RE: La adquisición casual de habilidades lingüísticas: ¿merece la pena?
Hey @dbooster! Sorry I'm just now getting around to this. Glad you could check the post out with Autotranslate, I decided to make this just in Spanish, though I did consider writing an English version.
I've heard of Prof Arguelles, but don't know much about him, so I'll have to look into his methods.
500 kanji in 8 months is pretty good. Most gaijin don't manage even half that in several years. For me, kanji is the most interesting of the 3 alphabets and the one I like the most. The characters fascinate me endlessly
I put a LOT of hours into it using WaniKani (SRS) which I remember you said you were aware of and even knew of the creater Koichi. I also practiced reading children's fairytales and NHK Easy News, but yeah it was pretty frustrating putting in hundreds of hours and I still had barely scratched the surface of all the characters. However, I share your deep fascination for the characters. It'd be so much easier to learn something with a latinate script but my heart belongs to complex logographs. Go figure.
I have seen two main language learning types: Those that have to focus 100% on a language and will get confused if they add in more, and those that benefit from and enjoy the increased connections that can be made from studying multiple languages at the same time. Studying multiple languages also allows the "ladder effect", where you can bounce between them giving all equal practice. For example, sometimes translate between english and chinese, sometimes between chinese and spanish. Many polyglots swear by this approach (in fact, I think I picked up the term "ladder effect" from Dr Arguelles). I say studying, but I think you could get the same effect even if you are just passively taking in Spanish while focusing more strongly on Chinese. But it does depend on you and how your brain works.
I believe that I'm the type that benefits from this approach, though I've never tested it thoroughly. Whether I'd get confused studying, say, French and Spanish at the same time I don't know. But totally different language families? Should be fine for the most part. I did notice some distortion between Spanish and Japanese when I was doing them somewhat simultaneously, but it was minor. The benefits seemed to outweigh the interference.
Anyway, thanks for weighing in man, sent you a @steembasicincome share. Cheers!
Annnnd....I'm just getting back to replying. Sorry for the delay. If you see this, @d-pend, let's see how long we can stretch this comment thread out!
I remember that conversation. That was a good time talking with you. We should talk on discord more often. Anyway, yeah I feel your pain. When I was going thru the 2000 basic ones, I had to keep reminding myself of various motivating stories (turtle and the hare, etc) to keep my spirits high, because it totally is super frustrating when you know how to read and write 1000+ of the characters but still can't read anything useful. I also tried to make it into a game as much as possible. Hell—I still do. I still review my kanji flashcards in Anki whenever the come up.
If you try it, post about your progress. I would love to hear.
By the way—why Chinese?
I think Chinese is very interesting and I would love to study, but there are others I want to get to first. Strengthening my Italian (or Sicilian) or trying my hand at Esperento are appealing, and I am in love with Devanagari so I'd also like to try my hand at learning one of the Indian languages that uses it one of these days.
Ah... need more hours in the day.
Thank you!