/aca/ — Academic Topics

I'm a native Spanish speaker but because I don't use it every day, I try to post and read in Spanish. Not reading a book atm bit I'm thinking it's going to be Corazón de las Tinieblas translated by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Languages I'm learning from scratch:

Pali (Buddhist literary language of S/SE Asia). I found a really good online class and am obsessed with my teacher and classmates. I wish we could be irl friends. This is why I've had a lot of energy for learning and reading about the language.

Chinese. I have a private teacher who has me work through a textbook and once a week she has me improvise through scenarios she's prepared. I would like to eventually be able to read books and academic articles. She's not currently teaching me any reading/writing, but I think it's ok because speaking/listening is a good foundation and feels immediately rewarding.

Literary Chinese. This has been on the backburner honestly. Once my Pali class is done I'm planning to work through a couple textbooks and also try to read/translate Buddhist texts that have parallels in Pali. I'd like to eventually read more poetry as well as early modern purpose.

im learning mandarin and japanese. im in immersion classes for madarin rn, ill start up immersion classes for japanese in september. my japanese is solidly intermediate, though currently quite rusty. my mandarin is ok, i recently passed tocfl B2 but im not very happy with my speaking

for practice i do anki, watch anime/read manga in japanese, and id like to start listening to the news in mandarin as well. i dont consistently do any of these things as much as i should.

ik people's opinions are split on this, esp among japanese learners, but i find classes extremely useful and think anyone who has the opportunity to take them should. having an in person community of like-minded ppl + an external way to judge your progress is super useful (fears of bad input notwithstanding)

i'm learning spanish, i don't know where exactly i would peg my level. i definitely punch a lot higher with my reading than with anything else, which is something i want to work on. i find general internet chatting/ reading pretty easy but i pretty frequently get filtered by youth/colloquial/regional slangs, which is what i'd say impedes me the most.

i had a pretty good high school teacher, so i've been able to teach myself ever since based on the knowledge i had from that. two big things that helped me grow my reading level to the point where i could start reading books were reading manga and wikipedia. wikipedia in general is pretty nice to learn on because articles are very uniform in style/vocab and context is pretty clear. manga is nice cus it feels like 0 work but at the end you still are intaking a lot of words.

when i started tryharding spanish more a few years ago i kinda said to myself "well if i could just be able to read books and have simple convos that'd be nice" but now that i'm there i feel unsatisfied. it bothers me that i cant always understand the people on the bus or whatever, and it bothers me that when i speak it feels like the english words flash through my mind a split second before i say the spanish ones. i wanna think in spanish...

probably i should do more anki and watch more tv in spanish but i honestly dislike watching videos a lot so its been hard to force myself

>>3mr3ix6owug2f
i'd like to do a class like you mention, maybe i should see if there are any for about my level at the community college here. i don't really know where else i'd look.

i've been kinda switching between learning japanese, french and spanish for about half a year now.

i'm doing japanese classes in school right now, and took a little bit of both french and spanish in high school, but otherwise i'm just picking up vocabulary in bits and pieces through immersion and anki practice (which i need to be doing more). i don't really have anyone i can practice conversation with, so my focus is just reading/listening comprehension for now.

my fluency is very, very low in all of them, but i don't mind too much for now. i know fluency can be kind of a shifting goalpost, especially when learning on a spoken level, and honestly i'm a lot more motivated by just the enjoyment of learning other languages than by trying to reach a specific level of proficiency. that might chance as my skills grow and i have new goals to strive for, but right now it's nice to be taking things at my own pace.

>>3mr3f5noxts2d
how has learning pali been?? are you aiming to read the tipitaka? i'd be very curious to know more about that class. (studying literary chinese is a long term goal of mine too)

>>3mr3ix6owug2f
i agree about classes, though it definitely depends on having a good teacher/classmates. my teacher is really good, but my classmates are largely military guys with annoying, xenophobic sentiments about the country whose language they're learning, which is probably why i haven't done as much conversation practice.

>>3mr4ct647ik2d
yeaaaa, wikipedia is very underrated for reading practice. it also just continually amazes me how many articles on both spanish and french wikipedia haven't been translated onto anglo wikipedia at all. you really don't realize just how much of the world you miss out on by being monolingual.

For me right now the list is French (essential for daily existence, have technically spoken it since early childhood but forgor, still pretty fluent but not at all where I should be), Mandarin (respectably intermediate, can hold conversations and read books with some difficulty, progress a bit slow due to lack of speakers in my area), Japanese (beginner, primarily for anime appraisal purposes), and most recently Inuktitut (could be useful for work in the future, plus its cool).

Inuktitut is definitely the indigenous language with the most and the best resources I could find but it's still pretty thin, especially for the Nunavik dialects I'm interested in. I had initially planned to learn East Cree but that just proved completely impossible, though I at least learned to read syllabics in the attempt which cleared a big hurdle for studying Inuktitut. The comparative linguistic detective work it requires I find really fun, cross-referencing between very different dialects and having to rely more on academic papers and whatnot. Still, I got badly spoiled by the readily available comprehensible input stuff for Chinese and Japanese, I miss it.

not learning it yet but im taking french during my next semester of college. ive always wanted to learn it and im hoping to at some point become fluent, theres a lot of stuff id like to read and watch. i took a few years of spanish in highschool, was great at the grammar (rules, conjugation, etc) but horrible at vocab, ive never been good at memorization. if anyone has any tips id appreciate it, itd be my first time taking a language class seriously lol

>>3mr72s7j56p2d
For French I'd say take advantage of the amount of shared vocabulary with English to start reading fast, like just go out and grab Le Petit Nicolas or something and stumble through it as soon as youve got a handle on the basics. If vocabulary retention is your problem, having already seen a broad sample of vocab in context will save your life, even if you didnt fully Learn it on the first pass.

