Forum like this for Spanish?

[matteo]

On 10/17/2022 at 4:07 PM, Woodford said:

I've been doing Duolingo German, and that's been my experience. Maybe it's due to the fact that Duolingo forces you to write and speak in the target language, but in less than a year of casual study, I can already do things in German that I struggle to do (or can't do) in Chinese. 

 

ha that's funny, I've been doing Duolingo German - very casually as well - as a way to take a break from Chinese. Struggling on simple sentences and having to learn simple words like "auto" and "apfel" makes me really appreciate the progress made with Chinese in the past years and is motivating me to pick it up again. 

All the more so because I realize that German is much "easier" compared to Chinese.

 

However, German doesn't seem to capture my heart and imagination nearly as much as Chinese does.  I wonder if it's just a matter of sticking with it until it becomes familiar and welcome, or if it's an instinctive feeling that can't be changed. 

 

On 11/5/2021 at 10:51 AM, Moshen said:

While we're on the topic, can anyone suggest something other than Harry Potter for a first Chinese book effort?  I don't want to read sci-fi.  I like memoirs, thrillers, detective stories, social commentary.  Thanks.

 

撒哈拉的故事 by 三毛 is a popular choice and it should be fairly approachable (I only casually read a few paragraphs here and there thou, never read the whole book). It probably falls in the "memoirs" category.

草鞋湾 by 曹文轩 is a detective story for kids that several people on the forum read as "book of the month" a while ago. Not your typical lighthearted children's book; I didn't find it super easy personally but enjoyed in the end. I seem to remember that the first chapter was by far the hardest due to a long scene with description of birds flying around.

“River Town" by Peter Hessler relates the author's experience of a two-years exchange period as a teacher in Fuling in 1996. Well written and full of interesting cultural insights, one of the travel books I enjoyed the most. There is a Chinese translation of it. While it is not extremely easy to read, having read the original in English before would surely help going past the gnarly bits. 

 

 

[Flickserve]

On 10/16/2022 at 11:46 PM, Jan Finster said:

With a background of German and English and 3 years of Latin and French in high school (ages ago), I can pretty much understand >95% of "intermediate" language learning videos on Youtube I watched. Even in advanced Spanish videos I understand the gist of it.

I have 2 years of Latin, seven years of French (but not conversational), 6 months German. German was tough hence I gave it up early. 
 

3.5 weeks….that sounds tempting. 

 

 

[Moshen]

Quote

However, German doesn't seem to capture my heart and imagination nearly as much as Chinese does.  I wonder if it's just a matter of sticking with it until it becomes familiar and welcome, or if it's an instinctive feeling that can't be changed. 

 

After I studied German for Reading in a summer crash course, in the next course we read Kafka.  That was very cool.

[Woodford]

On 10/16/2022 at 10:49 PM, matteo said:

German doesn't seem to capture my heart and imagination nearly as much as Chinese does.

That's probably my biggest struggle. German is very similar to English and has an aura of familiarity to it. Chinese has all those cool characters, feels very exotic, and presents a fun challenge. However, I am excited about the rich legacy of the German language--so many great authors, scientists, philosophers, etc., wrote in that language, and it's still a language that's required for many areas of academic research.

 

On 10/17/2022 at 12:24 AM, Flickserve said:

German was tough hence I gave it up early. 

 

I must confess that in my first few months of studying it, I entered into a rather horrible phase where I was trying to figure out the proper order of words in sentences. Duolingo would tell me, "No! Don't put this word here! It belongs at the end of the sentence! No, don't do that! Adverbs come first! No, don't put that preposition there!" So I would memorize the rules, and then....it seemed that the rules would change! Duolingo would tell me to go left, then I would go left, then it would say, "No, go right!" Then I'd go right. Then it would say, "No, go left!"

 

So I would get punished, over and over and over. The feedback I would get from Duolingo was, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Bad! No! Wrong! Stop! No! Wrong!"

And then at one point, everything suddenly clicked, and I finally understood. Learning the specific rules didn't help too much. I had to develop an intuition, and then let that intuition guide me. My wife can speak German fluently, but she can't articulate/remember the rules very well.


I suppose that in Chinese, the struggle isn't so much word order, but finding words and phrases to express things the way a native would. 

[StackExchange]

Have you tried https://spanish.stackexchange.com/?

[Moshen]

Quote

Have you tried https://spanish.stackexchange.com/?

 

Thank you, I had a look.  It's not what I was looking for, because unless I missed something it doesn't include reading/listening recommendations or questions about cultural differences between speakers of different languages.

[Moshen]

Need a good laugh?

 

I came across this essay by Mark Twain about guessing the meaning of Italian newspapers stories without a dictionary and with no desire for a dictionary.  It had me laughing out loud six or seven times.

 

https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/ItalianMaster.html

 

It relates to the discussion a short while ago about methods for learning Italian and/or Spanish.  Maybe that was in a different thread?