Does anyone have a reliable way to find ebooks in non-English languages? I wanted to find Jurassic Park in German–it’s a book I already know well in English and it has a pretty low difficulty level. The best I’ve been able to find is used paperbacks and hardcovers from 3rd party sellers. Even switching my Amazon over to German doesn’t help; I can find a handful of other Crichton ebooks in German but not Jurassic Park (aka Dinopark)
My backup plan is to find some other junior literature that I’ve vaguely familiar with, like Hunger Games or something–I’ve been able to find translated versions of those super popular books. I just never actually read the books in English so it’ll be a little more challenging, and I don’t really want to give up on JP.
One thing is to do your Google search in the target language.
I.e. ebooks sa wikang tagalog
Gets different results from
Ebooks in tagalog
Another recommendation is to have the English translation side by side. Sometimes I get a bit lost in a page, and having the full page translation helps me makes sense of it. Especially when words/phrases are being used in new ways that the dictionary hasn’t been able to clarify
Great idea. That tip and adding “pdf” led me to a (moderately sketchy looking) site, zlibrary[dot]to, that had a downloadable PDF of the book. Not as legit as I had hoped but it’ll do!
I’ve been making great progress on my Tagalog recently. A few things that are working.
I now have three daily things that I always do.
Finish my Anki flashcard reviews.
In my evening poop I will.
open my intermediate tagalog book in Kindle and learn something
open my physical tagalog novel and read at least a paragraph
This is very inspired by the atomic habits idea of doing something small every day.
Sometimes I literally open the Kindle app, learn two words and then close it
A few other things that have worked
Italki.
I booked some short 30 minute online lessons. But the key here is to keep that easy and feel fun. So I mainly just talk to people and chat. No homework, nothing hard.If I get bored I finish early. I only book lessons when I feel like it.
Non language flash cards. I’ve been putting a few non language stuff in my flashcards. Like fun facts I learn from books, or nice memories I want to remember. This makes my flashcards review something that I look forward to and doesn’t feel like a chore.
Key thing is consistency and making learning fun/not hard.
I’m on an unbroken run of 310 days for Anki. And 25 for the kindle/physical book combo.
Nice progress, and your points about having fun and consistency, as well as the importance of italki (i.e. speaking/listening practice w/a native) pretty much mirror my thoughts on language learning.
How long have you been learning Tagalog? Did you start from 0 and where are you now?
I’ll get random spurts of inspiration with Thai, but after 1.5 years, I haven’t learned much at all, and honestly, doubt I will. The motivation just isn’t there.
When I learn my next language, I’m hoping it will be Portuguese or Italian so I can leverage my romance language knowledge. It’s also so much easier than learning an Asian language, especially one with a new alphabet and tonal system. We’d like to live in Rio or Italy some day.
Was watching some European TV show the other day with subtitles, and it’s incredible how much you can pick up not even knowing the language due to similarities to English. And you can read it straight off the bat.
I’ve been learning Tagalog off and on since about 2012.
Lots of off.
As Asian languages goes it’s pretty accessible, lots of borrowed words from english and Spanish, which adds familiarity, and it’s written in Latin alphabet.
It has one feature which makes it harder to learn, and it’s that everyone’s english is so good.
This means two things.
Trying to practise in tagalog is normally an imposition on the other person, not a good thing. It makes it harder for us to communicate not easier.
The pay off to effort is less.
In many languages, every bit of effort results in being able to communicate better. The pay offs with tagalog are much less linear. It’s gone something like this.
With every line being a unit of effort and the payoff.
ability to insult your white friends in tagalog for laughs
ability to haggle better and give directions to taxi drivers
(Lots and lots of lines)
feel less left out in mixed conversation groups (they talk in tagalog to each other and english to you)
(lots more lines)
I’ve now reached a better level, and I’m starting to have better tagalog than some people’s english. So it’s now becoming much more practical. My tagalog is better than most less educated people’s english.
but I’m still miles away from tagalog being the best medium to communicate with most of the Filipinos I deal with every day.
Mrs Rugby’s dad teaches a university level course in tagalog (which is rare, education is almost exclusively english) so I view reading his textbook or attending his class and having a conversation with him about it as the final boss.
Somewhere before that will be talking tagalog to older business contacts in not international sectors who will be more comfortable in tagalog even if they are completely fluent in English
One thing I recently learned is that if you want to learn Portuguese, don’t live in Lisbon. Just about everyone we interacted with (as tourists) spoke English. I guess it might be different if you are living there and aren’t always doing touristy stuff.
I had only one uber driver that didn’t speak any English. He was from Brazil.
On a completely unrelated note, am I the only one who thinks Portuguese sounds more like Russian than Spanish? Obviously the written language has a lot of similarities with Spanish, but when people speak it it sounds nothing like Spanish at all (to me).
It’s kind of crazy to think of how those two languages evolved to be that different on such a relatively tiny peninsula.
