u/adventuringraw

I've learned Japanese German and Spanish more or less just for reading books. I originally started Japanese for games but it's kind of a pain looking stuff up. Honestly, making lookups as absolutely fast and easy as possible is the main secret for me at least. I stopped using flash cards even, reading enough makes it all stick eventually, though you do need up to a dozen contacts before words really start to stick sometimes. Just from reading, I've noticed things like noun gender and other grammatical features don't stick super well. Even at 20,000+ pages read in German and being very comfortable reading the kind of stuff I usually read without a documentary I've still got some basic stuff I struggle with when I try and produce the language.

I've used a site called readlang for years but there's some features I wanted so I ended up making my own reading system, haha. I wanted nouns highlighted by gender and the option to mark different verb tenses so maybe it'd stick a little better exactly when subjunctive tense is needed in Spanish, haha. I also wanted an easy way to quickly see verb conjugation tables and get notes on what phrasing and word choice wouldn't be natural for Chile since for once I'm learning for a reason beyond just reading.

Anyway, haha. Definitely doable, but it'll be a long time before you don't need to look stuff up so much anymore. Like a hundred books levels of long time. I tried reading without looking anything up ever for like a dozen books in German and you learn much slower, so I do think lookups are worth it... But that means those lookups need to be extremely fast, or you need a way to very quickly add stuff for review so you don't need to look the same thing up so many times. Either way that means figuring out a pretty efficient system so you can cover a lot of ground without a ton of friction.

Oh yeah, the first stage is tough too. It's vaguely possible to start with just a super basic foundation and brute force multiple lookups every sentence and have it get easier eventually (I did that as an experiment with Russian... It was rough but a thousand pages got it to a much more reasonable level) but you'll probably want a good way to get through the beginner part before you start seriously reading. Graded readers or just working through a beginner course are probably the best track.

You said he's really involved and affectionate and present even home, and you said he's got OCD and being super engaged in a hobby is a possible symptom.

So... Steel man argument. It sounds possible that he does like you and the kids, but you're being overshadowed by an obsession. That's the absolute best case scenario it sounds like, and might be overly gracious to him to assume that so take this as a thought experiment.

If that WAS what was happening... A man with a mental health struggle that makes him incapable of showing up as the husband and father you thought he would be... It still might be worth considering that this isn't the life you and the kids deserve, neglect can come from someone hyper focusing elsewhere, not just from him not liking you. Being very clear with yourself about what you need, and what you're willing to do if that's not meant might be the place to start moving forward. If that doesn't mean divorce, what does that mean? Nothing? A separation without the legal side yet? Would you want to date and find someone you could see sometimes with a babysitter at home? Spend some time alone recovering? Separation but keep him as an FWB? If you have actual plans and let him know he's going to lose his family if he doesn't change (he's already losing his family whether he knows it or not, his kids won't see him the same after a long time of this few days together) maybe he'll make some changes. If he genuinely can't then maybe you need to be the one making changes instead.

I had a 13 year relationship end because my ADHD and mental health struggles made me unable to be the kind of partner my ex needed. She's happier now. It was a hard transition, I felt like shit but ultimately I think we're both with people we're better suited for now. I got married this year, my wife also has ADHD, our house is kind of chaotic with things vanishing kind of often but we both know we're in it together so neither of us feels too broken because of it, it's more like a shared challenge. We're both gamers so there's more hobby overlap, like... Maybe your husband likes you but you just have incompatible needs, as sad as that is. It's difficult to navigate all that with kids, but I've got my kid with me a few nights a week, he's happy and really gets on well with everyone's new partner. Me ex and I are really good it seems about navigating the new life... We talk kind of often and have been doing a good job facing things together and making sure our kid is happy, healthy and growing up into a capable adult ready to face the world. Maybe your kids will end up becoming hunters over time, like how my kid plays games with me, haha. We've got a 500 hour factorio base, and my ex isn't lonely because she's got a different life now, she's got him on other times.

