cant wait for Olly's response video / diss track

“If you don’t know the word, you can’t know the meaning when you hear it.” I mean when people think they need to know the meaning of everything before they read or hear it. I learn most of my new words through context and then being beside words that I do know.

Great video, let's hope all the newbies see it coz you are right.

That knowing the translation means you understand the word.

@@MobWave yeah, newbies often don't understand words between languages have overlap, not exact correspondence. grammatical structures too. Example? Penis and Hanging Curtain in Chinese can be represented using similar or even the same character(s). It's why some jokes are 'lost in translation'.

🤣🙏 Please

If he doesn’t have a life he won’t have anything to make videos about

😂 sí por favor

@@nendoakuma7451 Haha that's true. This is actually a very silent problem on KZfaq - you can only make good YT videos about things you do. But they take so long that you tend not to do very much.

@@daysandwords that’s why I don’t do a KZfaq channel. How could I do that on top of language learning?

Ég borða, þú borðar, hann / hunn / það borðar... Ha! Ha! Ég er að læra íslensku líka! Gangi þér vel!

Yeah that's fair. I guess there are two sides to it. Thinking of it as a tough challenge to overcome is fine. Thinking of yourself as a legend for learning it is probably unhelpful.

Every language has hard bits, and what is difficult varies from language to language. Genders are a lot of memory work in German for example, and almost trivially easy in many other languages. And it is definitely true that some writing systems are harder to learn than others. The hardest bit about English, for example, must be the spelling.

It reminds me of what my mom told me when I was a teenager, just before going in to take my driver's test. "If you get nervous, just remind yourself of how many morons you've seen out on the road. If they all can do it, you can do it."

Quite right. Every language wants to be spoken. With sufficient exposure and need, becoming fluent is an inevitability.

I met a singer in Brazil who sang various US Rockbands to near perfection in English however he couldn't understand a word of English when I spoke to him after the show.

Exactly!!! This is what is known as "language like behavior." The phenomenon seen in many language classes: students "practicing the language" by reciting lines to each other. It can look and even sound like communication, but it is not!

Part of the issue with kanji, I think, is that the difficulty is wholly unnecessary. The language itself doesn't need them, and if the winds of politics had blown ever so slightly differently, we would be writing Japanese phonetically just as Korean is written. That said, I definitely agree. Kanji are a pain, but far from impossible and you will learn them if you keep studying. Japanese vocab cards are just a little heavier than Korean equivalents, for example. I spent months and months gnashing teeth about kanji, half tilted because they are unnecessary and I hate unnecessary convolutions, but ultimately doing work works and is much more rewarding than vacillating endlessly.

@@Komatik_ If you remove one difficulty (kanji), you'll add a new difficulty (more ambiguity in written text). Personally my pet theory is that languages in general have the same general level of difficulty, it's just that they've spent their "difficulty points" into different aspects of the language. Native speakers would not have issues without kanji, but learners would struggle more because IIRC there are more homophones in Japanese than there are in Korean (purely due to there being less phonemes in Japanese). While it sounds a bit silly, there are well-studied evolutionary aspects of languages where harder parts of a language are slowly simplified by native speakers (since nobody wants to keep speaking in a way that is harder without good reason) -- the logical extension of this is that humans have a general aversion to making languages difficult, and since any human can speak any human language it seems that the null hypothesis should be that each language was optimised as much as possible by native speakers.

​@@aleksasarai8658 There is ambiguity in both written and spoken expression in every language, though. In English, we could wonder if "I saw her in the spring" means a pool of water or if she's the star of a comedy bit and stuck in a huge mechanical device. Or maybe the speaker meant the season. If I'm complaining about the Japanese script, I could in theory be talking about the Japanese version of some piece of fiction and not the writing system. In my native language, "kuusi palaa" can mean things like "six pieces", "the spruce tree returns" and "your moon is on fire" (seriously), yet nobody cares. If we are in a row, are we standing side by side or having an argument? A fringe benefit would be dispelling some kanji-caused etymology. A lot of the linguistic analysis prompted by kanji are red herrings. The difficulty points theory does have some merit to it, I think, but also depends on things like how isolated or widespread the language is - widespread languages tend to become more analytical, and isolated languages grow hideously convoluted. Whether Japanese or Korean has more homophones depends a lot on the examples used - I don't think anyone has an objective accounting. People like to post that one impressive-looking chart where Japanese has one word to represent a ton of Chinese originals, but some quora user made a similar one for Korean where Japanese had a lot more distinction. As far as natives simplifying the language goes, the effect is definitely real, but presuming that the language has been simplified as much as possible is clearly not correct: Creole languages which are much simpler than their component parts are proof that it's not the case.

