6 ms·

From the submitted blog post: "I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level

From the submitted blog post: "I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal. The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency: 1. Spanish 2. French 3. German 4. Swahili 5. Russian 6. Hindi 7. Farsi 8. Arabic 9. Afrikaans 10. Polish" That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method. AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.

dpapathanasiou 14y ago
I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/ http://macaronics.com/ It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
- ghc 14y ago
  I just want to emphasize, for anyone hoping to learn writing this way, that you can't effectively learn to write Japanese by typing. It truly isn't for beginners. Some Kanji are so similar that the only real difference is the stroke type and stroke order. Anyone wanting to learn how to write Japanese should, after mastering Hiragana and Katakana (both of which don't take long), pick up an engineer notepad, a brush pen and a modern Kanji learning book like "Let's Learn Kanji", and proceed to practice. Within a few months of daily practice you'll have mastered 250 Kanji, all of the Kanji components and learned a lot of new vocabulary as well. Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
  - dpapathanasiou 14y ago
    You're right in that my site is for people who've already mastered kana and some basic kanji, and there are already so many resources where you can learn those, but there are relatively few for intermediate and advanced students, and that's what I'm addressing. As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know). But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how. It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
    - createmenot 14y ago
      It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology. Rather, they have forgotten the stroke order on certain characters, or often confuse two similar characters. It's very debatable as to whether this has been caused by more widespread use of computers, or if such "character amnesia" has always been present. The same can be said for spelling: Do you think English speakers never made spelling mistakes before spellcheck?
      - snogglethorpe 14y ago
        > It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case. Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout. I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.
kumarski 14y ago
I agree. Is Arabic indo-european? I thought it wasn't. Maybe I'm mistaken though. I don't know that my solution works, but it's a stab at it.
- mitchty 14y ago
  Semitic if I remember my tree's correctly.
stan_rogers 14y ago
An argument can be made, too, that both Afrikaans and Swahili approach the simplicity of a creole; they're certainly closer to being truly rule-based grammars than most of their relatives (which tend to have accreted a lot more arbitrary classifications, exceptions and etic peculiarities). Standard Arabic is also relatively simple, being more of a regional lingua franca than a typical everyday language (much like Europeans slipping into Latin for political or scientific discourse).

dpapathanasiou 14y ago

I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/ http://macaronics.com/ It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).

ghc 14y ago
I just want to emphasize, for anyone hoping to learn writing this way, that you can't effectively learn to write Japanese by typing. It truly isn't for beginners. Some Kanji are so similar that the only real difference is the stroke type and stroke order. Anyone wanting to learn how to write Japanese should, after mastering Hiragana and Katakana (both of which don't take long), pick up an engineer notepad, a brush pen and a modern Kanji learning book like "Let's Learn Kanji", and proceed to practice. Within a few months of daily practice you'll have mastered 250 Kanji, all of the Kanji components and learned a lot of new vocabulary as well. Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
- dpapathanasiou 14y ago
  You're right in that my site is for people who've already mastered kana and some basic kanji, and there are already so many resources where you can learn those, but there are relatively few for intermediate and advanced students, and that's what I'm addressing. As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know). But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how. It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
  - createmenot 14y ago
    It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology. Rather, they have forgotten the stroke order on certain characters, or often confuse two similar characters. It's very debatable as to whether this has been caused by more widespread use of computers, or if such "character amnesia" has always been present. The same can be said for spelling: Do you think English speakers never made spelling mistakes before spellcheck?
    - snogglethorpe 14y ago
      > It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case. Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout. I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.

kumarski 14y ago

I agree. Is Arabic indo-european? I thought it wasn't. Maybe I'm mistaken though. I don't know that my solution works, but it's a stab at it.

mitchty 14y ago
Semitic if I remember my tree's correctly.

stan_rogers 14y ago

An argument can be made, too, that both Afrikaans and Swahili approach the simplicity of a creole; they're certainly closer to being truly rule-based grammars than most of their relatives (which tend to have accreted a lot more arbitrary classifications, exceptions and etic peculiarities). Standard Arabic is also relatively simple, being more of a regional lingua franca than a typical everyday language (much like Europeans slipping into Latin for political or scientific discourse).