Self-Study vs. Classes

'Sup /lang/.

Which is better when learning a foreign language? Self-Study or classes? Which do you prefer?

>>38
who the fuck speaks old english?

>>38
does

Get classes if at all possible. It's hard on your own. Self-study is only good for getting a background. As soon as you try to have a major conversation, you will fall apart. Classes or a trip to a country speaking the language are the only real options for doing it properly.

>>37

Since even earlier than that, actually.  The Cultural revolution had a bigger crackdown on written reform (although that created problems in its own right, but we won't go there), but the language has been effectively standardised since the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE), with crackdowns every few hundred years or so in order to keep the standard.  How else do you think they managed to rule such a large empire for so long?  Pro tip: It wasn't with spoken Chinese.

>>15

WHY HASN'T ANYONE NOTICED THIS ISN'T FUCKING PROPER LATIN?!?

THIS IS JUST GOBBLEDEGOOK THAT PRINTERS FILL UP PAGES WITH BEFORE CONTENT IS ADDED...

>>45
OMG, somebody will finally understand the message, too?! :)

Whether class-study or not, all studying is self-study by its nature.
Even the bestest teachers or materials or methods bring about nothing if you can't pull up your socks.

We have a saying in our language,

"Dil dile değmeden dil öğrenilmez"

You can't learn a tongue(language) if tongues don't touch each other first

go and get a foreign girlfriend.

Classes : most efficient
Self-learning : most pleasant

I like self-learning best, but if you have no desire or belief in yourself, you'll get nowhere no matter what you use.

class: learning
self: masturbation

Do schools really have to teach English?
I don't think so.
It's a waste of time.

Personally, I will never probably use English in my work, neither in my free time.
I can read Japanese newspapers and magazines.
I can learn all about other countries by reading in my native language, not English.
I don't have to watch the news in English in order to understand what is happening in the world.

Just think of what else I could have studied instead of English.
I wish I had spent more time on studying history so that I could understand my country better.
Nobody speaks well of Japanese if they have a glib of tongue but knows nothing about Japanese culture.
Yet, large number of Japanese are still learning English.
For what reason?

You can't fucking learn a language from classes, they're too slow and you'll forget too much shit by the time you would get fluent from all that studying.

Self-study is far more effective. There's definitely some flaws in it, and it requires godly discipline which most people these days don't have, but other than that, it's vastly superior.

>>53
Class+self study is the best.

i'm in fucking pig disgusting china right now and i hate it.  guess what, china is gay.  i'm leaving this summer.  I'm going to Nippon.  I fucking studied chinese so hard, god dman it it damn god.  now it's all pointless because china doesn't have a rei ayanami and all the food her si fucking pig disgusting and i hate it goddamnit.

faggot gay

i'm in fucking pig disgusting china right now and i hate it.  guess what, china is gay.  i'm leaving this summer.  I'm going to Nippon.  I fucking studied chinese so hard, god dman it it damn god.  now it's all pointless because china doesn't have a rei ayanami and all the food her si fucking pig disgusting and i hate it goddamnit.

faggot gay

is rosetta stone any good for self-study purposes?

Rosetta stone is good, I try to do a lesson in it every day.
The best thing you can do is to talk to native speakers.  Usually, they won't try to burn you or anything if you make a mistake.

If you're learning Japanese, go to Little Tokyo, if you're learning Chinese, go to San Gabriel.

YOu also have to have some sort of motivation.  Yes, wanting to understand anime is a motivation, despite being amazingly shallow and pointless.

'sup /lang/.
My classmate makes the same silly grammatical mistakes but is it ok to point that out?
They say no matter how I'm careful not to hurt his feelings,
to tell "your Japanese is incorrect" is equal to "you're ugly", "you stink". Is it true?
I must take the advice but still I don't get it.

>>59
You are only hurting them in the long run, when they actually try it out on natives and gets laughed out of the country. DO IT, FAGGOT

>>17
Listen to this man.
Compared to serious self-study, you don't learn shit by attending classes. I didn't learn English by attending the crappy classes my school forces me to visit. Most of my classmates depend on those classes for learning the language - and can't even watch a fukken movie in English, despite ten years of "studying". And everyone's accent is still so extreme, it hurts.
Get yourself some good material for getting started with the basics (books and software), and as soon as you start understanding the language to some degree, immerse yourself in an environment filled with it (computer games, websites, news, movies etc.).
To practice actually expressing yourself in the language, message boards are very useful. Especially anonymous ones, where you won't be stigmatized as "the foreigner whose posts are hard to understand and will be ignored", but rather start anew with every post you write until you blend in completely. Talking to a friend who is a native speaker works even better of course, but I'm guessing most 4channers are fairly unsociable and don't make friends too easily.

