No foreign language I'm not going to teach. Why do I need it. Yes would learn Japanese without subtitles doromy look better all took on new meaning, movies, anime. You can always use the knowledge to something else. Language for me is too complicated. Scripture is worse. Grip on me four languages. I have a specific problem, sometimes confused about the words from other languages. I think need to teach their native language, speech will be confused. It is associated with hikimori. Sometimes I think of one, tell time differently. In my head bard thought, I can arrange on shelves. Over the years succeeded in marks, not to communicate with people. Although I do not think that is something to help. We need more to communicate with different people on different topic. I think the solution is just not clear what exactly help. Work can solve the problem, it all depends what kind of work. Again the problem appears, I do not want such work where people have many different talk.

I've recently learned of a method called shadowing, it looks very interesting. I'm going to try it with Japanese and Korean and see if it improves anything.

I'm learning japanese and how to read phonetics. So far it's going pretty well.

Just read through this thread in its entirety and it has motivated me to work harder to learn German. I'm quite impressed by those of you taking on difficult languages like Greek, Latin, Japanese, etc. It puts things in perspective for me, makes me realize that going from English to German is nothing to worry about.

Lord_Belail, I was interested to hear about "The Laddering Method" that you use. I think maybe someday I'll try to use that method to learn French. Also, I am curious to know what the "shadowing" method is?

Shadowing is when you listen to sentences while having a paper in front of you with the sentences written in both the target language and English, the goal is to say each word in the sentence before you hear it. You also walk back and forth while doing this, I think it helps with getting your brain more alert.

Ummm.... I can read an write in Hebrew.

This is probably one of the most intetesting topics on hikiculture. I just memorized 200 kanji in the past two days, then played Mother 2 to see if I could understand anything. The result was very little but I plan to keep working on it.

Something that's apparantly helpful is to surround yourself in an atmosphere that's similar to the one you grew up in where everything was in your natove tounge. Listen to foreign podcasts,video games, music, and make friends with people who speak the language you want to learn.

I've wanted to learn Japanese for the longest time, but I feel like learning a language is just too hard and Japanese does happen to be one of the hardest languages to learn. I know quite a few Japanese words from watching so much anime, but not enough to actually form sentences and the written language of Japanese seems impossible to learn. The main problem is one I don't have to patience and determination to learn and two I don't really have a proper way to learn it. If I learn Japanese I want to do it right. I tried Rosetta Stone and don't get me wrong the program works good, but it doesn't seem like it has what it takes to truly teach you the language. I feel like I would have to get a teacher if I wanted to properly learn it.

This is why I've given up on ever being able to learn a language by way of self teaching. I'm too unmotivated and disorganised. I think the only way I'll ever be able to learn German or Japanese is if I go to university.

The only real hard part I see about Japanese is learning the writing system, specifically Kanji. The rest is more logical than most languages (Japanese grammar and spelling makes sense while a lot of the time in English it doesn't). The rest is just vocabulary which you can build in the same way you've built your English vocabulary. I don't think that what they teach in courses is the correct way of teaching because they'll just give you a bunch of words and symbols to memorize and you'll get stressed out fast. And if you want to learn this way, you could probably do it more efficiently by yourself and with flashcard programs. You can learn any skill without a teacher, and in some cases you're better off just reading internet resources.

Assimil is, IMO, the best self-study program. 3~ months of moderate effort and you'll be able to surf the internet and read basic books with a dictionary. The format is basically target language dialogue on one page, English on the other, and a recording(essential) in the target language. Sounds simple, but it's 1000x more effective than Rosetta Stone, Teach Yourself, and classes will be. Japanese has the added step of the writing system, which is your own problem, but lots of people have good results by going through Heisig's Remembering the Kanji before or during Assimil.

I, however, got bored with Japanese. Again. I can never stick with it for more than a few months. Probably because there's not enough Western TV available in Japanese dubs.

I'm kind of interested in Ancient Greek and Arabic now. Which is dumb, because both are hard and don't have any media available with which to entertain myself. I encounter a shitton of Arabic names at work and it's driving me crazy. And Ancient Greek is...beautiful.

I never found learning how to read Kanji as an overly daunting task. The best way to avoid getting overwhelmed is not to think of Kanji as made up of strokes instead of radicals. You could probably get through the entire Joyo kanji list in 3-4 months if you really worked hard. Having a clear goal will help you greatly with keeping motivated, for example, my reasoning behind learning Japanese is because I want to start a business that sells products aimed to the Asian consumer. Read some articles on this site http://japaneselevelup.com/ it may help you a bit.

Thanks for the advice and the website. 3-4 months is actually looking to be a good goal for learning them all.

I'm currently studying several arcane languages such as Old Norse (Old Icelandic), Old English, and Gothic.

I wish my English would be good enough for writing poetry.