On language

[TheWalrus]

I've decided in my old age to take up german. (I'd sure love to learn Gaelic too, but good luck there.)  Has anyone used Rosetta Stone or any similar program and enjoyed it? Should I just be taking college classes, or doing books at home or what? Anyone have a good experience with a course of some sort? Speak up!

[Pennilenko]

My business partner picked up rosetta stone spanish and german about a year ago, one to talk with laborers and the other to talk to some of his distant relatives he was planning on meeting at a giant family get together. He now appears to be passably capable of being understood in both.

[Muffled]

No expert here, but it seems to me that dedication is much more important than how you go about learning; computer, book, or class.  Having a quick memory helps too, of course.

I would say go with whichever seems like it would fit your schedule or your predisposition best.

[Ingmar]

How much of a self-starter are you?

http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php

[Viin]

I used the (now defunkt, I believe) online subscription to Rosetta Stone to learn some Japanese before my trip there - I thought it worked pretty darn well.

[Hawkbit]

Rosetta has been helpful to many I've talked to, though check with your local university.  Ohio State, for example, had a weekly coffee session that was all about meeting people and talking only in Deutsch.  Considering our teachers went every week, it was both good form to show up for added credit and extremely good to be tested. 

Also, Deutsch is one language that I get much better at when drinking.  I have periods around beer 4-8 that I can slip right into it like a native speaker. 

Good luck!  It's my favorite language outside English.

[climbjtree]

I also speak Russian, and I've done a whole lot of the Russian Rosetta Stone stuff. I've also taken a lot of classes. I think that, hands down, the best way to learn to speak another language is to actually get out there and speak it. If you've got a base of knowledge already, I recommend a language exchange site like www.interpals.net.

I've had good luck there, and have made a few friends that I Skype with on a regular basis.

[proudft]

Rosetta Stone is kinda weird.  It's basically a bunch of multiple choice pictures and you pick which one you think the narrator is talking about.  Paying big bux for it?  Eh....  Maybe it's at your library or something, though.

I am in a resumed battle with Mandarin, which is a goofy language.  I took a semester at a community college a couple of years ago which was actually incredibly useful and not too expensive, but classes get bogged down with the - not to be snooty - but the, um, slower people.  The attrition was horrendous, too - it started with like 50 people with not enough seats for everyone and there were like 8 at the end.  At the beginning I thought the teacher was mean, but by the end I decided she was just depressed and her attitude came from this happening every semester.

I think one semester was the sweet spot for getting down pronunciation & grammar without wasting too much time sitting in class listening to other people mangle the language and then really it's all vocabulary (the vocabulary in the class was really sad - like maybe 100 words or so).  Mandarin has really simple grammar, though, and not too bad pronunciation for English speakers - I dunno about German, the comparison might be poor in that respect.

A really good forum for language stuff is www.how-to-learn-any-language.com .   The name seems dodgy but it's really just a forum with people talking about everything they're learning and whatnot.

If you're feeling really non-traditional, there is a semi-crazy dude at www.alljapaneseallthetime.com who claims he learned Japanese by basically self-immersion for a year or something.  It's a gigantic site full of all sorts of random motivational stuff but the core idea is pretty simple - people beat themselves up over not learning languages quickly but if you think about it, babies that start to talk have like a year or two of listening immersion down already before they even start to talk.  So listen hardcore first, then work on talking.  He claims it worked for him, who knows.  

This method would be dependent on how much German material you can find, of course.  There is an absolute shitload of Mandarin stuff out there (who knew, rite?), so I am sort of doing this, though more like 10 hours a day rather than 24, supplemented with the FSI courses and other random stuff.  I can already see a fair amount of progress in what I can understand, though, after just two weeks, which is quite encouraging (though I am not starting from zero).  I'm also having weird dreams where people speak Mandarin syllables that don't mean anything.  At least, I think they don't.    

Anyway, who knows if that is helping me, but hey, having the TV on the Chinese channel while I'm working isn't any skin off my nose.

[Sheepherder]

Mandarin has really simple grammar, though, and not too bad pronunciation for English speakers - I dunno about German, the comparison might be poor in that respect.

Most Asian languages are very contextual.  German will be far easier for a native English speaker to pick up.

And Frenchmen can fuck off with their irregular verbs.  What a bunch of cocks.

[Cyrrex]

I had to learn Danish a while back (one of the harder languages) and tried a few different methods.  Best by far was Berlitz...don't know how they operate in the US, but you would actually go to one of their centers and join a class with one or two other students.  Few hours a day, and it was total immersion.  The instructor never uttered a word to you that wasn't in the language he/she was trying to teach you, not even to explain the rules of the language to you.  Was very effective.  I would use it again if I had to learn another language.

