(Part 2) Best study & learning books according to redditors
We found 172 Reddit comments discussing the best study & learning books. We ranked the 92 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
For exposure to German, there's Heise.de and Tagesschau, the latter does a 100 second news blurb every day and they have streams you can listen to and catch up on news.
About.com German is a great start and first exposure. If you ever get frustrated by it and start to lose hope, check out Awful German Language by Mark Twain to give you a little chuckle.
You might want to try all ideas you have, since people learn differently than others. Studying abroad definitely helps, and there are plenty of free / cheap materials (other than Rosetta Stone, unless you snag it online) that you can get access to see which method works best for you. Personally, I've had a lot of help using books in German and language aids.
German in 30 Days and German Made Simple are great resources and my personal favorites.
I posted this elsewhere, and repost it here, slightly edited, for your convenience:
On to the actual learning portion:
This isn't a course, but a reference guide. This breaks down Japanese into the grammatical nuts and bolts like nothing else, and has been one of the best Japanese learning resources since it was just a text file passed around online in the 1990s. It doesn't bother with trying to ease you into practicing the language, but simply tells you how it works at a fundamental level and how to build sentences with it. The introduction is not a bad introduction to learning Japanese, but this will be the best reference you have for basic to intermediate Japanese to supplement whatever other course you use.
http://japanesepod101.com
They used to have a large amount of content available for free, but that's been reduced. However, you can sign up for a month and download as much material as you like. They have written materials and video lessons, but their primary focus are their podcast audio lessons, which are formal lessons that are fairly casual in style and excellent in quality.
http://yesjapan.com
YesJapan has its own coursework that functions more like traditional textbook style (they actually do publish the lessons as textbooks, "Japanese from Zero"), and you're more locked into the monthly fee in order to continue. YesJapan has a video series that give very casual, entertaining lessons in real-world useJapanese, and they're absolutely worth checking out once you start making progress in Japanese, regardless of if you don't use their guided course. or The Pimsleur Speak Japanese series is also very good. It's more formal and more textbook Japanese than common use Japanese, but the "Pimsleur method" is vaunted for a reason. It's expensive, but easy to buy used and it holds its value for resale (if you have an eyepatch and a peg-leg, it's easy to pirate). and/or The most common "real" textbook series is Genki, and it's common for a reason. If you're using an audio course and want a progressive, hands-on textbook, it's a great place to look.
http://www.thejapanshop.com/Genki-Te.../dp/B003TU46O4
It's a fantastic dictionary, and lets you look up kanji by radical very easily. You can get free dictionary programs that use the same data as jisho.org but I'm not sure what you OS run to be able to recommend one (and I don't know what's best on Windows, frankly). As other dictionaries go... while I vastly prefer to look up kanji by radical, some people like the SKIP system of looking up kanji, which as a beginner you'd use the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary for.
http://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji.../dp/4770028555
I have this, and I do like it, but I almost never pick it up since I use the computer dictionaries like jisho.org
And some resources for after you get past the beginner stage of Japanese:
http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Connecti...dp/4770028601/
This breaks down Japanese much like guidetojapanese.org does, but it has more depth on issues you'll be pondering when you get to the intermediate stage. It's a good little book.
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Sente...dp/4770029837/
This is a phenomenal reference book. It lays out English sentence patterns and shows you what the equivalent pattern would be in Japanese. We rarely ask ourselves "how do I say that?" when learning another western language, but you WILL wonder this when learning Japanese. This book makes it dead simple.
http://www.thejapanshop.com/Dictiona.../dp/B003V5504W
This is like "Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication" in reverse--taking a Japanese sentence pattern and explaining what the heck it means. These are thick reference tomes (and priced to match), but if you're really digging into Japanese enough to be reading actual Japanese literature, they are incredibly useful. I don't own these, but that's only because I've been putting it off, hoping for a good deal on a used set to come around.
http://alljapaneseallthetime.com/
In fact, he's written so much about it that he had to write a guide to navigating his website. He's overly-mouthy, and a lot of what he has to say is just plain good life advice about dedication and efficient use of time, but what he has to say about language learning, especially Japanese specifically, is worth checking out.
