Reddit mentions: The best children foreign language books

Recommended Textbooks
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Integrated Chinese - This is used in many university classes in the US. The companion CD is definitely recommended. The workbook wont be much use if you don't have someone to check your answers, as the company is pretty strict about not letting out the answer keys.

New Practical Chinese Reader - This is a great alternative to Integrated Chinese. There are also PDFs and mp3s of all materials floating around on the internet if you look.

Character Practice
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Skritter - Seriously awesome. It does have a monthly subscription though.

Oral Practice
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Pimsleur, Assimil, or the FSI course (free). I've only used Pimselur, but I've heard good things about the others. These are good for practicing your tones.

Online Resources
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Chinese-forums

nciku - A Chinese - English dictionary. You can draw out unknown characters, which can be much easier than going by radical like in other dictionaries.

You should also set up Windows (or whatever OS you use) to be able to type in Chinese (usually through pinyin).

Once you're good enough, you can find easy books called "Graded Chinese Readers" that often have a companion CD to help with pronunciation. They're pretty cheap as well if you import them from China.

Good luck, Mandarin is a difficult language, but it's also really fun. It might take a long time to see progress (I still can't read newspapers), but as long as you keep at it you'll probably be happy with your results.

Yes! As for books these one's have really helped me:

• Everything Learning German This one is super great for grammar. It has exercises at the end of each lesson so you can practice too :)
  
• Collins Complete German This one is probbbbably my favorite. I love it, it has a guide for pretty much everything you need to know in the grammar, it explains everything well, and it has verb tables so you can study the conjugation. It has some vocabulary in the back too.
  
• Graded German Reader This one is also really awesome. You can find a used one for 10 bucks on amazon, just the new ones are really expensive because I don't think they are made anymore. This starts with simple reading passages and gradually gets more difficult while adding new words- but it's at a perfect pace so you don't get overwhelmed, and you will probably be able to completely understand.
  
• Cafe in Berlin Another german short story book. This one is great too.
  
• German Pre-Intermediate Reader Another reader- this one incorporates the top 1000 words in German.
  
  I know I have more but these are my favorites! As for movies/shows.. when I watch like youtube videos (try 'easy german') or kids shows I tend to watch them without subtitles. If I'm watching an adult movie/show I pretty much have to use subtitles otherwise I can't pick up anything. I usually put the subtitles in German though, because I read better than I listen!
  
  Let me know if I can help you with anything else :)

First, i know it will seem pessimistic of me to ask but; are you guys getting along very well? Most likely one will be better than the other, cause some frustration and will kill the learning process because of ego mismanagement.

If you guys can really work as a team, here's what i suggest:

• As a couple, your best asset is the very fact that you're a couple. If you live in a big town, google russian and the name of your town and go hangout there. Since it will be an "enclave" rather than a ghetto, you will see cultural stuff everywhere. Pamphlets and ads in local russian newspapers with tons of cultural events and beginners-in-russian are most often than not warmly welcomed, since russian is a very hard language to master for non-native speakers, meaning that they will be happy that a stranger puts in the effort of learning their language and their culture. They will often go the extra mile to help you pronounce and correct your mistakes. Of course, you will encounter suspicious and taciturn characters but hanging out in russian cafés and attending local cultural events will super-charge your russian assimilation. Languages are meant to be spoken.
  
  
• Secondly, i strongly, strongly recommend the acquisition of this book:
  
  http://www.amazon.ca/Russian-Learners-Dictionary-Words-Frequency/dp/0415137926/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300431171&sr=8-1-spell
  
  And follow this man's method, The Goldlist Method:
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6FERpM5fQ (Part one)
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTyJiGVJ0LM (Part two)
  
  This will be your main method of vocabulary acquisition. I also recommend:
  
  http://www.amazon.ca/Schaums-Outline-Russian-Grammar-Second/dp/007161169X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1300431298&sr=8-2
  
  and
  
  http://www.amazon.ca/Big-Silver-Book-Russian-Verbs/dp/007143299X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
  
  Yes i know, spending money sucks, but i bought all three of them and not regret my choice at all. Very practical.
  
  Speaking of spending money, if you have money to spend, spend it on a private tutor for both of you. The value of this cannot be stressed enough. He will explain things to you that books can't and will correct your pronunciation and also challenge you by having higher degrees of conversation (like the use of dative instead of instrumental, etc) so that you learn in deep and not just "to get by".
  
  A huge part of language acquisition is the exposition to culture. The longer you expose yourself to russian, the faster and better learners you will be. That means listening to russian music, watching russian videos and movies, reading russian news and get interested in what's happening int he country, speaking russian as much as possible. Immerse yourself in it.
  
