Hacker News Reader

Comment by shinryuu | Hacker News Reader

It's been about priorities. I've just found it hard to make German a priority, given that the hurdle has felt pretty big.

So I hope at least, this will lower the hurdle a bit. Getting a flywheel going so to speak.

View on HN

I'm at a loss as to why you'd invest time and energy in studying kanji, because Japanese is such a different language from virtually any other.* Besides the thousands of Chinese characters and the couple hundred building blocks they're constructed from, there's the numerous different semantic and pronunciation readings and the very high rate of homonyms in Japanese due to its relatively small set of distinct sounds. Plus there's zero linguistic overlap with any European language so bootstrapping is significantly more work.

If this seems easier than the hurdle of learning German, it makes me think issue is more psychological than technical, eg maybe you find German people a bit intimidating or there are some socialization patterns you don't feel comfortable with.

Certainly Anki will help if you stick to it daily. But grinding unrelated vocabulary and sentences is also likely to feel fragmented and random until you pass some threshold where things start to gel in your head and you notice emergent patterns of word formation and sentence structure. You need more German friends and you should probably buy a bunch of children's books. Also listen to daily news broadcasts on radio or TV; newscasters are selected not just for looks but for perfect elocution.

* I'm exaggerating somewhat; Japanese is part of a family of related languages. That said, only native speakers and linguistics nerds care, because these related languages are only spoken within Japan or the surrounding islands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_the_Japonic_...

> I'm at a loss as to why you'd invest time and energy in studying kanji

The explanation for that is that I used to study Japanese at Uni, and my wife is Japanese. So in some sense, it already is easier. Starting something from scratch is always a lot more difficult.

Some good other suggestions. I also thought of playing something like Broken Sword (adventure game fully voiced with text in german).

Ah, with two head starts like that it makes a lot more sense. Absent context I thought you had perhaps just taken it up out of curiosity or as an intellectual challenge.

You might find it helpful in Anki to color-code things as you encounter them (you can do this very easily with a control and the digits 1-7), as well to switch Anki itself into German, so you have to read it to check your intervals, progress and so on. I grind Japanese for a couple of hours a night and the forced-immersion aspect helps me a lot.

You might also like this site which has graduated short readings in German that start out very accessibly - I was able to read the first few cold despite never having studied the language. I think it's very important to study vocabulary in some narrative/situational context because the filling-in and inferential processes you do with a text are very important; they help you invest a word with meaning rather than just assign it.

https://lingua.com/german/reading/

Anki won't change your priority issues. If it's not a priority, it doesn't matter how you try to learn German. And nothing is more valuable than a German course with real people.

You're right that Anki won't change my priority issues. But at least starting to give some priority to learn German that way may lead to more motivation to other activities, such as German course with actual people.

My plan is to re-evaluate where I'm at end of January next year.

Babbel Live costs $99/month or less if you pay for more than a month. It has classes with a native speaker as instructor and 0-5 other people. The classes focus on a specific topic in your level and are entirely in the given language.

Personally I found Anki to be fairly demotivating way to learn. You need to find something you actually find fun in order for it to be motivating. For me, it was Duolingo. But it can be also in person class, peppa the pig series you keep watching in foreign language, whatever. But you need to actually like it.

Anki is basically soul destroying. Go to an in-person class and start having fun talking to other people. That's where everything changed for me.

This is very personal. I credit "fun" classroom conversations with scaring me off French for a decade. Anki on the other hand is great, it's a big dopamine hit when it lets me pick out a word in the wild for the first time, especially when it's something niche that I was dubious about learning.

If you can't even enjoy speaking the language in a controlled environment with other people who suck at speaking then you probably aren't going to learn anywhere. Same as this idea that Anki will magically somehow fix 8 years of complete inaction or whatever. Language learning isn't about knowing words, it's about speaking, reading, writing and listening. Anki is actually none of these things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com