[Der Helm]

What other language to you know and how well ? There are a few differences between German and English that can be hard to wrap your head around. 

[MrHat]

I rather enjoyed Rosetta when I used it for spanish.  Trains your brain to pick up the language contextually.  If you are able to supplement that with some of the forums/native speaker/immersion things mentioned here, you'll be able to communicate w/ that language within months.

The absolute biggest thing is to get over yourself when talking w/ a native speaker.  Just remember that one ESL kid you knew who was learning english.  He talked poorly for a few months, but was able to communicate.

[Sky]

My pidgin german when drunk is apparently hilarious. German couple used to run a bar here and town and I would get free drinks if I would try to say stuff, because it would get them howling with laughter.  My german teacher was certifiably insane, though, so I have an excuse. It was a great class, we had a running war with flamingos that got out of hand and ended up with a hundred flamingos on the teacher's yard on graduation night. We also drank A LOT, and our class trips were to the local maennerchorn, where we would drink a lot.

My umlauts...they're all kinds of messed up. You're probably better off with Rosetta Stone than a 4' tall insane irish women with a flamingo fetish teaching you german.

Great language, though, pretty easy to pick up though I hate the gender stuff.

[Lantyssa]

You'll have to figure out what works best for you.  One of my high school immersion classes did very little for me.  For others they're great.

Personally, I needed to understand the grammar and structure first.  Vocabulary was secondary.  Not something to ignore, since you cannot communicate if you don't know the words, but easy to learn once I had the foundation.

Because of that I only need refreshers when I want to read German since the grammar more or less stuck with me.  A pocket dictionary is really helpful for that.  Once you have a good grasp on it, you can sometimes muddle through Dutch, Danish, and other similar languages.

[ghost]

One of my high school immersion classes did very little for me.

You have to make sure you're "immersed" in the right way-  meaning around the right people and with no bailout speech.

[Sky]

That's why the maennerchorn was so awesome. I may suck at german, but I understand the structure pretty well from having heard it in (drunken) casual usage.

[Lantyssa]

You have to make sure you're "immersed" in the right way-  meaning around the right people and with no bailout speech.

The teacher refused to speak English.  If you saw him at the store he would still talk in German.  The only time I heard a word of English come from him was when the front office contacted him over the intercom and we all refused to translate for him.  He was mad, but we were all laughing hysterically because we got the better of him.

As I said, it was effective for some.  But I also have hearing difficulties, so trying to sort through them while at the same time learning the proper words likely didn't help.

[Khaldun]

I used a tape-casette based course to learn one of the African languages I used in my early research (mostly faded, though I can still read it with some laboriousness) and it worked enough to let me exchange pleasantries but not enough to really converse, not the least of which was because what I was learning via tape was formal and what I was hearing was colloquial. Language instructors will tell you that there is a very defined hierarchy of difficulty for English-native speakers: Romance languages easiest (Spanish most of all); Germanic languages next easiest; Bantu-family languages and others next up; Mandarin (and other Chinese dialects) and Japanese almost the most difficult and Arabic, Pashtun or Farsi about the hardest. (This scale includes written plus verbal competency).  It almost doesn't matter what pedagogy you're relying on, that hierarchy doesn't change much. But there's a lot of evidence that immersion of some kind is required.

[Sky]

The teacher refused to speak English. 

That guy sounds like some kind of language nazii.

[Lantyssa]

You drop all your 'e's and add extra 'i's to everything now?

Nah, he was a good guy.  He just had some fun at his students' expense and a belief that it helped their language skills.  (Honestly, I'd do that same.  I liked him and the class, I just had some personal difficulty with the method.)  Apparently he worked for the CIA when he was younger and could speak seven or eight languages.  Fluently and without accent.  (We were also laughing at his Texas drawl, 'cause we'd never have guessed.)  He was a life-line for foreign students who couldn't speak much English.

[craan]

I picked up a Pimsleur Basic Russian set of CDs and have been trying them out.  I'm really terrible but I'll give it a few months and see if anything sticks.  I want to explore Russia and ride the train from Moscow to Vladivostok one day.

[Ard]

You drop all your 'e's and add extra 'i's to everything now?

He's clearly working on a new language, why you gotta hate?

I took classes in high school and college for spanish and french, and it was pretty much the same way Lantyssa described.  Learn the grammar and verb rules first, and then learn the vocabulary.  Sadly, I don't have much facility for new languages though, and neither really stuck much, but I never really had much in the way of immersion type learning there.

[Sky]

You drop all your 'e's and add extra 'i's to everything now?