  If you do all of this and you really, really dedicate yourself to it and use your couple as a blessing rather than a curse, i guarantee you that in 6 months, your level of russian will be that native russians will not believe you when you will tell them it's всего шесть месяцев :)
  
  Hope this helped, good luck with your russian!
  

Catullus

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Betrayal-Catullus-Bruce-Arnold/dp/0130433454/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=22K0V9X7X9C74&keywords=love+and+betrayal+a+catullus+reader&qid=1558536403&s=gateway&sprefix=love+and+betrayal+%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

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Ovid

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Transformation-Reader-English-Latin/dp/067358920X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=28WT9VPC88Q7S&keywords=love+and+transformation+an+ovid+reader&qid=1558536463&s=gateway&sprefix=ovid+love+and+trans%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1-spell

​

https://www.amazon.com/Ovids-Amores-Book-One-Commentary/dp/0806141441/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=amores+book+1+ovid&qid=1558536435&s=gateway&sr=8-2

​

https://www.amazon.com/Ovid-Metamorphoses-VIII-Latin-Texts/dp/1853997226/ref=sr_1_11?keywords=ovid+metamorphoses+8&qid=1558536602&s=gateway&sr=8-11

​

Cicero

https://www.amazon.com/Cicero-Pro-Caelio-Marcus-Tullius/dp/0865165599/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=cicero+pro+caelio&qid=1558536500&s=gateway&sr=8-1

​

I really enjoyed Ovid at your level, which is why he is over-represented in this list. I know Perseus has commentaries on all the Catullus poems except the more risque ones. Unfortunately, those are also left out of the book I posted here. I would probably go with the Catullus one or the first/second Ovid books, just because I think love poetry is entertaining. The Cicero was definitely more difficult, but had a lot of juicy insults and was also quite fun. I used all of these and they definitely helped me improve my Latin, so whatever you choose will be good, just pick something you'll have fun reading. Good luck and enjoy!

I know nothing about Greek, but for Urdu I have Teach Yourself Urdu by David Matthews and Mohamed Kasim Dalvi. I think it's a pretty good book. However, I would not try to learn the script from it. Get Teach Yourself Read and Write Urdu Script for that. A friend of mine also had good things to say about Let's Study Urdu by Ali Asani. She also really liked Urdu: An Essential Grammar. I haven't used that, but I have use the Essential Grammar book for Hindi and thought it was pretty well-written. There is also Darvazah: A Door into Urdu, but unfortunately certain parts of the site don't seem to work.

If you're into it, you could also learn Devanagari (Hindi script) and then you'd have access to Hindi learning materials as well (Hindi and Urdu are VERY similar- most deviation is in vocab and grammar is mostly the same). I could give you some recommendations for Hindi too if you're interested.

yes I know that Japan borrowed Chinese characters for their writing system but that doesn't make the languages related. just like koreans used the chinese writing system to express their language, and the vietnamese also. however, neither of those languages are related to chinese except that there is a great deal of vocabulary that is borrowed.

that would be like saying that because my friend borrowed my clothes to wear, he is my brother, which isn't true either.

chinese and japanese are from different language families and have evolved independently of each other.

I honestly don't know why you made this thread because you seem to think you know more than you really do. I have been taking chinese for almost two years and am in china RIGHT NOW studying chinese.

it is my opinion that if you actually want to learn chinese and not flex your intellectual penis on reddit you should do it from the standpoint that you don't have any experience with chinese, because in reality you don't.

edit:

also, just so I can feel like I'm being more helpful rather than feel like I'm berating you here is the book I used in "chinese 101"

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Chinese-Reader-Textbook-Vol/dp/7561910401/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262081421&sr=8-2

it has dialogues in chinese characters subtitled with the pinyin. and the vocab lists are the same way. and until you get to an intermediate chinese course all beginning level chinese text books will have pinyin. it is necessary to learning the language.

http://www.chinabooks.com.au/ChinaBooks/search.cfm?UR=14071&search_stage=details&records_to_display=5

THIS is the book they use for entry level courses here at BLCU for people learning Chinese. it is in much the same format as the other book (dialogues in chinese characters subtitled with pinyin).

I think you will find this to be the most common format and also the most logically designed for learning chinese.

There are admittedly not many good resources out there for learning Finnish. I started with self teaching myself, but never really got very far until taking Finnish classes in college. Self study from things available on the internet isn't that bad once you already have a foundation, but getting that foundation is annoyingly difficult.

It doesn't help that almost every book out there for learning Finnish makes things needlessly complex. At some point or another, I think I've looked at almost every major resource (book-wise anyways) for English speakers learning Finnish. Here's some notes on some that come to mind, feel free to ask about others if you want.

