This is a more focused follow up to a question I had the other day about moving to other countries. I’m wondering what the best options are for learning a new language at the moment. I’m vaguely aware of companies like Duo-lingo losing their reputation lately and it’s hard to trust the top google results nowadays with all the SEO junk. So does anyone have suggestions for trustworthy/useful sites for learning a new language? If it matters, in particular I’m interested in trying (In roughly this order) Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish.
CI is the correct answer. The ppl at dreamingspanish have a great breakdown of why it works. Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find CI content, especially for beginner, but I’ve made faster progress in both spanish and chinese than I have with any other method.
I tried all the other methods people suggested below for years (flash cards, audio courses, reading); none of them worked. You might memorize words, but you won’t actually be able to understand someone speaking to you. I have a friend who has a duolingo 3+ years streak (meaning she uses it every day), and still can’t understand a native speaker talking at a beginner level. If she’d have spent even 1% of that time doing comprehensible input she’d be much further along.
Thanks for the recc. I was half expecting it to force a pay gate to simply watch any of the videos (the internet can make me cynical like that!) and better yet, they have a superbeginner video on an exact topic I was interested in learning about after some South American immigrant friends had brought it up. Immersion almost seems ‘too good to be true’ because one can learn interesting content more enthusiastically than studying it formally, I’ve found the same with history and political theory.
do you have any you can recommend for chinese?
Lazychinese is really the only good channel / site that I’ve found. But it needs a lot more content, especially at the beginner levels. I’m having trouble making the jump from beginner to intermediate, because there isn’t enough content there yet.
There’s a YT channel called comprehensible mandarin that has a lot of content, but unfortunately none of it is organized by difficulty, which makes it impossible to use. You should really be understanding like 90% of the content, and if you can’t, you should bump down to a lower difficulty.
If anyone has any other good recs, I’d also like to know.