>>59
depends how many he's making. i make loads of mistakes in my german, so when people stop me at each one it is impossible to speak to them, but i make very few in my gaelic, so being stopped is productive and doesn't spoil the flow of the conversation.
if he is making the same mistakes over and over, and not loads of them, it is worth pointing them out, otherwise you'll just damage his motivation and he won't want to carry on, thus never getting past those mistakes. maybe point out the real howlers, but otherwise let him learn on his own for a little.

With the internet today, the arguments of "Not being able to get the proper vocal experiences" are moot. There is so much shit online for learning almost every language it is even funny to say that anymore.

Self study all the way.

I left school with a D in Spanish.

I've been studying Japanese for a few months, self-taught, and can so far flick through a manga (with furigana, of course) and get the general gist, and identify about 200 kanji prett fast. All of that came from the internet. Tae Kim + Jim Breen and a handy DS dictionary is basically all I need to learn it. And this guy I know who's studying it at school for almost 2 years knows less than me.

Now I really really want to learn Spanish and perhaps French too. I've picked up Spanish again, and can probably say that I've learned more useful phrases, words, etc in about 6 months than I did at school. For me, I didn't pay huge attention every single lesson, at least with self-teaching, you can do it whenever you want, and, more importantly, with the right motivation and the perfect pace.

>>64
Haha, I'm learning Spanish and Japanese right now as well. Where do you get your furigana-covered stuff?
I watch anime with Spanish subtitles by the way, mostly from frozen-layer.com and elrincondelmanga.com.

That seems like a good idea, using Spanish subs, seeing how my listening skills are nowhere near good enough for movies/tv/music. Furigana covered stuff is easy to find. I guess I'm pretty lucky, I live near London where there are a few big Japanese bookstores, and they get the weekly manga-zines and have a good library of past and current manga, most of which has furigana anyway. Basically, look for raws of Jump stuff, and that will doubtlessly all have furigana.

How well do you know either language, 65?

>>66
My Spanish is good enough  to watch a normal tv show and get all of it, save for maybe one or two words every 10 minutes. It does still require lots of effort though, and when I'm tired, I barely understand half of what I hear.
When reading a somewhat more sophisticated book (reading cien años de soledad right now, oarsome so far) I still have to look up about 1 word per page. No problems with grammar.
I've also been posting some stuff here and there on 1492chan, and it seems I can pretty much blend in, as long as I don't write a fucken essay.
Also, I started out with a crappy school-Spanish too. I wasn't even able to read a news article without looking up every third word. Took me about a year of practice/self-study to get where I'm now.

I only started learning Japanese roughly a month ago, the first 2 weeks being devoted exclusively to kana. I know maybe 100 Kanji and some very basic grammar.

>>67
Hm, good to hear. There's every chance I may get to spend some of this and next year living in Spain actually, so that would be great for learning it, I'm assuming that you live in an area that is sort of peppered with Spanish, on TV, people etc?

That's pretty fast going speed with the ol' nihongo, too.

I'm assuming that you live in an area that is sort of peppered with Spanish, on TV, people etc?
As a citizen of the internet, of course :D
I do know a few Spaniards and South-Americans, but their German is far better than my Spanish, so we usually speak that, except if we don't want the people around us to understand what we're saying. But it's nice to have someone whom you can ask about pronunciation etc.
That's pretty fast going speed with the ol' nihongo, too.
Why, thanks. I've had lots of spare time this and last month, you know.

>>69
I feel like such a fail browsing this board already; I only know English, born and bred in namesake's country. Wooo. And at school the language was just fail. We STARTED learning BASIC BASIC French when we were about 8 I guess, and it just got annoying after a while, but I took up Spanish for high school...and just didn't pay attention. It's odd that only now at 19 I really really want to learn these languages and regret not having the real opportunity to do it earlier. I don't mind self-teaching myself either, that's pretty much what i've done with japanese so far and that's only been about 4 months in between college work. If that encompasses learning a whole new grammar structure and writing system, then picking up the latin languages again should prove less of a hurdle.