• Kuulostaa hyvältä / Sounds good by Lili Ahonen. This is a 2 part series, one of which has the Finnish first in the title, and the other with the English first. Kuulostaa hyvältä features short texts in Finnish along with exercises, but is completely in Finnish. Sounds Good is to be used along with it's Finnish counterpart, and contains grammar and vocabulary explanations in English. This is probably the best book I've found for learning Finnish, though it might be a bit difficult to get started with.
  
• From Start to Finnish by Leila White. This is probably one of the better books for those who have absolutely no current foundation or understanding of Finnish. It's not too heavy on the technical details, and contains many useful examples. It is however grossly overpriced for being such a short book (only 180 pages or so), this being due to it being imported from a Finnish publisher.
  
• Teach Yourself Finnish by Terttu Leney. This book is one most people recommend, and for a complete beginner it's not a bad choice. You will not get very far in Finnish with this book, it just doesn't go very in depth. You will get the ability to interact with people in your stereotypical tourist situations, and it will help you get comfortable with Finnish's grammar system, but it has a very limited amount of vocabulary words and texts to learn with.
  
• *Colloquial Finnish by Daniel Abondolo is a decent reference book if you're attempting to write a linguistics paper about Finnish, but not so good to learn from.
  
  Non-book resources:
  
  
• Selkouutiset, a Finnish 'easy' newspaper. Bookmark this for when you get a decent Finnish foundation under you, it's very useful for helping expose you to Finnish once you hit the intermediate stages.
  
• Local Finnish programs. Check out the Finnish consulate webpage for a list of universities and other places which offer Finnish classes in the US.

Why Urdu and not Hindi? I'm not saying it's a bad idea to learn Urdu, but there are so, so many questions that are raised. Do you want to learn to write it as well? With whom will you speak? After all, learning a language is usually a means, not an end. Does anyone in your family know Urdu? Do you watch lots of Bollywood movies, or do you like the music of someone like Atif Aslam? Do you already speak Panjabi or Pashto? Maybe, Baloch or Sindhi?

It's totally fine if you answer "no" to all these questions. In fact, if you DO answer no to them all, then your desire to learn Urdu is all the more intriguing.

Do you speak any other languages?

Last question:

Do you already have an ear for it? You can't learn Urdu on Duolingo. You CAN go to Amazon and buy Ruth Laila Schmitt's Essential Urdu Grammar. If you pair that with 1) passion, 2) lots of Bollywood (it's Hindi, I know, but it's ear training), 3) some music, and 4) friends who will indulge your nascent attempts to communicate, then you just might succeed.

Firstly, this torrent has a ton of things to help you learn Dutch. I own a hard copy of a grammar book, Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar. It's very good. There's some workbooks in the torrent but I haven't really looked at them. There's also some kids books with their audio versions included.
For vocabulary I use memrise mainly, but there's also some flashcard sites: dutch flashcards, anki. A good grammar site is this. Here's a podcast to help you learn Dutch. And here's some other sites: http://www.2bdutch.nl/, http://www.lingq.com, more resources, more resources, Mango (I used this when I was a beginner because I got it free through my school. You might be able to get it free through your library), lang8, and that's all I've got. Should be enough :p Good luck!

Yeah, I'm doing a degree in Russian and French!

I'd say start by learning the alphabet, it's really important because all the [best] resources you're going to find are going to be partly in cyrillic. We learnt it in two weeks at uni, it's really not that hard if you're consistent about it. It's a really phonetic alphabet, meaning that (generally) one letter = one sound. In fact, for me that makes Russian pronunciation WAY easier than French.

After, I'd probably pick up a good textbook and try to work a bit on it every day. Russian is REALLY different from English, it doesn't have the same grammar rules at all (word order and cases is one of the biggest difference). So it's good if you take it in little by little and just try to do even 30 mins every day. In my course we've been using Colloquial Russian , it's pretty nice and covers all the basic grammar points. Of course, we still get loads of resources from our teachers, but you can find that online or in other books.

Also, duolingo now offers a russian course! If you want to start by taking it really casually and "light" it can be a good option for you. (to type in Cyrillic I just use my on-screen keyboard option and turn it into russian [on windows]).

More importantly, it can seem really overwhelming, but you just gotta remind yourself why you're doing it, and keep going. After a few months you'll be amazed at how much you've improved!

Forget software! That's only helpful for a first few words (A1).

For anything higher, you'd want to get a good grammar book (like this one and a language learning book. I used 'Taal Vitaal', but that's for German-speakers, which mean I can't really recommend one for English-speakers.