@@Komatik_ I see the point you're trying to make about ambiguity, but context and common-sense play a big part in that too. With your 3 'spring' examples I could say 1 of them is a likely meaning, 1 of them is a relatively rare instance where spring means something other than one would expect, and the other is a complete reach and so overly specific/niche that I would go so far as challenging whether anyone has said/written and meant this in real life. I now imagine that other English speakers could see my 3 comments about your 3 sentences and know exactly which one I was talking about. I have never had an experience in my life where someone said the word 'spring' and I did not know which kind of spring they were referring to. If I'm buying a new bed and I tell the shop assistant 'I think this one has a good spring to it' they will know that I'm not talking about anything to do with water coming from the ground or the time of year. Kanji being a part of the Japanese writing system makes reading a lot less jumbled. Even though there are no spaces in written Japanese, kanji can act like a built in determiner of when certain parts of and types of words start and end. Not to mention it means you can express more ideas with fewer characters, because more kanji means less kana. Eg: 物語風(3) = ものがたりふう(7) = (意味=narrative-like structure; narrative style).

@@chicha400 "I see the point you're trying to make about ambiguity, but context and common-sense play a big part in that too. With your 3 'spring' examples I could say 1 of them is a likely meaning, 1 of them is a relatively rare instance where spring means something other than one would expect, and the other is a complete reach and so overly specific/niche that I would go so far as challenging whether anyone has said/written and meant this in real life." That's true of the spring examples - they're mostly something I write out routinely in these kinds of discussions since people bring up things like the niwaniwa or kaisha sentences up as serious examples of why kanji are absolutely necessary and life would end otherwise. I definitely agree that in reality context solves most issues - that's more or less the whole point. If you write phonetic, spaced text and the actual spoken language is comprehensible, your writing will be comprehensible as well. Twitter is definitely an advantage of kanji use, no question about that. Whether being able to send a few less tweets is worth the insane number of extra hours sunk for an entire country sinks into learning to read and write is another matter entirely. re: はし, true. But I'd say that eg. in my language kuusi (number), kuusi (spruce tree) and kuusi (your moon) are all different words in people's heads, the sound is simply the same, and it works out fine. As another example, Swedish. The Swedish spoken in Sweden has a pitch accent system, while the one in Finland simply doesn't. Both kinds of dialects remain comprehensible and the tones aren't usually written on the words. "I think that kanji is useful and integral to the way Japanese is written and read. I wonder how many literate native speakers would rather read just with kana (or worse romaji...)" Next to none, because they're all used to reading mixed script and have put in the ungodly amount of work already. Asking them to get used to reading phonetic script would be both pointless (they can read mixed script already) and extra work to get used to it. Koreans were irritated by the changes initially for those reasons, but now the younger generations read hangeul-only script without issue, because almost all of their practice in reading Korean is in reading hangeul-only script. But the gain is that people don't have to spend ages learning to read. To illustrate: ᚱᛖᚨᛞᛁᛝ᛬ᛖᛝᛚᛁᛋᚺ᛬ᚹᚱᛁᛏᛏᛖᚾ᛬ᚹᛁᚦ᛬ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ᛬ᛁᛋ᛬ᚨ᛬ᛒᛁᛏ᛬ᚺᚨᚱᛞ᛬ᛁᛋ᛬ᛁᛏ᛬ᚾᛟᛏ? There's nothing intrinsically impossible about those letters, and the sentence is plain English ("reading English written with runes is a bit hard, is it not?"), but we're not used to it so it looks troublesome and is annoying even if we can kind of figure out what's going on. If Elder Futhark was the standard script, there would be no issue. "Also, when it comes to words originating from Chinese, seeing the kanji that makes up those words often gives insight about the roots of words" Also true, but just as often the components are complete nonsense (若い wakai, young splits into 右, right (as in direction) and 艹 grass which is completely nonsensical) or suggest a false etymology: 明, for example, didn't have a day character in the original oracle bone. The character originally depicted moonlight shining through a window.

