What are /r/languagelearning's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Great for this user!
He/she chose to go full immersion by deleting all English accounts and joining more popular sites like Ok.ru and VK instead to practise their Uzbek.
Omad tilaymiz, deleted user!

IANAL

The book is still in print. You likely won't be able to do what you just described legally, even if it's for educational use considering that's the entire purpose of the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Navajo-Language-Grammar-Colloquial-Dictionary/dp/0826310141

You're probably walking a very fine line reproducing this book without consent considering it's still on sale, even if it's for the education of the people in this subreddit. Consider consulting the following: https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/68621.pdf

Here's the announcement of creating an offline mode a year ago, and there's no mention of it being a paid feature.

And here is where they announced they were introducing a paid service, which was a whole 10 months after they introduced an offline mode.

This looks pretty great. I know the site is a work in progress, so you are probably well aware of its current limitations, but I'll go over what I noticed after playing with it for a while:

The video player is a really great idea and has some great features. Audio and subtitles in the target language, instant translation on demand, and it keeps track of all the words in the video and whether you've seen them already or not. Now I just want a bigger selection of videos to choose from.

Duolingo import is cool and useful, but clunky. I can see what the function does, but pasting code into a console is something that people should be wary of. Is the same information not in the user's json data in duolingo? The json that is at https://www.duolingo.com/users/foo ? The data there is public, so all you would need is for the user to provide their username.

In text/learn/cloze: the feedback is confusing on correct vs incorrect answers. Whether or not you get the answer correct, three of the buttons turn red and one turns green. The practical result is that you click a button and see a bunch of red on the screen. So it feels like you got the question wrong every time. There should be some more positive feedback on a right answer. Maybe even just gray instead of red so that the green is more prominent.

Also, when you click finish after a close lesson, nothing happens. Yes, it brings up the summary overlay, but it really should launch the next lesson, or at least give you a easy choice of next lesson / do something else.

There is no information up front about what the contents of the site are. Fine, it's a work in progress, but all the content was behind a registration wall. Because of that, you got fake info from me. It would be great if you could use the site without registering, and then have the option of registering to record your progress.

A very promising start. I will certainly be checking back in to see how things develop.

Spaced Repetition System i.e. you see a word once, then it comes up a day later, then a week later, then 30 days later, etc.

Anki, Memrise, Lingvist, Clozemaster are some examples.

For me I do 5-10 minutes of Clozemaster https://www.clozemaster.com/languages/learn-dutch-from-english

This is general vocabulary based on frequency used

I also use Readlang.com to read novels and it also has an SRS built in, which I only use for new words that I encountered while reading. Italian: https://i.imgur.com/9NOWBYX.png

On the subject, for anyone who is interested into how English spelling got to the way it is today, I recommend "Spell It Out" by David Crystal. It's a very good read and incredibly informative :-)

Amazon link here.

And as mentioned below; historyofenglishpodcast.com

Many resources are unfortunately only kl-da, or da-kl. I haven't yet seen en-kl, or kl-en in schools, or anywhere. But I know there is an old app for android that goes kl-da, and da-kl. It is meant for greenlandic students learning danish. If you still know your danish, you can use the app to translate words.
There's also a website(again, danish to greenlandic, and vice versa).
The reason there's no much resources in English is because Denmark handles all foreign affairs, so Greenlands way to the world is Denmark.
I hate the fact there are 3 subreddits for learning greenlandic, /r/Greenlandic, /r/kalaallisut, and /r/LearnGreenlandic, and they all seem to be dead.

Congrats on passing the B2 exam! I'm working on a project for intermediate-advanced language learners that you might find useful, https://www.clozemaster.com. Its aim is to improve and expand vocabulary and comprehension skills in a productive and fun way. It's also free!

Not sure if this will help, but what my French professor did for us when I was in high school was that she had us listen to short youtube videos (and we did a transcription exercise with them), like this one that she used. We didn't have to transcribe the entire thing of course, just portions of it that corresponded to the questions she asked. That and we were able to listen as many times as needed, but the first time was without writing anything.

But even before this in our second year until our last, she actually showed us popular musicals (with subtitles, discussions, etc). Even if we didn't understand what was being said, it was still really entertaining to watch and one of the things that I really loved about the class.

EDIT: Reminded by what dzhen said, if you are able to get each student to use a computer in class lyrics training is a website that I really enjoy using.

This makes me think of this joke:

>A Swiss guy, looking for directions, pulls up at a bus stop where two Americans are waiting.
"Entschuldigung, können Sie Deutsch sprechen?" he asks.
The two Americans just stare at him.
"Excusez-moi, parlez vous Francais?" he tries.
The two continue to stare.
"Parlare Italiano?"
No response.
"Hablan ustedes Espanol?"
Still nothing. The Swiss guy drives off, extremely disgusted. The first American turns to the second and says, "Y'know, maybe we should learn a foreign language."
"Why?" says the other. "That guy knew four, and it didn't do him a bit of good."

I think this map is pretty good and this one is fairly similar. I seem to recall an article about common Lingua Francas around the world in different regions, but I can't find it right now...

It's not new - I've finished it a long time ago...

​

but I didn't know that they've released an official Slovenian course:

https://www.memrise.com/course/2059404/slovenian-1/

I don't have any current interest in polish but damn I love how fast they're adding courses these days. Russian just came out, hindi, welsh and vietnamese are coming in the next six months, and after that we'll have swahili, indonesian, and korean before the end of next year. Not to mention catalan for spanish speakers is out and guarani for spanish speakers is coming.

