Hi All,
(This is a koohii Lounge post, so, please don't flame me for being somewhat off topic from Japanese!)
I've been studying Japanese pretty diligently for about two years now and I feel like I've learned a lot about how to approach learning a language. One thing I've learned is that learning a language to fluency takes a lot of time, so instead of telling myself I'll learn Spanish "next" I'm trying to get started with that language _now_, however slow my start may be.
So here are some random thoughts of mine:
1) There is a massive, massive amount of really unhelpful, kind of misdirected and/or inefficient language learning material out there.
2) When googling up "learning Japanese" I find a plethora of personal blogs, structured web sites, podcasts, recommendations, forums -- more or less a thriving community of self-learners. When I google up "learning Spanish" I get a lot of paid program advertisements and what seems like a lot more spam and commercial learning stuff (probably due to the larger Spanish language market?).
So, the obvious questions are:
1) "What're the recommended texts for serious, language-lovin' students starting off in Spanish?"
2) "What're the Tae-Kim guide, RtK forum, AJATT, Core6K Anki resource equivalents (if any) floating around the net?" [the smart.fm Spanish Core2K is whack as far as I can tell]
3) "Is there any advice or obvious pitfalls to watch out for, as a native English speaker that has studied Japanese but never a romance language?"
I've found this one text with high Amazon.com reviews, but any product with the vibe of "new magical way to learn easily!" sounds like snake oil to me so I'm automatically skeptical: http://www.amazon.com/Madrigals-Magic-K … 0385410956
Anyway, I'm really, really excited to study a language that will be, relative to Japanese, effortless to read and comes with so much latent familiarity. If anyone here is a fan of studying Spanish and Japanese or has experience therein and wants to share their two cents please do.
Thanks for your time!
K.
wccrawford
Member
From: FL US
Registered: 2008-03-28
Posts: 1551
Having studied Spanish in highschool, I can say that there's only 2 ways learning Japanese will have helped you:
1) You already broke most of the rules of what you thought language was. There's a couple more for Spanish that weren't broken by Japanese, but it won't be a problem.
2) You gained an idea of what it takes to learn a language and the study habits required, no matter what method you use. (This even goes for AJATT... Er... ASATT.)
You'll find that in the US, there's a lot better access to Spanish materials than Japanese. You'll find many more classes, textbooks, books, movies, radio, and more. You'll also find more websites, and that Google does a better job auto-translating.
The only thing I think you might not find is the community. EN->JP has a community like I've never seen before. It's incredibly inclusive and helpful, and amazingly short on actual bickering and trolling.
If I were going to study Spanish at this point (starting from scratch), I'd probably find an Anki deck with audio (or maybe LiveMocha), a pronunciation guide, a short grammar guide... And then go to LingQ and start reading. If I weren't starting from scratch (and I'm not, since I had 2 years of it in high school) then I'd go right to LingQ.
You didn't try that Spanish Only glossary thingy? As I commented above, I used that trick (frequency list + searches via URL/regex stuff) to great effect to create a deck with easy sentences and audio. I mean, a friend used it.
It's too bad though, European languages are so much harder than languages like Japanese, because of the alphabetic writing system and its impoverished semantic aspect which makes learning words so difficult. So, good luck with that. ;p
Last edited by nest0r (2011 June 09, 9:56 pm)
Earthlark
Member
From: Japan
Registered: 2008-12-23
Posts: 25
Not sure if you guys are interested in this, but it's a multilingual text-to-speech pack from Ivona (English, Spanish, German, and French). I use a couple of the (British) English voices all the time and they are pretty listenable. The other ones sound pretty good too. I use them for listening to all sorts of documents (including threads in this forum) while on the go (doing dishes, bicycling, etc). Anyway, it's not free, but they have a special going on for the next week, so I'm thinking of getting it since I'll be starting Spanish when I get back to the States in November. (I guess I can use it for my French as well.) I'm still waiting for the Japanese voice though! But perhaps that's a little more difficult to implement.
! Try Michel Thomas, probably available on iTunes?? He does other languages too but they're not all great, however the Spanish course works really well. Dare I say it: it makes learning Spanish nigh on effortless...
