Real Conversation #3 - Learning Languages (Gabriel & Brian)

GABRIEL: And you know... I think that it's great to try to have chats as much as... as much as possible.

And... So when you're learning a new language, do you like trying to have chats as soon as possible; do you like having conversations as quickly as possible? BRIAN: No, I'm usually very self-conscious, I think that's something I need to change, because I've heard from a couple of people who are good at learning languages, that you should try and speak as soon as possible; you should like immerse yourself in a conversation.

Usually I spend time just like getting vocabulary, and try to learn the grammar I guess, I use like Duolingo, where you constantly construct in sentences and you learn that along the way. GABRIEL: Duolingo is fun.

I find it fun. I use it every day for Russian right now for instance where I was supposed, and my level in Russian is already pretty decent, so that's why I'm sort of almost done, and it's good, because there are a lot basic vocabulary that I missed, because of my method, reviewing and learning it is good. BRIAN: I know that too, I also have like a flash card program.

GABRIEL: Is it Anki?

BRIAN: No, that one is really good though, but I tried Memrise.

GABRIEL: Memrise is good, I like it.

BRIAN: So I picked that one and I did the advanced German stuff and some stuffs was, I felt like a little too difficult sometimes, so I picked them in the immediate, I was like, wow!

This is too easy, but then I did it any ways, so I kind of like give myself a break while I'm doing all these advanced stuffs, and then I noticed I forgot this one, Rave, and so like you do pick up hard words that you had just like forgotten. GABRIEL: They come back to you, they are used in memorize mostly for Chinese characters, and I've learned maybe around 400 of them, which actually gives me the ability to read about 50 to 60% of Chinese things, this is interesting, but to get to around 80% of reading comprehension, I read about already thousands of characters, over a thousand, and to understand 99% of written Mandarin, you need 3,000 characters of words or more which is a bit intense, but I think that this 400, 500 characters in Mandarin, they are more than you can memorize, I'm really going to help.