Do you know how people of your target language do things differently in casual text messages/on the internet?
A good example: russians often drop the double dot from smiling face )))) vs. :)))) or how in some middle-eastern languages they write hhhhhhh instead of the “hahaha”.
A well-known Japanese Internet chat thing is the use of “w,” which translated into “lol.” It comes from warau or a similar word, for laugh. Can tack on multiple wwwww, which led to 草 becoming shorthand for big laughs, because multiple W’s look like grass!
I’m still plugging away. Still struggling with listening comprehension a bit. Noticed I’m having a focus problem, so I’ve started looking up ADHD strategies for active listening, see how that goes.
Lol love the connection to grass! Thanks for sharing.
Focus has been an ongoing struggle for many here sadly. Guess it’s also because listening comprehension can be quite taxing too. Let us know how it goes and what you tried out!
I’m slight panicked - next year, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll need some basic understanding of 9 languages, of which only 2 I already speak.
That’s quite a spread! Not to pry too much (feel free to not share details), but why the immediate needs for all those?
+1 to this question, I am really curious. That’s quite the task!
To @[email protected] and @[email protected], planning to travel in a future vacation through some countries from Europe. But I worry English would not be enough, specially when I’ve seen people in a few of those countries struggling to communicate with just that. Also not weighting as much for this hurry of mine but still relevant, I find it an extreme disrespect to visit a country without knowing their language.
As someone from Europe (Poland to be more specific), I’d recommend to not worry about it. Really. Learn to say “hello”, “where’s the bathroom”, and “thank you”, the rest you’ll handle in English or use improvised sign language if the person you’re talking to doesn’t speak it (which at least in Poland gets rarer and rarer with every year). Or google translate, automatic translators work decently well for basic things.
Nobody will mind - honestly, if you were to actually learn Polish most of us would react with “that’s really impressive but why bother???” You’ll get the same reaction in most other countries except for maybe Spain/Germany/France, they’ll be more used to people knowing their languages, but at least in Germany they’ll still probably try to talk to you in English.
Of course if you want to learn for fun then go ahead, but there’s no need to put too much pressure on yourself, I’ve been all over Europe knowing only English, Polish and how to read cyrillic script and it was more than enough. English gets you 90% of the way there.
I don’t know what specific countries you’ll be going through, but focusing on French (if going through France), German (in Germany + a bunch of neighbouring countries + a lot of old people who don’t speak English in Western Europe will know it), and some slavic language (probably Polish and/or Russian, Polish will get you through Poland and with effort through Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Ukraine, Russian is useful because, as with German in Western Europe, a lot of older people in former Soviet republics will speak it, but bear in mind it has some negative connotations) should cover the basics.
If you have any questions feel free to message me!
Oh wow! A very cool goal but don’t burn yourself out!
I think as long as you know some basics people are happy even if you don’t know their language :) In german I always start with (in german) hello, excuse me I have a question, but my german is not very good. Do speak english?"
This changes their attitude usually towards a more friendly one than directly asking in english. Often, after this, they want to help even if they don’t know english.
I’ve been obsessed with building the perfect Anki deck from big frequency dictionaries, corpora, and model exams. It’s probably a waste of time lol
I started to go down this rabbit hole with templating/media but recognized it was getting a little out of control. It’s funny how I stuck with an obsolete SRS program for years because I didn’t want to deal with how complicated Anki seemed, I coincidentally take a refresher course on HTML/CSS/JS last year and now I’m ready to go digging into card code. 🤦🏻♀️
Still a little interested in attaching images though…
I know the feel. I’ve tried to build up a deck of words that cover each common reading of characters, and only a couple hundred charcters in it’s already taken a lot of time. Usually I’m just using other people’s decks, much respect to the people that build the high quality ones.
In one sense it’s probably not a very productive use of time, but I think it can be a great motivator. No resource (deck, video, app, class, etc) is going to make things easy or instant, but if you find or build one that gets you fired up to learn, that counts for a lot.
Learning and related tasks are never a waste of time :) that sounds awesome. I mean as long as it’s fun of course.
Well. It’s what you might call productive procrastination. Instead of studying my 5K list I’m building a 23K list and still feeling like it’s not enough so I go and search a 1M word corpus and before I know it I’m writing code to parse these pdfs and tokenize and all this mess.
I haven’t even mentioned the few days I spent going down the rabbit hole of trying to procedurally generate a crossword puzzle out of my anki deck. Would be really cool but it’s a catch 22. To find a good solution you need many words, but to make it easy enough for me to solve you need few.
That is starting to sound like a serious hobby wow. Cool as long as you don’t burn yourself out.
If you do create a crossword puzzle out of an anki deck please let us know! That would be kinda useful lol.
Switched my main Anki deck and JPDB cards from just the word on the front, to instead show a sentence as the cue. I think it’s a big improvement.
At first I thought having the sentence would give away what word it is… but I’ve slowly realized that’s the point. Understanding words in context is the reason to learn words in the first place. And having the sentence up front, with no furigana, helps give reading practice on other words.
Good idea. And good point. Vocabulary training is actually more productive if you can associate those words with certain sentences, really helps with memorizing!
For the OP’s question, I see Japanese tweets (on bsky) write words using these small width characters like ｸﾞand ｷﾞfor emphasis and effect. That and they more often use those long emoji things like (( °ω° ))/
In Spanish, I’ve at least seen that people use jajaja instead of hahaha.
Japanese tweets always look so interesting, i feel like there is so much to their internet culture! And yeah the Spanish J sounding like H makes this funny to someone learning German :D