So... You've been focusing on how he feels about you. But even if he genuinely loves you, it sounds to me like that's just not enough, and that's okay. Something just needs to change, and if it's not going to be your husband's lifestyle it will need to be something else.

I mean... The approaches that could be said to be based on probabilistic analysis are way broader than just LLMs. That said, sounds like OP doesn't want to use LLMs for something more like ethical reasons rather than just the quality of the results. I personally think it doesn't make sense, but if you look at it like a jewish person avoiding non kosher meat then I guess this is a reasonable position to take. God knows OP isn't the only person wanting to avoid LLMs in all forms. They're high if they think this transition in translation methods isn't going to be permanent though, at least until the field advances to even more powerful methods.

I just read the first dungeon crawler Carl book in Spanish. Aside from the Spain Spanish flair (trying to learn chilean). Sounds like exactly what you're looking for. A trashy page turner. And will you look at that, it was translated into Finnish, haha. You should put that one on your list if you're down for a cross between an RPG isekai and hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy. There'll be some weird vocab for sure but I flew through it and my Spanish isn't that great yet.

There's no good answer, but I feel like the question is Kitty corner to poetry or song translation. Or joke translation for that matter. There's a reason a lot of jokes are replaced entirely with something else during translation, there's plenty of stuff that just can't make the jump. Suppose that's part of why it's always going to be worthwhile to learn other languages instead of dealing with translations.

I don't need to look up much in German anymore, so down the road you won't look stuff up because you'll already know it. The tricky part is the early stage.

First trick... Start out with graded readers. You can 'find' a copy of "Erste Stufe", that's the first thing I read. It's out of print so a physical copy is going to be kind of expensive. There's plenty of other graded readers though, just look around and see what you can find.

The other trick is making lookups faster. Check out readlang. You can just highlight words or phrases, get an instant quick translation and you're on your way again in under a second. When it's that fast and easy it makes a lot of lookups a lot easier to stomach.

For what it's worth, the first thousand pages read are the hardest by far. By five thousand you'll be seeing paragraphs you don't need to look anything up. By ten thousand it'll be pages, and by twenty thousand you'll just be looking up the odd word every few pages. The downside... I still can't hold a conversation, haha. If all you do is read, you'll get comfortable with reading, but there's a limit to how far it'll take you, just as a heads up. It does make it WAY easier to start working on speaking and listening when you don't need to work on vocab so much and everything's at least familiar.

I've done a fair bit of extensive reading too when I was learning German. Going back to looking everything up that I didn't know as I went really sped things up. It takes a lot of encounters as it is to learn new words, and there's reading tools that make lookup so fast it barely interrupts flow so it's definitely worth The tiny bit of extra effort to look things up in my view. But that's partly because I'm not attached to reading physical books, once you're reading on paper lookup gets a lot more cumbersome and the choice isn't so obvious.

That said, I don't think your 'creating headaches for yourself later' makes much sense. The only downside I think is that you're not learning as fast as you could have, but it's not like that's actively setting you back or anything.

I think Anki cards can be good to remind you of different concepts, but I'd say you shouldn't just review the card and move on. Take it as a reminder to use the concept in speech and writing. For stuff to be automatic you need to use it a lot it seems, no way around that unfortunately.

I've got ADHD too, it definitely makes it rough to hit a lot of goals. What helps for me at least, is that most of what I do to learn languages is stuff I do even I'm procrastinating doing other stuff. I mostly like to learn by reading, it's nice since I can just pull out my phone and read for ten minutes, hit my streak goal on the app and then maybe stop for the day. Or maybe read for a few hours and get fuck all else done. I started dungeon crawler Carl (Carl el Mazmorrero) last Tuesday or something and I'll probably finish it today or tomorrow. Oops?

