I restarted learning Japanese again and someone sent me a Youtube playlist of someone explaining sentence structures. They prefaced the series by saying that the reason you have struggled for so long is that they keep trying to teach Japanese in English ways, when in reality their language structures are completely different. She then started to explain the particles and it turns out my understanding of “wa” (は actually “ha”) was not really correct, they explained its true form, and everything clicked for me.
Jan 6, 2025

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I’m bad at learning western languages I think it’s remembering the gender of random objects like oh ok apples are boys. English doesn’t have that. Japanese doesn’t have that. And as an English speaker it’s kind of fun to do the puzzle of where what words go where. Maybe try Japanese it’s not the most practicable but that’s a boring way to choose
Nov 3, 2024
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1. Learn the basic building blocks for your language of choice (i.e. pronouns, action verbs, common objects– literally the essential words you’d need to formulate the most basic sentences to communicate simple ideas). That can be done by googling things like “essential verbs in (insert language of choice here)” or “100 essential words to learn in _______.” Pair that up with any beginners grammar language book that you can take out from your local library. At this point, you don’t need to know how to speak the language, just have a general idea of how different elements come together to form coherent sentences. 2. Once you’ve acquainted yourself with those principles, the fun and most critical part comes into play: immersion. Since you’re not at the talking stage just yet, you need to treat yourself like you’re a baby hearing words for the first time and trying to associate meaning to them via their context. The best way I’ve found to do this is by watching kids tv shows in the language you want to learn and also finding YouTubers who are native speakers of that language. Turn on the subtitles and also keep them in the same language. This will allow you to start matching visuals with words and understand how sentences are composed in more organic ways. It will also force you to make language connections the way children do when learning their native tongue. You want to remove the buffer of thinking in your mother tongue and then translating the word in the new language. Instead, you want to start making immediate semiotic connections to the things you’re seeing. Like 🍎 is manzana in Spanish, but you wanna avoid thinking “oh that means apple in English which translates to manzana in Spanish.” It’s an extra loop you have to jump through that makes the language learning process less natural and more arduous imo. 3. In tandem to immersing yourself by listening to the language being used, here’s where you can start applying it bit by bit. This can be by either repeating the sentences you see in the tv shows you’re watching and start challenging yourself to write & say very basic sentences with your knowledge from step 1. In an ideal situation, having a friend or acquaintance who speaks the native language and can start talking with you is also incredibly useful since they can actively correct you while you practice. Though very beneficial, I know that that may not be an option for many people, so practicing on your own with the aid of the media you’re watching in the native language still works very well! This is a very long response, but I hope that these suggestions can help create a more structured approach to learning your new language. Good luck!! ✨
Feb 19, 2024
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I’m learning German intensively at the moment and something that helped massively was watching a TV show I was v. familiar with in German (I chose BoJack Horseman). The main thing that helped was to have absolutely no subtitles (English or German) because it forced me to really focus on the melody of the language and pick it apart. I’d also really recommend finding a podcast series that you find engaging, because the conversation is just so much more realistic. My teacher explained that the most important thing is to surround yourself with the language in every way (music, YouTube, even changing your phone language) even if you don’t understand everything, because that way your brain will naturally start to internalise the language :-)
Jun 11, 2024

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