Expanding our mental fitness

Have any of you successfully learned another language by teaching it to yourself? I want to attempt mandarin, thoughts?

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kys weeb faggot

For mandarin? Really? Calm down lmao

Westerners (read: Americans) who attempt foreign languages are almost universally shunned and never actually pursue it to meaningfully communicate in any way. You already speak the most useful language there is, after that is just a silly hobby.

If you insist, find a community with a population of fluent/native speakers and for the love of god don't let your countrymen know. Too much stigma re: yellow fever, sex tourism, smugness, etc. People WILL hate you.

case in point

Yeah unfortunately I don’t understand why it’s looked down upon to learn another language. Whether it’s spanish, French, hindi, or mandarin, it’s all useful and keeps your mind busy.

>looked down upon to learn another language
it's not, some (few) people will just assume learning an asian language = yellow fever. you're right that it's useful and beneficial.

as for learning languages on your own, the hardest part would be speaking, because your ears wouldn't be able to tell the difference between sounds. for example, japanese people are largely unable to hear any different between L and R sounds at all. so for speaking you'd probably need someone to give you direction.

as for listening, meaning, syntax, spelling, etc. you could probably learn all that on your own.

Been learning french with duolingo for a while now. I'm dumb so it's hard but i am making a bit of progress.

Mandarin is fucking brutal and the mainland Chinese are pieces of shit scumbags with a stupid shitty country and a stupid shitty government. Taiwan is alright. Don't talk to or associate with mainlanders.

I would advise you not to attempt to learn a language just for the economic value, unless you're actually required to use it for a job you want. If you don't have any interest in the media/culture, have a job and/or living space within which to study it, or anyone to communicate with, it will bore you to death, and you'll quit. I say this as a self-study JP learner, so I have an idea of the kind of difficulty you will experience with Mandarin.

Being able to become fully engaged in your target language is essential to learning any language well. If you feel you will be able to do that, then I do encourage you to go for it. Also, this: Mainlanders suck.

best way to learn a language is to get a gf that you live with who speaks that language natively. I learned Japanese this way and my time in Japan was the best time of my life and my fellow Americans fucking despise me with the righteous fury of a thousand suns.

Even as I type this I know some Jow Forumsack incel is getting ready to fire up his most profane anti-hapa/sideways pussy reaction pic

Tfw no azn gf to teach me mandarin so we can have private conversations in public

congrats bro but what happened, any instances of RL hate?

>any instances of RL hate?
California. SJWs. The Asian-American activist sort really despise interracial relationships. Some bullshit about "power disparity" or "systemic racism" or whatever voodoo bullshit words they use that don't really mean anything. People openly referring to her, in public, as a "mail-order bride" or "china doll" or something or other. Other sorts of asians just being colossal shitheads about it but that has more to do with intra-asian tensions.

Just google "yellow fever asian" to see the kind of bullshit people come up with. It's thought of as like this degenerate fetish like bestiality or pedophilia.

I don't even have a thing for asians this is just how things worked out because I was surrounded by them in university. I'm into thicc (or "high test" or whatever Jow Forums calls it) and she was thicc (fat by Japanese standards)

This.
Am 1/2 Chinese born in Australia, have family in both China and Taiwan. Chinese are elitist and probably the most racist people I've ever met, literally hate anyone who isn't Chinese. Taiwanese on the other hand are nice and welcoming.

But yeh OP like other people have said, if you want to learn, you need to be living in the environment to properly practice and you need to have a purpose for doing it otherwise you'll lose interest.

You can learn anything easily, you just need dedication and someone to practice with. A lot. I remember learning German by myself quite unsuccessfully until I practiced with a friend for four days. After that it was a blast.

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What do you use German for? I'm confident I could pick it up with great ease, and have considered learning it before, but I can't think of what I could apply it to aside from some older literature (and I don't care to read fiction). Perhaps it would make sense if I was a doctor or scientist.

I learned Spanish in order to fuck qt Latinas and ended up reading Borges, Marquez, Baroja, Bolano, all day

yes and dont fall for mandarin meme

I've learned 4 languages besides my native (3/4 are dead so I only really learned to read them), but those were all in school. I'm starting to teach myself Japanese in earnest, i.e. with an actual structured lesson plan, this week, so we'll see how that goes.

Latin, Greek and ?

Hebrew