After the festival, I got sucked into the new 三国 TV Series, which is loosely based on the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. It’s not a romance at all, it’s about history and chivalry, and it’s considered one of the “four great classics” of Chinese literature. Considering how much literature has come from China, making it into eternal memory as one of the uncontested top 4 has to count for something, so I recommend anyone to have a look. Either way I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese video with Chinese subtitles and it’s helping. About a week ago, while hosting a Couchsurfer from France (yay French practise!), I first noticed a Chinese voice in my head. That is, whenever I was mentally phrasing something, the Chinese translation would pop into my head without any effort of mine. Before, I always had to translate and carefully plan anything I wanted to say in Chinese. This is a major milestone!

I believe I may have overdosed on vocabulary study for Chinese. Following my success bringing my character level up to 3000 in a single year, I’ve been religiously using Anki for Chinese, and I’ve taken weekly classes online with a private teacher. During class, we spent half an hour working with the Boya Chinese textbook and half an hour in free conversation. I do not think that I’m presently getting enough exposure though, especially when it comes to things modern people might say (as opposed to phrases that can only be used by time travellers, which I’m learning from 三国).

This is why I’ve decided to participate in the “Read More or Die” aka Tadoku challenge this April. It’s very simple: read as much text in your target language(s) as possible for one month and try to outdo the other participants in number of pages read. You can participate even if you know that you won’t place near the top; this is just a way to utilize your competitive streak for motivation. Time is running out to register – if you think you can out-read me, sign up quickly!

My stats from January 1st until March 31st:
49 hours of French
109 hours of Mandarin
2 1/2 hours of Greek (hope to remedy that)
8 hours of Swahili (need to work on that too)
70 hours of Dutch
1/2 an hour each on Italian and Arabic

Good news: I’ve already almost reached half of last year’s time spent on Mandarin and 1/3 of last year’s time spent on French. Very happy with that. Bad news: I really wanted to spend more time on Dutch and on my maintenance languages.

In April, I will focus on reading Chinese, Dutch and Greek. I may start dabbling in Spanish, because Spanish is next on my list of beginner languages to learn. I also absolutely have to squeeze in at least one month of Listening-Reading for Russian before July because I’ll be going to the IJK in Kiev and I want to see how far Listening-Reading can get me.

Well, I’m addicted to learning vocabulary. Yes, addicted is the right word. I can’t go a day without. It’s too much fun. How? I will tell you, but I want you to first promise that you’ll give it a try. I suggested this tip to many people, and most were skeptical at first, but those who tried it still randomly come up and thank me for it. It changed the way they learn languages.

The secret is Anki. Anki is a small, unprepossessing piece of software, open-source (though maintained and continuously improved by one Damien Elmes, who also provides awesome customer support) and available for all platforms including smartphones. Anki doesn’t look as fancy as some highly-marketed commercial software like BYKI, but in functionality it’s much better. Let me go over a few things I love about Anki.

For one, there’s the algorithm, the most important part of any SRS (= spaced-repetition software). Anki’s algorithm is well-honed, only asking me words when I’m on the verge of forgetting them, easily transferring them into my extra long-term memory. It’s also possible to tune the algorithm e. g. by giving different default intervals, or by specifying that forgotten words should be asked again right away / in 10 minutes / after 8 hours or the like. This makes Anki suitable for different styles of learners, as well as different subject materials. For example, I also study Go problems on Anki and these I don’t want to see too quickly again; while for pesky Chinese characters 10 minutes or less seems to be optimal for me to make sure I learn them.

Speaking of Chinese, one of the key features of Anki for me is the ability to have unlimited “sides” to a card. For Chinese there’s the issue of learning characters, pronunciation and translation. Using actual paper cards, I never know whether to put the pronunciation on the character side or the translation side. If I put it with the characters, I don’t learn to recognize the characters. If I put it with the translation, I don’t learn to build a link between the concept and the Chinese. This problem is not exclusive to Asian languages though. For example, for European languages I like to have another field for grammar, another field for related words, another field for a sample sentence, another field for a translation of the sample sentence… and then Anki allows me to test myself in any direction, not just word to translation but also translation to word, word to grammar, sample sentence to sample sentence translation (all automatically generated based on one-time entry)… and Anki allows me to specify what I want to see when quizzed in each of these directions, e. g. when I quiz myself on Chinese characters to translation, I also want the pronunciation of the characters to show up underneath the translation. When I quiz myself on translation to Chinese characters, I want to see the pronunciation underneath the characters, plus an example sentence or two. This flexibility is awesome.

