How do academic linguists learn languages?

• yomichan

  63 842 7.6 JavaScript

  Discontinued Japanese pop-up dictionary extension for Chrome and Firefox.

If you want to read something in a language you know nothing about as soon as possible, and with a better accuracy than MTL, then: 1) Get a grammar book like https://i.imgur.com/EEZzH3j.png or https://i.imgur.com/GWFNTQA.png or https://books.google.ru/books?id=cq84wbbabOsC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false . Quickly read the most important parts (probably 30-100 min? I've never counted...); don't waste time on memorizing conjugations if there are many of them (Arabic, Basque, Sanskrit, etc.) because you can find noun/verb's tense/aspect/perfectiveness/number thanks to the context. Continue to use the book only when you encounter something unknown while reading. 2) Use MTL (if available and its quailty is not terrible) but only to understand the gist of the text, which will help you read much-much faster. By having the context now, you can automatically learn new grammar rules without any books just like you can learn Latin from zero by using only Latin with "Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. Pars I. Familia Romana" (there are 2 parts; some opinions on reddit). 3) If you encounter a word that is a particle/conjuction/etc., or is much shorter than all others, or is very highly used, then see 50 examples of its usage on tatoeba.org or context.reverso.net . Don't try to memorize all other words in the example sentences unless you suspect they are in the top 1000 most common words. 4) Use these awesome popup dictionaries (browser extensions): * Russian->English & Russian→French: for Chrome only. I didn't test this extension very much (since I am a native speaker, I don't need it), but this seems very good. My screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/tM6doiy.png . You can switch the target language from English to French in the settings (don't forget to reload the page). * Japanese: 10ten, for Firefox. Or Yomichan (although it supports Anki sync, it's more heavy so I don't like it, and you need to manually download&install dicts, don't forget the pitch accent dict). * Mandarin: I wish I could recommend LiuChan (Chrome, Firefox) but it doesn't support pressing "g" when you hover over a grammar word, so use: Zhongzhong for Chrome or Zhongwen for Firefox. * Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time: Use LiuChan for Firefox (Cantonese is bugged in the version for Chrome). * Korean: Toktogi: for Chrome, for Firefox * Arabic: for Chrome, for Firefox * Thai: for Chrome only (I didn't test this one) * Also I found extensions for other languages, and some of them have small dicts like Komi->Ru. * Probably there is an extension that looks up words from Anki (ankiconnect)? 5) In addition to #4, use good multilingual dictionaries that support an input containing conjugated words (https://www.lingvolive.com/ is the best for it/es/en←→ru, but don't forget to click "With examples" there). Often, English Wiktionary is good, but sometimes, for example, ru.wiktionary.org is better for some Russian words (same with other langs).

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