Yeah it's pretty interesting! I love its character, as the last stage of a language with a nearly 4,000-year-old literary history. It kinda kills me to know that it died as a vernacular so recently (though yeah I've read the spurious accounts of it "still being alive" in various remote villages).

I've decided I want to work backwards. I have a textbook on Middle Egyptian, and and once I'm satisfied with my capacity in Coptic I feel like Middle Egyptian should be even more interesting. I find Latin more interesting in light of the Romance langauges as well, sort of like unravelling a puzzle of "What happened here?"

The book I'm using is Thomas Lambdin's <em>Introduction to Sahidic Coptic</em>, which is the most secular material I could find on the subject. Naturally, given the available corpus, nearly everything will be tied to the Bible or the Coptic Church, but I haven't even been able to find simple online groups that just like exploring the language itself. High Valyrian has more general interest groups, from what I've found. :P And sadly /r/CopticLanguage has little to no activity, though I did find a few points of interest there. But again, a lot of it is religious.

Hello! I highly recommend the Foreign Service Institute’s free courses. They have one for Lao:

https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/FSI/fsi-lao.html

The FSI courses can be a little old-fashioned, but they are good quality and free. This is literally what the United States government used to train diplomats serving in Laos. I’ve used a few of their courses (can’t speak for the Lao one though, never tried it).

Sok dee!

Every Russian learner needs a copy of this textbook. I don't study the language any more, but it is a fantastic resource that somehow makes sense of the ridiculously complicated Russian grammar.

I thought some people might like to see and do the same. The site I'm using is Readlang, and I've changed the settings to use a custom dictionary (Lingvo Live, because it's very good) and in a new tab. For Russian learners, the article is from Echo of Moscow, which has a lot of audio interviews that are transcribed. I downloaded the audio and put it in VLC in the bottom so I can listen at the same time.

The advantage is if I find a new word that interests me I can easily see it in other contexts to get a better idea of it's meaning. Sometimes I read the English phrase first myself and try to translate it in my head before reading the Russian version. It's a slow way to read that takes a lot of pausing, so it's not for the impatient, though you can use it to read quickly if you want to.

Basque is on Clozemaster! https://www.clozemaster.com/languages#eus-everything For anyone looking to gain exposure in a fun way, Clozemaster is gamified language learning in context. Hope it's useful! Also I'm the creator - let me know if you're learning Basque from another language besides English and I can try adding it.

> Publishers of chess books are able to create online versions of their print books and sell them.

Not only that, one Chessable course was already published as a print book!

"Revive" is a bit strong. You are not going to revive Attic Greek.

As far as speaking it, that will be no different than speaking any other language: create a scenario in which there are themes that you are able to speak about, and then speak about those until you comfortable enough to add in new themes. Learn in chunks - that is, be able to produce the entire structure rather than just words in isolation. This can begin with scripts which include phrases that have easily- replaceable structure, and eventually become as broad as narrative structure.

Read is a time-honored tradition to increase exposure to structures, but of course Attic Greek will not lend itself as easily to that. Interestingly, however, there are pedagogical resources which focus on Attic as a living language: Polis

Move up, no question!

The 1.x classes would be an absolute waste of your time.

It's a good idea to complement the course with SRS, something like Anki. You'll catch up to your class mates in no time.

Although the very top jobs were conducted in English, the British Raj in India not only mandated that any civil servant sent to work in India be conversant in the local languages - on average they would speak 4 local languages each - they also stopped the top jobs being only conducted in Persian, which actually made them more accessible to the average Indian than they had been before. Ironically, it was because the locals were considered not civilised enough to be worthy of speaking English that made it so popular. Meanwhile, the French had a policy of trying to convert everyone to speaking French and now French is basically dying as a language while English isn't even dominantly British anymore.

SOURCE (amongst others that I forget) - https://www.slideshare.net/322011/role-of-english-in-the-colonization-of-india

Here is the course page, if you wish to be notified about its release.

"Klingon is the constructed language spoken by the fictional extraterrestrial Klingon species in the Star Trek universe. Created by Marc Okrand, the language itself is centered around spacecraft, warfare, and weaponry — but it also reflects the directness and sense of humor of the Klingon culture. For example, the closest word you can use to express "hello" is "nuqneH," which actually means "What do you want?". There are also plenty of insults, as it is considered an art form.

The mastery of Klingon is extremely uncommon on Earth. Join the galactic elite and start learning this fascinating language."

You should probably use Anki to review your vocabulary. This way you'll review your vocabulary just when you need it, and quickly figure out if you're trying to learn too much or not.

Try Clozemaster! https://www.clozemaster.com/ It's built for exactly this purpose and using sentences from Tatoeba. I'm also the creator - if you have any language requests or feedback please let me know! Hope you find it useful!

Did you know Amazon will donate a portion of every purchase if you shop by going to smile.amazon.com instead? Over $50,000,000 has been raised for charity - all you need to do is change the URL!

Here are your smile-ified links:

Assimil Spanish

^^i'm ^^a ^^friendly&amp;nbsp;bot

I’m bilingual (Spanish-English) and I’m certified to teach English as a foreign language.

Start with the basics. Something I find with the people I tutor is they may have heard certain terms used before, but don’t have a strong grasp on the meaning. The book I’m currently using is called “English the American way.” It reads like how Americans talk rather than feeling rigid like a textbook. The book also points out terms that ESL students may not be familiar with. I have my students read the book to me and we discuss any unfamiliar words and I listen for pronunciation errors.