Maybe you can even do a language course. I always found them to be too slow for me, so I stopped and learned the language using books.

Good luck and have fun!

P.S.: If you're planning on working in the Netherlands, learning Dutch is probably one of the best things you can do. As you've probably seen in the two years you were in Utrecht, you can come by with English only, but you never get to dive in and not be regarded as a foreigner.

Also having a native-speaker around you to practice with helps a lot.

First of all, you'll find that there are two different writing standards for Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk. You will almost certainly want to learn Bokmål, the most common. There are also a wide range of regional dialects; you will almost certainly want to learn Standard Østnorsk. It's nothing to worry about, as Bokmål and Østnorsk are almost always the ones taught to foreigners, but do be aware that you will find Norwegian that doesn't conform to what you've learnt.

As for somewhere to start, I'd suggest Norwegian on the Web, a basic introductory course covering grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, built up little by little in each of ten chapters. To have a minimal understanding of pronunciation you will need to read up to at least chapter 6; for grammar at least chapter 8.

I know you say you can't really sink money into it, but in my opinion the most valuable book, if you were to buy one, is Norwegian: An Essential Grammar. Most of your Norwegian learning can be done on the Internet, but I've not really found another decent reference for more complex Norwegian grammar. That can wait, though.

You'll probably also be recommended Teach Yourself Norwegian at some point, but in my honest opinion I don't think that's a particularly good book, especially considering the free courses you can find online. Just make sure to use a course from a reputable source — there are guides written by non-natives that are misleading or just plain wrong.

Once you get past the level expected for courses, you can try having a go with actual Norwegian text and speech, perhaps beginning with resources for people who are still learning Norwegian, like Klar Tale and SkoleTV.

Lykke til!

I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet and was actually pleasantly surprised that it's not that hard. A lot of the letters aren't that foreign at all, and Russian has LOADS of words that you'll already know.

The toughest bit for me are telling apart the sounds of ш, щ, ж. But it's incredibly rewarding and it can make you feel proud to be able to read a new alphabet. Here's a vlog in which you can see a bit of my progress.

I'll give you the same advice I always give language learners: Go slowly, make sure you study with people (tutors are worth it, classes are worth it), and make it a regular thing. Here's the book I showed in the video, and I loved it for learning Russian. The author has a Norwegian version too:

An Amazon Affiliate Link

A non-Affiliate Link

If what you want to achieve is A1 and nothing beyond, you best bet would be getting one of the many course books:

• Schritte (http://www.amazon.com/dp/3190018510/). You may simply ignore the 1 stars review as they're irrelevant.
  
• Lagune (http://www.amazon.de/dp/3190016240/) and a lot more others. Actually it doesn't really matter which one you pick. Any one of them is sufficient.
  
  A arguably better alternative would be the free online course offered by Deutsche Welle (http://deutschkurse.dw.de/KursPlattform/WebObjects/KursPlattform.woa/wo/6.1). Do register and try it. Really valuable resource. Together with Deutsch – warum nicht? (http://www.dw.de/deutsch-lernen/deutsch-warum-nicht/s-2163) you can go far. (In case you didn't realise already, both the sound files and pdf notes can be found on the right, featuring four series.)
  
  Maybe the only problem you would encounter is speaking. The speaking test is actually like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGNd-6pDkEI), and you may panic if you don't already speak in German for a several hours. Try to find someone who speaks German and wants to do a language exchange with you. (http://www.language-exchanges.org/) is one of them. You may as well find one on Reddit.
  
  By the way, if you really want to have a strong command of German sooner or later, there are some good, though popular (popular doesn't always mean bad) books for foundation, apart from your already awesome German for Reading:
  
  
• German: How to Speak and Write It (http://www.amazon.com/dp/9650060359/)
  
• The Everything Learning German Book (http://www.amazon.com/dp/159869989X/)
  
  If you insist on getting a grammar book, a nice start would be:
  
  
• Essential German Grammar (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0340741899/)
  
• English Grammar for Students of German (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0934034389/)
  
  And eventually you may want to take down the boss:
  
  
• Hammer's German Grammar and Usage (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1444120166/)
  
• Duden 04. Die Grammatik (http://www.amazon.de/dp/product/3411040483/)
  
  Finally I recommend you to take a look at my favourite reading material when I started, Studien und Plaudereien (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22160), freely offered by Project Gutenberg.

Vigernere1 gave you some pretty solid advice. It sounds like you are focusing on reading more than speaking, correct?