Even more awesome is that Anki does auto-completion for Chinese, so I only enter a Chinese word and Anki will already try to fill in the translation and pronunciation for me, so entering vocabulary doesn’t take so long. There are also many awesome decks (for many languages) already available for free in the “Shared Decks” section (like a marketplace, but all free), e. g. a huge, well-made deck covering almost 10,000 Chinese words including all the HSK levels, and a deck with 20,000 Chinese sentences for those who want to try AJATT‘s 10,000 sentence method.

For Japanese there is also auto-completion but for other languages there is something almost as valuable: remembering keyboard layouts. So if I use a Greek keyboard layout to enter my Modern Greek vocabulary in the “Front” field, and then a German keyboard layout to enter the translation in the “Back” field, and I switch back to the front field to enter another word, my keyboard layout will automatically be set to Greek again. Same for Arabic. You can’t believe how much time this saves me!

Anki also has extensive plugin abilities. While I was studying Chinese characters last year, I really liked a plugin that told me how many characters I knew and how they compared to a) frequency lists and b) the HSK official character lists. I could e. g. see that I covered 95% of the HSK 2 list, and then click on it to see which characters I was missing. Click on any character to come up with a dictionary entry for it… awesome. Other plugins extend the kind of data Anki can handle, e. g. there’s a plugin for importing Smart.fm vocabulary, or one for viewing Go games / Go problems in .sgf format as part of the card. Anki natively already supports images, sounds (I made an Esperanto deck with every word recorded), video, HTML, LateX and clozes on cards. A good use for images is studying geography, e. g. learning to recognize countries on the map, also learning their capitals. My boyfriend is addicted to a deck like that.

Ah yes, addiction. The sense of achievement that comes from watching all those words wander into your long-term memory (hitting “Show next in 6 months” etc.), the stats underlining your progress, and also the simple, satisfying way of going over lots of cards at once in the 10-30 minutes I study an Anki deck every day. On the computer I use the numeric keypad 0-4 to rate cards, making the mouse unnecessary so I can go very quickly and lean back comfortably while doing this. Even better with the iPhone version, which I’ll use in bed, on the couch or (even better) on the subway and in the elevator, turning every moment into valuable language-learning time.

Get Anki and tell me about your experience with it!

… a continuation from part 1.

How to improve your…

Pronunciation: if you don’t know how to pronounce a foreign word, Forvo.com has a huge database of recorded words for many languages, mostly done by native speakers. If you however need to know how to pronounce a complete phrase or even a complete text, go to Rhinospike.com instead – there you can request that someone should make a recording for you (for free).

Reading comprehension: the best way to learn how to read foreign texts is – to read them. If they are beyond your level though, for example if you try to read a Mexican newspaper after only studying Spanish for 5 hours, use WordChamp (the “Web Reader” function). This will add translations to all words, so that you can rapidly move over the text and start to understand it. It’s much faster than looking every word up in a dictionary, and additionally this tool is able to understand conjugated words. There are also some browser plugins that will do the same thing. You can use these to read not just your own texts, blog posts or foreign newspapers online, but also lots of literature for example – this is a great collection of links to sites that have online literature in lots of languages, such as the Project Gutenberg. And if you prefer somewhat simplified texts, there are some websites for that as well, collected here. Also LingQ has simplified texts in a bunch of languages, and an in-built on-click translation system to boot. Parallel texts (here and here) are also very useful to beginner and intermediate students – there, one column is in the language you’re studying and another column is in your native language, but both feature the same text, so you can compare meanings and constructions across languages.

Listening Comprehension: first, there are podcasts that propose to teach you languages, such as GermanPod101, where I’m project manager, or any number of them available through a quick search on iTunes. Most of these are for beginners or lower-intermediate students. If you’re beyond that stage, there are foreign-language audiobooks (books that are read to you). Audiobooks are becoming popular now, but often they’re expensive. At Librivox.org you can find open-source free audiobooks in several languages, and there’s a more complete listing of such sites here. If your listening comprehension isn’t good enough yet though, you could try listening to an audiobook in a foreign language while reading along in your own language – a lot of words will become clear and they will enter your vocabulary with little effort. This method is called Listening-Reading (see explanations by the inventor) and some resources have been collected for it at Bilingual-texts.com, or you can mix & match your own with the literature and audiobook links above. If you’re a bit more advanced, you may also like to listen to something while reading along in the same language; for example some news sites offer recordings of the news as well as transcripts of them. Or you can watch videos in your target language with subtitles in your language – Dotsub collects subtitled videos online, or there are always DVDs. If your DVD doesn’t have the subtitles you want, you may find some at OpenSubtitles.org, and of course the internet is also your friend if you’re looking to get movies in your target language.

