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.
@mcgrew @http_error_418 Yeah. I forgot most of it by now, but the high point of my jp proficiency was when hosting Japanese VIPs at conventions (not as interpreter), and when traveling in Japan. Kind of obvious, but hard to keep up for me, these days.