I have studied for a few years, and I am probably around 2000 characters. I bounced around with a few textbooks, but if I were to start over, I'd use New Practical Chinese Reader books 1-4. The videos from the lessons are on youtube as well. Then move to All Things Considered (put out by Princeton). I have 4 of the books from their series. They are all good, but All Things Considered is fabulous. They have a few books that are higher level than that as well. It also has simplified and traditional characters.

Buy Pleco if you haven't already and make flashcards. Do quizzes and quiz yourself to you go blind and you should be good to go.

[New Practical Chinese Reader] (https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Chinese-Reader-Vol-2nd-Ed/dp/7561926235/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501086151&sr=8-1&keywords=new+practical+chinese+reader)

[All Things Considered] (https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=all+things+considered)

I learned to do this my first semester of Chinese. It's actually incredibly easy and nowhere near as complex as one might think it would be. The computer is really accurate about guessing which character you want to use based on context so as long as you input the pinyin correctly you generally get the correct character.

This is the one we used for class, but windows also comes with its own version which you can access by simply going to keyboard settings and adding Chinese (simplified or traditional) as an input method. From there switching between languages is as simple as hitting alt+shift!

If you're interesting in learning, we used this textbook series which I found to be really awesome. And it can be found online for free, of course.

Colloquial Russian by Svetlana Fleming & Susan Kay. It was the set text for my first year of university (studying German and ab initio Russian) and now I'm near the end of my fourth and final year and I can confidently say that it provided an excellent foundation. It has accents to mark stress as well as useful audio CD accompaniments. Available on Amazon fairly cheaply - hope it helps :) желаю вам удачи!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colloquial-Russian-Complete-Course-Beginners/dp/0415469953/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427536468&sr=1-1&keywords=colloquial+russian

In my opinion, apps and software don't tend to be of much use; they don't let you advance quickly enough and don't expose you to enough material. If you're serious about learning Russian, grab a good book and study each text or dialogue until you understand it both in reading and aurally. There's Teach Yourself Russian, Routledge's Colloquial Russian, the FSI FAST (Familiarization and Short-Term Training) Russian, Assimil Russian (if you speak French), and I've heard good things about the New Penguin Russian Course. In all cases, be sure you get audio along with the book, or have a native speaker who is willing to help you learn. Good luck!

A really good book for basic beginners Greek is Greek to GCSE. I actually can't remember whether it starts from the very basics though. Primer of Greek Gramaer is great for a slightly more advanced learner as a grammar reference point, whereas Morwood is simple and well laid out. The basis of all Greek language is Homeric vocabulary so books like this which has basic reading notes and vocab in the back are really good for broadening your grasp of Greek.

You're not too stupid. You can do it. It's just taking it step by step and setting little targets and goals. Everyone was at some point at your stage at the beginning of learning a language. Which books have you looked at so far?

I came from a beginner/intermediate level of Japanese fluency to Mandarin a year and a half ago. I have been using the New Practical Chinese Reader series (here) and have been very pleased with it. I think it will work well for you because 1) the vocabulary seems pretty accelerated to me and 2) there is a good amount of audio content with the texts. Hope that helps.

Don't Use That Link! Use This Link HERE.

Name: Colloquial Lithuanian: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series (Book Only)).

Price: $51.96

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Here are some things I found on amazon:

Vocabulary:

1. https://www.amazon.de/dp/3190094705/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_z7sQCbPQN42A7 (especially for forgein kids)
   
2. https://www.amazon.de/dp/3190079218/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_h9sQCbA1PKQBG (a picture book for adults)
   
3. https://www.amazon.de/dp/3468489536/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_qatQCbKRG0YN9 (these are cards with pictures and the fitting words on them; I used something like that with a russian kid (didn’t speak german at all) at my elementary school myself and had great experience)
   
4. https://www.amazon.de/dp/3125160855/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_QgtQCbZW367FD (in my opinion the best one; have the same for russian)
   
   Grammar (and Vocabs):
   
   
5. https://www.amazon.de/dp/0008141789/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_fftQCb06X0H77
   
6. https://www.amazon.de/dp/312562858X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_DjtQCbJZ6ZWXE
   
   There are also some good allrounders from the publisher „PONS“ or „Langenscheidt“

Here are the only three books I'd recommend to learn to speak the language:

• Modern Persian: Spoken and Written, Volume 1
  Despite the picture of a CD-ROM, it's a real book and real big. There is a volume two to it as well. Also, I would imagine it would be tough to learn on your own with this book, but if you could find a tutor or class to go through this with, it may work well. May (or may not) come with CDs.
  
• Colloquial Persian It's a decent book and could be used for self-study.
  
• Persian Language Teaching, AZFA Bar-none, one of the best textbook series out there. May (or may not) come with CDs.
  