Have you done his intermediate uncovered spanish course as well? I'm currently doing the beginner.

Jepp….. :-/

"but native speakers will hate you forever if you don't buy the course!!!!!!"

Only the might of Bill can cure you of The Infection in the Japanese learning community

I've been learning Japanese for two years now I've had a lot of life changing realizations, many unrelated to Japanese but many apply to language learning. It is the weirdest feeling when you realize this massive thing that was impossible two years ago is now perfectly comprehensible. It feels good but also, weird. Also, keep up the great work! Learning Kana is a huge accomplishment and is more than half the battle! Kanji comes with time but if you know Kana (and have a good kanji dictionary), you can read anything.

Another thing, at least for English speakers, is to recognise that English *is* agglutinative just the same way as the other Germanic languages are: English orthography just makes it look like it's not. Those long German and Dutch words are less scary when you realise that. Mind you, you'll still have a harder time with Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and other properly agglutinative languages, but the principal still applies: break the word down into its components of meaning as if they're all standalone words, even if some elements are bound morphemes (that is, units of meaning that don't exist outside of words). A small amount of training in basic linguistics can be really helpful in making things less scary when dealing with languages very different from your own.

@@talideon yes. Certain dialects are definitely agglutinative to an extent

@@athenagreen5390 yeah The grammar is pretty straightforward. And phonetics is quite easy If it wasn't for different script, I would've been farther( Scripts I simply dislike learning

New unit of learning: Yotsuba

Yeah, I kind of do just however much I feel like doing that day as I have school work and sometimes exams which I prioritise first. I usually do about 45-90 minutes a day, depending on how I feel and on my free time and it's so nice honestly. I used to feel pressured to do at least an hour a day because I saw some people online saying if you do any less, you won't progress too quickly, and if I didn't do at least an hour, I'd feel guilty. Now that I've given myself freedom to do whatever I want in my TL (I used to have a very structured plan) and for however long I feel like, it's great! And it's so much easier too because there's less pressure and stress involved.

I'm in a similar situation to you, I started spanish in September but found it so incredibly easy, in january I decided to start japanese alongside it. It's probably not as difficult as you think - although it may look threatening sitting at the hardest difficulty level, it can be smooth sailing if you do the right things. The grammar isn't very complex but can get slightly annoying. The kanji look incredibly daunting, but as you learn more your brain justs get better at association random scribbles with sounds and meanings. All in all, if I wanted to learn a language but the only thing putting me off was the difficulty, just do it. There will be moments where you think "why tf did I choose this language" but with sufficient immersion and time, you can get used to even the most ridiculously complex crap in any language. If you want to learn something, anything, but are too scared of the difficulty, just go for it

Of the Scandinavian languages Norwegian (bokmål) is the clearest and simplest and sounds most happy, but of course Swedish is the language is most widely understood in the Nordic countries. Except for English of course. You have found a method that works for you, so congrats and kudos! If you ever start with Japanese, the method that Cecilia Lindquist (Chinese-teacher from Stockholm) presents in her beautiful book "Tecknens rike" might interest you - it seems to make very much sense, and that must be why it is a a long time bestseller!