Also in-person French classes tend to give pronunciation severely short shrift so ball's kind of in your court there unfortunately. A lot of your freeform study should be shadowing recordings of native speakers and getting a clear sense of what the sounds actually are.

To save you some pain out the gate: the French U as in «lune» is just ee as in cheese but with the lips all kissy pursed. Say "ee" and tighten your lips into a small circle, like when you pronounce an "ooh" or "oh" sound, but without moving your tongue at all from the "cheese" position, then youve got it. People love making that one sound more complicated than it is for some reason.

Bonne chance!

i'm a native spanish speaker; i've been learning japanese for quite a few years now i like to think i have a decent grasp on it..
when i was in high school i took german classes for ~2 years and then dropped it but now i happened to get an internship job in austria so i'm picking it back up
i've also taken mandarin classes during uni and french classes in school.. i wish there was enough time on this earth to learn every language (;´Д`)

currently learning japanese, mostly as a thing that gives me a thread to follow throughout my life even when im not sure what to do with myself (although it has obvious links to my hobbies too). fairly ok at reading, not super good at listening, absolutely zero output ability. i looove handwriting though

i'm very interested in giving Basque a go when i feel like i want to pause my jpn learning, i've always been very fascinated with it.

>>3mr72s7j56p2d
as bird mentioned the amount of shared vocabulary actually makes it a great pick if ur already fluent in english, especially if you already have experience with romance grammar (although french obviously has its particularities).
one thing i recently mentioned to someone about pronunciation is that french orthography is less about what letter is silent and such, which is how learners who come from english tend to see it as, and more as a sort of big syllabary where clusters of letters are the unit (eg. "ait" makes an è sound, "oux" makes an oo sound), which is actually a very consistent system. which may make the task of learning that less daunting, i dont know.
good luck with ur studies!!

Learning Japanese. Have the kana down and working on my first ~100 kanji

>>3mraqqtlgyc2d
are you learning kanji with vocab or just as the characters?

btw i use this in anki to practice writing hanzi idk if there something similar for kanji but its basically the same thing with just a slightly different character set so i assume theres something
https://krmanik.github.io/Anki-xiehanzi/

i don't really entirety like the way they set it up by default but i just cut and pasted the script into my own note system as a card type and edited it a little so it works

it isn't like entirely necessary after you internalize how you write characters but i feel like it helps me avoid minor stroke order mistakes which im nervous about getting careless about, like sometimes a component is written slightly differently than i expected

ive spent a lot of time thinking about anki i might upload my decks at some point after i clean them up

>>3mriei5gdmg2n
tbh after sharing my handwriting progress with my friends i regularly get replies from native japanese speakers where they use a different stroke order from the official one, and i assume theres no reason for hanzi to be different there so it's probably not a big deal lol

>>3mriei5gdmg2n
i do still want my stroke order to be correct tho even if it doesnt really matter, its a fun and relaxing activity for me

>>3mriirdddnc2c
>>3mriisuq2nk2c
yeah i mean theoretically you don't really have to be able to write at all now with typing but im kind of interested in doing calligraphy eventually so i want to do it "properly" also i just like it too

>>3mr63hgzdq22d
there isn't a specific Tipitaka text I'm aiming to read -- I just want to be able to read any of it if I want to, and I want to not be taken in by any one person's translation. It's a good entry point into Prakrit, Sanskrit, Gandharan, etc. too, all of which interest me. My instructor teaches Sanskrit online out of Barcelona. I'll probably take his next class in September. Two birds with one stone working on Sanskrit and academic Spanish at the same time!

If you're at all interested, Yogic Studies is the platform I've been using for learning these classical languages. It costs money but the instructors and classmates are all really cool. I've had a lot of fun studying Pali with them for a year and I'm honestly having separation anxiety about graduating

any of you have advice about learning multiple languages at once/when to add a second or third one? i don't think im ready to go beyond just mandarin yet but id like to learn two or three more languages eventually

>>3mrstuh7zxg2d
I dedicate each day of the week to a specific language -- Monday:Pali, Tuesday:Mandarin, etc. No mixing allowed.

I suspect it also helps to use a distinct input/output method for each language in a given period, but this is maybe only possible for someone learning modern and classical languages together. For example, I don't think Pali and Chinese interfere with each other cuz Pali is mainly reading and Chinese is mainly listening/talking, for the moment.

In general, I think you just need to be excited about doing it. Having study buddies and enthusiastic teachers go a long way

>>3mrstuh7zxg2d
i think its pretty much like learning a single language, ur facility will depend on the amt of input u get and how consistently ur able to practice. studying mandarin has only impacted my japanese ability in the sense that i have less time to spend studying japanese (and ig that i say すう學 instead of 數學）i dont find that they mix around too much in my head. its simply really difficult to resist the gravity of ur native language and that actually works to ur advantage when u try to pick up a third one imo

>>3mrtgnkt6lb25
iow the extent to which my japanese gets rusty as my mandarin gets better is from my POV is still the result of me not parcelling out enough of the time i spend speaking and thinking and writing in english to dedicate to japanese, and not because its inherently impossible or even particularly difficult to learn both at once

speedrunning latam spanish bc we moved to my partner's parents home country for [gestures generally at the state of the united states] since my home country was not an option for similar unchecked rampant fascism reasons

im hoping itd go quicker than learning english because that took uhhhhh 4+ years of living in an english speaking country, im so far doing really good with my selective mutism around language things, it seems promising [and also being somewhere where going outside is at all an option without spending sixty dollars helps]

>>3msxl6es36s2q
good luck! would enjoy reading updates about how your speedrun is going