  On the question of learning both spoken and book Persian - it's possible, but you'll really confuse yourself. Learn one first and then the other. The vast majority of people learn book Persian first and then try to learn the spoken form second. I think this is backwards and would recommend learning the spoken language first.
  
  On the question of newscasters - yeah, things can be very different. Let me give you an example that happens - my wife is a native Farsi speaker. She struggles significantly with understanding the Dari (Afghan) and Tajiki (Tajikistan) colloquial accents. But she can listen to newscasts from Afghanistan and Tajikistan with almost no problems, because they are all in book Persian, which is highly consistent across Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. So this is to say that the colloquial manner of speaking can be different from the standard book Persian. They each have their purposes - but if your purpose is to communicate verbally with people, learn the spoken language. I wish I had a good comparable story with spoken and written English, but I don't really.

no, its xin shiyong hanyu keben， 新实用汉语课本

https://www.amazon.de/Practical-Chinese-Reader-shiyong-hanyu/dp/7561910401

its a good textbooks series for learning, the first volume still has pinyin under the characters and the second one still has tone markers over them , easing you into reading over time.

i recommend getting each together with its workbook, since you get a lot of practice examples in the workbook. I`m currently in book 5 out of 6 but im looking at switching since ive heard that for advanced level theres better textbooks available, im just used to the format by now :)

For reference material on grammar try the following:

• A Short Reference Grammar of Standard Slovene (Marc Greenberg - also free to download from Duke University's Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center)
  
  
• Slowenische Grammatik für Deutsche: Inhaltsverzeichnis & Übersicht (since you understand enough German, you may find this freebie handy and a good complement to Greenberg's .pdf)
  
  
• Slovene: A Comprehensive Grammar (Peter Heritty - a book for you if you really want to geek out on grammar. The 2nd edition is more expensive and thicker than the 1st edition that I listed)
  
  If on the off-chance you're sniffing around for a self-instructional course for English-speakers, the best one available is the new edition of Colloquial Slovene by Marta Pirnat-Greenberg (avoid the editions by Andrea Albretti as they're terrible based on personal experience). Pirnat-Greenberg includes dialogues in each chapter showing both formal and informal Slovenian in use and covers basic grammar.
  
  Srečno!

Norwegian shares some with both Swedish and Danish, so it's a nice pick for understanding at least a bit of those. It's also quite easy for English speakers to learn, on par with Swedish and maybe just a touch easier.

For learning resources, check the sidebars of specific subreddits like /r/norsk and /r/svenska, and/or ask in there. But for Norwegian I really like Norwegian: An Essential Grammar, and I used the Pimsleur course.

Sure!

Amebis translator, better than Google Translate for Slovene

Forvo has 8k pronunciations

Linguee has some contextual translations, but they are mostly discussions from the EU parliament and are not everyday language

Sublearning, this site gives you a line from a movie and asks you to translate it. It has lots of out-of-sync subs

Slovar Slovenskega Knjiznjega Jezika, a standard Slovene dictionary, entirely in Slovene

Pons is a classic English-Slovene dictionary, with some examples

Learnslovenian.net was made by some volunteers, I haven't used it

Termania is a beast of a dictionary and is my go-to dictionary whenever I need something

This site helps with noun case modifications

This site has a list of resources

And there's this site, created by the Faculty of Arts

This is an older book on Amazon, written in the 90's I believe

Colloquial Slovene is a good one that I've used

Aaaand that's about it. There are some Memrise courses as well, but I haven't been hearing good things about Memrise as of late.

I'm learning Hungarian with Colloquial Hungarian and I love it. This book does a very good job of introducing the most important grammar concepts and providing plenty of dialogue and short stories for examples.

Aside from that I use Hungarian Reference. I must forewarn though that this website should not bet used as your primary resource, but rather as a supplement. It even says on the home-page:

>The objective of this site is to serve as a reference to the beautiful Hungarian language. If is not intended to be a ground-up course, it is not intended to teach you Hungarian. It is meant to be a companion to your own study.

It should go nice with Duolingo though. Find a sentence you don't understand, and refer to Hungarian Reference for a more in-depth explanation.

I haven't been able to find any resources for actually practicing/using the language besides jumping into native-level content. I'm actually pushing through the Wikipedia page about Hungary at a snail's pace. I do write on the Babylonian Chaos thread every Thursday, so even though that's not getting corrections, at least it's making me use the language.

Lastly, I set Word of the Day as my homepage. Whenever I want to use the internet, I have to read each sentence provided before I'm allowed to visit any page.

Jó szerncsét!

Why do you need this for college? I'm not trying to be mean but most colleges don't care if you know a language unless you're fluent. And I'm not sure how much you mean by "a bit".