I would suggest buying an ESL textbook and an English grammar book to help guide your teaching. Remember to contextualize new terms in the beginning to help them stick. I would also suggest buying a Spanish textbook for yourself. Something that has been instrumental in my teaching is the fact that I learned Spanish as a second language. I’m able to explain grammar concepts in a digestible way because I have been in the shoes of my students. I’m able to use the same charts to explain verb tenses as I did in Spanish.

I like the textbook “How to Spanish” by D.R. Sava. It’s currently unavailable on Amazon (unless you have a kindle), so you might have to do some digging.

I'm sure it's super frustrating when your other skills are strong. You're going to have to build comprehension from the very basics.

The podcast News in Slow French is probably one of the most basic resources since it's at a slow pace and has a restricted vocabulary. There are transcripts as well.

A bit more difficult is RFI's Le Journal en Français Facile. The pace is more natural. They also have transcripts.

French in Action is great for comprehension because there's so much extra information (pictures, examples, story, context) to help you. If you search you can find transcripts.

BBC's French Experience and Ma France are pretty simple and have subtitles. The content is pretty interesting too.

I find it very helpful to get a bilingual translation of a text that also has an audio recording. A lot of people do this with the Harry Potter series, but I prefer to use native texts to enrich my cultural knowledge. You can find some free bilingual translations of Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Rimbaud, etc. here and free recordings of at Librivox.

Assimil and Linguaphone are great for this sort of thing too, although they aren't free… and everything else I've listed is at least mostly free!

Find some French music you like and spend a lot of time listening to it—this helps too. If you can't understand anything, maybe find some children's songs and read the lyrics.

If you translate, rather use https://www.deepl.com/translator imo the best translator there is for free atm. For talking just overcome the fear of making mistakes. If you don’t know a word, you can ask or describe. Practice is key for getting better in any language.

For anyone using Google Chrome, you can add Wiktionary as a custom search engine

This lets you type wt <tab> word and it'll search Wiktionary

https://zapier.com/blog/add-search-engine-to-chrome/

The string to use is:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%s

The only way to improve listening comprehension is by listening. A lot. Some things that might help:

• Listen to music, especially songs that you can sing along with (disney, soundtracks from musicals, etc)

• Recorded books are great. You can read and listen at the same time, or listen first and "check" yourself by reading, or something else. One good source for free recorded books is LibriVox, although I don't know what they have in Spanish.

• News and TV shows. If you are in the US, Hulu has lots of shows. On the Dramafever website, you used to be able to make (Spanish-language) captions pop up in a separate dialog box, although I don't know whether they still offer that.

• When you read, try reading out loud. I don't think it will help as much as the other stuff, but I think it does help at least some.

(Caveat: My experience is mostly with German. My first intentional listening practice was with recorded books and podcasts. The books were a great help, but early on I think that music was better, and memorizing songs (and parts of songs) really helped. I think that part of the challenge isn't just learning to recognize specific words, but also learning to pick out common word combinations and patterns. The songs I listened to also used more informal language than the books I was reading.)

Lingvist's terms of service

>When you subscribe to our paid Services, you will have the right to request a refund during 14 calendar days from the date of your original purchase. After the expiry of this period, you may still cancel your subscription at any time; there will be no refund but you will be able to use the paid Services until the end of your then-current subscription period, after which your subscription will no longer be renewed. Please contact our customer support team to request a refund or cancel your subscription.

&#x200B;

I used this app to learn the alphabet, which helped me a lot because it didn't simplify the pronounciation at all - it uses mouth maps and IPA letters to explain exactly how to pronounce letters. It also gives a lot of examples.

I also used Write It! Arabic to learn how to write. Another thing that helped my writing was literally just going on the BBC Arabic page, and writing a paragraph or two down each day.

I'm a US diplomat. I've already been taught Chinese will be taught Romanian next. Feel free to hit me up with whatever questions you might have. Can't think of any better job for language nerds.

Also, I'm going to plug a book that helped me figure out where I wanted to go with my life when I was struggling with some of your same questions.

I've created a web-app which is made for exactly the kind of process you describe. It's called Readlang (http://readlang.com) and works like this:

• You upload any text to read (or use a Chrome extension to read a webpage)
• While reading, click a word or drag across a phrase to translate it
• Everything you've ever translated is stored in your account for you to learn with flashcards, which contain the surrounding sentence for context. You can either use the in-built flashcard system or export to Anki. The in-built flashcard system uses SRS like Anki, but also prioritises by word frequency so you learn the most useful words first.

If you try it out I'd love to know what you think.

Thank you for creating this, it's absolutely awesome! Some of the features I would like to be added:

• Google translate works like a charm when used with popular languages such as english/french or english/spanish, but the translations tend to be very poor between french and spanish, because of the statistic nature of gt (and the fact that it's using English as a pivot between two other languages). It would be great to use "static" dictionaries such as wordreference or offline ones.

• a way to create anki decks and/or a built in flashcard app for the words you saved.

• when you move your cursor over a word, you can't move it to translation box to scroll because it's disappearing once you move it away.

I'll see if I can commit something useful to the repo anyway!

Come join us on /r/Esperanto and you'll see it's still active and growing! Almost 700,000 people have joined the Duolingo course after only a year and a half, and roughly 1,500 new people join every day.

I really enjoyed Duolingo.

It put me way ahead of one semester of College Spanish, and I only had to fill in vocabulary for my Spanish class that Duolingo didn't teach, and get a bit of practice on listening and speaking through the class. Without effort, all of my homework assignments ended up getting As. I credit Duolingo for this.

I believe my experience supports Duolingo's claim that &quot;34 hours of Duolingo = 1 University semester&quot;.

I think Duolingo, a good dictionary and grammar guide for reference, a language exchange partner, and Anki, Memrise, or some other SRS flashcard system for vocabulary building is a great way to learn a language to a high A2 / low B1 level.