I’d only learn Portuguese if I were moving to Brazil or Portugal, and there’s a 90% chance I’d move to Rio if I end up in a Portuguese-speaking city. So I’d probably be learning it there, and English levels in Brazil aren’t super high, so I’d get plenty of chance to practice.
Honestly, even if I were living in Lisbon, I’d still probably learn the Brazilian accent. For one, Duolingo and the majority of the learning materials teach Brazilian Portuguese. Two, it’s more pleasant and neutral, and has many multiples more speakers. In general, I try to select the accent that’s most neutral and thus could be understood by the most people.
For example, when I lived in Montreal for 2 years, I was still learning the French (from France) accent and not the Québécois accent. The latter is notoriously goofy sounding and a lot harder to understand. And of course in Montreal they’re super used to the more neutral accents and would have no issues understanding. OTOH, if a Québécois goes to France or N. Africa, they might raise eyebrows and cause confusion. Especially a more rural accent (like my ex’s Mom, who lives in the boonies in Quebec), would cause difficulties for most non-Québécois French speakers.
As to your last point, I’ve also thought that the Portuguese-accented Portuguese does sound a lot like Russian for some odd reason. Weidly, Portuguese from Portugal and Spanish from Spain are both odd sounding and the much more neutral accents are found in Latin America. My Mexican wife could speak Spanish slowly to a Brazilian speaking slow Portuguese and they could pick up a surprising amount of the convo. That % prob drops drastically when someone from Portugal is speaking to someone from Spain (or Argentina, Chile, etc).
This is a fun level to get too. When I visit my wife’s extended family I like getting cheap laughs using local jargon they’d never expect me to know (or that sounds funny said by an accented speaker).
Man, this is such a hard level to attain. Because mixed groups are often in louder settings, like bars, plus the fact it’s mixed means there are multiple convo threads going on.
I still struggle a bit with groups even though I’ve been with my wife 5.5 years and we speak Spanish 90% of the time together. I suspect my listening skills in general are a bit low though. I’m more mathematical/logical in my approach and learn best by seeing the word written, THEN hearing the pronunciation, and associating the sounds to how the word is written. I’d probably be fucked trying to learn English b/c so many words have random ass pronunciations without any consistent rules.
Think about it like listening to someone with a really strong Scottish or Irish accent (Actual OG Scottish or Irish, not New York) t’s technically the same language but sounds completely different.
Yeah. It’s a little easier with Tagalog because there’s some many English words and phrases so you get extra context clues to keep up. If people were straight “deep” tagalog with no taglish i would really struggle.
I’m a shy learner, but I’m finding reading is helping me with recognition, you just get to hit a lot of words in different contexts and variations a lot, which is what you need for listening comprehension as well.
Scottish and Irish aren’t that bad for me personally. Tough, but I can get most of it.
The worst for me is some of those Caribbean accents with their slang words. I was in Antigua listening to two tour guides talking to each other as they are leading us somewhere. I was like “What language are you speaking?” Their answer, of course, was “English”. Obviously when they were talking to us, they sounded completely different.
Even though I’ve been living in Thailand 1 year and have 4 more to go, I’ve decided I’m not going to go beyond learning the basics of the language. As dumb as it sounds, I love Duolingo, and there’s no Thai course in Duolingo. Also, the language is just frickin’ hard.
I still miss learning languages though, so I’ve decided to become fluent in Italian followed by Portuguese (I’m already fluent in Spanish and French). My goal is to complete all 4 trees in Duolingo. I’ve been at it for 2 weeks on Duolingo in Italian and am on unit 6 (of 40 I think). It’s crazy how fast you can pick up romance languages when you already know 1 or 2. Duo says my vocab is 120 words, and of those, only like 2-3 aren’t a direct cognate of EN, SP, or FR. So it’s super quick picking up vocab, plus the sentence structures so far are exactly like either SP or FR.
Italian isn’t super useful outside Italy, but it’s possibly my favorite country, and we’re eyeing a 3 month stay in Palermo in 2028 and eventually I’d like to stay there longer if possible. Mainly though, I just find language learning to be a fun hobby and for now I’m enjoying my 30-60 minutes a day on Duolingo. I’m also listening to 30 minute Coffee Break Italian podcasts during my walks w/my dog and have banged out 3 of those. If it ever gets to the point where it feels more like work, then I’ll slow down.
I have a trial lesson booked on Preply in 2 weeks to try out some basic conversation w/a teacher, and eventually I’d like to start watching a series in Italian. I get a lot of joy out of being able to watch foreign series without Eng subtitles, so that’s the near-term goal for Italian.
Not even necessary. One of my pasttimes here is eavesdropping on the awkward negotiations between 70 year old farangs and women that could be their granddaughters.
Yah, definitely. There are a few Italian series that look pretty interesting.
Yah, it’s impossible. I was browsing through a Spanish picture dictionary and realized that I wouldn’t even know like half the words, but for most of them I could use my Spanish to make it clear what I wanted. Random household items like tweezers, nailclippers, spatula, etc. I’d never learn them all. So for me it will just be “thing to cut nails”.