OT - Any other foreign language learners?

[huskyharry]

Learned Spanish through six years in Middle and High School + having Puerto Rican friends in Willimantic and travelling/livng abroad in Central America during 8th grade and one summer in high school...tool that I have to frequently use in medicine.

Learned Dari during my first Afghan deployment and had a good conversational ability at one time. Learned Pashtu during my second Afghan deployment, but never as well as Dari. Learned greeting words in Croatian/Macedonian to be able to speak to the DFAC workers.

Learned about 1500 words and some conversational ability in Arabic during my deployment to Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain from which I returned this past April.

Dabbled with Japanese to prepare to chaperone a school field trip their eight years ago and then again 3 years ago when I covered temporarily at the NH Okinawa. Preparing again for a trip to Tokyo in January.

 

[caw]

Yeah, Japanese is not a particularly tough language to speak, I feel. But it's just the god damn memorization needed to learn to read and write!

Though, to be fair, computers have made reading and writing in most situations super easy. It's only writing by hand and reading printed material that are difficult. I have an addon for Firefox that allows me to hover over any kanji to translate it, and typing is just phonetic.

Ditch the auto translate, grab an old school kanji dictionary and use it to find Kanji you don't know/remember, one of the best ways to learn Kanji reading. I recommend the "compact Nelson". It's set up by radical which makes you learn those as well. Once you grasp those it gets easier to search (there are instructions on how to search). if you move to Japan, carry the darn thing everywhere you go.

If you don't come across enough Kanji you don't know, pull out a Kanji list and try and learn 4-5 new Kanji a day and maybe 2-3 compounds off those individual Kanji. Just so you learn all the readings of the Kanji (on-yomi and kunyomi). the jump from level 3 to level 2 is large but don't get discouraged, just set goals and keep studying.

 

[Leebo]

I have an electronic kanji dictionary on my iPad (and other portable devices). You just draw the kanji, but you could search by radical if you wanted to. Occasionally I do remember kanji that aren't in the levels I'm learning, but I generally don't worry too much about level 1 or 2 kanji I encounter in webpages.

Looking things up manually is nice for learning, sure, but sometimes you just want to read the damn page in less than an hour =)

I have about 500 in my repertoire that I know how to write from memory and know most of the pronunciations. I kind of have to cram a bit in the last month to cover everything for level 3 though.

 

[Eskapeesto]

I highly recommend Memrise for vocabulary and Duolingo for grammar (also available as apps).

https://www.memrise.com/
https://www.duolingo.com/

 

[caw]

I have an electronic kanji dictionary on my iPad (and other portable devices). You just draw the kanji, but you could search by radical if you wanted to. Occasionally I do remember kanji that aren't in the levels I'm learning, but I generally don't worry too much about level 1 or 2 kanji I encounter in webpages.

Looking things up manually is nice for learning, sure, but sometimes you just want to read the damn page in less than an hour =)

I have about 500 in my repertoire that I know how to write from memory and know most of the pronunciations. I kind of have to cram a bit in the last month to cover everything for level 3 though.

Sounds like you should do fine on that section of the test. Im cramming for the N2 now, it's killing me, work, kids, Japanese class, cramming. I think I'm at 4 hours of sleep a night for the past month. Good luck.

 

[Uconn77Duke74]

http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=husky

 

[Leebo]

頑張ってハスキーズ！

EDIT: I was curious, so I looked up which levels the kanji in ganbaru are, because those are definitely ones even most beginners recognize. Apparently 頑 is level 1 and 張 is level 3, but I guess I haven't gotten to it yet. It's amusing to me that such a common expression wouldn't be expected to be known in kanji form until level 1, but I get that that will happen sometimes with how many kanji there are.

 

[uconnfan68]

Good point. I studied Japanese, lived in Japan for two years and worked for a Japanese company for six years.

It's getting a little rusty now since most of my Japanese friends are in different phases of their lives. Plus, I no longer have a Japanese girlfriend!

I also lived in Korea and can speak Korean, though my Japanese is far better.

Can't speak a lick of Spanish even though I studied it for 5 years through high school. It would come in handy now living in CA~!

I learned more Spanish living in San Diego reading street signs than I did French after 3 years of HS. That said, I absolutely envy people that can speak and understand multiple languages.

 

[TerryA88]

I'm fluent in Ebonics .