I haven't used Assimil, but what I described above seems rather superior than trying to rely on any other beginner material's that I've tried.

Overall, I think Duolingo is great for the "first steps" in picking up a language. I think it'd compliment Assimil, a college course, or any other beginner's materials: using Duolingo to get a head start working in many aspects of the language, and your other materials to master the concepts Duolingo introduced and to get experience in parts Duolingo glossed over.

That said, Duolingo is deficient in listening and speaking practice, is ok at writing, but is most effective at reading.

I'm no expert but I think it's wrong to assume adults can learn a language the same way a child can. Rosetta stone pushes that whole 'learn naturally' thing but I'm not sure it works better than just some hard work and dedication.
That said, listening to audiobooks, tv, etc is definitely a good way to learn and get used to the sounds of the language. Especially if you already have a knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, its a good way to pick up new words and nuances.
Also https://www.netflix.com/de/ use that and change your vpn to Germany, is what i've heard. I've never done it though.

According to Oxford Dictionaries, and referring to the Oxford English Corpus:

"Just ten different lemmas (the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I) account for a remarkable 25% of all the words used in the Oxford English Corpus. If you were to read through the corpus, one word in four (ignoring proper names) would be an example of one of these ten lemmas. Similarly, the 100 most common lemmas account for 50% of the corpus, and the 1,000 most common lemmas account for 75%. But to account for 90% of the corpus you would need a vocabulary of 7,000 lemmas, and to get to 95% the figure would be around 50,000 lemmas."

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-oec-facts-about-the-language

As I've learned Spanish, I noticed that at around the 500 word mark, I could understand about 80% of any given news article (which are usually written at about a sixth-grade level.) However, the 20% I didn't understand were often verbs or adverbs upon which the whole sentence relied.

For example, in a recent article about the Panamanian presidential elections, I read that Panama had "one of the most _______ economies in the Americas." Without that missing piece, that sentence is pretty much meaningless (I soon learned it was a "vigorous" economy). As such, I'd be hesitant to say you could understand 80% of what you read with just 500-1,000 words; if you can't form phrases, an individual word isn't that useful.

I picked a structured program (FSI), and then follow a daily routine based on where I am in it. I posted this elsewhere, but here's a quick overview:

• Duolingo (10-15 minutes) - more of a warm-up than anything else.

• Read 2-3 articles in your target language (another 15-20 minutes), I recommend using sources from different countries to familiarize yourself with regional variation in the way the language is used. While reading, jot down all the words you don't understand and plug them into Anki or a similar tool.

• Go through 50-100 Anki cards (10-15 minutes), including the vocabulary you just learned.

• Write a summary of the articles you read on Lang-8 (15-30 minutes) - native speakers will correct your entries so you can improve your language.

• Find 2-3 language exchange partners, and practice with them regularly. I found a few people on Lang-8 and italki who I was able to speak with every few days via Skype and Whatsapp. Again, aim for regional variety when choosing language partners to train your ear to understand different accents. Ideally, find someone to speak with every day, for at least 30 minutes.

I recently scared to death my very polite Japanese friend pointing out the danger of the word “proszę” as polite "please" which slightly misspelled sound as “prosię” meaning “young pig”.

I've done this for multiple languages with language-learning podcasts, and I get a lot out of it. It's slow going because I don't spend nearly as much time driving as you would as a truck driver, but I'm fine with that. I do supplement with speaking practice via Italki and additional vocab learning via Memrise, which helps a lot. The podcasts alone would take me a long way, but not nearly as far as I can get with additional non-podcast material.

You might be into this: The Mystery of Nils. Part 1 - Norwegian Course for Beginners. Learn Norwegian - Enjoy the Story. https://www.amazon.com/dp/3945174007/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_ECZNXW11436Y1S9X0VRG

Buy it from the American site. I think shipping might cost more than usual.

Also, third-party sellers carry it on Amazon as well: https://www.amazon.ca/Harry-Potter-Philosophers-Rowling-2003-05-04/dp/B01FIZH464/ (the price isn't as good as the $7.80 on the American site).

Btw, the Kindle edition is free if you have Amazon Prime.

Boring but effective way for me: Go to Amazon and after reading carefully through the reviews, buy the most highly-rated, conversation-based audio lessons you find. These usually come with a workbook and dictionary if you are lucky. Don't automatically buy the most expensive. Listen to these CDs with headphones many, many, many times. Using the workbook will cement the words. It's easy beacuse you only have to learn about 4,000 entirely new words used in various contexts to be considered near-fluent; so get started by listening and repeating!

I have found the Living Language series effective for getting up to speed quickly in various languages.

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Language-German-Complete-coursebooks/dp/0307478556

You could probably torrent the dubbed episodes with a bit of hunting. If you can torrent them, you might be able to find the subtitle files independently. In German at least that's an option.

From a technical side though, my understanding is that Netflix blocks VPN access by blocking known IP blocks. It makes sense that it wouldn't be iron clad, they're just playing wack a mole. I did 30 seconds of digging and found an article talking about something called smart DNS proxies, with two suggestions... Ironsocket and ExpressVPN. I know nothing about either, but that might be a place to start if you want to still try and break past Netflix' walls.

tl;dr: yes, find something easier to read.

In the long run the goal is to engage in extensive reading. In short, extensive reading is:

• Reading material at your level (ideally ~98% comprehension)
• Reading for an extended period of time
• Not interrupting your reading by looking up unknown words (you can look them up after you finish reading)

Google "extensive reading foundation guide" and read the first ~5 pages. Also check out this article, *What 80% Comprehension Feels Like (based on this presentation).