>>70
picking up the latin languages again should prove less of a hurdle.
And while it of course consumes time, it'll also make learning Japanese much easier. Because when you learn a language, you don't just get better at speaking that language, but also generally at learning a language.
Same with script. I don't know about you, but I remember spending several hours just trying to get the "あ" right. Now, learning 3-5 Kanji per day in much less time isn't a problem. (I don't learn all the readings, though)
By the way, my English went from complete fail to being actually useful when a few years ago, I picked up, and played the shit out of, the English version of Morrowind. Right now, I'm thinking about torrenting the Spanish version of Oblivion. I've tried Pokemon for Japanese, but sadly, it's kana-only (I was hoping for kanji+furigana).

Ah of course, I guess video games are a great way to encounter some nice everyday language, Spanish and Japanese. Probably not Japanese just yet, but I got through a trial (with a dictionary for a few words) on Phoenix Wright on my DS in Spanish and that really boosted my confidence. As for learning the script for Japanese I guess I had a sort of head start. When I was a little younger I was even more of a loser than I am now and I was completely obsessed with writing scripts. So I effectively learned Korean hangul, katakana/hiragana, hebrew and some arabic just because I liked the idea of writing with a different system. All in all that took me just over a year when I was about 11.

Some Japanese games do have hiragana, sort of, like Taiko No Tatsujin for the DS, which has hiragana in brackets after certain kanji (as the screen is too small for furigana). It can get a little annoying, though. I also got the first Harry Potter book in Spanish, to see what of that I could get through. It turns out it wasn't very much, but I hobbled through the first 20 or so pages with a dictionary and the English version of the book.

>>72
Yeah, and I'd say RPGs are the best genre for learning. They have both lots of text and keep you addicted for long periods of time. And when you point with the mouse at, say, a broom and the word for "broom" flashes up, that helps a lot.
There are also kanji learning games for Japanese children, but from what I've seen so far (I've played Doraemon The Kanji Study Boy or something like that, for gbc) they're of no use for me other than maybe for stroke-order. They naturally assume the player to know the words, just not the symbols. And aren't all that fun either.

>>73
The kanji learning games really aren't best suited to foreigners learning kanji, as a pretty good hook of the language anyway is required often to get through to learning about stroke order etc. Also watching subbed stuff in English is good, it's a bit like using stabilisers, albeit if you're cycling at 2 years old. Because you can slowly stop looking at the text and get the general gistof structure etc., only having to look down every now and then for some vocabulary you might not know.

On the subject of actual self-study, how do you tend to go about it? Are there routines you have, or is it more casual and whimsical? I find I can honestly only 'study' for no more than about 2 hours before I start to get either annoyed or tired/bored.  I suppose that that is one of the joys about self-study, as it really is suited perfectly to your mood and current motivation. Can anyone reccomend some good self-study methods too, especially for Spanish?

>>74
Watching stuff with subs in your language is good for learning pronunciation, not much else. If it were any different, everyone in /a/ would be fluent in Japanese. If you want to learn something, use subs in the same language as the audio is in.

>>75
Not even for pronunciation, unless you're aware of male/female pronunciation distinctions and capable of recognising dialects.

>>74
Try to immerse yourself in the language as much as possible. If something can be done using Spanish instead of English, do it that way. Play vidya gaemz in Spanish, later on use the Spanish wikipedia (unless the article sucks too hard), animu (Mexican dubs are usually way better and closer to the original than the English ones), news (bbcmundo.com), everything. And before you use a dictionary, try figuring out what the word means on your own, from context.
And don't worry if you don't understand every single word, if you get the gist of what's happening, it's fine. You'll understand more and more with time.

Classes. Just because your teachers sucked, doesn't mean they all do.

>>14
SPOILERS READ AT YOUR OWN RISK








You suck at chinese and your accent is horrible, classes with a good professor and a dedicated study-abroad trip could have fixed this, but instead you are bragging on the internet about how great your language skills are and how "OMG STUPIDDDS" everyone else is.

Generally, self-study.
But for languages that aren't as widely spoken as English, Japanese, German, French etc., there might simply not be enough stuff out there to efficiently teach it yourself. So in that case, classes, if they are offered in your area.