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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

With old-school graded readers. Turns out that the people in past centuries who we ridiculed for their antiquated approaches for learning languages all spoke multiple languages.

They didn't have comic books, though, which are another good source of interesting reading material that also comes with elaborate visual hints to what is being said. If I were trying to learn Mandarin, I'd scour the internet for bootleg scans of Jademan comics from the 80s.

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Yes. That's how I learned my native language and that's how I learned other languages. Super effective, and super fun. No rote memory whatsoever. BTW, Chinese didn't have a tradition of producing comic books, but they were big on turning classics into so-called 小人书，a perfect source for learning authentic, highly contextual, yet simple Chinese. Here is an example: http://www.laohuabao.com/xiaorenshu/gudian/9/113957717.html

Slight aside, but I learned to read with Asterix & Obelix & Tintin. The Asterix series in particular was fantastic for reading the same story in difficulty languages, and savoring the wordplay in each, and how the translators played with things. Having visual context to go with the words themselves was such a boon, I really am surprised the approach isn't given more legitimate respect.

Comic books are especially helpful for conversation because they are often written in that sort of "what one would really say" style, which is extrememy helpful for speaking more native. When I was learning Finnish I found a set of translated Garfield books that were really helpful.

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