The Language Learning Thread

SpyofMoses

SpyofMoses

Protestant
Heritage
Learning a new language is a life-changing pursuit. It will enhance your ability to communicate, increase how many people you can talk to, even increases/helps maintain brain power.

I saw a couple mentions of learning languages around the forum recently and got the idea to start a specific thread for it. This is a thread where you can post anything about learning a language. Any language. Perhaps if there is a whole bunch of discussion around one language a separate thread can be started for that, as there is already a Learn Russian thread. But the idea is to have a thread where anyone can post language learning materials, tips and general methods of study, and exchange experiences related to learning a language.
 
Thank you for creating this thread. I will repost my comment from the Russia thread here, since it is more about general language learning. MODS, please feel free to delete my old post.

******************REPOST********************

There's so much incredible material out there for free now, that I see little reason to pay good money for books, when you don't need to. I personally have hundreds of digitalised books, mp3s, websites to full languages and programs, etc.

Here are just 2:

Easy Persian - Free Online Farsi Language Lessons​

Easy Persian website offers online lessons in listening, speaking, reading and writing Persian or Farsi as spoken in Iran. English and Persian translations.
www.easypersian.com
www.easypersian.com

FSI Language Courses List - Learn a language today​

Access hours of free FSI language courses: including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Thai, Turkish, and many more.
www.fsi-language-courses.org
www.fsi-language-courses.org

Back in the 70s and 80s, when I started learning languages, those FSI courses (if you could find them) cost over $100...at the time a small fortune. Now they are free, albeit outdated, but who cares?
 
Learning Russian has been very rewarding and is very mentally stimulating, as I imagine other languages are also. The best advice I can give for a language that can be so tough for native English speakers, is just keep plodding along and focus on a ton of input at first.

There have been a lot of peaks and troughs for me. Huge peaks when I am able to understand increasingly complex texts or have conversations and understand videos. But there are also demoralising moments, for example, I went to try and sign up for a gym and I totally couldn’t understand anything that was said to me and my brain froze and I seemed to forget all my vocabulary. It can also be frustrating when you understand something and want to be able to discuss it, but there’s a big disparity between your understanding and passive vocabulary and your speaking ability and active vocabulary.

The grammar isn’t as scary as people say, but it is still tough and it’s easy to be thinking too hard about it and hinder your speech. I have a habit of freezing if I can’t remember which of the 12 or so ways of saying each word I need, which definitely hinders you. Much better to say the nominative form and let a native speaker correct you for reinforcement.

You will definitely find one of the areas way easier, for me, it’s reading and writing. Early on I made the mistake of neglecting other areas so my comprehension of speech is pretty terrible, so most of my practice involves listening to stuff now.

There’s a lot of buzz about “comprehensible input” which makes a lot sense, and also to use material you genuinely find interesting. The problem is that the crossover between what you find interesting and what you can understand won’t occur immediately. You have to suck up a lot of “Иван Иванович идёт в магазин” before you can listen to podcasts about Orthodoxy for example.

This is itself very frustrating, trying to get the boulder to the top of the hill so progress can be quicker and more fun down the other side. A lot of the comprehensible input stuff available online is created by libs as well.

The final point I would make is about the current fashionable idea of “acquiring a language” where you just listen to stuff and follow your interests and pick it up without doing the boring stuff or consciously trying to drill vocabulary etc. this does work, and is probably the most appealing method, but I have come to the conclusion that some sort of memorisation drills for vocabulary are needed, especially for a language like Russian. It’s purely my lack of words that holds me back from being able to read more freely etc. I just want to find the best method for doing this.
 
1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Listening
4. Speaking

These are the techniques I use for learning (re-learning) a language I lost during my childhood.

But when it comes to learning a new language from scratch, I am still skeptical if it is even worth the mental effort.

"Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body"
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Ecclesiastes 12:12
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virtue said:
1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Listening
4. Speaking

These are the techniques I use for learning (re-learning) a language I lost during my childhood.