I like using readlang, it makes lookups super easy. Easy and fast to the point where it's not TOO terrible getting started. Just find the easiest stuff you can, the first book will be a little rough, but if it's dungeon you end up clicking with it'll get much easier over time. I started Spanish last September or something, I'm like 30 books in now and reading trash is getting easy to the point where there's decent stretches I don't need to look anything up at all. I didn't use flash cards for most of that but I actually want to be able to speak Spanish too, not just read it so I'm starting with flash cards again. I can read German and Japanese reasonably comfortably too so I know how far just reading will get you. Pretty far, but there's limits for sure.

If you're the kind of person that does better with listening to stuff in the background while doing chores or something, that'd definitely be an ADHD friendly route too. Stuff you can hyper focus on or stuff you can half focus on while doing other things seems to be the easiest to do regularly, haha.

If you want to give readlang a try, feel free to message. There's a few tricks for getting started.

The tip is to read more, haha. That'll get you better at reading. For writing the answer is similar. I like to read light novels, even one series can be dozens of books, so you'll definitely have plenty to get through once you get started.

I use a different app with a streak counter called readlang, basically just makes lookups super easy. There's no way to adjust how the streak counter works, basically you read two pages and it counts the day as done. I like it since it's a silly reason to log in every day, and most days once I hit the streak minimum I just keep reading a bunch more. I've read tens of thousands of pages of books in three different languages (four I guess counting the bit of Russian I got into) so... I guess the streak serves a purpose. It's not like I need to remember why I'm doing it though, I just like to read and it keeps me going. Obviously just reading will never get you good at speaking or listening though so maybe the lazy part is how little I do aside from reading, haha. Changing that with Spanish though we'll see how it goes.

that's true, if it worked for you my own experience certainly doesn't change that.

As someone that's watched plenty of anime with English subs even while learning the language... That's really not a great use of time. Native subs native audio is way better. If it can't be followed it's just not time to learn with media you can't pause easily.

I did a similar experiment, but much more ridiculous, haha. I picked up basic Russian in a similar way except without the language similarities. I was looking up More like 90% of the words at first, not 10%. The app I use is fast enough that I could still make progress, but it took a WHILE to see any progress. I read through all the Narnia books and the first Harry Potter. By the end of all that I feel like I was at the point where learning from reading wasn't such an absurd thing anymore. There were still a lot of words I didn't know but it's a lot easier to look up a new word than try and figure out the structure of the language even.

So this was a silly way to learn, I think it's more efficient to start in other ways probably. But if you're just learning for fun and you find the process enjoyable, it'll absolutely sink in over time. In my experience it takes about 10k pages read for listening and speaking to start to feel like approachable skills. Still things that need to be worked on specifically if you want them, but it's not so bad when you already know a lot and the stuff you're trying to learn to produce or understand is already stuff you know. If you like doing this as a hobby, it won't be wasted time I think, long as you're consistent and willing to keep up with it for a while.

Esto se ve bien, gracias por la sugerencia. Oí parte del primero, creo que esto es que usaré.

Es un libro sin audiobook sí? Suena interesante, gracias.

Haha, tell me about it. I used a Kindle and DUDEN dictionary to learn German going through all the Harry Potter books. German has hilariously bad separable verbs, the get split and the front half goes all the way back to the end of the phrase, potentially dozens of words away. Kindle wasn't made for that, haha. Readlang works great though.

Glad you liked it! I learned some basic Russian and got through the Chronicles of Narnia, so I've got a little library there under Russian too, haha. Приятного просмотра!

Have you tried reading with tools they make lookups super fast? I use readlang, and for most lookups I don't even feel like it breaks flow at all, it takes less than a second.

Sure, this is readlang.

https://readlang.com

Basically you can highlight words and phrases you don't know and it'll give you a little translation along with the reading in hiragana. It'll also read it out loud. You have to pay a little extra to not get the crappy AI voice though, haha. It's probably not as good as using an audiobook and reading along as far as perfect pronunciation goes (it definitely gets the reading of kanji wrong on occasion) but I think there's value in trying to read it yourself first and having it give you the answer when you get stuck.

