I can't imagine learning Japanese by myself without knowing about RTK, core2k/6k decks in anki, this community, etc. There are so many great resources that I'm sure have cut years off the time it will take me to reach fluency.

Now, is there an equivalent for Spanish?

Living in southern California (and being an American in general), I've had a lot of opportunities where knowing Spanish would've really helped me out. I don't think I'll ever be as into Spanish as I am for Japanese, but I could at least see doing the core2k and getting to a point where I can watch movies without subtitles and still keep up with events. My focus for Spanish is conversation (my focus with Japanese is reading). But I really don't want to revert back to Rosetta Stone for this. So anyone know any good anki decks? Word lists? Grammar books? Easy Spanish movies?

Thank you all!

You should go through a few thousand Spanish sentences with Anki (there are plenty of highly rated Spanish sentence decks on the Anki cloud), and then start reading and listening to Spanish radio (and watch TV, if there's anything interesting on - but TV is not as good as reading and radio).

For reading, check out Learning with Texts, it's a pretty interesting tool that keeps track of vocab and overall volume, and gives you quick dictionary access, while you read. It doesn't work well with Japanese, because it uses spaces to pick out words, but it's great for alphabet languages. If you're not sure how to set it up (needs a web server to run locally), it's set up for online use here: http://lwtfi3m.co/

But learning more than one language at a time is not optimal.

I took Spanish in High School and although I forgot most of what I learned, can say from experience that Spanish is a lot easier. Spanish shares a writing system with english, the pronunciation of the letters are (with a few exceptions)very similar, grammar is very similar, the number of cognates is high. As an english speaker, you could open a Spanish book to any page and most likely puzzle out half of what it says after reading it over a few times. Don't try that with Japanese! When I started learning Japanese, I thought it was going to be as easy as Spanish - oh how wrong I was! According to the state department Japanese takes over 4 times as long as Japanese!

I know a few people learning spanish who give high reviews to Doulingo. With Spanish, the major hurdle is mainly vocabulary. So just load up anki or duolingo and go to town. You'll be watching telenovelas and rocking ciento uno punto nueve in no time.

yogert909 Wrote:I took Spanish in High School and although I forgot most of what I learned, can say from experience that Spanish is a lot easier. Spanish shares a writing system with english, the pronunciation of the letters are (with a few exceptions)very similar, grammar is very similar, the number of cognates is high. As an english speaker, you could open a Spanish book to any page and most likely puzzle out half of what it says after reading it over a few times. Don't try that with Japanese! When I started learning Japanese, I thought it was going to be as easy as Spanish - oh how wrong I was! According to the state department Japanese takes over 4 times as long as Japanese!

I know a few people learning spanish who give high reviews to Doulingo. With Spanish, the major hurdle is mainly vocabulary. So just load up anki or duolingo and go to town. You'll be watching telenovelas and rocking ciento uno punto nueve in no time.

I know what you mean about Spanish being easier than Japanese. I took two years of "college Spanish" (Level I and Level II at my local university) and I was bored and not challenged enough. With Japanese, I feel much more mentally challenged (ok, I'm cuing for the snide remarks).

It's sad but true. Even if you've never studied Spanish before, you can understand a lot of what you see written in Spanish (assuming you are a native Indo-European language speaker).

Same with Italian. I was flipping through a book in Italian (which I've never studied) and I could understand so much of what I saw I said to myself "compared with Japanese, this is a joke!" (although to be fair, I have studied Latin, Greek, Russian and German and throughout elementary school and some of high school I was forced to study French).

I've often considered gaining some basic ability with Spanish after I get better at Japanese (if it's not reading, I completely suck at Japanese; I can get by in reading), if only to spite the people that said "You should learn Spanish or something instead"; I figure blasting past their understanding of basic ability in a year or so would be so fulfilling.
Of course, I'm more interested in Swedish than Spanish, so...

As for materials, I'd imagine that a day or two searching the internet for good lists and grammar resources would be plenty (or a stop by your local library), since it's really easy to find books, radio, and television in Spanish in the US.

Of course, it could be so plentiful as to be overwhelming, so...
I think checking the Anki shared decks would be best.
Also, I don't remember if there's one for Rikaichan/kun/sama, but I'm sure there are pop-up dictionaries.

As for grammar... I can't say it's really that similar to English, other than the basic sentence structure. It's been a long time since I took Spanish in school (and failed miserably, since I was so bored), but I remember it requiring a lot more memorization for basic grammar than I remember needing for Japanese.

These 3 words represent 14% of spanish:
de la que

If you add these 8 words, you get 30%:
el en y a los se del las

If you add these other 162 words, you reach 50%:
un por con no una su para al lo como más o pero sus le ha me si sin sobre este ya entre cuando todo ser son dos también era muy hasta desde mi porque qué yo vez así nos ni parte él uno donde bien tiempo mismo ese ahora cada e vida otro después te aunque gobierno tan durante siempre día tanto tres sí gran país según menos mundo año antes estado contra sino forma caso nada hacer general poco estos presidente mayor ante les algo hacia casa ellos ayer hecho primera mucho mientras además quien momento hombre pues hoy lugar nacional trabajo mejor nuevo decir entonces debe política casi tal luego pasado primer medio nunca poder aquí ver embargo partido grupo cuenta nueva cual mujer frente tras fin ciudad he social manera tener sistema historia juan tipo cuatro dentro nuestro punto ello cualquier noche agua haber

According to my source, if you add the entire dictionary RAE (88000 words), you would cover 73% of spanish.

I did a little search yesterday and found that there are 10k-15k English-Spanish cognates. So you get a good part of the lexicon for free basically.

sholum Wrote:As for grammar... I can't say it's really that similar to English, other than the basic sentence structure. It's been a long time since I took Spanish in school (and failed miserably, since I was so bored), but I remember it requiring a lot more memorization for basic grammar than I remember needing for Japanese.

It's been a long time for me too, but I seem to remember being able to understand spanish without explicit grammar instruction. One quick and dirty way that I've found to determine if grammar is similar to english is to translate a page with google translate. Translated spanish reads quite well in english, but translated japanese is almost complete gibberish. Of course there could be some manipulation besides word for word translation, but it seems the rules are fairly simple enough that a dumb computer can apply them.

yogert909 Wrote:I did a little search yesterday and found that there are 10k-15k English-Spanish cognates. So you get a good part of the lexicon for free basically.

sholum Wrote:As for grammar... I can't say it's really that similar to English, other than the basic sentence structure. It's been a long time since I took Spanish in school (and failed miserably, since I was so bored), but I remember it requiring a lot more memorization for basic grammar than I remember needing for Japanese.

It's been a long time for me too, but I seem to remember being able to understand spanish without explicit grammar instruction. One quick and dirty way that I've found to determine if grammar is similar to english is to translate a page with google translate. Translated spanish reads quite well in english, but translated japanese is almost complete gibberish. Of course there could be some manipulation besides word for word translation, but it seems the rules are fairly simple enough that a dumb computer can apply them.

Perhaps; I can't say I tried particularly hard in that class (I really didn't care for Spanish class).
But yes, I do remember vocabulary being very easy, especially since I was made to study classical roots for years, being a native English speaker.