occasionally read/try to translate (I haven’t put much time in this apart from listening to the songs while I work; I haven’t entered anything into Anki yet).
We used to have a regular German lunch on thursday at work, but the organizers quit and nobody picked up; I would usually add a few entries to Anki each time (and I still review them). I might organize a Japanese lunch eventually.
I have a “Mafalda” comic book in Spanish in the restroom, along with a Spanish-French dictionary, and usually read one strip (looking up unknown words) each time. Nothing in Anki, and I don’t study any Spanish outside of that.
I am improving my Arabic via private lessons. I have tried this several times over the years; I’m still not very good.
Some years ago I started Japanese, but the kanjis have been a nightmare.
You might be interested in Remembering the Kanji, a guide to using mnemonics to systematically memorise the meaning of all the kanji. I found it helpful while reinforcing it with flashcards + going to high school Japanese class. Wikipedia page for Remembering the Kanji
Along the lines of Remembering the Kanji, but significantly more entertaining is KanjiDamage, which features more yo momma jokes than necessary for learning Japanese, but is moderately entertaining and also provides example compound words and usage.
It also has a premade deck for Anki, if you wish to overcome the initial overwhelming barrier of having to make them. Inferior to making them yourself, as the cards tend to be too dense, but better than loafing around.
Incidentally, even if you do not end up using it, check out the Dupes Appendix which disambiguate homonyms which are also synonyms.
If you plan to practice by reading web pages, I highly recommend Rikaisama for Firefox and Rikaikun for Chrome.
These extensions automatically give definitions upon mousing over Japanese text. Highly useful as a way of eliminating the trivial inconvenience of lookup. I will warn you that EDICT translations (the default back end to rikai) tends to give a very incomplete and sometimes misleading definition of a word (seldom used meanings of a word are presented alongside the common ones without differentiation) but it’s still better than nothing. I would advise moving onto a Japanese-Japanese dictionary as soon as possible (probably a year or so down the line depending on commitment).
I have all 3 volumes. I need the discipline to sit and open them.
Nick Winter’s skritter is optimised spaced repetition learning for kanjis. In contrast to using an Anki deck skritter also teaches you how to draw the characters.
Found free Anki decks for Japanese: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/japanese and in particular Kanji: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2455367092
I’m also interested in Dutch.
Native Dutch speaker here. Hit me up if you need to practice or have questions. My girlfriend just graduated as a high school teacher (with Dutch as one of her specialties ) and I’m sure she’d help me out with any question I’m unable to answer.
I’m interested in learning German and Russian to translate technical literature. I started working through an old German book I bought in high school while simultaneously going through a large Anki deck, but I had to stop due to lack of time. Still reviewing what I covered, though.