Foreign language study thread

I don't know if there are a bunch of people interested in foreign languages or if it's just me, so if it turns out no one else cares you can just mentally retitle it "Ini's Portuguese thread." But I'm titling it this way so that anyone who has language questions can ask them.

I'm studying Brazilian Portuguese via the Pimsleur program at the moment. I'm very pleased with my progress, but it's pretty much all audio and I'm worried that my grasp of reading/writing/spelling may be suffering. Can anyone recommend a grammar textbook/workbook for introductory Brazilian Portuguese, or a series they found useful that might have a BP variant? I fully expect this to cost me a little bit, resources don't have to be free websites. Resources do need to be specifically Brazilian Portuguese, not continental.

I'm a native English speaker, and was at one point fluent in Spanish but it's been ten years so I'm probably just a "pretty good" speaker now. I can help with questions about either of those, although I suspect no one here needs English grammar or vocabulary help.

If anyone else is interested in Pimsleur's courses, I do recommend them. I have a friend who's done both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone for various different languages, and she recommended Pimsleur over RS when I asked her. She said she breezed through all three levels of RS' Swedish course, and still didn't feel competent. I'm feeling pretty good about my progress given how little time it's taken. Like many of you, Pimsleur seems to feel strongly about the importance of being able to order beer, so expect to be taught vocabulary relevant to that aim for quite some time.

The Pimsleur stuff ain't cheap -- Pimsleur and "Pimsleur Approach" don't seem to be the same thing, and buying the individual modules tends to run about $120 if you buy them digitally (which is cheaper) or $335+ for bundles of several modules. But I think you can get 25% of pretty much any order easily (by taking a free lesson, or just reusing what I'm pretty sure is a permanently available coupon code that you get for doing that), and it's not like Rosetta Stone is inexpensive.

As it happens, next year I'll be doing an intensive Portuguese writing class, so I'll let you know what turns up.

I would sort of like to learn Portuguese as well since I have friends in Brazil that I want to go to visit.

I am at the very very beginning of teaching myself French. My library has access to PowerSpeak (online software), so I'm using that.

Currently learning Polish, as I'm living there at the moment, and all I have to say is FML! It's a horrifying language, as they have this tendency to change the entire word rather than using affixes or suffixes. I mean, they use those too, but 52% of the times they don't, and the rules don't seem very clear cut. It's a bit like the ten million exceptions to the I before E except after C rule.

I looked at language software awhile back - I want to learn Spanish because living in America, it's a good idea, and I have a fascination with languages. I'm envious of people who speak more than one.

<twitch>

Welcome to the wonderful world of Slavic languages (meant non-ironically).

I'm learning from the same set, and I think the written/reading bit isn't that big a deal. Once you understand some basic transformations (e.g. leading 'r', double 'r'), I'd say it's not that big a deal. Pick up a book on the topic and you'll be fine, the one I used was the Everything Learning Brazilian Portuguese Book. For tutoring I've had some luck with local tutors and I keep meaning to set aside time to use Street Smart Brazil's online tutoring, which is very cost effective and convenient.

Since I practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu I also try to read Gracie Mag's online blogs which are in Portuguese.

I can converse slowly with my Brazilian friends, and I've found that once I got a handle on the basic grammatical structure/idioms (which most Romance languages share) it's just an issue of filling in holes in the vocabulary and then loading up on idiomatic expressions. Portuguese and Spanish are so close that I can often decipher Spanish subtitles from my minimal Portuguese skillset.

That said, I came crashing down to earth when I tried to watch a couple Brazilian movies and I had no idea what anyone was saying. I'd pick out one word per sentence and that was it. Kind of depressing, but also expected when you don't have an opportunity to really immerse in it.

To save money on Pimsleur, you should check a local library. The King County library in Seattle had all the Pimsleur stuff I was interested in.

Jeez we seem to have a lot of shared interests. How long have you been studying? Might be good to do some conversation practice together, although I'm not far into the program yet.

That book looks like a good start, thanks, I'll check it out. I'm also gonna take a look at the Livemocha website, which some people at SA recommended.

Library is probably a good idea, but I already bought the full BP set. Maybe for next time. I was thinking about maybe Tagalog next. But that'll be a while, I want to commit fully to learning one language at a time.

I started about 3 years ago, but only did it seriously for maybe 18 months (and by serious, I mean 'in my car' and I had a tutor for about 9 months, meeting once a week).

One thing I've learned is that conversational practice between two people who don't speak a language fluently usually ends up with a lot of "Wait, are you sure you pronounce it that way?" discussions, both getting it wrong, and then looking silly when you try to speak to a native speaker. =) And regional differences are fairly pronounced in Brazilian Portuguese, so to some degree you kind of want to pick whether you want to sound like a carioca or paulista or whatever. Carioca (from Rio) sounds very distinct, since the 's' becomes more like a 'sh' sound, e.g. "nos estamos" is almost "noysh eshtamosh" Not quite that dramatic but it's definitely there.

