#language learning material

by Rev. John Batchelor F. R. G. S.

Read on OpenLibrary | Internet Archive

I feel like this video is a PERFECT outline of what you should be actively doing to learn another language.

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Here’s the main takeaways with some of my own ideas thrown in:

1. Don’t learn a language with the intent to enjoy fun things in your target language LATER after you gotten to whatever your target level of fluency is: Just go ahead and start now! Watch the TV show you want to watch even if you don’t understand any of it yet, you’ll get there eventually.

2. You do not need to be speaking all the time with others to get good at speaking. It helps, but it should not be solely relied on. OP gives a good example of what he did wrong in the video.

3. Speaking a language isn’t due to knowledge like learning math is, it’s more like a muscle that is always working for the sake of function.

4. You can’t just do 30 minutes days and expect to be fluent eventually. You need to be using your target language as much as possible (aka immerse yourself). Immersion takes much more than 30 specific minutes out of your day. I actually do this all the time, talk to yourself in your target language, read your target language (I follow a lot of social media accounts in my target language so I constantly see it), text others in your target language, watch videos/movies, voice shadowing etc etc. You may even be able to feel when your brain is in (insert language here) mode. Me personally I can tell, and I notice that if I’m in Japanese mode it’s hard to absorb things in Mandarin or other language

5. Mindset is everything. If you think constantly about how hard something is, you will always feel like the task is hard. If you are learning a notoriously hard language, and ruminate about this, it will only hurt you in the long run. When I started learning Mandarin as a kid no one ever told me it was hard before, and I picked it up fast, and I only slowed down when I got frustrated about how hard the language is but sped back up when I reminded myself that input and immersion will get me the results I’m looking for eventually no matter which language.

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This is something I only realized I could use more recently and I haven't seen someone mention it so I thought I should; Wikipedia can be a great resource to learn specific vocabulary and can be really helpful if you are pursuing a translation specialty like medicine or politics as Wikipedia has endless amounts of articles about those topics. (Sometimes Wikitionary will also have definitions for things you are looking for as well)

We all know that Wikipedia is full of information in English but has thousands of articles in other languages as well. On English articles all you have to do to change the language is select the language button at the top right of the screen and select another language. However, not every wikipedia article is translated from English, and some articles exist without an English translation. Also, even though there are many translated articles, many will not be an exact 1:1 translation and can be missing a lot of information but it is a very good tool when wanting to learn the meaning of words that might not be in an online dictionary.

For example: Here is the article "First Secretary of State" in English:

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In the top right corner you can see a tab that says "15 languages", this clearly means that there are 15 different languages to choose from that the article is translated into.

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Now, if you click this button and select Chinese, the page will look like the picture below. Now you may deduce that the correct word for "First Secretary of State" in Mandarin would be "首席大臣" and it also states the English version of the word in the Mandarin article in this instance which further confirms the meaning. However, some articles may be missing this function.

Also, if you find an article in Chinese or another language first, the language tab is on the bottom left corner instead of the top right.

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To learn how to pronounce Mandarin words you find (that aren't already in online dictionaries) you can use websites like MDBG or Chinese Converter that will show you individual pronunciations for characters. Even Google Translate is quite reliable for pinyin but in Chinese Converter and Google Translate sometimes they do not pick up characters with multiple pronunciations correctly or ignore tone change rules.

For Japanese you can use websites like Nihongo Dera's Kana Converter or Jisho to figure out pronunciations.

I could make a whole post in itself for how to figure out pronunciations for words in languages you don't natively speak so I'll stop here.

I hope this post helps someone!

(Not including their AI translation feature)

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Reverso is a website that provides dictionaries, example sentences, and machine translations for a multitude of languages.

The website has an AI translator, which in my opinion isn’t that great with Mandarin (the language I use the website for the most) so I never use it, but I don’t usually use machine/automatic translations anyways.

I use Reverso’s Context feature very often and it helps immensely with translating and learning Mandarin, as well as other languages. However, keep in mind not every language has an equal amount of quality material. It’s not ideal for beginners either, because there’s no settings to make simpler sentences show up more.

As of October 13th, 2023, Reverso supports 26 languages!

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How To

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For this example, I’m going to search the Mandarin word “平常”

* Note: A majority of the database seems to use Simplified characters, so use Simplified most of the time or it may not recognize the word.

Now you can guess from context if you didn’t already have this word in your dictionary of choice: 平常 must mean ‘usually; normally; typical; etc.’

This feature works very well with common word combinations that don’t have a direct translation in a dictionary.

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Downsides

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One downside I notice a lot is that the highlighting will be incorrect or sometimes completely absent. Other times the English translation doesn’t match the example sentence at all. So, if you are not an intermediate learner be extra careful using the context function for translations.

For example, I searched the word “洒泪” (to be shedding tears) and the first result I got highlighted the translation as “during”!

But if you are signed in to the website, you can submit corrections easily.

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Please correct me if I made a mistake

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It’s time for another small tutorial!

Whether you have hand troubles or never have paper on you, you can still practice Chinese writing on your phone. All you need is your thumb!

Simply go to your settings, select ‘general’ then ‘keyboard’ and select Simplified or Traditional Chinese (or both) and under each there should be an option for ‘writing’. Once it’s downloaded you can open it wherever you can type.

This function is really helpful when you see a Chinese character that you don’t know or remember the pronunciation for, so you can write it and input it into an online dictionary or Pleco.

This method will work for most Chinese characters so it can be used for Japanese Kanji as well. However, there are some Japanese Kanji that do not appear in Mandarin, thus are only sometimes detected by this keyboard. Rare Chinese Characters may or may not be picked up as well.

My handwriting is messy, but as you can see you can fit about 3 characters onto it.

If you’re a newer learner, I suggest you learn stroke order because it will help your handwriting a lot and make it easier to detect on these keyboards. The iOS keyboard is very good so it detected my messy handwriting correctly. However, other keyboards such as Pleco and MDBG may not be as flexible.

The downside (or upside?) is the characters you wrote disappear a few seconds after writing them, however the text character suggestions above do not unless you delete them. To me, this is an upside because it challenges your brain to remember the character faster and more efficiently as your brain prepares to rewrite what you lost.

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Please correct me if I made a mistake.