abadideaingeburgerd status: snipped in proper Dutch at some kids throwing their trash in the canal: “boys, next time, there is a public trash can over there”
Victoria Walberg@0xabad1dea Any tips on learning Dutch? Courses, apps etc. I do have books and a willing native speaker.
@vickyjo the Duolingo Dutch course is okay (assuming they haven’t utterly destroyed it with AI) as long as you understand a drilling app cannot, on its own, get you fluent
I took a Dutch edition of a novel I knew well and copied it by hand. Like, with a pen, on paper. The whole thing. This is what got me from “I want to learn Dutch but I always get stuck after a week” to having a working understanding of core vocabulary and grammar.
Advanced Persistent Teapot@0xabad1dea @vickyjo is this still viable for Chinese character systems? My recognition of Japanese words is slowly expanding but there are just so many I don't know and because there's no firm link between character and syllable/sound in Japanese, a lot of the time I would just be copying the character out with no idea of sound. At this point I might know 80% of the words in a book aimed at 5 year olds.
@http_error_418 for Japanese specifically, you can probably find youth books that have the ruby hiragana on all kanji?
toni 
@http_error_418 Reading youth manga helps, in my experience. You have the furigana and have context from the drawings. Being interested in the manga itself helps keep motivation up.
mcgrew@toni @http_error_418 If you can get something with Japanese voiceover along with captions in Japanese, that's another option. Video games, anime, music w/lyrics, etc.
I'm kind of running into this same problem myself. Right now I'm mostly trying to get as much input & output as possible and hope I pick things up.