Sounds like you should be able to handle native content, you don't need any apps with pre-made learning materials.

Watch movies, read books, listen to audio books. You'll want to have lots of exposure.

Additionally, find a language partner and have casual conversations. Also think about what you did in English to advance it, you wrote book reports, essays, etc.

Do that in Spanish as well. It doesn't have to be dry, you could explain to your language partner exactly why you liked a particular character from a book you recently read, etc. be creative.

You can supplement all that with SRS like Anki

Emily McEwan-Fujita has found native Scottish Gaelic speakers reluctant to speak Gaelic with non-native speakers or even their own children because of the ingrained habit that Gaelic speakers should accommodate English speakers.

>Like many children of Gaelic speakers throughout the 20th century, in childhood heheard Gaelic being spoken around him, but almost never to him. He seems to have been socialized into the “etiquette of accommodation,” analyzed in detail inthe following section, in which Gaelic should not be spoken in the presence of, oreven within hearing distance of, non-Gaelic speakers. He voiced the disap-proval of these un-named others – and of his English father – with the descriptionof “different attitudes around toward little languages like that” in 1950s urbanScotland (lines 13–14). Unlike diminutives in many linguistic-cultural contexts,“little” in this case indexes a diminishment of status, and voices a negative affec-tive stance.

All of the translations that I'm currently using can be found either on Project Gutenberg or Wikisource and they are all in the Public Domain. They all have licenses that allow commercial use as well. If you want to see where I got the Portuguese for Alice in Wonderland you can read it here and if you want to check out the license that the text is available under you can check it out here.

I've just done all of the work of going through these sites and finding where I can get complete translations and making sure that they have licenses that all the text to be used in a printed form.

For recent movies, they will be similar most of the time. For older movies, you may find several subtitles (sometimes because of fan-subbing).

However, 99% of the time, you won't have subtitles that exactly match what's said, because subtitles need to follow rules that spoken dialogues don't: they need to be short, concise, easy to read, while avoiding ambiguity.

You can check online for subtitles. For example, on this website: https://www.opensubtitles.org

There is no Ы sound in English.

Maybe this would make it clearer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB61Fi1LluY

If you want examples go to frovo and look up words with ы in them.

Мотыга, сыр, дыра, живопыра, костыль, камыш, малыш, пузырь, мыло, прыгалки, прыгун, кавыль, кобыла, калмык, кумыс, пыльца, рыльце (рыло), пыль, пылинка, былинка, лыко, упырь, бобыль, копыто, корыто, быль, пыль, ссылка, крынка

http://www.forvo.com/word/%D1%81%D1%8B%D1%80/#ru

http://www.spanishdict.com/

The pronunciation videos that accompany almost every word have been very useful to me as a beginner. Spanishdict and wordreference are the only two I've really used the past year.

You can find the answers to those questions on the Clozemaster website https://www.clozemaster.com/about

Clozemaster also has it's own subreddit /r/clozemaster and the creator is a redditor /u/wakawakafoobar

Kids are also pretty awful at learning languages solely through immersion. Babies take years to put together sentences in their native language, further years to have more advanced reading levels. But they're also less likely to give up (they don't really have a choice) and devote a pretty large percentage of their day to trying to understand without the added pressures of working, paying bills, etc.

Here are some interesting articles on the subject (a key factor that both point out is the benefit of learning from mistakes and how adults are more averse to making errors):

https://www.brainscape.com/blog/2015/12/adults-kids-learn-languages/

https://www.rocketlanguages.com/blog/language-learning-myths-adults-and-language-learning/

https://context.reverso.net/translation/russian-english/%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B4%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C

wordreference has never let me down so far and their forum is amazing. You can also use the one from Real Academia Espanola

If I remember correctly, there's an entire chapter in the book Humble Pi as to why Excel is not the program for this project.

Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/Humble-Pi-When-Wrong-World/dp/0593084683

There is an app for that, kind sir. Here it is for iOS and here it is for Android.

Well, while there are presumably hundreds of people who can write in Klingon with the help of a dictionary, most practitioners of Klingon aren't anywhere near fluent; most people don't have anybody to practice talking with, although in recent years social media and voice chat services have helped bridge that gap quite a bit.

However, what we lack in numbers, we make up for in fervor :)

Also, The Klingon Art of War doesn't contain a whole lot of actual Klingon (in fact, most of the Klingon therein is highly inaccurate). There is, however, a Klingon translation of The Art of War currently in progress, by the same person who translated the Tao Te Ching.

It is on Duolingo.

But for your own sake, make sure you're using more resources than just Duolingo. The sidebar of this subreddit has a great list of resources.

Who can only refer to people, but that can refer to both things and people.

&nbsp;

From the Cambridge Dictionary:

"We use that instead of who, whom or which in relative clauses to refer to people, animals and things. We use it to introduce defining clauses only. That is more informal than who, whom or which:

We met somebody last night that did the speech therapy course two years after you. (refers to a person)

The 8.30 is the train that you need to get. (refers to a thing)

She blamed herself for everything that had happened."

&nbsp;

From the Oxford Dictionary:

"[Relative Pronoun] Used instead of ‘which’, ‘who’, ‘whom’, or ‘when’ to introduce a defining clause, especially one essential to identification.

‘the woman that owns the place’

‘the book that I've just written’

‘the year that Anna was born’

Awful. Duolingo gets you to A1 completion for most languages at best, maybe mid-A2 for some languages (with obvious deficits in spontaneous speaking and comprehension of authentic language). I don't think they're even pretending that &quot;fluent&quot; on Duolingo has any relation to &quot;fluent&quot; in the real world? They admit it's just a calculation of what words you know and how important/frequent those words are - obviously language is much more than a list of words.