I've finished all 3 of the BP but haven't revisited them in a year -- I'd listen to it to/from work, but since I work from home now the opportunity really isn't there any more. I do find that I'm always (and this is probably an Aspy thing) "thinking in Portuguese", i.e. when I'm thinking about something I'm trying to translate to Portuguese simultaneously. Totally subconscious.

For example, the subtle pronounciation differences between boa and porra can be amusing.

I will say that once I finished the series, the next step was just immersion, because I could have a basic conversation and then start asking questions about usage, vs. the early struggle of "Fuck, how do I even form a sentence?!" I still suck at conjugation and I REALLY suck at future-tense/past-tense and all the various future-imperfect stuff, but I don't think that's so much book learning as it is just sitting around talking and picking it up.

One thing about learning any language (or probably most skills) is that it's very hard initially but accelerates rapidly after that, because much of it is just connecting the dots. When you only have a few dots, connecting them requires traversing a lot of empty space (i.e. stuff you don't know), which makes that path very stressful and error prone. When you have a lot of dots, then it's very easy to approximate or guess at a phrase.

I may unass myself and finally get around to signing up for Street Smart Brazil. We'll see, I don't have many Brazilian friends here in North Carolina, whereas there were quite a few in my BJJ class in Seattle.

The problem with less popular languages is that the Pimsleur sets may only have one level (e.g. BP is up to level 3, but French they have to level 5), so you might find yourself limited.

I just talked to a Brazilian dude for like an hour on LiveMocha, that was awesome and also terrifying. That site is hilariously active, I did a lesson for less than 10 minutes (I'm well past the lesson 1 content) and in that time I had 3 friend requests, a chat request (the guy I talked to), and like a dozen people commented on my audio recording.

I want to do LiveMocha (Spanish language) but I haven't gotten over the "terrifying" part yet.

I speak Spanish more or less fluently, or I did. Should certainly be enough to give you some conversation practice if you want a less... overwhelming environment, and to speak with someone you know will understand your English perfectly if you have questions.

I'm working on re-learning Spanish. Took two years of high school, and enough of it stuck that I can translate a few nouns and conjugate many present-tense verbs (even if I have no idea what the verbs actually mean). I have a Spanish grammar workbook that is gigantic (like, the size of a phonebook, but not printed so small). I've been through three chapters now I think?

All I can say now is that I am REALLY tired of conjugations, and my vocabulary is much more awful than I thought. I translate everything in the workbook, even if the assignment doesn't require it.

I'm still really terrible of doing English to Spanish translations, compared to Spanish to English. I also can't speak a lick of it, even if I can write it. My brain just doesn't work fast enough yet I guess.

A guy critiquing my Portuguese on Livemocha, himself studying intermediate English, is dropping words like "orthography" in his feedback to me.

I... have a lot of work to do.

I went to the LiveMocha site and...I'm not even sure what the hell it is. I hate the design is one of those "Sign up now!" call-to-action bullshit designs and it doesn't actually tell me "THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD SIGN UP NOW!" Learn? Teach? Explore? What?! So I click Learn...okay, uh, hmmm...Portuguese. REGISTER NOW!

Gah. It's just hard for me to sign up given they don't actually have a clear presentation of "This is what LiveMocha does and how it works for you", it's just "LEARN CLICK HERE LEARN NOW REGISTER!"

Sorry, ranting =)

I learned English, French, Latin and Ancient Greek at school and then never needed to use anything other than English for the next 15 years. I moved to Paris and suddenly realised that I couldn't speak French for shit but I retaught myself partly by reading ads on the Metro, partly by making myself translate random thoughts that I was having but mostly by insisting on speaking French and having it spoken to me as much as possible. After five years of that and a brief interlude in Dublin I moved to Germany where I started with no knowledge of the language other than the few phrases I'd picked up from Commando comics as a boy. Turns out that "Achtung Spitfire!" and "Hande Hoch Englische Schweinhund!" aren't as useful in general conversation as one would think so I started teaching myself in the same way as I did with French. Now my German is still weaker than my French but I can hold conversations.

Hilariously when I go to France now, I have no problem with French grammar but because the German vocabularly is closer to the top of my mind, I find that I randomly insert German words into French sentences. I get very confused looks when I ask for 'Deux mal croissants s'il vous bitte'. I call this Freutsch and I am a fluent speaker in it.

