nest0r wrote:

BTW, Can anyone recommend some good French books for when I eventually move on to that?

Correct Your French Blunders is my favorite. It clears up so much and all of the points have a lot of example sentences, if anything too many.

leosmith wrote:

Maybe ok for you and Khatzumoto, but IMO, bad advice in general, unless you are near native, or there is some pressing reason to do this (such as lack of learning material in one's native language). Generally, it's more efficient to study languages separately using one's native language. The additional practice in your second language will not make up for the lack of progress in total.

I humbly disagree.
I'm far from fluent in English, but due to de lack of learning material in my mother tongue(L1), I study Japanese(L3) using English(L2) as my base language.
What I've found is that you don't need a base language to study another one. After the initial steps when you need to understand the basic structure of a sentence in L3 (something you should master in L2), L3 becomes more and more "self sustaining" and L2 becomes nothing more than an anchor point...
You don't need to be near native level in L2 to use it to learn another language (but obviously you need to understand it very well).

I think if you know N+1 in L2, you can use it to learn N of L3. Clearly real life languages aren't mathematics so N in a language doesn't match with N in another language, but the formula I wrote is just to express an idea, don't take it for absolute.

I dont know. I never studied italian, but I think maybe I would be more confortable using italian to study japanese than japanese to study italian. Ehehe.

Yeah, just joking.  People find katakana harder because they see hiragana much more, not because it's actually harder.

LordGolem wrote:

I humbly disagree.

...

I think if you know N+1 in L2, you can use it to learn N of L3. Clearly real life languages aren't mathematics so N in a language doesn't match with N in another language, but the formula I wrote is just to express an idea, don't take it for absolute.

Depends on the actual combination of languages. If you're Italian, learning French or Romanian through Japanese is highly inefficient.

Leosmith wrote:

French is going to be my next language. Not a book, but have you checked out the French in Action dvds? They come highly recommended.

This is a fantastic series. Apart from a few minutes during the introductory lesson, it's COMPLETELY IN FRENCH. It's designed to use pictures, context, etc, to help you figure out the language, and it works really well. There is also a book (again, all in French), which gives more supplemental material, and I'd suggest tracking it down.

You can watch the video material for free here:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html

With the books and videos together, this is honestly the best language course I've come across - it's complete immersion. If more courses were designed this way I'd be a polyglot ...

abdwef wrote:

I think, if the languages are sufficiently unrelated, you won't get confused.

It's quite the opposite for me. I've learned Japanese to the point where it's pretty internalized (equivalent of 5 years of formal study and 2.5 years of 24/7 immersion) so I don't get it confused with the Mandarin or Korean I'm still learning at a basic level. In fact knowledge of 熟語 helps quite a bit with learning Korean. They don't use kanji (hanja) much anymore but the pronunciation and compounds match Japanese more than they seem to match Mandarin. The hard part is figuring out what characters they used to use and then remembering the vocab becomes easier. Something like 70% of Korean vocabulary is actually made of Chinese compounds (many of which are in Japanese too), with a large part of the remaining percentage being loan words from Japanese.

I found the course amazingly effective. It is completely monolingual, but because of the way it's designed it has a very different feel than AJATT. The lessons in French in Action are structured, you're being guided from the basic elements of the language to a decent intermediate level. It is immersion, but you're not left to swim on your own. You see pictures, listen to dialogues, watch situations, etc., all in French and you really do figure it out on your own. It's hard to explain - guided immersion is maybe the best way to say it. So you can grab onto the basics of the language quickly and don't feel overwhelmed with masses of content you don't understand. Anyway, just check out the first few lessons    and see what you think. They're free, and if you find them interesting and effective you can track down the books later.

Leosmith, you're wrong. I started to learn korean recently, and I would never use Swedish (my mother tongue) or even English (L2) to learn it, simply because it's SO much easier to understand the structure using Japanese (L3). Now, I'm fluent in basic japanese and I learn basic korean sentences, so it's not like Japanese is holding me back in any way. The benefits are HUGE. For example, the sentence "I'm studying".

Question:
공부 하고 있어요.
Answer:
Kong-bu ha-go iss-?-yo
勉強　して　います

(that korean sentence could have some spelling error, I haven't trained any production yet.)

As you can see, I question myself on the korean sentence written in hangul, and on the answercard I write pronounciation using swedish letters (perfect since korean has the ? and ? sounds) and then I write the meaning of the words in Japanese. Why in Japanese? Because as you can see, a direct translations of the words became a perfect japanese sentence! This is common in almost all basic korean sentences. Since I can make japanese sentences perfectly, I can start doing creative output right away with korean.

I could have written my answers in English, but how would that look?
"Study doing [in process of]". Would it work to learn that way? Yeah. Would it be more efficient? Hardly.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2008 September 17, 8:09 am)

IPA is eurocentric, you can't transcribe Asian languages to it very well. My Japanese linguistics text spends much of a chapter describing the phonetics in terms of "it's like IPA x but articulated differently in way y". At best you can roughly approximate the sounds - just like you can in roman characters if you remember the rules. You also can't type IPA directly without using something like ascii IPA which is even harder to read.

I also do my Korean flashcards into Japanese. It's a real benefit because many of the words overlap with Japanese.
ex: 大学生 is a 1:1 mapping with 대학생.
大->대
学->학
生->생
If you associate the readings with kanji you can use them to remember other words like 선생（先生). Other words aren't 1:1 with Japanese but it still comes in handy.
ex: 일학년 = 一年生
일=一
학=学
년=年
so we get 一学年. Not the same expression as in Japanese, but it's very understandable.
It would be so much easier to learn Korean if they still used hanja instead of hangul.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2008 September 17, 2:20 pm)

leosmith wrote:

ashman63 wrote:

One thing Khatzumoto recommends if you are much stronger in one language than the other is learning your 3rd language by using your 2nd language (instead of your native language).

Maybe ok for you and Khatzumoto, but IMO, bad advice in general, unless you are near native, or there is some pressing reason to do this (such as lack of learning material in one's native language). Generally, it's more efficient to study languages separately using one's native language. The additional practice in your second language will not make up for the lack of progress in total.

Tobberoth wrote:

I started to learn korean recently, and I would never use Swedish (my mother tongue) or even English (L2) to learn it, simply because it's SO much easier to understand the structure using Japanese (L3). Now, I'm fluent in basic japanese (snip)

If you are fluent in Japanese, it's easier to understand Korean structure using Japanese, and (I'll add one) there is a lot more Korean-learning material in Japanese, then why do you think I'm wrong? Did you only read the first 12 words of my post?

The first post on this topic was someone with English L1, Japanese as L2(at an intermediate level), wanting to use his Japanese to learn Mandarin. Are you saying that would be faster/more effective for him than using english?

Tobberoth wrote:

why not learn it in Japanese, since that will make your Japanese better?

Why not use english, since your combined progress will be better?