It's true you can't take up too much, but I find that hard to believe you could make much progress in 10 minutes. It's like learning to drive or code in ten minutes a day. You don't even start getting into it and you're done. Also, Duolingo for 10 minutes a day is not even learning, that is after a few months

@@davidtrak2679 I spoke already 3 other romance languages, that is why it was doable (syntax and vocabulary are very similar). Also the "10-min. rule" is just a rule to avoid stress, if you are passionate about it and have time you don't count the minutes or hours passed the 10 min. :). At least that is what I did. I even watched a series and a film (definetly longer than 10 minutes hehe), but there was no pressure to reach more than 10 min. daily

Actually, native Esperanto speakers exist, and from what I've heard, they started introducing irregularities in the language, just like any native speakers community would. I bet Zammenhof hadn't seen that one coming.

Nästa gång: Dagar av svenska, på riktigt. English subbed Swedish videos would legit be a good idea exactly for that reason. So much language learning content is useful insofar as it goes, but it's not immersion.

You definitely need a college to write anything more complex than a bubble sort.

@@IkarusKommt That's demonstrably false. There are people who do not attend university who have written good books.

@@daysandwords I meant programming.

@@IkarusKommt not really, college just makes it easier to get proficient i'm thinking

Glad you enjoyed it!

Hahaha the first one is so dumb. They're all dumb yeah but I don't get what people see in any of them.

@@daysandwords They're dumb but fun; not everything needs to be Bergmanesque. ;-P

@@BryanAJParry I don't even think they're fun. I think 2004's The Punisher is fun. It's awesome. But Taken is just stupid. It's Besson trying to go back to his glory days of Léon and failing.

@@daysandwords Fair enough. Different strokes. I take Taken as if they were a Jason Statham film; ridiculous popcornery but which entertain me personally.

Hi Flauschball How are you today?🌺🌺

The problem with cricket insults is that it only works on British and former British colonies people. All other would be like: What the hell is a cricket?

Neither and both.

We don't like the russian language as well.

What are you doing to study? I started Russian a year and a half ago, and have made steady and significant progress with comprehension. I haven't made any effort to speak so far, so can't advise on that... but happy to share ideas.

I spoke 5 languages growing up (just a note for context) English, Mandarin, Filipino, Cebuano, and Hokkien. Last year I started learning EU Portuguese and after only 6 months I can speak on a basic level of A2 in things I am familiar with or about things pertaining to my life/profession etc, 5 months ago I started with Russian and I can say that I am nowhere near my progress in Russian as I had with Portuguese. I think because 1. I didn't have a goal of wanting to speak in 6 months because I know Russian is my first ever Slavic language, 2. reading in Cyrillic is difficult for me because again I have never tried to read in Cyrillic before. 3. Life got busier. The method I enjoy is the Goldlist method and reading and listening via the Lingq app. How much time listening to the language have you had? To me exposure is key. Right now I had 760 hrs of Portuguese and only 180 hrs of Russian.

@@thenaturalyogi5934 Nah, I don't buy the Cyrillic thing. Many American monolinguials would stress how bad it is, but for you, with the scripts you know? To each their own, and I can see someone spending all their life in Latin scripts finding it difficult, but for anyone who's had a bit of experience in other scripts, it's a breeze. I basically learned it to 80% in a day (Good morning, Mr. Pareto), and I'm not any some script-o-geek or anything. Only a bunch of letters are different, and there'll always be the non phonetic aspects of Russian, but the script itself shouldn't discourage anyone.

Learning languages is a lesson in self discipline, self honesty, humility and a true sense of accomplishment, rinse and repeat. Pay close attention to the advice given in the video, it's golden. What's your intention for learning? In all honesty, do what's fun, so long it's *a bit* helpful. Don't do what's "a neccessity". not early on. So only you know when you're tricking yourself. Doing Duolingo for 6 months, because it's "fun", yeah, it's just a grindy kind of fun which won't take you far. But doing whatever you do in your native language, just in Russian, would be the absolute best. Don't get me wrong, just finding the material could be a nightmare. But you have to just start doing it. If you like books, you can settle for somewhat less interesting, you could watch a sketchy tv show, but - 1. do stuff that you aspire to be fun for you 2. don't spend years gathering the perfect, funniest material, just start This is from experience, I will say I started seriously watching German shows only after Mama Netflix came to town, and Dark was shot. So I didn't have any real-good shows before. But after a year of two of tv shows, mildly entertaining, I discovered the German movies, which are 10 times better. Moral of the story? had I skipped the tv shows because they weren't good enough, I'd never have discovered the movies, and if I did, wouldn't have been able to understand them. Had I not waited for Dark to come out, I'd have no shows to watch. But maybe I'd have picked up movies. So it's quite complicated, but the best you could do is - 1. have fun 2. just start 3. do prepare to have "less fun" at first, because you don't understand or the content is meh GOTO 1