Thank you for your feedback. Because now there is no such feature in the app, you can search on OpenSubtitles.org to see the available Swahili subtitles: https://www.opensubtitles.org/hu/search/sublanguageid-swa To see available subtitles in other specific languages, just change the language select field which is at the top in the middle.

Either you work for this company and are doing backwards publicity or this website was made in heaven for you. hahha I think this is what you requested. Although I havent used the site myself, it looks to be exactly what you wanted.

I'm using Mi Vida Loca for Spanish and it's excellent. Looking at the French equivalent, Ma France, it looks just as good. Ma France

Duolingo is like grammar practice so you should be okay for that. I've heard a lot of opinions about whether or not to learn grammar explicitly or use flashcards for learning words out of context. Mostly, it boils down to "You should learn grammar because you're an adult and it's easier," VS "You shouldn't learn grammar because kids don't and they learn languages just fine!" I guess it's up to you; Living Language has a nice grammar book if you want to go that way.

Youtube has plenty of French music videos (Stromae, Pierre Lapointe, etc) and general information videos. Yabla has French videos with correct subtitles and transcripts but it's $10/mth; not that many videos. FluentU is the same as Yabla with some grammar lessons for free but $15/mth for unlimited video player usage; also not that many videos.

Accessory Resources: ReadLang has a lot of reading material at varying difficulties. HelloTalk (Android/iPhone app) is nice to start getting conversation in, at least through text. Mindsnacks (iPhone app) is another gaming app, mostly for vocab.

Children's books are a great idea! Also, a book in which you're already familiar with the plot is handy, since you won't get stressed about getting lost. Something you've read in English, or perhaps one that you've seen the film adaptation of.

You probably shouldn't look up every word you don't know, too much looking up can distract you from the flow of the story you're reading, so if you can guess the meaning from the context sometimes that's good. If progress is too slow it then reading can become a slog and motivation suffers - depends on your personality so do whatever works for you.

As an alternative to reading on the Kindle or with a dictionary at your side, you might like to try my webapp for reading designed especially for language learners: http://readlang.com - it provides very fast word and phrase translations and you can review new vocabulary later with flashcards.

You'll also find Extr@ with sync'ed transcriptions on Readlang - search in the German public library for "extra" to find them (can't make direct links to these searches, but plan to work on that!).

It's never too late to learn a language.

Steve Kaufmann is a good example of this.

He is 75 and still learning languages.

By the way, on his website/app, which is called LingQ, you can find great resources for learning French.

https://www.lingq.com/

Unfortunately, there are likely fewer textbooks available for Polish than Japanese. Check out the books (and some sites with exercises) listed at this link: Clozemaster Blog - The Best Resources for Learning Polish.

I've been using Clozemaster for a while now for both Spanish and Italian.

I find the 'cloze' method is my favorite for maintaining and learning vocabulary. Compared to Memrise or something where it gives you 'contento' and you select 'happy'. Cloze tests expose you to the other 10 words in the sentence and also provide context. It's also why I like Lingvist (no Italian though).

I usually aim for 1000 daily xp or around 10 minutes a day. It's a good supplement/refresher then I move onto reading Harry Potter, Netflix, writing or whatever.

If you just finished the Duolingo Tree I would do the Fluency Fast Track version. For my Italian it's almost done with 2,000-3,000.

One negative/positive is that it throws different verb tenses at you so you should learn conjugation from another resource

Anki is open source and supports Cloze sentences.

Useful link: Anki Manual - Cloze Deletion

Another useful link: Bulk Generating Cloze Deletions with Anki

This might fit the bill. EDIT: added links.

From AnkiDroid documentation: >AnkiDroid allows you to type in the correct answer and then compare it to the right answer. You have to set this up with Anki desktop, as described in the Anki Desktop manual.

There's a great app on the Google play store, if you have an Android device. It's called Beelinguapp, it gives you dual language stories with audio narration which you can turn on/off. A lot of the books available have a price, but some are free. There's 13 different languages to choose from, Spanish included �� it's worth checking out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.david.android.languageswitch

I'd highly recommend HelloChinese (IOS & Android) instead of Duolingo for learning Chinese. Its Duolingo plus much, much more!

I will also recommend LingoDeer (Website, IOS & Android) for Korean, Japanese ~~& Chinese~~* (It does teach Chinese but HelloChinese is better in this respect.)

PS: Both are totally free, for those of you ~~cheapskates~~ curious out there.

Here is a beautiful example of Irish sung by the UCD choral scholars.

From the other link of the Avicii song cover, I was shocked by the interview with Mícheál Ó Foighil, I attended Coláiste Lurgan 3 times and NEVER before saw that man speak English! ^_^

I was able to speak semi-fluent if broken Irish a decade ago, but have lost it since emigrating... Dutch having solidly replaced it as my second tongue. I was still able to understand my Gaeltacht residing cousins at a recent family event however.

This thread has inspired me to add it to my Duolingo routine :) Edit: Link to Duolingo Irish

I think that your timing is very good! Duolingo is set to launch its Swahili course by the end of 2016 (although the launch date may of course be pushed back), and Language Transfer is currently creating/recording its complete Swahili course, with the first tracks set to be released in September.

https://www.duolingo.com/course/sw/en/Learn-Swahili-Online

http://www.languagetransfer.org/#!complete-swahili/c5ht

Those are two highly-regarded free resources, so there may very well be an increase in interest in Swahili in the next six months!