For most people this would be an insane way to learn to read, you have to look up a truly stupid amount for a long time but... You already did that so maybe you enjoy that kind of patient activity too, haha.

A few words of warning though. The platform wasn't exactly made for Japanese so there's a few quirks. The word count tracker is just two characters per word as an estimate. It didn't work at all until I messaged on the board and the guy that made it answered and added the feature, haha. Another problem is that furigana seriously breaks the formatting. I usually get my epubs and strip out all the furigana. I used to do it manually with a program called collibre but it was kind of cumbersome, and surprisingly Claude can do it so I have the AI fix my books and remove furigana now, haha. Last problem is actually getting the books. I always buy my books unless I have beef with the author (Harry Potter and such) but it's a pain to get Amazon purchased books on readlang, so I usually buy it and then go and find a more easy to work with copy elsewhere. It's not super hard to do but... Figured I'd mention that as another possible downside.

What are you interested in reading? I read Kiki's delivery service, that one wasn't terrible as far as kanji load goes. If you do just look stuff up until it sticks though, expect it to take a dozen books before you're really starting to go more comfortably. I like learning this way but it's not exactly fast.

This sounds like a really interesting mirror image of what I've done. Instead of learning Japanese with conversation though I did it by reading a ton. I stopped for a long time but picked it back up again, in the last few years I read over thirty light novels. No flash cards really, just looking stuff up as I went until... You know. You stop needing to look things up so much.

I've done that with three languages. German's my strongest, I've read almost double in that and I don't really need to look up much at all anymore but I've also heavily plateaud. I feel comfortable assuming I've found the limits of what mass reading and nothing else buys you, haha. I'd be tempted to trade skills, I don't have a way to do a ton of active production in Japanese, so... Your skills seem harder to get.

Luckily(?) I'm embarking on an adventure to do a bit more what you've done. I got married a few months ago, my wife is Chilean. She speaks fluent English, but her mom and Dad and a lot of her old friends don't at all. The month her mom stayed with us I sure got a lot of Spanish practice, haha. Since it's Chilean it was different than what I learned from reading too, so that's interesting. Even some different verb conjugations, and a ton of vocab differences. I've picked up some Kansai ben from reading and videogames, maybe it's a little like that.

Anyway. I suppose you already know this, but you break out of patterns by changing the pattern. I just started a book going through Spanish grammar from the beginning, making flash cards in Anki as I go. You could work through something casually in a few months and probably see a huge improvement.

Idea number 2: get into reading. It's the easiest way (in my opinion) to pick up new words and phrases for use while talking. I've been enjoying ascendence of a bookworm. Use readlang if you go that route, it's really important to be able to look stuff up VERY fast when you're looking up a ton.

The third suggestion though... This one might be the best one given your goals, but maybe start writing? Taking your time to put more complex thoughts into words will make it easier, and the faster you can do it, the more likely you'll be able to manage on the fly while actually talking. Japanese is uniquely rough to do that with though, haha. Probably better to start with reading.

Honestly, it's a life long journey so you can experiment a little. Try something for three months. Reflect on how it went. Try something else. You'll learn what works for you. My way of learning languages has changed massively over the two decades since I started my first one. Japanese in high school so I could play Chrono trigger, haha.

I like the suggestion someone else made to summarize what you read. I started doing that a while ago. I guess that combines reading and writing, haha. Secret idea number 4.

I guess as far as your sister's side goes, does she ever let this friend borrow anything? If she wants to keep the relationship, maybe she just figured out it was a terrible idea to trust her with certain things. Maybe she made peace that the friend is kind of fucked up and just figured out boundaries to avoid getting into trouble. Adults should be able to learn and grow and feel empathy and be responsible, but I guess if you look at this person as emotionally disabled and just choose to navigate around it, I guess I could see her being surprised you loaned her anything in the first place. Like a 'why'd you stick your hand in the oven if you didn't want to get burned' kind of a thing. If that's how your sister actually feels though it seems like a weird choice in friends, I feel like for me to feel that way about someone would mean I wouldn't respect them much. Either way, your only mistake was trusting her it sounds like. I'm not Christian anymore but I still have enough of my upbringing to respect Christlike qualities. Patience, kindness, forgiveness, willingness to give the benefit of the doubt... You're definitely not an asshole for those traits, they just come with risk.