We had an Italian-born language teacher who also taught French and Latin. I always wanted to learn French from him so I could speak it with an Italian accent.

[Ingmar]

My first semester of German in college was taught by a woman from China who spoke no real English - most of my classmates came out of that speaking German with a bit of a Chinese accent (I had previously had a little in junior high so I was safe.)

[Cyrrex]

Learn the grammar and verb rules first, and then learn the vocabulary.  Sadly, I don't have much facility for new languages though...

I submit that your need to learn the grammar and rules first, and that fact that you don't learn languages easily, are related.  Probably the same for Lantyssa.  I don't mean this as an insult - some people have a knack for it, and others just don't.

[Bunk]

I've often thought about learning another language, partly just to see if I can still make my brain learn something at this age. Tough part is deciding what language. For practical sake, learning Hindi or Mandarin would be most useful around here. On the other hand though, I've always wanted to visit Japan some day, and it's far more likely that I'll watch Japanese movies/tv over Indian or Chinese.

As for the French I learned in highshool; never use it for anything, didn't even use it in an entire weekend in Quebec.

[Raging Turtle]

Learn the grammar and verb rules first, and then learn the vocabulary.  Sadly, I don't have much facility for new languages though...

I submit that your need to learn the grammar and rules first, and that fact that you don't learn languages easily, are related.  Probably the same for Lantyssa.  I don't mean this as an insult - some people have a knack for it, and others just don't.

Disagree.  I taught EFL for three years and have studied 3 or 4 languages myself.  A very small percentage of people really are 'naturals' at language and can pick things up without a solid grammatical foundation, and a somewhat higher percentage can do it with complete immersion (living in the country and speaking primarily in that language) but most people really need it. 

Even for a language that's easy for native English speakers to learn, such as Spanish, something like the subjunctive tenses aren't something you're going to master on any level without clear, repeated explanations.  Those explanations can be in Spanish, and in a good language class they will be, but 98% percent of people studying the language are going to need them and won't be able to 'just pick it up'. 

As for Rosetta Stone, it depends *entirely* on how self-motivated you are.  For some people it's great; others, such as myself, do a lot better in more structured classroom setting.

[Cyrrex]

Learn the grammar and verb rules first, and then learn the vocabulary.  Sadly, I don't have much facility for new languages though...

I submit that your need to learn the grammar and rules first, and that fact that you don't learn languages easily, are related.  Probably the same for Lantyssa.  I don't mean this as an insult - some people have a knack for it, and others just don't.

Disagree.  I taught EFL for three years and have studied 3 or 4 languages myself.  A very small percentage of people really are 'naturals' at language and can pick things up without a solid grammatical foundation, and a somewhat higher percentage can do it with complete immersion (living in the country and speaking primarily in that language) but most people really need it. 

Even for a language that's easy for native English speakers to learn, such as Spanish, something like the subjunctive tenses aren't something you're going to master on any level without clear, repeated explanations.  Those explanations can be in Spanish, and in a good language class they will be, but 98% percent of people studying the language are going to need them and won't be able to 'just pick it up'. 

As for Rosetta Stone, it depends *entirely* on how self-motivated you are.  For some people it's great; others, such as myself, do a lot better in more structured classroom setting.

I don't think you actually disagreed with me.  But I would disagree with your last point.  Self-motivation is always important, but that is not the lone key to success.  Some people will still have a knack that others do not.

[Teleku]

I'm one of those people who needs to learn the grammar structure and all that first.  I absolutely hate teachers who refuse to speak English.  I need somebody to explain all this shit to me and answer my questions in a way I can understand.  You can keep speaking gibberish I don't understand over and over at me for 20 years straight and it will still be gibberish to me.

[TheWalrus]

Thanks a lot for all the replies people. Big help in there.

[CmdrSlack]

Now I'm torn about getting Rosetta Stone to learn Arabic. I understand enough from context here at work, but I'd like to walk in one day and drop full sentences on people.

[Bungee]

I don't know, but someone told me the best way to learn a language, is to get the basic grammar and vocabulary down with do-it-yourself books/audios and then just start watchin movies/series first in your native language with foreign subtitles, then the other way round and finally leave the subtitles altogether.

Never tried it, but sounds reasonable. And German Sub-titles and German synchronized Films aren't hard to come by. And I guess it's hilarious to hear the actors synced voices :)

[proudft]

True Lies in Mandarin is frickin' hysterical, I can tell you that.

[Cheddar]

Barring serving in the US Military - Rosetta Stone is the best out there.  The commercials that make this claim? 100% true.

Heading out west for language courses is actually based completely off this methodology.