Writing: to get better, you should write a lot in your target language. That’s why I like the service at Lang-8.com, where native speakers correct your foreign-language texts for free. Busuu.com is similar, though it’s only good for a limited number of languages. In exchange, they offer courses and ideas what you could write about.

Speaking: even if you live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, you can speak your target language every day. How? Use italki (or one of many similar websites) to find partners who will talk with you via Skype. They will help you learn their language and you will help him learn yours. Normally you speak half an hour in one language and half an hour in the other, but this can change if your level of language knowledge is different. If you however don’t have the time to do the exchange or if you’re still unable to talk at all, you should find a paid tutor at Myngle or Edufire. Compared to a random native speaker, who cannot explain things or empathize with your situation as a learner of his language, a tutor is often a better choice, especially if you’re not very advanced yet. The advantage of online tutoring is that you can easily find many native speakers of your target language and choose the best teacher from among them, while in your city there may only be one qualified teacher, or even none. I also like online tutoring because it saves me the time I’d otherwise spend commuting.

The rest: if you have a question about a language you’re learning, if you don’t understand the grammar, need help finding websites, are looking for a good textbook or don’t know how to learn efficiently, there are special forums about language-learning that will provide answers. For grammar or vocabulary questions about a particular language I typically recommend the Unilang forum because it unites native speakers and students of lots of languages, including very obscure ones. For questions about language-learning in general, new study methods or evaluations of textbooks / language programs, I recommend the how-to-learn-any-language forum. That one is Esperanto-phobic for the most part though, so if you speak Esperanto, join me for a more open-minded, more international language-learning forum.

Don’t forget to have fun learning languages!

P.S.: If you know other great free websites for or about language learning, please let me know!

First, to get a taste of a language, I normally read its article in Wikipedia and I look over the most important phrases in this language – http://travlang.com/languages/ is a great resource for that, even though it’s full of ads, because they have resources on lots of languages and even made native-speaker recordings. There’s also a much more complete phrasebook, which is almost like a course, available from 50languages.com. For the really obscure languages, this online “language museum” can give me a first impression of the language’s sound.

The internet is good for much more than just getting a first impression though. You can also learn languages completely for free online; there are lots of free online language courses. Of course those are often not as good or not as complete as commercial courses, but there are also great and really complete courses online, for example the course in Modern Greek from Kypros.org with more than 100 lessons, the German course by Deutsche Welle, or this Korean course put online by Sogang University. (This blog post won’t try to be a comprehensive listing of available good online courses, my other site tried to do that.)

Sometimes there are even online courses that used to be (or still are) sold commercially. For example, the American Foreign Service Institute allowed many of its language courses from the 60s to be published online at this site. And there’s an awesome commercial multimedia course in Modern Greek (including video!) here, made available for free. LiveMocha is a website that offers courses for a whole bunch of languages, but they are pretty bad. The best webpages are those that only teach one language, for example Lernu for Esperanto – this has to be the most awesome most complete free language site ever! Would that more languages had sites like this!

Apart from complete courses, the internet also offers great tools. I shall list them according to their learning goals. If you goal is…

A bigger vocabulary: www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html lists online dictionaries for all languages. You don’t want to learn all the words of a dictionary though, so have a look at the Unilang.org basic wordlists with around 600 of the most common words for any language (select category “Unilang Basic Wordlist” and choose your target language). There are also various topical word lists. If you’re not sure how to use a word, or how to say something correctly, www.tatoeba.org is a multilingual database of phrases, in which you can search your word. For memorizing words, definitely try out the free open-source software Anki, which is much better than commercial programs. It’s cross-platform and even available for mobile phones.

Grammar: There are online grammars (for example the complete official reference grammar for Esperanto) just like there are courses, but there’s not one page good for all. Let me just mention Verbix.com, which can conjugate any verb in more than 50 languages.