There are courses broken down by individual module. I don't think they're very good compared to Pimsleur, but they are free. The first one also seems to teach a different accent -- I say "-de" at the end of a word as /jee/, they say /dee/. Other lessons teach the accent I'm familiar with, though.

There are three things I think are really valuable, though. The end of each lesson includes writing and speaking practice, and those are peer-reviewed. So it's great for finding out if native speakers think you're doing a good job with it or not, and sometimes they give very helpful feedback. You can also critique others' submissions -- I know how much I appreciated the detailed feedback I got, so I try to do the same.

Lastly, you can set yourself as available/not available to chat, and have chat sessions (they have both text and A/V, I've only done text), and that's very cool. I chatted for a good long time with a guy living in Florianópolis in Santa Catarina.

There's stuff you can spend money on but it isn't required, and you can earn site currency by helping critique submissions. I have like 600 coins right now just doing some of them for fun. For 120 coins I can have a professional look at my work. You get about 30 per review.

I'm finding that I'm learning more by reading (translating) the reviews of my work than the actual lessons (even if my work is perfect and all they comment on is, well, that). Hooray expanded vocab!

What's the terrifying part of Spanish? I was raised in a bilingual school and I learned French and Latin from my mom and nana (respectively) so I'm sorry if that came across as rude or anything.

Talking to actual strangers is scary. Making a fool of myself is scary. Talking to actual Spanish-speaking strangers in Spanish (which, since I'm a beginner, requires making a fool of myself) is almost terrifying.

Oh! Well, if it makes you feel any better, that's perfectly normal and it took me forever to talk to a native Spanish-speaker on my own. Several of my Colombian friends say that's how they feel when speaking English to native English-speakers. It gets easier once you start talking to them and you'll generally find that you probably know more than you think you know. Plus, they're willing to help you improve your Spanish and its usually tiny things that you forget. And it can be really fun, too.

Don't suppose anybody has taken the plunge on a variety of Chinese-learning resources? I studied the language for two years in college but fell off the track when I studied abroad (in Scotland), and would like to pick it up again, but would prefer not to spend a ton.

No, but I want to. However, due to the fact that I am a broke college student, I cannot :(

I am, incidentally, a Spanish-speaker who is learning English.

When I was younger, I used to read my favourite books in English, with what little I had been taught (mostly just pronouns and some verbs) in school and a dictionary. I did that for three years, and then I discarded the dictionary. Still, since English is so... how to say it... the english pronunciation is too prissy and stuck up for us Spanish speaking natives (at least Chileans. Peruvians would probably be just fine, but then again, we make fun of Peruvians all the time). We usually make fun of you for that, too. So yeah, I couldn't really speak it because I was too shy to actually practice.

Then, when I went to live a couple of months with an aunt that had better internet that mine at the time, and I started to watch Let's Plays. Specifically, Cloud8745's I Wanna Be The Guy.

At first I could understand anything he said, but as I watched I eventually catched on the pronunciation. I started to watch a lot of LPs by guys of different countries (so far, the Australians are by far the funniest) until I could understand spoken English and speak it a bit myself. I'm slow when talking, though, because since I don't practice it doesn't come naturally and I have to translate it "manually".

I am not that shy anymore though, I have no idea of why I don't actually practice. I guess I'm too lazy.

Also, if any of you need help with your Spanish just tell me. I am terribly patient after all, so I wouldn't mind it if you made one or twenty mistakes.

I may take you up on this. Sometimes, I do get confused because I've been taught by a Peruvian, a Venezuelan, a Mexican, a Cuban, and a Puerto Rican. However, my current professor is from Spain and I practice by translating for a Colombian family that speaks almost no English.
no wonder i am so confused most of the time

No wonder you are confused. Every country that Speaks spanish speaks it diferently. Vastly different.

Peruvian Spanish is well pronounced but dorky as hell. Venezuelan and Colombian Spanish can only be described as... exotic. Mexicans have different accents depending on the zone, but unless they are middle-high class they will speak nonsensical stuff. Cubans have a potato in their mouths all the time, and Puerto Ricans just can't pronounce the 'R' (hence the nickname "Puelto Lico"). Chilean Spanish... oh dear, we speak like shit (no 'd', no 's') unless we are being formal, and we do not like being formal unless it is in a joke. Spanish Spanish (yes) is pretty damn different from latinoamerican Spanish, with a couple of different pronouns and rules that change most conversations.

It is a pretty complex language, yes, and you have to be careful with what you say. You can ask in Argentina to buy what in the rest of the zone is the name for "box of cigarettes", and be slapped by the store clerk because in Argentina that word means "vagina".

Still, once you get on the right tracks it isn't that hard of a language to learn. Or so I've heard.

My last teacher was from Columbia and even my gringa ears could tell she spoke it differently than I was used to.