It's a Swedish flag, although hung vertically it does look like the cross of Christ (which is actually the reason for the Nordic countries having that shape on their flags). The lighting means you can't see the colours properly but yeah it's a Swedish flag. I'll probably do a short on it.

@@daysandwords Thanks for the reply. I never would have guessed it was a flag!

Sure, everything counts. 30 minutes a day is also not a waste of time - you might not get to a high level of fluency, but you will learn something, and at some stage you will be able to communicate on a reasonable level. It's fun to be able to communicate, even if it's only to order a coffee, say where you're from and comment on the weather.

Learning a language is something you can do at any age, so that's not a factor. What may be a factor is having the time and mental energy if you have an otherwise busy lifestyle, but the main point is how most people think about learning a language. It's easy enough to pick up a bit of vocabulary and grammar to get by in the language, but the next step is a lot harder. As you progress, you need to, for example, double your vocabulary with every step, so it becomes more difficult. It's up to you when you decide you've reached a level you're happy with. To fully understand a Norwgian TV series, you'd need to have studied seriously for years and maybe even lived in the country for a while. That doesn't mean you can't watch them and get the gist of what is going on long before that (as well as improve your listening skills by doing so). Language learning is a journey and it's about enjoying every step of the way, even when it feels sometimes like you're going backwards :)

I think doing some work with new words helps - I remember kanji easier by going through the list of parts they're built from, even if they're nonsense. I think if you're frustrated by not knowing, aggressively checking the dictionary should help. It'll burn the word in your memory a little stronger than just seeing it on the page and going "huh?", which increases the likelihood that you'll recognize it the next time. One fun way might be to find an etymological dictionary and check the word's etymology. Lykke til!

Yup, it also took me three takes to even SAY "glue" and not "blue", because I was trying to make it sound natural. And obviously "glue" is unnatural. My favourite colour isn't even blue!

@@daysandwords Let me guess, your favorite color is banana?:)

Yeah... though it's actually the same room the whole time. Same angle too.

Hej, kul att se en annan nybörjare! Jag har pluggat svenska för 17 månader sen. Det känns ut som jag har bara skräpa av ytan. 🍀 lycka till!

Tummen upp från mig!

@@sharonoddlyenough Vad kul! Ja, jag förstår precis vad du menar.

Do you find that the lack of material is the hardest part? Not many tv shows in N'Chelkchwe. Nor books. Phrases is not really "learning".

@@davidtrak2679 Yes definitely lack of resources makes it seriously tough. I'm learning Ojibwe/Nishnaabemwin, which is one of the bigger languages on the continent, so there are a quite a few more resources for this language than for other N. American languages. Still way fewer than for, say, Catalan. Learning phrases is definitely 'learning'. It might not be very good learning, though. A lot of the resources I came across in the beginning were book courses with CDs that were more like phrasebooks than language courses. I was learning one or two phrases a day from one of these for a while, and I came across a more systematic language course and I immediately switched to that. The interesting thing though is that I'll come across words and structures I learnt when i was indiscriminately learning seemingly random phrases well over a year ago. In those cases the grammar points stick really quickly and the seemingly aimless phrase memorization doesn't seem so entirely lacking in value.

@@ylfetu Really interesting. In any case, for such a language (though of the more documented among the native of the Americas) even phrasebooks is something. There's a structured course for it? interesting. How about media? not a lot of ways to gain exposure, that's what I'm mainly interested in, courses are okay, phrasebooks, whatever, but once you get to the beginner-to-intermediate, what's next in way of exposing one's ear to it? Same goes for native speakers, in italki and so on (though I suspect the old fashioned way of actually going out of the house and looking for speakers could be better here)

Thanks for saying so!

