Learning another language

yeah the characters. holy sh*t. there's like tens of thousands of them right? where each character represents a word in the language? I took a semester of japanese in junior high. The characters are all syllable based and I found even that too complicated. I can't speak japanese, but I definitely know it when I hear it (or see it).

There's a lot of characters, and then you have traditional vs simplified on top of it. They say you should know about 2000-3000 characters to be fluent. What's also fun is that a lot of words have multiple meanings, and its differences are determined by tone.

Scorpion and shoe have the same sound, for example. Its how you say it, that tells the listener what you're talking about.
 
I used to be fairly good at speaking Spanish, but I've lost a lot of the ability to converse; I can understand most of what's said, but I lack the ability to reply.

I'm in the process of teaching myself Cyrillic now; I'd like to think that I'm making okay progress. I'm at the point where I believe that I can pronounce words correctly, but I don't always recognize what the words mean until I look it up.
 
I took some Spanish in high school and college and have also run through the Pimsleur program available on CD. I know Spanish well enough to get by but am nowhere near conversational with it and I think that's the problem with any language course. Unless you have someone else with whom you can speak the language, your conversational skills don't develop. Move to Costa Rica would be my advice.
 
I envy you guys trying to learn Spanish. Its super easy. Especially compared to my Mandarin.

Oh my life!
 
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