But when it comes to learning a new language from scratch, I am still skeptical if it is even worth the mental effort.
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Just a friendly reminder, that for those seeking to learn a "dead" language like Koine/Ancient Greek, Latin, etc. the effort is only 1/4 of what you would need for a modern living language. For dead languages you only need to learn to read it. One exception might be if you want to be a teacher or professor of that language and you need to learn to write it.
 
Until I turned on the CC subtitles for the video, I wasn't sure what I was watching. Someone actually took an enormous amount of time to sort and splice all the linguistic phonemes from the Simpsons (in order). Then I laughed my head off. Respect to whoever did this.

 
Does anybody know how difficult the Persian language is? Has anybody tried studying it? I'm thinking about trying as a bilingual English and Russian speaker. It seems resources are limited for English study of Persian.
Sorry if I'm in the wrong thread but I don't think there is a languages thread.
 
TCOCBR18 said:
Does anybody know how difficult the Persian language is? Has anybody tried studying it? I'm thinking about trying as a bilingual English and Russian speaker. It seems resources are limited for English study of Persian.
Sorry if I'm in the wrong thread but I don't think there is a languages thread.
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MODS: Move this to the language-learning thread, please.

There is a language-learning thread here: https://christisking.cc/threads/the-language-learning-thread.394/#post-7220

That being said, Persian/Farsi is considered one of the "easier" languages to learn. I have studied it in the distant past and found it to be fun with its own unique challenges. It is an Indo-European language and NOT related to Arabic, despite sharing a modified Arabic script. As a native English speaking polyglot, I would rate it about a 4 or 5/10 in terms of difficulty. It is my personal opinion that one major reason it is hard to find materials for, is due to the fact that almost all major language learning websites like Duolingo are either US or jewish owned and they do not wish to support or emphasize anything related to Iran. Here is a good free web-based resource I can recommend:


Another option is to use Memrise, where there is a very large collection of community-created language programs. These are different from the official Memrise language programs, and can only be joined through the website, but can then be accessed after that through the mobile app.

 
Christos_NIKA said:
I lived in Germany for many years and I can confirm that one of the main ways German women "flirt"is by insulting you. Seriously, it's a thing there.
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Well at least you got it, I took it personally and ultimately did not end up dating a German long term despite mastering the language.

That really stinks to be honest, "insulting you", and perhaps explains to some extent why I had a monstrous argument with the German wife of a friend of mine who insulted me with no provocation.

„Und was hat Sie nach Deutschland verschlagen?“

That is also for me an insult! Like what, aren't you happy I'm here? Why are you talking to me then and smiling..

Have you got any tips for insulting them back in German? I'd definitely like to try that out next time I'm there...
 
Christos_NIKA said:
MODS: Move this to the language-learning thread, please.

There is a language-learning thread here: https://christisking.cc/threads/the-language-learning-thread.394/#post-7220

That being said, Persian/Farsi is considered one of the "easier" languages to learn. I have studied it in the distant past and found it to be fun with its own unique challenges. It is an Indo-European language and NOT related to Arabic, despite sharing a modified Arabic script. As a native English speaking polyglot, I would rate it about a 4 or 5/10 in terms of difficulty. It is my personal opinion that one major reason it is hard to find materials for, is due to the fact that almost all major language learning websites like Duolingo are either US or jewish owned and they do not wish to support or emphasize anything related to Iran. Here is a good free web-based resource I can recommend:


Another option is to use Memrise, where there is a very large collection of community-created language programs. These are different from the official Memrise language programs, and can only be joined through the website, but can then be accessed after that through the mobile app.

Click to expand...
Thank you for this. I had actually specifically been thinking about Duolingo when I said it's hard to find resources: Duolingo, which has many really obscure languages, does not have Persian. You really think it's because of US/Israeli hatred of Iran? I mean, they do have Russian and Arabic, though I suppose their hatred of Arabs is selective as they've brought some Arab countries to submission, and many liberals still claim to like Arabs. I'll also say they emphatically hate if there's any country they hate more than Russia it must be Iran. Iran is on a level beyond for them.

I have not found from brief Google searching that Duolingo is owned by Jews, but I can of course assume a lot of different resources are.

