Great advice for language learning!

Make flash cards by hand on 4x6 index cards, yet another pathway to cementing info into the brain, in my opinion. Especially for lamguages not using roman letters as in English or.any of the ok ther romance languages.

3:51, I am Russian, but I never use this word in that form. Instead, I use возвращаться, вернуться)

4:57 - or you can use Basic (type in an answer) note type so you physically can't look up and know the word before actually answering

I'm mostly interested in Asian and African languages that don't have a lot of compelling input--and some have hardly any resources at all. The method I eventually developed and stuck with as a beginner is to memorize lists of sentences (including repeating the audio recordings aloud many times to improve my pronunciation), deduce the grammar from the sentences, and talk to myself (think aloud) in the target language using the vocabulary and grammar I learned from the sentences. I've never liked Anki except to review words or sentences that I've already learned/memorized elsewhere: It's tedious and stressful for learning new material, and it's hard to keep the cards from piling up (even following tips from your earlier video). For now, I'm using paper flashcards for sentences and (the paid mobile version of) Quizlet for individual words. Quizlet's flashcards aren't very good, but its matching game and quizzes are--if I limit my decks to about 20 cards each. It's easier for me to memorize sentences if I first memorize the new words contained in the sentences.

Great tips Julian, thanks for making it

Some good advice here, but I disagree on several points. My current target language has a large number of cognates with my maternal language, but there are a lot of false friends as well. For that reason I add as many new words as possible to the deck, because although I might well understand a new cognate when reading it for the first time, I won't necessarily be able to use that word when I am speaking. The second point is that, as an older language learner, I know that my memory is not as good as it was. When I was younger I would learn new words faster from context without having to make an effort to remember them. Things are different now, but I still need to be able to recall a word very quickly when I want to use it to say something. So, older language learners need to do more Anki than younger ones, in my experience. Finally, in my two target languages the orthography of the word dictates how it is pronounced. For that reason my decks prompt for a typed response and flag misspellings.

How would you act if you would learn MSA which has in comparasion to most languages an abudant amount of vocabulary which are highly dependant on the context.

Can you recommend me a podcast app please?

After spending several hours adding vocab to a deck, discovered that Anki only allows you to have 30 cards per deck. So, have lost all the vocab that I have added to the first and second deck. Waste of time.

I'm currently looking for pieces to do for my Wind Ensemble audition in University. I was recommended this and I can see while. Bravo!! Brilliantly performed!! 👏👏👏

How to know which adult books are comprehensible input after you have learned those 1000 common words?

If i turn on cc captions autotranslate Portuguese on screen , and turn on transcript english below, i can follow your sentences at same time and pause for active study.😅🎉

This 3 tips have serious long term benefits. Have you considered a video for immediate Fun tips? I've seen a dozen Portuguese booktubers lately and each one has cc captions. Some have the Transcript option too. I can play both same time , then pause to see port. & english same time. If under focused study , have a reward same time. I should do videos myself but my humor might get in the way.😅

Me gusta tu canal y me gusta tu voz, suena muy bien en español, inglés y también en alemán. Ciao Laura!

Muy buen video. I'm so friking impressed. You guys are amazing, I speak 2 of the languages you guys speak. E tambem um pouco de portugués. And you guys speak so well. It blew my mind.

the spanish accent was so accurate. the brazilian portuguese was well spoken but the accent was terrible.

And congratulations on your channel.

Fascinating. Thank you

unfortunately, my mind is super resistant to any kind of formal study, so i am not a person who could ever manage to stick to flashcards (especially when it comes to something like language learning). i threw out the idea of using SRS about a week after attempting it, so instead, a lot of my learning of my target language, chinese, has been heavily, heavily based on taking in content in some form (books, podcasts, and youtube/bilibili videos mainly). in my case, it's worked very well in the 8 months i’ve been learning the language. i think there's a sense of natural repetition that comes from interacting with a language in this way, where the word appears at the frequency that it naturally occurs at in the language. i don’t personally know if SRS/anki can manage to represent the natural frequency of words (as well as grammatical concepts), but the actual language itself certainly can. i’m sure SRS/anki works for people, just not me. i am much less structured in my approach, though. i don’t typically do what you’ve been doing with repeating watching specific content, even if it is probably beneficial. though i will occasionally revisit a video i liked when i first watched it months later as a sort of “benchmark” to see how much i’ve progressed in comprehension. i also don’t really aim for 100% understanding of all the words, just a general feeling of “yep, i understood enough where it feels like i got something out of this”. i mostly look up words when it’s come up enough times that it feels vital to what’s being conveyed, at which point, my brain has probably noted it as significant enough that it’s more willing to hold onto the meaning. it does require being comfortable with that ambiguity from not grasping every single detail of the content you’re taking in, though. though, my primary goal is comprehension of chinese media (especially reading chinese books), so this works particularly well for my personal goals. i’ve read a couple of books written for native adults at this point, so it’s worked pretty well for i initially wanted to accomplish. i’m sure most other language learners have the goal of communicating with others, so that might require different approaches. though at this point i’m so in love with the language learning process that i’ve been starting working on communicating with others :)

Anki is a huge waste of time. 15 years ago, I used to spend days on end making complicated cards with images, sounds, and formatted with Latex... and having more sides than index cards can have in the 3 conventional physical world.

Português sensacional! Meus parabéns 😃👏

interesting video to begin to enter more languages in a more educational way, thanks for sharing the advice.

I completely agree with you, I also used Anki to learn English vocabulary, the huge amount of vocabulary made me very tired, and creating cards also took quite a while even with add-ons. image and audio support

I still using Anki for Japanese and even for English. The problem is that people don't suspend old flashcard for example if I see that I'm gonna review one word in over ten mounths I'll inmediality suspend it because is a word I see with frequency in my immersion journey.