If I were looking for a YouTube channel, I'd look for something with native audio that focuses on interesting content rather than on teaching grammar. I would be extremely interested in documentary-style videos showing different places in your country/city, with clear, not-too-fast Swahili audio and Swahili subtitles. When I learn a language, I love learning about everyday life in places where that language is spoken. Learning about culture is such a huge, rich part of language learning.

I've been interested in learning Swahili for 20 years now, ever since I visited Tanzania and Kenya. I have my hands full with language learning right now, but I'm considering trying Swahili in 2018. Hopefully by then your channel will be well-established! Best of luck to you!

Looking at this article, it looks like the words did come back into use after funerary rites were completed, though sometimes the word was completely removed from the lexicon. That said, I don't think it'd change anything but the lexicon; syntax, morphology, and phonology, etc. wouldn't change.

There's a LOT of transparency. Hindi was delayed because they underestimated how much work was left to do and they were too optimistic about how fast they could do the work based on the not so analogous experience of doing the reverse course- not great, but it happens, and they admitted it would likely be delayed a couple of months ago if you scroll down the hindi page.

>This time however, there's tree design that is involved. More importantly, we have to come up with a way to teach a new script, Devanagari - देवनागरी, that suits and matches the Duolingo style.

This website is very useful for finding music in a lot of different languages/genres -- if you search for German it has 33 genres. You can click on them and get spotify playlists. http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

Such a program exists for genealogical texts. It's called indexing and it's translating written government records (birth, marriage, death certificates, etc.) into the computer so people can search for it. As they get access to new records new projects pop up, and they have them in a variety of languages.

https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/fsi.html

There you are. They are free and in the public domain and the quality is generally good. The most common critic to them is that they can be a little boring, but frankly I don't see the basis for them being more boring than any other language course.

As usual two courses are better than one, so any course is generally better paired with additional material. In the case of FSI language courses, however, this is not strictly necessary as they are generally complete. Their level, however, may vary, and when audio material is not available it is better to find some alternative audio input.

In general, since they have been developed years ago, it would also help to have some more modern courses to just be aware of the current usage of the language. For instance some expressions used in the Russian courses developed during Soviet times are not current anymore, as in you don't address people as 'comrade' anymore.

Instead of manually looking up and adding each word to Anki, you might want to give my website a shot: http://readlang.com

It lets you upload anything you like to read, click on words or phrases to translate, and everything you translate is stored to your account for you to learn with flashcards, either on Readlang or you can export them for import them to Anki.

If you try it I'd love to hear know how it goes.

I learnt the alphabet, learnt basic vocab, read about basic grammar (https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/russian/), found some anki deck with sentences (don't remember which one it was, honestly) and than started reading content and trying to understand, and listening and trying to understand content I found, even tho I was not understanding most of it. Watched some grammar explanation Youtube videos along the way. Once I started stumbling upon i+1 sentences started sentence mining deck. After ~1-1.5 years started reading literature, scientific articles...

Also I did this to train my grammar production: take some texts I read, replace word endings with asterisks, wait for a couple of days so I forgot the texts, read them and try to put in the correct endings (important: without trying to think, i just wrote the first thing that came to my mind and sounded right).

What was interesting is that on LWT's sourceforge page, the original message was this.

>In order to avoid legal disputes, the LWT software is no longer available. Try LINGQ: https://www.lingq.com

and now this:

>In order to avoid legal disputes we must end the LWT project. The LWT software is no longer available.

I can understand why people thought it might be LingQ because of the original message but the original message isn't inferring that it was LingQ either. There's too much speculation you have to make in order to make that jump.

Hopefully all of this will be resolved.

In my personal experience you would benefit from memorizing, say, the 2,000 most common words (or so, 2k is usually about 50% of a language), and then just read while looking up words you don't know. Online dictionaries speed up the process a great deal, in fact having a dual monitor PC set up with an ebook on one screen and an online dictionary on the other is my preferred setup. Steve (the guy in the video) has a website called LingQ built around this principle, you read a text online and the website defines words for you as you see them to even further cut down time looking up words. I have no used lingQ because the parser is not very good for Japanese (which has no spaces) but for European languages I have heard nothing but good things.

As you read you will gradually remember more and more words, become more and more familiar with the vocabulary, and as time goes on your skills will rise rapidly. Exposure, input. As you get better at reading, it becomes easier to understand the spoken language, and the more you listen and read, the easier it will be to speak more fluently. It all builds together into a successful way to learn languages. And in it's simplicity is the undeniable beauty of it - how could reading, listening, and speaking NOT lead to learning a language? You're exposed to it, you start to remember it, and poof, you know the language.

The one bit I disagree on steve is that he quits doing vocabulary flashcards after starting to read. This is valid to some, but for me, I never stopped doing flashcards, simply because I found it aided my retention of words I saw while reading.

I believe it's called laddering and B1-B2 seems like a good start to try it. Obviously you'll find more resources available in English.

Duolingo doesn't have a German -> Italian course yet but there's clozemaster for vocab

Clozemaster might be useful! The goal is mass exposure to vocabulary in context. https://www.clozemaster.com/languages#rus-everything Try the fast track for Russian - you'll see 44k unique words in context in order of difficulty. I'm working on adding the fast track for Polish too.

You might find Clozemaster useful, https://www.clozemaster.com/languages#rus-everything. The goal is to learn and practice the 10,000 most common words in context through mass exposure using a spaced repetition system (though less common languages may have fewer words or use random cloze words, but for learning Russian from English for example there's more than 200,000 sentences covering more than 8,000 words). The the sentence difficulty level is mixed, but having the context might nonetheless be useful. If you're using Chrome or Safari on desktop the text to speech is usually pretty good too.