The textbooks my Mandarin class in college is using are the New Practical Chinese Reader Series They're pretty cheap as far as textbooks go and you can watch video clips of their conversations on youtube.

Here is a website that has a lot of links for how to learn Chinese. I know not all of the links work, but a couple of them looked pretty good.

New Practical Chinese Reader is a popular choice for a lot of Mandarin courses. The Colloquial (T'ung & Pollard/Qian) and Teach Yourself (Scurfield 1, 2) books are both pretty popular for beginners.

I've heard good things about Lingodeer as an app for Mandarin/Korean/Japanese but haven't had a chance to go through it seriously yet.

Happy language learning!

Come join us over at /r/ChineseLanguage for starters! Look into chinese pod for listening, anki deck for learning vocab. And then try a book like New Practical Chinese Reader as a textbook. But to be honest, without some tutoring, or preferably time in China, it will be a massive uphill struggle at the best of times.

The New Penguin Russian Course is amazing and includes everything you need to know about Russian grammar. A book I am reading right now for beginners is First Reader in Russian. It is a very basic Russian book that has exercises and a dictionary in the back. The only bad thing about it is the dictionary doesn't include all of the words from the book so I usually have to go to my Russian-English English-Russian Dictionary. This dictionary also lacks many important words, but it hasn't given me any problems. Another good Russian reading source is Russian Stories: A Dual-Language Book. If you just look around on amazon you will find many good resources.

I found this reference grammar book very helpful understanding the grammar while I was learning Urdu.
It has Roman alphabet transliterations throughout the book so it's good for you if you are unfamiliar with Urdu alphabet.
Also what I like about this book is that it has short sections dedicated to Persian and Arabic elements used in Urdu. As you probably already know, Urdu has a lot of loanwords from Arabic and Persian and basically that makes it a lot different from Hindi. From my experience it would give you a head start if you have any knowledge on these two languages. So if your target language is Urdu and not Hindi, I recommend you to take a brief look at the languages that influenced Urdu.

I bought some great material the other day on Amazon.

[This is the book](
http://www.amazon.com/New-Practical-Chinese-Reader-Textbook/dp/7561910401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334379917&sr=8-1)

And here are the CDs

You'll see that both things are available used for very reasonable prices. It's the best language learning self-teaching system I've seen out there in a long time. It seems to be thorough, and the student is expected to learn and use that knowledge in the exercises - just like a student would with a real elementary school lesson book.

It's a refreshing departure from most language learning materials I've found out there in bookstores and on the net, which are woefully inadequate.

These two sentences mean the exact same thing, and they absolutely are both standard Norwegian, although you would definitely hear the second one being used the most in spoken Norwegian.

 

As for commas, the first one should indeed have a comma before for as it is a coordinating conjunction (as are og and men, among others), although there should be no comma in front of the fordi in the second sentence, as it is a subordinating conjunction. I suggest you go read up on the differences coordinating and subordinating conjunctions (including subordinating clauses).

 

If you're willing to spend a bit of money, two good books I would recommend are Norwegian: An Essential Grammar or Norsk grammatikk.

My focus is Koine, so I use Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, which has been enough so far. It also mentions some other, more specialized works that I may pick up one of these days.

But Attic is much harder IMO (having done both myself), so I would really recommend something focusing specifically on it if that's what you are studying. Plus there are various levels -- when you say "advanced," it's important to know what you mean exactly. Would something like this be enough?

In addition to the Chinese Breeze series already recommended, you can't go wrong with a text book.

​

Try New Practical Chinese Reader (comes with CD). Basically, each chapter is a reading/dialogue that lists the vocab and defines grammar structures used in the chapter. Working your way through the book will give you a really solid foundation in the language, which will pair nicely with your other methods.

​

The NPCR series goes up through level 6 btw. 加油！

​

*Edit: Also, check out /r/ChineseLanguage for other Mandarin learners

I highly recommend Lagune 1. Make sure to get the workbook and remaining Audio CDs as well.

Here are two relatively easy books that I've picked up:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1456439871/ref=oh_details_o05_s01_i00

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0844242810/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i02

Granted I'm American, and have used these to learn, but they should be of decent help to you.

Merry Christmas/God Jul/Hyvää Joulua!

This is actually quite common, this phenomenon is known as "Language Attrition":

>Language attrition is the loss of a first or second language or a portion of that language. Speakers who routinely speak more than one language may use their languages in ways slightly different from a single language speaker, or a monolingual. The knowledge of one language may interfere with the correct production or understanding of another.

Which seems to be what you're experiencing with Finnish, especially if your immersed in Swedish culture the majority of the time with school, the media, friends, family (even though you also said the speak finnish) etc.

