this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Language Learning

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Anyone else learn languages by immediately getting a dictionary and grammar reference and trying to bang out sentences? (pawb.social)
submitted 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by forestbeasts@pawb.social to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
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It sounds like a lot of people just try to passively memorize vocabulary and read a bunch of stuff and whatnot?

I uh, haven't been doing that. >,,>

I picked up German and after doing a few things of Nicos Weg, I was grabbing words off wiktionary, looking up grammar, and trying to say stuff. Oftentimes varying levels of hilariously wrong (shoutout to the time I said "ausm Artzt" and sounded like I'm a chest burster coming out of the doctor). It's super fun and I think personally way more engaging than just trying to memorize stuff without being able to use it. It also naturally exposes us to a bunch of random helpful semi-advanced grammar concepts, to be able to say things like "we really need to take a shower and we STILL haven't eaten anything".

Started picking up Chinese today and I'm doing the same thing: look up words, look up grammar, bang out sentences. It's definitely slower going than German though!

Yet everywhere I look (at least for Japanese stuff), I see "oh don't do output at first! you need to memorize a bunch of shit and be able to read things and THEN you can start talking". Surely we're not alone in how we learn though?

-- Frost

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[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 13 hours ago

I don't learn well that way, so it's not for me.