> Edit: Actually using -s to pluralize words is from French. German pluralization is much different.

It didn't, though. -s was already used in Old English. When the vikings took over, it became used more. Here's a talk about it by McWhorter. Basically, it's just a different paradigm from Old English survived, and it wasn't because of (Old) (Norman) French.

Edit:

And the vocab is only in the more advanced words. The most common words are all Germanic.

The Turkish course for Duolingo is on the cusp of entering Beta. It will be available on the web shortly and usually after about a month, it will be available on the duolingo app. They recently made the web version mobile friendly so you could just use your browser. You need internet connection to use it though so if you want to learn offline I would find a Memrise course like this one.

First of all, are you aware that Anki has a "type out the answer" feature? Have a look at https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#checking-your-answer

Could you elaborate on your reasons for wanting to type out the answer though?

I would assume this would only slow your reviews down without much benefit. My average answer time is 6.6s - Having to type out the answer would at least double this time. I would much rather just double the amount of cards reviewed than practicing typing.

But obviously it depends on the lang you're learning. I get that it's different when you're studying a lang with a different script.

If you really feel the need to type, maybe you could create a Note in Anki that has a field for "optional type out?" which in turn creates a "type out" kind of card. Kind of like the default "optional reverse card". That would allow you to enable it for certain notes, but not having to type everything.

Alternatively just create a special type-out note which you can use for words you absolutely must know how to spell correctly.

My wife is a proper Afrikaans boeremeisie, plus the rest of her family's English is rather crude, so it was pretty much a given that I needed to learn the language in order to embrace her culture somewhat. After 4 years of dating and now marriage, I'm easily fluent, people mistake me for a real Afrikaner because I have seriously worked on my accent.

I used: https://www.easyafrikaans.com/ and https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teach-Yourself-Afrikaans-Helena-Schalkwyk-ebook/dp/B0081RL2K6 ^^^ Is a really great book that I thoroughly recommend.

The most important thing is to read and speak the language imo, rather than memorising tonnes of vocabulary.

Tbh I had an unfair advantage to most people because I forced my wife to speak only in Afrikaans to me, and I was living in the Freestate so there are plenty of other speakers around me.

Most second-language books give a kind of 'crash course' in grammar terms alongside teaching the language.

But if you want to get to grips with terms like 'verb' and 'prepositional phrase' through English, something like an English Grammar book may be helpful.

A random example: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Modern-English-Grammar-Aarts/dp/0199533199/ref=pd_bxgy_1/261-4595286-5445163?pd_rd_w=InU2a&amp;pf_rd_p=e5130b5a-1765-4699-bcba-dfad57398256&amp;pf_rd_r=R2B7VM8K3S7YFPXBPR3H&amp;pd_rd_r=4c48b393-63cd-4d34-86c1-243f1b5bec2e&amp;pd_rd_wg=XZiHV&amp;pd_rd_i=0199533199&amp;psc=1

Hi there! I'm a native speaker, but my husband learned using a really good book I highly recommend: Ponto de Encontro (Amazon). It seems now this book also has a media access with audio files, etc to help with pronounciation.

Aside from that, look for good grammars (suggestion: Modern Brazilian Portuguese Grammar) that you can use as reference as you read other texts. French will probably help a little in reading, but be prepared to learn a completely different phonetic set...

Academic Portuguese is imho a lot easier to learn than colloquial PT. People tend to forgo their natural accent to speak with a more 'standard' entonation and enunciation which tend to be clearer as well.

Good luck! Portuguese is a beautiful language!

Haha, came here to say that it is time to fire up the VPN. The major ones all seem to offer about the same thing so I'd suggest looking at who has the best deals at the time of purchase. I got 2 years of PureVPN for $45 because of a "Birthday" sale they were having.

> Is there some sort of "secret"? Or is it just good old memorizing?

It's a language. You have to study. There's no "secret". It's not pig latin where you can just invert the word and add on an ending.

If you can read Hangul after a week without trouble then I'd say you're not doing bad. To understand the meaning behind Korean words you'll have to study them. Anki and Memrise work well for building vocabulary.

I don't know specifically for Korean but LingoDeer is a pretty good app for helping with other east Asian languages.

&#x200B;

Oh, a quick P.s., you might also enjoy this crunch of Charles Duhigg's fantastic book "The Power of Habit".

https://whywhathow.xyz/book-crunch-power-of-habit-charles-duhigg/

For me, the best thing I did in language learning was schedule lessons at a regular time each week / day. Nothing more embarrassing than making no progress at all so these acted like little milestones that kept me working hard to improve in the interim.

Here's a little grammar that might help.

There's some books on Nahuatl here too, though they might be inaccurate/outdated/not in English.

Some studies indicate that it's actually more like 95-98% for fluent reading and adequate comprehension. If a line of text contains about 10 words, then 90% is one unknown word per line, 95% would be one per two lines, and 98% is one per five lines.

There's a fun example of what these levels might look like in English: https://www.slideshare.net/MarcosBenevides/how-easy-is-easy

Like this? I make them from time to time and though they obviously do help I wouldn't say they are the most effective way to learn. Where they do help is where you come across words that you kind of think you know and would have skipped over, but in the course of having to find a translation you end up understanding it much better than if you had just kind of read it and assumed you knew it.

But of course if it's a method you enjoy then that will make it easier to do it for long periods of time. And when I make them it's just for the making of them, so if you were to be more pro-active about using it to learn by making Anki cards and so on as you go along then it should be quite effective.