So if you rated Persian 4 or 5 / 10, what would you give Spanish, a 1? I'm trying to compare with languages I have some experience studying. And do you think Persian is easier than Russian? I saw some articles rating Persian easier than Russian because of simpler grammar, but I thought, surely with the Arabic script Persian has to be harder than a Cyrillic language.
 
TCOCBR18 said:
Thank you for this. I had actually specifically been thinking about Duolingo when I said it's hard to find resources: Duolingo, which has many really obscure languages, does not have Persian. You really think it's because of US/Israeli hatred of Iran? I mean, they do have Russian and Arabic, though I suppose their hatred of Arabs is selective as they've brought some Arab countries to submission, and many liberals still claim to like Arabs. I'll also say they emphatically hate if there's any country they hate more than Russia it must be Iran. Iran is on a level beyond for them.

I have not found from brief Google searching that Duolingo is owned by Jews, but I can of course assume a lot of different resources are.

So if you rated Persian 4 or 5 / 10, what would you give Spanish, a 1? I'm trying to compare with languages I have some experience studying. And do you think Persian is easier than Russian? I saw some articles rating Persian easier than Russian because of simpler grammar, but I thought, surely with the Arabic script Persian has to be harder than a Cyrillic language.
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I have never studied Spanish, but I know Russian, and Persian is FAR simpler than Russian. You can learn the Persian script in a matter of hours.
 
TCOCBR18 said:
I have not found from brief Google searching that Duolingo is owned by Jews, but I can of course assume a lot of different resources are.
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Ceo of Duolingo is a Guatemalan jew. I swear, I swear, some months ago I found that in his Early Life section. I wasn't even looking for that, I just so happened to stumble upon it while signing up for "DuoCon 2023"(I love Duolingo).

Lo and behold, I looked just now and it's been scrubbed. Apparently his mother is a "Guatemalan of German descent."
 
TCOCBR18 said:
Does anybody know how difficult the Persian language is? Has anybody tried studying it? I'm thinking about trying as a bilingual English and Russian speaker. It seems resources are limited for English study of Persian.
Sorry if I'm in the wrong thread but I don't think there is a languages thread.
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Farsi/Dari is pretty easy, while overseas I learned enough in my spare time, for getting around in streets. Haven't thought about it much or done any upkeep but a decade later I could understand two Iranian women in the immigration line joking about how bad the bathrooms were at the airport.

If you can, search the old rvf backup on (the site that shall not be named), I'm pretty sure QC made a post or two about learning the language, which he learned to read and speak during his time in the Marines (I think).

Map the arabic letters onto the same keyboard layout that you currently use.
So Qaf = Q , Pe (پ) = P , Che چ‎ = C etc except I suggest mapping خ to ; (right pinky) instead of X since you'll be typing it often.

Now, today If I had to learn it over I would try to find a program to transliterate the Persian script to the Latin alphabet. From there I'd try to find something interesting to read like the poetry of Omar Kayyam, or Rumi... the official Iranian Soleimani biography or the highlights of Tehran Holocaust revisionism conference hehehe.

They used to post their Supreme Leader's main speeches along with English subtitles, on their official media. Can't remember which site.

“Farsi shakar ast” is true. It's fun. The Farsiwaan have some great tunes. And the women are hot.




 
Has anyone found a good offline, preferably open source foreign dictionary for their phone?

Linguee is a good online service, enhanced by neural networks.

The traditional dictionary publishers, such Pons in Germany have their products for sale in electronic form, but generally force you into one of the two app stores.

I don't mind paying to buy these things but fear excessive privacy invading stuff in their apps, and trying to go online every time you search.

In the early days of smartphones, pre iPhone, I had a Nokia Symbian phone with very good foreign language dictionaries. Low tech, low bloat, but effective. Paid for them as well, but that was fine. In those days it was not purchased through a centralised app store. In any case I am too paranoid to even use Google Play Store on my degoogled device and am not sure if you can get paid android apps through the Aurora store.

Just would be handy, even if it's within the language, not to English.
 
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