As dumb as it may seem, I actually can't come up with a straightforward way to go about learning an 'easy' language. For example, Japanese is hard so you have to start pretty much from 0 and sure it's painful and hard at (most) times, it has plenty of bumps and humps, but it's also more or less upfront (I don't know if I can't even agree with that myself).

Now take something like Italian for a Spanish or a Portuguese speaker. It's so rather 'easy' that using basic materials is boring and impractical, and harder stuff like native content is just overwhelming, too 'hard'.

I can only speak for myself, but I imagine the process would be pretty much the same as for a "difficult" language. Ie read and listen a lot. But progress after the first couple of months would in theory be much faster thanks to the existence of cognates. Presuming you're native English speaker and talking about languages like German French etc you might gain a lot of mileage from some grammar books as I imagine (someone correct me if I'm wrong) it would be simple enough to not confuse the crap out of you.

I was just thinking this the other day. I'm trying to improve my French (which I have high speaking and listening abilities in but 0 reading and writing abilities) and I find reading French to be unbelievably boring. I'm beyond the point of vocabulary drills and grammar isn't an issue, so really it's an issue of motivation and in my case laziness >_<

nadiatims Wrote:I can only speak for myself, but I imagine the process would be pretty much the same as for a "difficult" language.

Yeah, in my experience you learn them the same way. You just skip a few steps and go quicker on others for the easy one.

[Zgarbas]

my attempts to use SRS for non-Japanese languages were hilariously disasterous. No idea why.

The method shouldn't be that different, you can just make faster progress.

For European languages, I would recommend a combination of the Teach Yourself series, followed by Assimil. That combo should bring you to a comfortable level where you can use native materials with relative ease for a pretty good price, as that combo shouldn't cost more that $150. If you're doing french, German, Spanish, or Italian, and have some money you can blow, roughly $250, I would get the Michel Thomas courses. While they are not necessary, and he has a god awful accent, this audio course is probably the quickest way to a get a handle on the basics of a new grammar system.

Hirakana Wrote:I'm trying to improve my French (which I have high speaking and listening abilities in but 0 reading and writing abilities) and I find reading French to be unbelievably boring.

What are you trying to improve your French reading skills for then?

Well, get a grasp of the basic grammar, learn how to go from written<->spoken and then dive head on into native material! Don't go overboard with anki though, as it's simply not needed most of the time.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

Hirakana Wrote:I'm trying to improve my French (which I have high speaking and listening abilities in but 0 reading and writing abilities) and I find reading French to be unbelievably boring.

What are you trying to improve your French reading skills for then?

When I say boring, I mean it's boring as in it's difficult. I know if I read a book or two it'll get much easier and more enjoyable. And either way, not everything HAS to be enjoyable. i want to be able to read in every language I know.

Here are some quick tips, but I'll follow with more details about my experience of learning similar languages. To start: short bursts of grammar [5mins], daily audio lessons [10-30mins], college courses, chat with a tutor, graded readers, exposure to language on the net [videos/comments/forums]. Mastered the basics: watch a [dubbed] series whose story you know well and whose dialogue isn't too complicated, mine vocab as quickly as you can, listening-reading with a book you've read before. From then on out: native materials and/or more of the above.

My personal experience (Only if you're interested. The only real advice I have is what I wrote above.): I have a pretty high level in French, and while I may not be a native, other Romance languages are about as easy to me as you might expect for a native speaker of another Romance language. Here's what I did to learn a bit of Spanish in about 10 months.

The way I went about starting was by doing a lot of random activities that weren't too horrendously boring. I skimmed through the Essential Spanish Grammar Teach Yourself book when I had some free time. I took the first two basic classes in my local college. I grabbed a graded Spanish Reader, which I only half finished. I did 20-30 minutes of Assimil (+shadowing) pretty regularly until the 70th lesson when it got boring. Started very boring too, as expected, but got interesting/challenging after ~20-30 lessons. I also listened to the audio many times while walking to and from school. On the side, I chatted with a tutor on skype and went to Spanish meet-ups a few times.

When I felt a little more comfortable, I watched one episode of the Spanish dub of Avatar the Last Airbender every day (which I had already seen in English and French) while putting ~30 new words into Anki daily when I could. The first 10 episodes, I didn't really understand much, but I put up with it because I like the series and already knew the story well. ~60 eps later, I was understanding the large majority of the dialogues.

To finish it all off, I did L-R with The Hobbit and learned tons of vocabulary in the process. It was quite surprising how effective it was, compared to my attempts at Japanese L-R. Definitely give it another shot if your attempts with Japanese disappointed you.

After about 10 months, I could read general non-fiction (French vocab helps here) and some fiction novels. I don't everything, but it's enough to enjoy the subject or story. And my speaking isn't anything special because I only did a month or two of oral practice. At this point, I can hold a conversation and help the Spanish immigrants with no English that come to my work, so I'm pretty happy with my progress.

I'm about to do something similar with Portuguese and expect it to be much less boring and much faster this time, since I know more or less what to do. I've already started by just reading things in Portuguese when I have the chance. I've maybe done 15 hours of this over the past 3 months and I'm starting to be able to read easy newspaper articles. In the same vein, I'd highly recommend EuRom5 to anybody who has a high level in a Romance language and wants to learn to read 4 other Romance languages with minimal effort.

Really, just go for it. Find stuff to do and you'll eventually get somewhere. You should have a bigger return on investment than with Japanese in terms of progress/hours, so enjoy the ride.

Hirakana Wrote:When I say boring, I mean it's boring as in it's difficult. I know if I read a book or two it'll get much easier and more enjoyable. And either way, not everything HAS to be enjoyable. i want to be able to read in every language I know.

Just in case you find doing Anki reps more tolerable than reading children's books or graded readers:

The only worthwhile way to use Anki would be clozed deleted production (like nukemarine's Anki deck). That would indeed allow for vocabulary learning at a faster rate than straight up reading, or other non-optimal (by this I mean they don't refresh target vocab at optimal intervals) study methods.

But just doing sentence recognition decks wouldn't be worth it. Too much work, not enough net benefits compared to plain reading. Reading and listening to comprehensible materials (I highly recommend French in Action,

- if you're at a low enough level that it still contains stuff you don't know, regular TV and kid's/teenage novels otherwise) are a close enough (and far more tolerable) approximation of that. Japanese is a special case, where doing pure recognition is worth it because jumping straight into reading isn't an option (the Kanji will kill you). Not the case with Latin alphabet languages.