Language

Getting a tutor or going to french sessions is out of the question because there arn’t any affordable ones in my area.
I would like to self teach myself french. I already do it at school but we don’t learn it fluently- we only learn the stuff that we need to know for our exam.

Any people who have learnt to speak another language fluently, how did you learn?
Like are the tapes good? should I watch a lot of french films? how can I practise talking french to other people?

I learned by immersion.

By you got it right. A combination of movies, language exchange partners, software and reading will do.

For the sound of the language: watch movies, watch French TV (all TV channels have websites, go to French versions of major search engines (yahoo.fr …) … Notable: tf1.fr, france2.fr
Or listen to the radio online.

A good software is a great way to get affordable (depending on the program) self-teaching courses. You need to learn the fundamentals, otherwise, your knowledge will never be solid enough (sorry for the cliché!). You will need discipline. I recommend Rocket French, which is fun. Having fun is one key while learning a language, trust me. Second key is devoting to learning a few minutes each day (as opposed to 4 hours once a week for example). Thus the need for a good (and fun!) software, with which you can learn at will, from home. That’s http://www.rocketfrenchlanguage.com

Reading. You never read enough. (I learned a foreign language by starting to read it). Good for pretty much everything (except the accent!): vocabulary, grammar, even culture! …

Practice … Language exchange partner. Or find someone on MSN or Skype.

Voila! I hope it helps.

Bonne chance!

I have already mastered rolling around on the floor chanting and making up words but God never responds. I am obviously not doing it right and need to learn to speak proper tongue. I cannot find a tongue grammar primer and dictionary? I tried Amazon but had no joy.

I happen be Welsh and have a Welsh dictionary. Can I use that?

Before I saw your last sentence, that is the first thing that lept to mind. I have never seen a language where it takes 104 letters with 24 consonants in a row just to say "town."

I don’t believe, however, there is a tome that can help. I believe that part of tongues is finding your own voice. Perhaps, though, you could find some enlightenment by spending time in a psycho ward of your local loony bin. Psychiatrists and doctors have noticed great similarities in brain activity between the two.

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I would love to learn how to speak french…anyone have any tips that could help me or the best way to go about starting this???

Well my first Language was Spanish, & when I got into Pre-School I had a pretty hard time. But when I started Kindergarten I had the hang of it, but of course I learn new words every year. (=
So it took me a year to learn the basics of English, but a major part of it was the fact that we only spoke English at my school.
So my estimate is that it would take you 1-3 years to learn French if you really try. :]

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I want to learn to speak japanese because I watch a lot of Anime and pretty much all of it is in japanese and reading subtitles is starting to get on my nerves a bit lol.

So how hard is it to learn? And what would you suggest is the best way to learn?

OK, I taught myself Japanese from scratch – and yes, that means I had no teacher teaching me!! I started when I was about 14, spent time fiddling about with it for two years, applied for an exchange to Japan when I was 16 (took about 3 months of weekly tutoring beforehand) and came back with a level 2 in the JLPT and a standard of spoken Japanese that lead Japanese people to believe I was Japanese over the phone.

I now have a level one, and keep up the spoken standard – and this little anecdote is just here for all you ‘Japanese is too hard!’ ‘You HAVE to use a textbook!’ ‘You NEED a TEACHER’ conventional language learners out there.

I started out by teaching myself how to read and write(badly) kana from a phrasebook, which also had little bits on Japanese grammar which was a good start.

I was interested in songs, so I tried to translate song lyrics from the pamphlets out of CDs I’d bought. This was good as it brought me head-to-head with kanji – which is NOT as difficult as everyone says, it just requires frequent use (and never expect to know them all because nobody, anywhere, knows them all) – and I used to listen to the song lyrics to try and guess how to read the kanji.

My first translations were awful, but it was a start! I liked music, too, so I used to write out song lyrics during class (which turned out to be great writing practice, as I was using all three alphabets).

So music is not a bad starting point, if you’re into that!

As for learning how to speak — if you like anime, I’ll assume you’d also like manga. After the song lyrics, and when my kana reading was a bit more proficient, I picked up some Japanese manga books and read them a few times.

Most manga have furigana, so you can always read the characters. Sit and read through them with a dictionary and look up the different words, and if there’s anything you can’t understand cross-reference it with the English translation to figure out the meaning. It’s a good system, and everything written in a manga book is dialogue – i.e. how people speak. You may not start out speaking like the most polite person in the world, but at least you won’t be thrown for a loop when people use a plain verb form with you. And you’ll learn to understand some slang.

Some manga are harder to read than others, so ask around (personally I learnt off Inuyasha, but you definately don’t pick up polite or standard Japanese from that…)

Before you try most of this, you’ll have to get your head around the basic grammar structure – which lots of people say is impossible because it’s completely different to English, but I think it’s wonderful because that means you can’t get them mixed up. Also, Japanese grammar doesn’t change – meaning once you know where the words go, you just interchange them. You don’t need to rewrite the sentence just because you changed one word (unlike English).

this grammar guide:

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/

is fantastic. just keep hold of the basic grammar section and refer to it whenever you come across something you don’t understand. The rest of it you’ll learn with time and coming across it in context, so don’t go trying to memorise it.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) to get full understanding and fluent usage of the language you will eventually have to go to Japan (host family/homestay is the best option) as you’ll pick things up much quicker there. I would say that to make the best of it – teach yourself a good chunk, then go find a tutor for some conversation practice and become comfortable speaking Japanese and THEN go (otherwise you could easily waste your time there learning things you could’ve learnt at home and, consequently, not getting as good as you could have).

All of this advice is just based off my experiences, and what worked for me, and as everyone learns a little differently you should feel about and see what you can get hold of. I would advise against using textbooks as all the beginner textbooks my friends have are incredibly confusing – as in, i look at them now and go ‘OK, that makes sense, but you really can’t use that in real life and why are you learning that now, anyway?’

Textbooks also have a habit of separating the words and omitting kanji to make it ‘easier’ for students, with the result that people go OMFG WHAT THE HELL IS THAT when they get onto it.

The trick to learning any language, though,, regardless of what method you take, is to remember that it’s really NOT THAT HARD!!! If 20 million Japanese people can speak it — so can you!!

I have been taking spanish in high school for 4 years and my spanish speaking skills are poor at best. I really want to learn how to speak the language since i don’t want to know that i wasted 4 years of my life. How can I learn how to speak spanish?

If you can learn how to structure a sentence, you can learn any language. Focus on sentence structure.

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I’m planning to attend Temple University in Japan next year and I’m hoping to learn to speak Japanese while I’m there. The problem is that all classes are in English, however, they do offer Japanese language classes. I’ll only be there for 4 years, so I don’t expect to be fluent by the time I leave, but what’s a good way to enhance my learning while I’m there?

rosseta stone. or if you want a more interesting method, become more social while in japan, get on myspace or thier equivilent and meet people in your area