SGP wrote:Whenever someone is an Esperantist, I am a bit curious what this particular person's motivation was. Because it is a conlang. Some, for example, consider it a way of both "parties" meeting half-way. Reportedly, these are the words of a person from China, too. (Who has been unnamed in that Internet Esperanto Article, but that doesn't matter right now anyway).
So, I had multiple exposures to Esperanto since the age of around 15, and I tried to learn it a few times.
My initial exposure to the language was a library book. Me and my best friend had an interest in learning a language to use as a secret means of communication. Esperanto seemed suitable for this. He quit it immediately, I quit once the library book was due. I had more encounters with Esperanto over the years, but I finally learned it, more or less from scratch, in 2015. I wanted to test out this Duolingo website people were talking about. There was no Japanese course, but Esperanto was there like a bad penny.
Without even finishing the course, I went into Esperanto chatrooms and just fell in love with the community. The most rewarding thing to me about interacting with the Esperanto community, was when I met someone who either had no English or very little English, but we were able to still do a genuine cultural exchange with one another. Another incredibly enchanting part of the community for me was that Esperantists, by and large, are just lovers of languages in general. I had no idea about "polyglots" or anything at the time. So this was my first time meeting other people who were learning a language just because they loved it, not for work, not as a means to some other end.
At this point, I have friends that I only speak to in Esperanto. I sometimes catch myself spontaneously thinking in Esperanto. The language has simply become part of my identity, and those initial reasons for learning it have somewhat lost their salience for me. I study Esperanto because it is part of who I am, and those initial reasons all feel somewhat quaint now.
SGP wrote:And what might being a Spanish "beginner" mean in your case?
I'm not exactly sure where my Spanish level is, but I do feel that I am a beginner. I sometimes have a feeling that I am on the edge of a breakthrough in Spanish. But that breakthrough still hasn't happened.
So there are a few things that stand out to me as marking me as a beginner for Spanish:
1) My reading comprehension is very low. This isn't just an issue of a lack of vocabulary. I am still very likely to miss the "point" of a story in Spanish, even if I know every word. Even if I do an intensive reading with a dictionary.
2) When listening, I can only understand stuff that is targeted towards learners, or stuff that is targeted towards children if I already know the basic outline of the story (so I can understand fairy tales I've heard in other languages in Spanish)
3) My production abilities for Spanish are still non-existent. Putting together even basic phrases in Spanish is very difficult for me.
I think that it's possible that I need to return to basics with Spanish and attempt to complete a Spanish course. But I kind of have a Goldilocks problem-- every resource I look at is either way too hard for me, or way too easy.
Still, it's not all bad. I occasionally find myself understanding things in Spanish that I didn't expect to understand. Spanish is much more present in my environment than Japanese or Esperanto, so it happens randomly that I catch some Spanish just in the air around me, and I understand more of it than I did last year. So progress is occurring, if slowly.
SGP wrote:No doubt that your Japanese is more advanced than mine. But just in case you didn't know, the Kanji a.k.a. Chinese Characters consist of several radicals. And knowing about any of them in isolation can really help recalling their meaning. However, understanding their isolated meanings wouldn't be enough. It is about the combination, too.
My kanji knowledge is kind of all over the place. About 800, I would say I truly know. I can write them, I know their major readings, I can more or less define what the kanji means.
There's another several hundred after that, which I can guess certain things about, but I can't write them, and none of my knowledge is definite. So I recognize 張 from 頑張る and 引っ張る. Based on the right half being 長 I would guess that the onyomi is ちょう and I would also make a guess that the kunyomi is はる based on ばる and ぱる from the words I do know. But, I don't have a strong impression of it's meaning, and I can't write it. Or 引 which I also can't write, but I understand the definition, and I know the kunyomi but not the onyomi.
And then the remainder, which I can't even speculate about. I would like to eventually know all of the jouyou kanji as well as I know about 800 of them
The reason I haven't been able to accomplish this goal is burn out. The 800 kanji that I would say I know well--that's a result of having done extensive study of the kanji using radical based methods that you describe. The other several hundred kanji that I have vague knowledge about, that's just learned from sheer exposure more or less. I learned things about those kanji, apparently effortlessly, but the knowledge is completely fragmented.
Sorry for this incredibly long response but, I'm thinking a lot about this because I want to set goals to address these shortcomings for Japanese and Spanish as new years resolutions.