To combat this I suggest attempting Finnish as if you were a novice...

Books:

1. Teach Yourself's Complete Finnish
   
   
2. Routledge's Colloquial Finnish
   
   
3. Routledge's Essential Grammar: Finnish
   
   Or if it's not too hard you could try something like "Suomen Sujuvaksi" or "Tarkista tästä!" Where Finnish is taught in Finnish, that might or might not help.
   
   Hopefully this helps :)
   

I'm a fan of Colloquial Russian. I think it's more accessible/less dense than the Penguin course and has free audio online for the dialogues.

I had just finished Grad school, and I didn't have a job and was living at home—that helps :)

But basically I would wake up, repeat words I learned the previous day, then learn another 30 or so (I have a decent memory). Then I would go over a grammar topic for a few hours then try to watch something. The only thing I didn't do was talk much (I wrote lots) because I had no money for a teacher and don't like talking to random people.

But to be honest I just become obsessed with Russian and it became my job (for the first year, anyway. After that I had different strategies as I started working etc). Sometimes I spent 12 or more hours on it a day.

I used this book for the vocal—https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Learners-Dictionary-Words-Frequency/dp/0415137926

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colloquial-Russian-Complete-Course-Beginners/dp/0415469953/ref=pd_cp_b_0

This book is the best I can suggest if you want to learn quickly.

What about Colloquial Hungarian or Hungarian: An Essential Grammar. There's also Teach Yourself Hungarian, but I don't think the grammar focus is as strong.

Also check out Colloquial Finnish. The Colloquial series is really good.

Pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also quite good but they're useless for reading and writing (which are honestly less important, especially for something with writing as simple as Finnish)

This is the best book https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Chinese-Complete-Course-Beginners/dp/1138958271

I used this book to teach myself the basics of Russian and Cyrillic. It focuses a ton on cognates, which made it a lot easier to pick up the letter sounds. I don't think I ever took the CD out of the package so I can't speak to its usefulness.

I bought this book, which you might find interesting:

Russian Learners Dictionary

The words are listed by their commonness, so you will learn the most common words first.

It's a little annoying because a lot of really obvious words are in there in the beginning (Я, Ты, и, или, etc) but then it starts to get interesting.

If you can get through that whole book, you will have a vocabulary of 10,000 of the most common Russian words.

Thank you for the recommendation! Is it this: http://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Persian-Abdorreza-Rafiee/dp/0415157498/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454111971&sr=8-1&keywords=colloquial+persian

Or this:
http://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Persian-Abdi-Rafiee/dp/0415560454/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1454111971&sr=8-2&keywords=colloquial+persian

I have been having a lot of luck with Urdu: An Essential Grammar, which is very broad in its treatment.

To be honest, it's hard to read real texts with just one semester of Latin. Any real text will have a lot of forms in that you haven't learnt and can't just figure out. Take second semester, and then buy yourself a graded reader. We started reading this one during our second semester class.

There's a Colloquial Lithuanian book that should be good.

I recommend this book, it has done wonders for me.

Also, Duolingo does explain the grammar (not very extensively, admittedly), are you reading the blurbs each skill has?

I can wholeheartedly recommend the Lagune series:

http://www.amazon.de/Lagune-Deutsch-Fremdsprache-Kursbuch-Audio-CD/dp/3190016240

There are several levels, audio cds, workbooks and even teacher guidelines if you want those too.

Hey, this is the book

https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Learners-Dictionary-Words-Frequency/dp/0415137926

Hi there, This book is the one I'm using. I would also switch all your online accounts to bokmål (if possible) and perhaps install a Norwegian proxy so you can watch dagbladet and nrk videos.

Here is the mobile version of your link

This textbook and workbook was used for CHNS 101 and 102 for Spring and Fall 2018:

https://amazon.com/gp/product/7561926235/

https://amazon.com/gp/product/7561926227/

CHNS 101 went half way, while 102 finished the textbook. So if you are going for upper level chinese, you probably would need something else.

I would also advise anyone to check out Urdu: An Essential Grammar's Farsi (and Arabic) grammar of Urdu section.

I actually enrolled in local university course. I'm old enough to know that unless I have external pressure and schedule I tend to wander off, break the schedule, postpone things and generally grow more lax about things. To avoid that I decided to make it official so that I'd feel some sort of obligation to keep going. I can effectively teach myself things that take few weeks or monhts to master, but this project is much more serious so I need someone else to push me along too.

We're using New Practical Chinese Reader which is not exactly a fast paced textbook, but it seems to be a standard. There's a series of them, all with workbooks and audio.