Well, I guess that sounds like a totally normal result? No experience, no training, no planning before hand on how to set this up, so no one dying but no one really making much progress is about right. So just grant yourself some slack for one, but then sack up and move forward with the following.
What does your student already know that you can use to help make inroads? He got “about” wrong. Ok. What might he get right? Look around your immediate target and provide access to examples. Show some positive examples of the words being used correctly in context. Perhaps provide substitution tables so that you can help reinforce recognition and application of correct forms while also giving them a chance to play around with them.
A lot of things are hard to define clearly, especially so your first time. What do the men in your family look like? Can you describe it with a rule? No, but you may be able to talk about some features common to them, some relations and conventions that make sense. Not all have every one of the features you describe, but you’ve given enough information for people to help the learner recognize them.
TLDR: don’t try to explain the rule straight away, and don’t plan your lesson around thinking “I’ll just explain this if they don’t get it right.” It won’t make any sense most of the time because it’s free of context, and that’s if you can even explain it on the fly. Provide that context by identifying known use of the language; scaffold some engagement with switching around alternate functions or alternate content with substitution tables (and if this term is new to you look it up now), give them a chance to experience using the language correctly, and move forward by negotiating and interpreting the grammar with their input and connection to prior knowledge.
Later on, if you’re going to be here, get something to help yourself and move forward, like this for example pow
>This to me is big fallacy,
Everything I have studied and experienced agrees with your position. The behaviorist idea that you can learn a second language fluently by completely immersing yourself in that language while isolated from your native tongue is an attractive and even an intuitive idea, but it is dead wrong.
This is especially the case when it comes to learning grammar and complex sentence structures, where you should refer to the meta-linguistic knowledge you have from your first language (maybe not as important for simply memorizing new vocab).
Pidgins are a good example of how being forced to communicate in a foreign language only produces a simplified/broken communication system; it is not until the second generation that a Creole with complete grammar develops.
I think many language schools and language material producers like to stick with the immersion theory, first, because they are stupid and not up to date with current research, but especially because it is a convenient business model. They don't have to create SLA materials for different languages and they don't need teachers who can speak other languages. The same flash cards and textbooks can be marketed to language schools all over the world and language schools can teach students with all different first language backgrounds at the same time.
I went to a language school in Japan that followed this model and it was a complete waist of my time. It would literally take the teacher an hour to explain some simple concept (e.g., causative or passive verb conjugation) using pictures and other crap what would have taken five minutes to explain if they were allowed to use English. I learned more during a regular semester state-side then I did living in Japan and attending that school.
The book,"How Languages are Learned" covers this subject pretty well:
http://www.amazon.com/Languages-Learned-Handbooks-Language-Teachers/dp/0194422240/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
http://www.amazon.com/ENGLISH-101-FIRST-YEAR-COMPOSITION-Taylor/dp/0757555713
The entire field of Second Language Acquisition. Here's a really good introductory book.
There are several resources that I think you might find helpful, however I would advise against the Lebanese YouTuber as she only gives very basic lessons and uses allot of English.
[701 Lebanese Verbs] (https://www.amazon.com/701-Lebanese-Verbs-Maroun-Kassab/dp/0615751245)
The book is good, not great, but the verbs are very very lebanese so that may be a plus.
Also YouTube has quite a few shows in the dialect that are pretty entertaining. If you are advanced I would suggest Ma Fi Metlo, DNA, as well as just searching for anything using the terms "مسلسلات باللهجة اللبنانية"
If you just want to get familiar with the dialect go for either Beirut I Love You (The mini series not the short film) or the film West Beirut as they both have subtitles.
Righto, here we go:
Book2 Ukrainian for English speakers course
Teacher Yourself Ukrainian (Complete Course) - you can get the ebook copy and download the audio for free from their website.
Colloquial Ukrainian - same as the above.
There's a Pimsleur course for Ukrainian, but I know they can be pretty expensive.
Look on /r/ukrainian for some advice
Then, once you have a decent foothold in the language, you can stay substituting bits of Ukrainian in for English and hopefully try to make simple conversations. Then it's on you to keep going; find some books, read them, check your pronunciation with your husband, and hopefully you'll be talking at a comfortable level (not fluent, may I add) within a year.
Best of luck.
