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sudo wrote

Richard Stallman has a pretty good method:

I have developed a way of learning a language that works for me.

First I study with a textbook to learn to read the language, using a recording of the sounds to start saying the words to myself. When I finish the textbook, I start reading children's books (for 7-10 year olds) with a dictionary. I advance to books for teenagers when I know enough words that it becomes tolerably fast.

When I know enough words, I start writing the language in email when I am in conversations with people who speak that language.

I don't try actually speaking the language until I know enough words to be able to say the complex sorts of things I typically want to say. Simple sentences are almost as rare in my speech as in this writing. In addition, I need to know how to ask questions about how to say things, what a word means, and how certain words differ in meaning, and how to understand the answers.

I first started actually speaking French during my first visit to France. I decided on arrival in the airport that I would speak only French for the whole 6 weeks. This was frustrating to colleagues whose English was much better than my French. But it enabled me to learn.

I decided to learn Spanish when I saw a page printed in Spanish and found I could mostly read it (given my French and English). I followed the approach described above, and began speaking Spanish during a two-week visit to Mexico, a couple of years later.

As for Indonesian, I have not got enough vocabulary to speak it all the time when in Indonesia, but I try to speak it as much as possible.

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GrimWillow wrote

I know what you mean. I couldn't find anything either and ended up pirating "rosetta stone" which isn't even as good as I thought it would be.

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[deleted] wrote

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NEOalquimista wrote

Before Rosetta Stone, we had Livemocha.com, where all courses were free, and you could interact with people freely like a social network. I was learning mandarim so I made a friend from China. It was very cool there...

Until Rosetta Stone bought Livemocha and made most content unavailable unless you paid for a premium account. It was a total disaster, of course, so Livemocha died. Fuck Rosetta Stone.

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autonomous_hippopotamus wrote

I guess the question is-- Is there any free langauge learning software ?

And the answer is -- FUCK NO

I had a pirated version of rossetta stone v3 which was not as in depth as i thought, as well as a cracked version of Babble, which only has Spanish Spanish, not latin american spanish.. and it also seems like they've fixed whatever vuln allowed that to happen.

Basically, i've fallen back on youtube, textbooks and dictionaries.

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radac wrote

translate.google.com

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libre_dev wrote

Google

What fucking Web software did you just fucking recommend to me, you little used???

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