I’ve been studying Portuguese for almost 10 years and I’ve visited Brasil 18 times but I still can’t read or converse and I have to translate everything into English to understand. I practice every day with my girlfriend and have been doing it for 6.5 years but I still can’t understand her . She only speaks Portuguese so we’ve never had a conversation yet.

great video Julian!!!! Very interesting

To any learners out there, don’t be scared of learning to read! It’s actually easier that you expect. With exposure, you will naturally start remembering characters. Learning the characters helps you differentiate between vocabulary that sound exactly the same too. The thing you can feasibly disregard (if you’re not planning to work/study in China) is writing. Because, these days, the need to write by hand is next to never and most Chinese people begin to forget how to write properly after completing education anyways. Not saying it’s ideal, but reading is definitely a lot more important than writing.

How come the Chinese can learn to speak, listen and write at the same time and others cannot?

Ni är superduktiga, all min respekt till er :D.

Good but youre speaking russian not kazakh. So just use another flag instead

Zuì hâo de bànfâ shì, xiān yòng pīnyīn xuéhuìle Hànyû, ránhòu zài xué hànzì. Bùyào ràng hànzì tuōle nî de hòutuî, shî nî de qiánjìn bùfá biàn dé chíhuân, shènzhì wàng'érshēngwèi, guôzú-bùqián. Nî shì duì de, nî dāngchū de xiângfâ cái shì duì de.

Use the book "Remembering the Hanzi" and Anki. You only need to be able to read.

Bro! I can really see your passion learning Chinese. I watched the whole video even if i don't know a thing or two about the language 😂. Good luck to your journey! I remember when we met half a year a go, you only knew the basic stuff. I'm surprised how far you've been. And I'm excited what will be your progress in the near future! I am so proud! and I'm sure she is proud too!

Why no screen shot ?

Sei sempre il migliore❤

I want share that mistake with you so you don't do the same thing.

Actually I would recommend to ignore Chinese characters and PinYin all together at the beginning stage and focus on listening only! Watch/listen to a lot of Comprehensible Input in Chinese. When we Chinese natives started learning Chinese characters/PinYin, we were speaking Chinese fluently for years already. Start reading/writing too early will unavoidably give you some bad pronunciation/accent (you would read the Chinese subconsciously with the incorrect pronunciation/tone guaranteed). If you can find native Chinese speakers to crosstalk with, that will be the best approach.

While useful in the beginning, I soon found pinyin to be a hindrance. Certain reading materials had pinyin underneath the characters and it was hard for me to stop relying on it as a pronunciation reference. Written Chinese also lacks punctuation in places where I'd expect it to appear in English. This means that I sometimes have to re-read a sentence several times before I understand its meaning. Another thing I find challenging is when compound words are separated within a sentence--which, again, initially makes it hard for me to follow. An example might be the word 当面 which means 'face to face' in the sentence 他回到他住的小房子里，弄了点儿水和沙子，放在一个杯子里，当着村里人的面对着水说了些连他自己听不懂的话，然后给病人喝下去。

I think it is key to know the Chinese characters. You don't need to write them, but recognizing them is vital. They are super helpful, as they give you context in situations where words may sound the same or be similar, and sometimes they can also give you hints on how a character is pronounced and its meaning. Having to learn characters may be something that seems different from learning other languages with alphabets, as you will usually have to use spaced repetition learning so you don't forget them (I recommend Anki). But I think it is convenient in the end, as it provides structure to your learning:)

In my case, I've been learning Mandarin for two years, more or less seriously, and actually I know around two thousand Hanzi, but I cannot listen Mandarin properly. I took calligraphy classes and besides, I love new writing systems and now a lot of them. For example, I can read devanagari or hangeul, but I don't speak Hindi, Korean, Sanskrit... I have a huge problem now, because I can read in Chinese, even in Cantonese sometimes, but listen is too difficult. I'm increasing, but it spends a lot of more time. When other people speak about how difficult Hanzi are, I just can think about how more difficult learn Mandarin is, gathering Hanzi and the hard phonology. This is the fourth language that I'm learning. I can speak Portuguese (native), English, German and Mandarin. Maybe, awkwardly, I speak Mandarin better than a listen. It's strange. It happens due to the huge amount of synonyms in Mandarin. Of course, perfect synonyms are not true. In my experience, I learned that listen a lot is much more important. I don't now, but for me, Hanzi is a kind of memory hack. I can remember a lot of strange thinks with easy-to-catch Hanzi. 凹凸 are two Hanzi that follow this.

Anki the HSK word-lists, read graded readers, read HSK textbooks and write out the first 600 or so characters a few time each then forget about writing until much later. Writing the first few hundred helps you recognise character components, and also the strokes so you can use a dictionary better. As a beginner your focus should be primarily on listening, then words, and being able to recognise the characters for those words

As a chinese native speaker, i would suggest that there's no need put too much effort practicing writing the charaters, since you can type them easily in pinyin, people here in China often "forget how to write the character the moment picking up the pen" so it's not a big deal, BUT it's definitely essential to recognize and read the characters because of the reason given in the video

dictation exercise （听写） indeed was the way we used to learn the characters. Bit by bit you will master it! 加油

This is great! I've been wondering if you would jump into an East Asian Language and you do not disappoint!

No estoy de acuerdo contigo. Usar el marco común europeo es una guía estandarizada para saber dónde estás parado y qué es lo que te falta para llegar a hablar mejor y comprender más del idioma. No es bueno aprender sin una brújula que te indique la dirección a donde debes ir.

Excellent video and very well spoken! And just wondering, what is your musical instrument?

baguette