Due to the discussion and recent add of other languages sub-forum in Omnimaga, I finally started to learn some French and German.

I want to discuss about how some of you learn a new language alone and useful resources for it.

Things that come right now in my mind:
tutorials for that languages (websites any?)
Dictionary
spell checker (might be a bad habit to use early or maybe only if you use the suggestions without trying to correct yourself first, making errors and correcting them is actually a good thing for learning)
translator (http://translate.google.com/)
books for beginners (don't forget the ebooks)
software for pronunciation (http://translate.google.com/)
games (suggestions: Pokemon Blue/Red)

Playing a game in a foreign language is fun and educational, preferentially RPGs or any game that have a history to learn/search new vocabulary.
I found Pokemon Red/Blue amazingly easy to understand in German, I had 3 years of German, 3 years ago and I remembered already lots of stuff and figured out some new.

I found it hard to learn any kind of foreign language, unless I really needed to use them.
For example, in Korea, everyone, starting from like 2 or 3rd grade (in elemetary school), learn how English as part of the second-language thing, but I always failed, barely getting above 50 -_-;;
But when I came to U.S., only knowing ABC, I manage to get a decent grade in the 6th grade public school and be able to talk with native speakers... So at least for me, forcing you to learn the language and speak them was the easiest way to learn the language...

Depending on the language in question, learning without any in-person experience / exposure to native-speakers can be very difficult. It will be very hard to get the pronunciation right if you aren't hearing it spoken in everyday conversation. Movies and television can sometimes help with that, but there are some cases where fictional media might have more exaggerated characters who don't necessarily represent the language from a practical, everyday standard. There's also a lot of room for misinterpretation, with no one there to correct you along the way.

There are some useful book-and-CD instructions for teaching yourself a new language. The book will have several courses outlining everyday conversations, and the CDs will have the audio of that dialog. The "Teach Yourself..." series of books comes to mind.

I've been teaching myself bits and pieces of Japanese. In a way, Japanese is a very simple language; but from my perspective, it's also radically different from the structure of language I'm used to. Japanese has three writing systems: The kana (hiragana and katakana) is around 46 base characters, plus 25 diacritical characters, which represents a phonetic alphabet of consonent-vowel pairs. Finally, there are about ~2,000 kanji (Chinese characters) that would be memorized out of highschool, and applied in everyday reading / writing.

The sentence structure of Japanese is what gets me most. Sentences are ordered as subject-object-verb, whereas English is subject-verb-object. (although, English is flexible enough that you can often neglect this order) It's not just the word ordering, but how things are expressed. At times, a simple expression can seem wordy, while at other times, it feels like you're speaking like a caveman. If I wanted to say something like, "I'm not interested," it might go," Kyoumi nai." (lit., "Interest (in something) not.") The subject isn't even indicated, unless I'm just now getting into the conversation, or no subject has already been established. Don't get me started on honorifics, either. There is an unnecessarily large selection of personal pronouns in Japanese, for every situation and setting. Using the wrong pronoun at the wrong time could imply hostility, intimacy, a familial relationship, or possibly anything else that might make a stranger feel awkward.

I think it's a lot easier to get into languages that share some etymology with your own. Usually, that language is going to have a similar writing system and syntax; so it might be easier to pick-up on.

lol Korean is same structured as Japanese ^^
It must have been because Korean and Japanese were heavily influenced by Chinese

He means the sentence structure (subject-object-verb) is the same. Korean uses its own alphabet, where each character represents an entire syllable. Letters are stacked together to form each character / syllable. It's a pretty robust writing system, since it was only invented a few centuries ago. Korean also has a supplementary writing system involving Chinese characters, called "hanja." This can shorten writing, or help indicate the context of a word. Hanja have mostly fallen out of use, though.

Aaah ok, thanks for clarifying. And yeah I like how they can stack letters together. It can make text much smaller.

I think in video games they don't always do that, right?

Good question. In games that are unofficially translated to Korean, I can see how technical problems would arise. In games that are native to Korea, there generally wouldn't be any problems.

There are many languages I would personally like to learn. With the large influx of french members I'm tempted to pick up french right now. I can understand some pieces of the conversations already. The reason being that I had several years of Spanish in high school. Some of the words are similar enough to figure out, some can be guessed by the context clues, and some are similar to the English equivalent. French syntax and rules should be fairly similar to Spanish also, since they both evolved from latin.

Notice the space allocated to the text, this is what I mean. Somehow I doubt they can fit an entire word in one character (unless I am misunderstanding the concept japaneese only works by syllables instead of words?)