Things did blow over as far as things go it sounds like. This is just the new normal, it changed the relationship. Your feral family friend got feelings about how things went down and it seems she's not likely to change with time. Up to you what you want to do about that, but as long as you want an apology and want her to act like a reasonable human being, I think the friendship might be over. That doesn't sound like the kind of person she is.

NTA, but your sister's right in a way. You knew this friend was pretty entitled seemingly. You decided to be trusting and give her the benefit of the doubt, but you gave her rope to hang herself with. You ended up in a bind where you had to choose between the friendship and your switch 2. It's been six months and it seems you didn't realize that was the choice you ended up in, but you've been getting pretty big messages that that was what happened.

It might be possible to repair that friendship maybe. I get that when it comes to family some people (not Redditers certainly) are willing to sacrifice a lot to keep relationships with kind of shitty people. If you decide it's worth it, you're probably going to have to do something stupid like apologize.

If you DO decide to repair the friendship though... I think you know this already, but don't loan her anything. She's borderline thief levels of entitled and if you're literally putting that relationship at risk anytime you loan her something. Same goes for other relationships in your life too, it's worth thinking about the other person's level of maturity before deciding to trust them, it's an easy way to destroy relationships once stuff like this happens.

I was using the standard edition on Amazon Kindle usually... Definitely a silly choice given that I read epubs in an app that just tells me word counts, haha. I've basically switched. For Spanish now I'm just counting a page every 250 words, so my page count now is just a word count with extra steps, haha.

Things get sillier with Japanese though. Apparently there, word counts aren't used even in publishing since it's much less clear what to call a word when there's no spaces in the language. I messaged the guy that made the app I use since it wasn't tracking words in Japanese at all, so the approximated it by calling every two characters a word. So in my Japanese books, the word count is a character count with extra steps, haha.

Haha, I saw Siddhartha and thought this list of 50 included German books too, and I was like 'that's random, got those on my read list too' haha.

Congrats! I made the dubious choice to track pages instead of words, looks like 5 million words is around 20,000 pages. About what I've read in German, definitely agree that by that point reading is pretty comfortable and not so much about lookups unless you're into some pretty challenging reads. I just crossed about 2.5 million in Spanish I guess... Got some similar ones on my list. I read los de abajo a bit ago, that one was an interesting ending in particular. El llano en llamas, Pedro páramo, cómo agua para chocolate and (randomly) El juego de ender are on my list too, haha. I just started a short story collection from Borges, been excited to get into him, I've always liked weird short stories.

Not sure if you've hit Chile yet, but I also recently finished la casa de los espíritus. A weird book since it was pretty funny and bleak and sad all at the same time. A world of magic that leaves as the country heads into fascism. I read a few other chilean ones, but my favorite one was El obsceno pájaro de la noche. Possibly the most fucked up book I've read in any language, definitely thought provoking. That one got me into the habit of talking with Claude after every chapter and asking for writing prompt questions. Ended up being a good thing to add.

I need to add some grammar stuff like you did with the formal course. This is the first language I actually want to be able to speak instead of just read and understand... Means I need to branch out and do some new things I think and that seems like a good place to start.

For the originally in Spanish books you've read so far, which was your favorite?

Oh, I get preferring the Kindle or paper books, but have you tried readlang? Lookups are ridiculously fast, and you can easily grab phrases too and it takes context into account so you don't need to figure out which of multiple meanings is the right one. Might be worth checking out, though it's admittedly less useful now that you don't need to look stuff up as much anymore.