In my next post I shall look at ways to improve your pronunciation, your reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing and speaking, and also some misc sites. Meanwhile, you can already tell me: what are your favorite language resources online?

Update: part 2 now available at http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2010/09/03/learning-languages-online-part-2/ – and my app Intense German has been approved for the app store! Yay!

What should my next foreign language be? (considering 45 languages so far, I’d appreciate help adding others)
Should I learn Esperanto?
How can I learn a foreign language? (evaluating your aptitude for self-study, classroom study, study abroad etc.)
Which program should I use to learn a new language? (still very sketchy)

Considering the audience of this blog, you may also like Which non-English movie should I watch?

I now found a book that seemed to know me better than I know myself. It also had an instant wowing effect on everybody else I know with the above-mentioned issues. The book is called “Refuse to Choose!
“, written by Barbara Sher, and after devouring it over Christmas break I can recommend it to everybody here. The book reveals more about yourself and puts you at ease with who you are, but since that was not much of a problem for me, I found another part most rewarding: the part where the author provides lots and lots of helpful tips and techniques to enable you to pursue your dreams. From where and how to start via time management techniques to how to finish projects that deserve to be completed (or that your boss/school requires), there’s a lot of helpful content.

Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

For just a few days, this iPhone app is now priced at only 3 Euros / 4 dollars, as we’re preparing to send out a free upgrade to 50 lessons. Once the upgrade has been approved by Apple, the regular price will go up to 5 Euros, so get this app now – you’ll never see it that cheap again!

Get it now!

To get a taste of Esperanto & the culture

Get answers to all your questions about Esperanto at Esperanto.info – and feel free to send me any questions if they aren’t answered there. Also read Volte’s account of her Immersion in Esperanto-land.

A quick introduction to some parts of Esperanto can be found at Wikibooks: Quick and Dirty Guide to Esperanto. Not very serious, but surprisingly good at teaching the key grammar concepts of Esperanto is the page How to Talk Dirty in Esperanto (not for minors). I also sometimes do a 1-hour introductory lecture (next: at the Expolingua Berlin) which empowers the audience to play with the language themselves.

To Study Esperanto

In terms of materials for studying Esperanto, Lernu wins any competition hands-down of course. Not just do they offer 12 free high-quality multimedia courses online, they also have a library of exercises, grammar explanations, vocabulary collections and of course texts. For intermediate students and those who want to study Esperanto the way Tolstoy did, I highly recommend reading texts and forum posts at Lernu with the help of the in-built pop-up dictionary that will allow you understand any item of vocabulary immediately. That way, no text will be too high level for you. I am successfully using this technique for Chinese as well, with the Wenlin software.

For the finer points of grammar, those not covered by the introductions available at Lernu, I’m happy to say that the Esperanto world’s definite grammar reference is available online completely for free: Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko.

To determine which words to teach, that is which words are the most useful to beginning students of Esperanto, I often refer to the list of Easy Esperanto roots according to the magazine Kontakto. The bold entries are the most basic, the non-bold ones still come up fairly often. I find this so useful that I even created an Anki vocabulary deck featuring at least one entry for every bold word root, along with the English translation, related words and sample sentences. The words are sorted into categories such as “Basics” or “Feelings”, so that you can disable the categories you don’t need right now. To get this word list and start studying, open Anki, navigate to File > Download > Shared Deck and look for the “Esperanto 101″ deck. For my students I also created a version that features myself pronouncing every entry, so that they could improve their Esperanto pronunciation and test their listening comprehension. If anybody else wants that deck with recordings, send $10 to sprachprofi@gmx.net and I will forward it right away.

To Use Esperanto

Once you’re at a certain level in a language, the most sure-fire way to improve is by using it. No more excuses, no more simplified stuff – just jump into the cold water already!

I always recommend attending an international Esperanto meeting, because there are few things as beneficial as immersing yourself in an environment where everybody speaks Esperanto and doesn’t share another common language. Even for beginners it can be very worthwhile, as most meetings offer Esperanto classes at the same time, so you could attend classes in the morning and then spend the afternoon, evening and night having fun with Esperanto speakers from around the world. After seven days or so in Esperantio, many report that they are dreaming in Esperanto. Eventoj.hu lists many Esperanto events.

