What’s the first thing you do (not including learning pronunciation/alphabet)?

General discussion about learning languages

What’s the first thing you do (not including learning pronunciation/alphabet)?

Learn Vocabulary
5
11%
Learn Grammar
9
20%
Listen
5
11%
Read
4
9%
Write
0
No votes
Converse
1
2%
Some combination of the above
17
39%
Other
3
7%
 
Total votes: 44

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anitarrc
Orange Belt
Posts: 174
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2022 10:10 am
Location: Luxembourg
Languages: Moved around... English + German + Spanish + Dutch + French + Portuguese
used daily
Catalá Russian Serbian: struggling but improving. Bahasa..needs refreshment
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Re: What’s the first thing you do (not including learning pronunciation/alphabet)?

Postby anitarrc » Mon Sep 12, 2022 11:22 am

It depends on the purpose of learning:
When I wanted to prepare a holiday in Malaysia I learned stuff like Greetings, where is, the numbers etc. Later I bumped this up to simple cooking, dragonflies and photography. Just from a simple teach yourself book. No grammar to speak of in Bahasa apart from simple conjugation.

But to understand and amend a complex Russian text, one has to learn prepositionals, instrumentals and all the other fun, like declension of numbers etc. Now this is work and thank God that a guardian angel has sent me Maria the Ukrainian to push me. She lives with me now and will get me there because I can't wiggle myself out of it with " there is a pile of portuguese to do", or "I should really learn that passado anterior one day so that I can pass a C2 in Spanish".

I never consciously learn vocabulary, think I looked at Anki once and never looked back. Vocabulary somehow enters my skull when needed, in context and despair.

But yea, i do learn grammar, listen, write and all that because I need it in my job and I'd be ashamed if I wouldn't.
I still haven't learned any dialects because I really can't do without reading and writing.
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mick33
Orange Belt
Posts: 139
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2015 6:39 am
Location: Lakewood, Washington, USA
Languages: First language: English
Languages I'm focusing on learning now: Italian.
Languages I'm learning but not focusing on: Afrikaans, Polish, Finnish Turkish, Spanish, Swedish, Catalan, Hungarian, Russian.
Just for fun I sometimes learn a little of: Hindi, Japanese, Indonesian, Georgian, Thai etc.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=762
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Re: What’s the first thing you do (not including learning pronunciation/alphabet)?

Postby mick33 » Wed Sep 21, 2022 7:44 pm

The first thing I do is listen to a new language. I try to listen for a few hours before I do anything else, though that doesn't always happen. Then I start learning some basic grammar and vocabulary. Writing some sentences comes next.
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