Learning A New Language

I’ve heard Pimsleur is far superior to Rosetta Stone. Any thoughts? Also, any other resources you know of? Shortcuts or Hacks? Thanks guys. btw, the language I’m going to learn is Japanese if that holds any weight…

get a Japanese girlfriend or 2 or 100 that cant speak English.

I learnt english merely by living among english people

wake2000 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > get a Japanese girlfriend or 2 or 100 that cant > speak English. Funny you mention that…

smuggycfa Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I learnt english merely by living among english > people Are you English? I’ve no experience from neither Pimsleur nor Rosetta Stone, which one is more audio based? I’d probably go with Pimsleur. I guess the shortcut is for you to start reading those manga magazines…

For Japanese, you first need to learn the hiragana and kanji system before you can even begin learning the language itself. You got to memorize up to 3,000 characters to be proficient and its quite a chore, but not impossible. An added benefit though is that you can pretty much skip learning the hanzi if you ever want to learn Mandarin since the Japanese and Chinese characters are very similar. For kanji, try buying Heisig’s books from amazon – “Remembering the Kanji.” There are three volumes to the work. You can skip volume 2. Heisig’s system involves breaking down the kanji into their components, giving these components tangible meaning, and then creating little stories using the components to help memorize each kanji. It’s the easiest way I know of. You’ll want to use a flashcard system for memorizing these characters – “reviewing the kanji” (http://kanji.koohii.com/study) has an online flashcard system based on Heisig’s book that I highly recommend for memorizing the kanji. The grammatical system is also the opposite of English’s so it’ll take some getting used to. alljapaneseallthetime.com is written by a guy who is fluent in the language (dedicated about 6 months to becoming proficient, now lives in Japan and is fluent) and has written volumes on the best way to go about learning the language – highly recommended.

You can learn romaji and still learn the language so not sure if I agree with the above advice. Best advice is to take an intro class to form a solid base and then date chicks that cant speak English. If you wanna learn Kanji, the Heisig book is solid as mentioned above along with flash cards. This stuff takes time though and your time is valuable chief. One character can be pronounced several different ways when combined with other characters etc. Its not something you pick up in a month. The language is tough grammatically but not impossible because the pronunciations are straightforward but its a totally useless language and I wouldnt recommend learning it unless you wanna bang FOTB chicks.

Ah, sorry. Yes you can learn the spoken language and remain illiterate too. That would be faster if you don’t need to read anything for whatever you want to do.

I dont speak Japanese, but I have used Pimsleur and Rosetta stone. Pimsleur is fantastic but I think more as a supplement to a proper language course. I used it in middle school for French and Russian and found it great as far as getting the conversational drift of a language and the repetition. I’ve used Rosetta Stone for Hindi and I actually don’t like the system that much.