this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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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 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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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[–] forestbeasts@pawb.social 3 points 1 day ago

Huhh! That makes total sense.

Yeah the way we're doing it you kinda need friends who know the language better than you do (ideally native). When we were starting German I got TONS of incredibly helpful feedback from our German now-ex, which unfortunately we don't get anymore, but we still have a couple friends who speak German and can correct me from time to time. And for Chinese we've got a couple friends who speak Chinese (one is native and has been being super helpful, one I'm pretty sure is a learner like us just farther along than we are). We don't have any Japanese friends and I bet that's why I kinda burnt out on it pretty early, no way to get feedback.

-- Frost