Oh, if you Google "FSI Language Difficulty" you'll see something very similar. It's pretty misleading though, in multiple ways.

@@daysandwords nice one, cheers. I know that language isn't just black and white and that we should take opinions with a pinch of salt. I have only ever seen the one from the American Institute of Foreign Languages up until now, and the one that you showed provided some languages that match my own thoughts so I'll check it out. Einen schönen Tag!

I prefer the colour 'grown' to the colour 'glue'. But if you want to stick with glue, that's fine.

I have quite a lot of language aptitude (it's been more or less "proven", with the military battery of tests) but 15 minutes a day is just too slow. Look I think you CAN progress in 15 minutes a day but I think at some point, whether it's after 200 hours or 1000 hours, whatever, but AT SOME POINT, you're going to need more. I only do about that much Swedish these days but that's different because I already speak Swedish. I'd never have gotten where I am without the few weeks I've done of several hours a day.

Thanks for your reply- I think it's great that with a few months of that intensity you got to that level. Have you done a video of overall what you method-month by month was to reach ?? level in Swedish? I may have missed it...

Hey - sorry, I've been meaning to reply to this it just might take a little time (I'm not known for brevity) so I'm not ignoring you. When are you planning on starting?

Hahaha, well... yeah, you've definitely come to the right place! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I am probably the only Australian who didn't start with a "legit" reason to learn Swedish (no romantic interest, no relatives there etc etc) and has never been there and has come to the stage of actually speaking it. I don't think this is a big headed statement, I just can't see anyone else having done that... so I would HIGHLY recommend these two videos: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/o9ifh8WEubK0Ypc.html kzfaq.info/get/bejne/f9SheL11qMewgqc.html

I use text-to-speech to have it read out to me in a way that is pretty native like. Reading in your mind before you know the sounds of the language well will ruin your accent, as I found out when learning German.

At first, yes, but then try to watch the same episode or show again with target language subtitles on only. After a while you don't need to do the English first.

That's like earlier I watched a vid in Finnish as I just started learning and it opened my eyes to how it doesn't have that many cases. They are just prepositions. Big words in Finnish is basically just a sentence glued together. All the sudden Finnish was logical and made sense and wasn't as daunting.

@@daki2223 It's exactly the same with Hungarian. What people count as a "case" are things like -ban/-ba/-ra/-l/-hoz and so on,which subsequently mean inside of sth/to the inside of sth/onto sth/with sth/to sth (meaning like up to the "border" of sth. For example "Autohoz megyek" would mean "I go to the car",but stressing specifically,that you're not entering the car,but you just go into its nearest proximity. If you wanted to enter it,you'd say "Autoba megyek"). And same about the sentence-long words. Each of their pieces conveys a part of meaning and it doesn't take long to start spotting those pieces instinctively (especially since they're your only help in many situations as the nouns themselves often just seem like a random combination of letters when you see them for the first time,due to the lack of refference for them from other languages you might know)

For sure. Sorry, I don't remember even bringing this topic up in this video... did I?

YES, THANK YOU! But also just this dumb narrative that literally everyone who talks to you ever is a criminal plotting some ridiculously elaborate scheme. The girl was so stupid that I didn't really care if she was ok (obviously I don't want something bad to happen to anyone but like... in a movie) and then Liam Neeson straight up shoots an innocent woman just to make a point. Oh and he outruns a car at one point. Like... it's a car. I know what cars are haha. I know middle aged men can't outrun them. Fit 20 year olds can't outrun them.

@@daysandwords 🤣 we have an ongoing argument at my work that applies here - a bunch of the guys say they can't get into fantasy, they have no idea why we like harry potter etc. and the rest of us maintain that what they like is ALSO fantasy lol. the typical example is fast and furious but john wick, taken, all action movies...

Well it's the culture, isn't it? That and the English speaking (again, culture), makes it ten times harder to learn it, albeit not if you only want to read books or something