The workbooks can be bilingual and they have a really nice chapter before every lesson that explains the grammar in English. Some PDF examples here: https://www.hueber.de/seite/arbeitsbuch2_the
Example Grammar page: https://www.hueber.de/sixcms/media.php/36/Th1ABE-S59.pdf
Vocabulary in the beginning of every lesson: https://www.hueber.de/sixcms/media.php/36/Th1ABE-S141.pdf
Unsure about the Textbook, mine is in German but the bilingual workbook does the job.
Just be careful to purchase "Workbook" instead of "Arbeitsbuch":https://www.amazon.co.uk/Themen-Aktuell-Workbook-Bilingual/dp/3192516909
I think there are a few more languages other than English. Click on "Look Inside" on Amazon and you'll see how a whole lesson (or most of it) looks like
I'm not on speaking familiarity with the term discourse marker but you may want to look into Particularly Good Latin, which is Claude Pavur's edited version of Thomas Dyche's English Particles Latinized. Generally I dislike public domain items being hawked on Amazon or eBay, but this isn't a print-on-demand of a PDF or unedited OCR of a book you can get on Archive.org, or Google Books. It's an edited and updated version available in Kindle format, cleaning up some of the things that would make it a pain to read for us moderns. No crazy old timey typeface. Archaic english is rephrased or annotated for modern readers. Nothing is dumped out of an OCR and put up for a quick cash grab. Worth the money in my opinion.
As an example, here are the entries that involve utcunque:
> Ever = howsoever, whosoever, wheresoever and in similar words : add -cunque to the Latin of the former part of the word, or double it : ubi ubi, ubicunque, utcunque, ut ut, quicunque, or quisquis
>But however things be.
>>Sed utcunque se res habent.
>However, Howsoever : ut ut, quoquo modo, utcunque, quomodocunque
>But howsoever these things are, your brother did well.
>>Sed utcunque se habent ista, bene fecit frater.
>We must bear all howsoever adverse.
>>Omnia utcunque adversa sunt toleranda.
The text could have used more formatting for readability, possibly with the English particle in bold and the Latin in italics.
A person I know used this book to learn Ukrainian. As far as I understood, it's pretty good though seems to be a tad pricey.
If you ever need to practice your Ukrainian with a native speaker, feel free to PM me, espcecially if you want to practice your written Ukrainian. I'm seldom available for a voice chat. However, I'm sure you'll find a lot of people willing to help you with oral Ukrainian too.
I was in a similar situation to you a few years back. I taught myself the language using the following book:
https://www.amazon.fr/dialecte-Libanais-larabe-litt%C3%A9ral-partie/dp/095288822X
This is the French version which can easily be bought online. There exists an English version that is easy to get your hands on in Lebanon but from abroad I am not sure it is easy to find.
I also found the following book incredibly helpful:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/701-Lebanese-Verbs-Maroun-Kassab/dp/0615751245
Honestly, every Lebanese worth his/her weight in salt should own a copy of that book. It's the closest thing I can find to a Lebanese dictionary (obviously just for verbs).
After learning the language, I started watching some Lebanese TV programs. Being of a younger generation, I can't stand soaps and Lebanese soaps are some of the worst soaps out there. I eventually stumbled on 'Mafi Metlo'. It's a sketch comedy show which is honestly quite funny (at least, the earlier seasons are). The accent they usually speak with is a bog-standard Beiruti one which is the most common you would hear in the media (and one of the easier ones for a person who did not grow up in the Arab world to understand I find). The advantage of watching a show like Mafi Metlo (there are other sketch comedies like 'Ktir Salbeh Show' but I'm not a huge fan of that one) is that you also get a heavy dose of Lebanese culture, politics and (more relevantly to language) idioms and common phrases that you wouldn't pick up in a textbook. This greatly increases your capacity to speak Lebanese since the language is full of (usually unwritten although I do now recall that my grandfather has a book on Lebanese proverbs) such things.
When it comes to Arabic script, Lebanese is hardly ever written (at least by the younger generations) in that script. Most young people will use Latin letters and the Lebanese form of the 'chat arabic alphabet' (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet ). Note that there is some internal variation in the country as to how certain letters are transliterated. For example, Christians and French educated people tend to use 'ch' to transliterate ش whereas it is usually the case that Non-Christian and English/Arabic educated people will default to 'sh' (forgive me for the sectarianism but it's something valid to be pointed out).
