EPTMemrise: Learning languages with a game approach - Page 60
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GT350
United States270 Posts
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Flicky
England2654 Posts
On August 21 2012 05:07 Rimstalker wrote: I am currently brainstorming some ideas for memrise, and one of them was a 'obscurity' rating that would be applied by native speakers, and you would be able to filter by it. - common - good to know - obscure (or something similar) I would like this to happen. I've been going over German basic 1 (about 70% of the way through) and some of the phrases I've talked to native speakers about have been met with laughter. Many of the words/sentences are out of date or never used. I don't mind learning more correct words (technical or full names) but knowing the shortened and common use equivalents would be massively helpful. "Jemandem einen Korb geben" springs to mind. It literally translates as "to give someone a basket" but it's being used as a phrase about turning someone down (if they ask you for a date). I think so at least. If you're wondering, Memrise translates that as "giving someone the brush off" so there are still plenty of really poor translations. If you aren't a native speaker and you're wondering what "giving someone the brush off" means, then you're fresh out of luck, because it does mean anything. It's close to brushing someone off which is still a bad translation. You shouldn't translate a phrase to an equivalent phrase because odds are they have different meanings beyond that. Many of the english words they choose as being equivalent are ambiguous or just confusing, especially to international speakers. They translated U-Bahn as Underground (as in short for the London Underground) which is just stupid. You wouldn't say U-Bahn means Tube as that would be ambiguous and misleading and how are non-Londoners supposed to piece that one together? Sometimes it comes up as subway (much better) but a majority of the time it sticks with the ambiguous. I've tried submitting or voting up better translations but it's not changed anything yet. | ||
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Rimstalker
Germany734 Posts
And German is quite regional, some parts of Germany would never ever use 'U-Bahn', but call it 'metro'. As TheUltimate said now repeatedly: At some point, you will have to create your own course to focus on what works for you. I am still happy with my Spanish learning on memrise, because it offers quite diverse courses and I can learn in the direction of what I think works for me. I have some courses just for verbs and verb conjugations, and others of idioms to get familiar with sentence structure and how prepositions are used. | ||
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TheKwas
Iceland372 Posts
On August 21 2012 15:02 robjapan wrote: I dunno, it confuses the hell outta me, in Japanese you can just write words using the roman alphabet and it matches perfectly with the Japanese sound. じゃ ー ja しゃ ー sha よ ー yo etc etc etc, when I tried hangul it asked me to input the "d" sound, I hit d and some other symbol came up! so, I'm guessing that Hangul is a bit too complex for a English keyboard? On the contrary, Hangul is so simple that it doesn't need to be written using roman letters first (as is often the case with Chinese and Japanese). It's an alphabet just like English, so they just create a Korean keyboard with korean letters in a way that is ergonomically efficient for the Korean language; just like how an English keyboard is set up with English letters in a way that is (not so quite) set up in a way that is ergonomically efficient for the English language. The fact that you can write out Japanese/Chinese phonetically using roman letters is largely a result of the Japanese/Chinese language not being very suitable for keyboards. | ||
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Tobberoth
Sweden6375 Posts
On August 21 2012 14:46 robjapan wrote: Can someone explain to me why the Korean keyboard layout is so... funky? The Japanese is pretty simple, if the word is 野菜 やさい yasai for example... you type in... yasai... so then why in gods name is Korean not made to match a standard English keyboard... ;-/ seriously, not trolling, I actually want to know! Nothing funky about it, just search on google for "korean keyboard" and check images, it's just as "funky" as a latin alphabet keyboard... but more like dvorak than qwerty in the sense that hangul keyboards are optimized for writing fast, while qwerty was technically designed to SLOW DOWN writing. Real japanese keyboards are similar to the korean one in that one button = one kana, but almost no learners use it since it's so much easier for learners to write in romaji. Personally, I've ordered transparant stickers from korea which will let me put the hangul symbols on my keyboard, so I will have a much easier time writing korean. | ||
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ShadowDrgn
United States2497 Posts
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robjapan
Japan104 Posts
I guess I'm just not used to the Korean method, I'm so used to where all the keys are on the keyboard now that re-learning a new layout seems like a lot of hard work on top of remembering all the hangul symbols. | ||
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spangled
United States24 Posts