Now is also the time to dive into Esperanto literature. My favourite work, especially for beginners, is Fajron Sentas Mi Interne (skip the antaŭparolo on that page, it contains too many spoilers). Lernu also uses the novel Gerda Malaperis as a course for intermediate students, and they offer a lot of Brother Grimm fairy tales in Esperanto with annotations. Once you’re ready for the real thing, have a look at Don Harlow’s index of Esperanto literature online, or just get some books from the libroservo at the next Esperanto event. Mail-ordering from Esperanto-USA (for North Americans) or the Universal Esperanto League (for everybody) is also a possibility. If you’re interested in current events, you could also start by reading news in Esperanto, news in Esperanto about the Esperanto movement or news analysis in Esperanto.

And don’t forget to enjoy Esperanto music! You can start to get an overview on this page (though some well-known bands didn’t want to submit samples there) or just look on Youtube, there is tons of it. In terms of internet radio, there are also several Esperanto radio stations where you can practise listening comprehension and discover new songs.

If you want to watch some movies in Esperanto, there isn’t much of a selection yet because no city could support an Esperanto cinema. However, Esperantists are busily subtitling movies now and at Esperanto events you will typically get to see a different subtitled movie every night. For home use, you can also download subtitles for a number of movies from the Verda Filmejo or DivxTitles. There’s also another site with other movies, but I forgot the link. Anyway this is a great chance to watch foreign movies that may not have been translated into English. Short films with Esperanto subtitles (or even Esperanto voices) can be found at Dotsub.com.

I wish you success in your studies and use of Esperanto.
Hope to see you in Esperantio sometime!

Right now I’m supplementing both my Greek and Chinese studies with 1-on-1 lessons on Myngle. I find them very useful in helping me advance quickly (the opposite of what I experienced in group lessons).

I typically take a lesson when I have a concrete need or goal. For example, the other day I was reading a learners’ grammar on the Greek tense system and found that I didn’t really understand the difference between θα γράφω and θα γράψω, or generally tenses based on the stems -γράφ-, -γράψ- and γράφει. The grammar had some examples, but each sample sentence was about a different topic and I couldn’t infer much about the crux of the matter. So I scheduled a lesson and asked Rania to think of sample sentences where the same idea (writing a letter) will appear in different tenses due to slight changes of context. For a native speaker, it’s not really hard to do if you ask specifically “What is a context in which I’d have to say ‘θα γράφω μια γράμμα’?”. Having these sample sentences with minimal variance really helped me understand why the changes occur, plus I have now entered the sentences into my Anki and test myself on them regularly (English to Greek).

Of course the lessons are never just about questions I have, we also practise conversation or listening comprehension or whatever else I feel is my weakest area at the moment. I do need a tutor for conversation at this point, rather than an unsuspecting native speaker, because once I’m talking about a subject, I refuse to give up on expressing something I wanted to express. I do try to rephrase sentences, but, if that does not help, I will ask for every single word I’m missing and then try to build the sentence. Unlike a lot of language learners, I do not keep silent or change topics if an idea is clearly beyond my level to express. Whether I’m having the discussion in Greek or in my mother tongue, I do not allow my limited vocabulary and grammar to hinder me from expressing the same ideas. Right now that typically requires angelic patience from whomever I’m talking to, so I prefer not to talk too much in Greek with friends. However, I believe it’s the fastest way for me to improve, because I’m learning words and structures that are 150% relevant and useful to me. What’s more, I can then discuss the same topic in Greek decently well with anybody else, no matter if it’s music, Berlin, what’s happening in our lives, the economy crisis or anything else I have talked about with Rania.

My name is Judith Meyer, I’m a 25-year-old German girl living in Berlin with my American boyfriend, Chuck Smith. I originally come from Kamp-Lintfort, a small town near Düsseldorf, but I’ve been living in Berlin since March 2008 and I absolutely love this city!

I have a huge interest in languages, programming, politics, history, philosophy and methods of learning and teaching. My university major is French studies, with minors in computational linguistics (wish I could take that as a major!) and management. I just need to write my thesis to complete my degree, but it’s taking longer than expected because I work so much on the side. I tutor people in German, Latin and Esperanto over the internet, occasionally also French or English, and I work as the project manager of GermanPod101.com, also writing and recording most lessons. When I need a mental challenge, I like to program in Ruby on Rails or play the ancient Asian game of Go.

Read more about my starting point in each of the categories!