Most of the folks I wish to speak with in daily life are Mexican or Latin American (immigrants in California), and I learned Spanish (Castillian?) spanish in school I think, which may be why I feel like an idiot when talking to folks, but I've been told Mexican and Spanish spanish aren't so different that it should be a problem.

No, not different enough to be a real problem, but different enough for you to sound terribly dorky (moreso if you feel insecure when you speak). It is best to try and find a teacher that has been living abroad for a while, so their accent is a little tamer and they teach you a more neutral Spanish. Also, it helps if they are from a country without a terribly strong and omniprescent accent.

Cubans that have been abroad for years might be a good choice, for example, since speaking English forces them to spit the potato they apparently have stuck in their mouth. Peruvians, as dorky as they sound amongst us, pronounce well and don't have that much of an accent.

Mexicans... well, I'm sorry to say this, but if they aren't middle-high on the social scale, they are probably not the best choice. Also, if they are from Mérida (Yucatán, southern México)... uh...

Yeah.

Which countries tend to produce "yo" with j sounds? I was taught to pronounce it as it looks, but LiveMocha uses sound clips that pronounce it more like "jo" or "djo."

Hey, same thing in American! ;)

Those would be the trasandines, namely, Argentineans and Uruguayans. They also say "vos" instead of "tú" and "sos" instead of "eres" and... well, many other things.

So I'm a few weeks into my Portuguese for Romance language speakers class, and it's going ok. However, the book we are using is an atrocity in terms of being used for an accelerated class where you spend a lot of time self-teaching. Luckily, my mom pointed me to Babbel, which gives me a less stressful way to remain disciplined about practicing daily. I like it because it's cheap, easy, and gets the "grind" part of languages done. For some reason skype hijacked my microphone so I can only use it if I have 1) skype open and 2) the audio preferences in skype open, but that's a small price to pay. I have yet to get over an 87 in pronunciation, though, this is like being terrible at rock band singing all over again.

Without going through the demo, is it just a cheap rosetta-stone-a-like? I seriously need to polish my French for employability's sake but I tried RS and wasn't all that impressed compared to my old standard (undergrad language course.)

I'm currently in Ancient Greek and Latin courses, which always seem a little peripheral to the "foreign language" set; after all, we're learning pretty much just how to read them, not speak/understand spoken versions/write them ourselves. (That one Latin composition course aside.) But because I'm trying to go into graduate classics studies, I'm also supposed to be working on my German and French for reading in my (ha!) spare time, and keeping up with my old Spanish on principle. (Gave up on Japanese and Russian because, seriously, not enough brain or hours in the day.)

I rather like DuoLingo for fun little introductory work on languages, especially because it has a cute point system. I do not like that it takes the approach of not spelling out rules, but making you figure them out from examples and context; I will take a chart of case endings over a set of sentences demonstrating them (but not explicitly pointing them out) any day, which...explains why I prefer dead languages, yes.

What I'd really like to find is some reading-focused language-learning sites. I need to get better at reading German and French, and I'm starting from pretty much point 0 on both of those. But all of the places and books I have available--some very pricy textbooks aside, and I'm not committed to coughing up for those yet--assumes I want to learn how to introduce myself and talk about my hobbies and order food in a restaurant and ask for directions, when what I really want is the ability to make it through a German paper on Euripides if I've got a dictionary and grammar book at hand. Do any free or inexpensive resources exist for that sort of thing? Or is it all pricy all the time for reading-focused work on living languages?

I have no idea, as I haven't looked at Rosetta in years. What I like about it is the emphasis on cross-linking concepts to images, writing, and speech, and the fact that you get through it in quick doses that you can easily review and get rated on. In general, I have a low opinion of the attrition/repetition approach to language, but since I need the practice, it's on my schedule of "whenever I feel like it, here's 15 minutes" and it's cheap, it works out. Keep in mind I am using it as a supplement to an actual course rather than as the main body; I don't know how it fares in that environment.

I'm guessing it's a scientific paper? The German used in academics is very, how should I say, pretentious. I'm German but sometimes the papers I have to read for university make me want to stab the author.

Oh, I don't mean a specific paper I'm trying to read; I meant it as an example of the sort of thing I'm learning German to be able to do. Because, yeah, it's all academic papers I'll be needing to use the German for. (being able to read German fiction and/or poetry would be a nice side-effect.)

I've muddled through languages I don't speak at all to get material I more or less knew was in there - honours advisor with a sense of humour. On a slightly less crude level I have much more recent practice in deciphering German history monographs than I do speaking and writing German. I wouldn't count on "being able to read for enjoyment" as a fringe benefit out of "muddling through to read for necessity," though. Managing the latter doesn't impart enough familiarity to do the former.