Recommendation for Learning Another Language?

[steveg700]

I'm looking to find some means to learn another language. I'm not too picky at the moment (German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese are under consideration). Just a bucket list item I want to tick off.

Can anyone recommend a product or service for this? Duolingo and Babbel both come in searches. Anyone have experience with these?

 

[Truthy]

Duolingo's not bad and probably one of the best free resources you'll find. I've also used Pimsleur, which is normally expensive, but a friend gave me a bunch of the French audio files for free. If you can get it at a reduced price or find it for free on the internet, I'd recommend it for working on your speaking/listening.

 

[BenitoChavez]

I've used Duolingo and it's a good starting point. I wasn't fluent after completing a course but it helped me to start having basic conversations, watching short youtube videos, reading children stories, etc. I used it for French so I imagine you would have a similar experience doing any of the European languages you listed. I don't know how well it does teaching the Japanese/Chinese character sets as that is an added complexity with those languages.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Teach Yourself, a good grammar book, a dictionary, and lots of media in whatever language you are trying to learn. Make sure you have audio and text material, and quiz yourself constantly with flashcards or whatever. Finally; regular, 15 minutes a day practice, every day, no days off.

Most of the app language stuff is pretty casual and isn't really great about learning a language so much as rudimentary conversation and word knowledge. That's absolutely acceptable if that's what you want, but if you want fluency and understanding and all that, you need to go deeper.