Levantine Arabic (which Lebanese is a form of; to be specific, it is Western Levantine) is surprisingly very formulaic (or perhaps unsurprisingly since it is heavily [and most uniformly] influenced by Aramaic). The more you get used to it, the more you realise the underlying (and sadly not well-exposed pedagogically I find) patterns. To a newish speaker the various forms of Levantine Arabic can sound very different (even within a country: the Tripoli accent is quite different to the Beiruti accent; similarly, Eastern Syrian sounds more like Iraqi than it does Damascene [which is pretty much grouped in Western Levantine afaik]). However, the more exposure you have, the more you realise that these languages all sound very much the same where the differences are mostly due to pronounciation rather than grammatical structure.
I used Basic Irish in the past with a Russian student. It's focused a little more on grammar than conversational scenarios, so I'm not sure if that's what you're after. Also, there's no tapes.
I think Ó Sé and Dillon's Teach Yourself Irish, which is also available free online, are meant to be quite good but I have no personal experience.
Hope this helps, and feel free to PM me anytime if you have any questions about Modern Irish. My own isn't perfect but I do my best.
the 2 apps I use are Kanjibox and Imiwa. Both are for IOS.
Kanjibox is a quiz type of app that teaches the kanji characters based on the JLPT certification levels. If you don't have IOS there is an internet based version here.
Imiwa is just a really extensive english - japanese dictionary.
If you are looking for a textbook, this and this are a couple of the more well regarded ones. This is another book for learning just the kanji.
Good luck
Yikes almost forgot!
https://www.amazon.com.br/Learn-Welsh-Now-Beginners-English-ebook/dp/B00ES1J4G8/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=learn+welsh+now+jason&qid=1568380009&s=gateway&sr=8-1
If you also know German or French, you could buy the Assimil Swedish lesson. But if not, I have also heard plenty of good things about the Teach Yourself language books. Here's a linky.
Edit: I'll add that looking at various Swedish phrasebooks on amazon or ebay and picking out one you like is a great way to get a peek at the language for little money. There's also a ton of info here but I wouldn't rely on that solely, since it is very rote-based.
It decided to move to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072PPCFGG
One of my friends worked there as an intern last year. Not sure if she still works there. Did her Master is Political Science. Met her while we went on a summer school to Beijing. The organization is not that big. I bet like 20 people. Check out their Facebook Page for updates.
The Chinese classes are good, but like most University Foreign Language courses you gain a lot more from actually being in the country. They are starting an honours class next year, which will be a first for Chinese in South Africa. Our third year textbooks were: Contemporary Chinese 3 and 4.
The classes are small. People rather go for French or German. In 2nd there were about 15 people in class. 3rd year about 8-10. Which I like.
Ok, sorry for the delay, I checked Amazon and found what I was thinking about.
1.1 Standard Minna no nihongo textbook
1.2 Translation and grammar explanation
1.3 Write, practice and learn
2.1 Standard textbook
2.2 Translation and grammar notes
2.3 Writing excercices
https://www.google.pl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=teach+yourself+irish+myles+dillon+and+donncha+%C3%B3+cr%C3%B3in%C3%ADn
I find that hard to believe somehow...
Amazon have a load of copies. You'll have to get the audio from the link the first lad posted though.
www.amazon.co.uk/Irish-Teach-Yourself-Myles-Dillon/dp/0340057971
I study both Dutch and Swedish. As far as vocabulary, both are equally estranged from English, but at the same time, not too much since they're all Germanic languages (although English has a stronger Latinate vocabulary root). Verb conjugations in Swedish are easier but forming plurals confuses me. On the other hand, Dutch pronunciation is simpler, I find, and more direct. Both are equally difficult, though, and they're not that hard to pick up.
In short, when choosing a language to learn, try to find the place where you feel more passion for, and learn that language. Go onto Google maps and do Street View in the Netherlands, in Sweden, and in Norway. Which place do you feel more attracted to? Pick the respective language.
As for a Dutch course, I recommend Hugo in 3 Months Dutch and for Swedish, the Teach Yourself.