I used to always lament in college that learning just wasn't fun and wish it was more like a game. Now with this site I can create my own study list and quiz myself and see how much I really know about any topic. I'm currently studying for my GRE exam which is the first step in my goal to get a MBA. So I'm expanding my vocabulary and enjoying this process of planting new seeds (words) in my memory bank. One funny story that I'd like to share was I did try to learn Vietnamese once from this site, and I actually learned 100 out of 500 words but when I tried to impress my friends with what I knew the words didn't sound right b/c you really need a native speaker to tell you the correct way to pronounce a word. I remember one my friend was going to lunch and I asked what are you eating, she said Rice and Chicken. So I'm like Oh, your eating Rice and Chim, because I learned Chim means bird in Vietnamese, so I'm yelling the word Chim to my friend looking for any signs of approval and she looks at me really strange, and than other Vietnamese people are wondering what in the world is this guy saying. Turns out the word Chim has dual meanings, it does mean 'bird' but it also a bad word that means 'pussy' That was the beginning of the end of my Vietnamese language experiment, gonna concentrate on getting a better command of the English vocabulary before I tackle foreign languages, enjoy learning my brothers! | ||
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Rimstalker
Germany734 Posts
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Perfi
Poland349 Posts
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Tobberoth
Sweden6375 Posts
On August 22 2012 14:21 robjapan wrote: I don't think any Japanese person uses the keyboard with the kana layout, all of the children I know who come to my school all use romaji input method. I guess I'm just not used to the Korean method, I'm so used to where all the keys are on the keyboard now that re-learning a new layout seems like a lot of hard work on top of remembering all the hangul symbols. Yeah, I think it's quite uncommon nowadays, though I hear older japanese tend to use it because I think it was standard before the romaji IME. Not surprising though, the japanese writing system isn't fit for a keyboard in the same way that latin/hangul is. | ||
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noodlesinsoup
United States106 Posts
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Cramsy
Australia1100 Posts
Learning Mandarin | ||
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Sra
Netherlands75 Posts
I have learned almost all of Japanese Kana. How much Kanji should i learn before i can start to learn some words? I can now read the characters but i have no idea what they mean. | ||
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ToT)OjKa(
Korea (South)2437 Posts
If you did you could move on to http://www.memrise.com/set/10024451/basic-kanji-book-1/ | ||
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Flip9
Germany151 Posts
On August 23 2012 18:13 Sra wrote: thx guys this is great. I have learned almost all of Japanese Kana. How much Kanji should i learn before i can start to learn some words? I can now read the characters but i have no idea what they mean. I suggest you learn the words, and learn how to write it in kanji, for example learn: Kanji: 日, spoken ひ, means day/sun 本, spoken ほん, means book 日本, spoken にほん or にっぽん, means japan you should start with grade 1 kanjis and then grade 2. You also should get the program Z-kanji and the firefox plug-in Rikaichan now that you know kana | ||
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Sra
Netherlands75 Posts
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Tobberoth
Sweden6375 Posts
Why is it good? Because using it, you can learn an amazing amount of kanji very fast and it will help a TON when learning words/reading japanese. Problem? Sure, you don't actually learn japanese. Knowing 2000 kanji by themselves is pretty useless since you don't know any words using them. But that's just a matter of time. If you're not that motivated, I would recommend just learning kanji as you learn words using them. Learning the radicals help a LOT if you want to be able to write them. | ||
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Zocat
Germany2229 Posts
So before you use Heisig to learn kanji, read that criticism and evaluate for yourself if you want to learn what Heisig offers. There are (a lot) of cases where this is still the case, but Heisig has it's problems. You might be disappointed if you have wrong expectations ("you dont actually learn japanese"). | ||
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Toadesstern
Germany16350 Posts
The thing on memrise is that they have a lot of different pronounciations and it's pretty confusing to get used to that because it's just so massive information overflow for me. I started out doing Kanji radicals, next thing was Kanji n5 and I can memorize how they look and I'd be able to translate them if someone would show them to me but I'd have no clue on how to pronounce them because that's just so much information to learn at the same time  So for the time being I'm sticking with a bunch of vocabulary instead. Trying to get that done and getting the corresponding Kanji on the fly. So I'm pretty much hoping that some things end up being at least from time to time self-explanatory once you get the vocabulary to back it up. But is it really necessary to memorize all the different pronounciations? For example I was told to pronounce hundred as ひゃく. Which shows up in the n5 kanji list as well but it also shows up as びゃく which I was told was an exception to the rule and it's used instead when you want to say 300 for example. If that's the case I'd rather just learn the "normal" thing and learn the exceptions in a second run to minimize the confusion right now :p Edit: Btw lol those starter Hira/Kata courses are dishing out points like candy. | ||
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