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Hi I'm Wout and this is my story. I grew up in a family where there was a lot off dyslexia and language difficulty. Both my parents aren't really keen on learning or speaking a different language then their own. My sister is also dyslectic and I myself early on was behind everyone else. When I was 8 years old I was very curious in ancient Greek culture. So I wanted to learn also a little bit off the language my parents gave me a travel book. Which only provides sample sentences so there is no explanation about grammar or anything. From what I know now that really isn't a very good way to study a language especially for a kid to leave him to his own devices. But regardless of the difficulties I learned some basic words and learned to count to 60. Then in middle school I learned English and at first it wasn't hard but I didn't have the same command of the language as some of my friends did. Then Yu-Gi-Oh came out and everything was in English and I couldn't really understand it until I got my hands on them myself. Then my English got better and better and it was suddenly easy, with me being able to think and even dream in it. In high school I got into anime and started learning Japanese. The jump from Japanese and J-pop to K-pop and Korean was one that followed soon after, but then I decided to stick with Japanese and my Korean withered away. A couple of years later I promised my cousins husband to learn Turkish not that I really started it but I thought I could do it. Later I had to pick school subjects and so I chose Spanish and German. Spanish didn't really go very well, but German was okay. This year I had my exam German, but because of bad habits inefficient resources and such it didn't go very well. So I googled a little and found a youtube video called skype me maybe. From there I went to fluent in three months where I saw a thread about italki and now I am here. Now I have the language challenge to learn 30 languages before 30.
Learning
Japanese
German
Chinese (Mandarin)
Hindi
Korean
Spanish
Turkish
Croatian
Language Skills
DutchNative
Lesson Feedback
Lesson history
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Completed lessons00220
Attendance rate100%100%98%
Teacher reviews
Lusine
Armenian
Aug 15, 2019
Thank you so much. It was an amazing lesson.
Milena
Russian
Jul 22, 2019
we had a lesson and I extended the time for you to learn more about our Georgian language. But in half an hour it is difficult to learn more than I taught you. We learned vowels and personal pronouns in the singular and plural form.and a few more Georgian letters
Priti
Hindi
May 29, 2019
THANKS
Alfonso
Spanish
Sep 25, 2017
"Thank you so much, Wout!" En esta clase empezamos conversando sobre los idiomas en general, y el japones en particular, ¡que, sin duda, es una lengua interesante! Después seguimos tu idea de ver un vídeo... ¡que en realidad estaba en japonés! Pero tenía subtítulos en español, e íbamos parando siempre que me lo pedías para explicar el significado. ¡Espero que te sirviera para practicar la comprensión escrita, y para aprender un poco de vocabulario! :) ¡Un saludo, Wout, y muchas gracias de nuevo! :)
Activities
  • Commented

    Angelica,

    I'm more than willing to help you with the basics (I'm not sure if I can help you beyond that) if your interested send me a message. As for books if you take lessons you can sometimes request if the teacher has pdf of the book that you would like to work from. Personally I used a nintendo game called My Japanese Coach that was very fun and comprehensive to get a solid basis for Japanese it covers everything you find in the common/popular books. Such as katakana/hiragana, sentence structure, grammar, culture, Kanji, writing, listening and speaking through games that are very fun and educative, I've found it to be incredible useful and if you're serious about learning Japanese I think you should give it a try.
    I agree that like most say that genki can be quit useful I have genki 1 and workbook 1and 2. (although I haven't worked in them.) I myself worked through Japanese For Busy People romanised version and I did learn a bunch of stuff and so I think it can be useful to learn some basic comprehension of how the language works. Books that should be very readible accesseble (forgive my poor typing also a second language and it's late at the moment.) are the www.mangaunversity.com series where you learn from reading manga's there's kana de manga and several (I believe 5 or 6) kanji de manga. In the series you learn kana or kanji through reading small manga like stories that are usually easy to understand and fun to learn from. I think it might also be worth it to give www.japanesepod101.com and Japaneseclass.jp a try. Japanesepod101 is a site with many podcasts (with explanations available in pdf's) for you to listen and they talk about things such as grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, proverbs, culture and a lot of other very useful things. I have a bunch more to say but otherwise my answer is getting too long. If your interested in more in either Japanese or Dutch (I saw in your profile that you want to learn that too) send me a message.

    0 voted
    January 30, 2017
    0
  • Posted
    In how many languages can you translate these sentences? I can do 4, can you do better?

    Oké before I give you the sentences let me give you a little bit about the background and about me. Hi I'm Wout. An enthousiast of languages who travels a lot and likes talking to strangers in other languages. My name is sometimes difficult to pronounce and I want them to get my name right. In Wout the ou is read like ow in now, cow and aw (like when you hurt yourself). But diffirent cultures have diffirent words and one method off explaining might not work in another language. So I use a couple of sentences to explain the pronunciation in a way that should be easy to explain and makes people think that your cool or funny.

     

    The sentences: ''What do you say when you see something amazing? you say WOOW .... t. Amazing with a t, Wout.''

     

    And in the other languages in which I can say it.

    Wat zeg je als je iets geweldigs ziet? Dan zeg je wauw .... t. geweldig met een t, Wout.

    Was sagen Sie wann Sie etwas geil sehen? Sie sagen woow .... t. Geil mit ein T, Wout.

    nanika sugei wo mitte. woow .... t wo itte. Sugoi to T, Wout.

     

    So who can do better?

    Doesn't have to be a literal translation as long as the context is the same. Please also tell me even if you know it in only 1 language that isn't here yet. Sign languages can compete in it as well. (please do post a link if you know it in a sign language)

    I'm looking forward to the responses

    January 20, 2016
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  • Corrected

    Getting lost

    I usually don't like getting lost, especially when I am almost late for an appointment.
    However, I enjoy getting lost when I travel because I find places with nice or interesting views or shops, and asking local people about the direction is fun, especially the people are talkative. In fact, I am not afraid of it. I would rather go further with curiosity.

    Fortunately, whenever I got lost, someone always helped me even some of them couldn't speak English, they tried to help me somehow.

    In Tokyo, the number of tourist has increased recently because of mainly the weak Japanese yen.
    Going forward, I want to help foreigners getting lost like me.

    Thanks for reading.
    Happy holidays!

    0 voted
    December 25, 2015
    0
  • Posted
    我是神吗？ （what's my name?) 您好，我是wout。我不知道我 名称。(Hi everyone, I'm wout. I don't know my name. - in chinese -) (I had some google translate help here.) But usually ''when you see something amazing you say wow ...t'' is also a part of my introduction. So I would love to be able to use that sentence in chinese as well. 谢谢， zai jin. XD
    December 15, 2015
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  • Answered
    I would say that welzijn is the equivalent of well being. So this is not just yourself physical but also your mental and emotional state of mind. But it can also refer to the well being offer the economy in a country or ethnic group. In het belang van het welzijn van die groep is het verstandig om geen ''ouwe koeien uit de sloot te halen.'' For the impotance of the well being offe that group it woould be wise not to talk too much about the past. Het is voor het welzijn van ons allemaal. It's for thhet well being off us all. I hope it helps.
    0 voted
    December 7, 2015
    0
  • Answered
    Yes, you WILL have to learn them! But I agree that it is actually better to start with kana. A lot of sources expect you to already know kana quit well if you are trying to learn kanji. I have heard a lot of really good things about heisig's RTK and it sounds like a really good method, Anki is also very useful just like memrise which is a diffirent flashcard system that allows you to use mnemonics to simplify your study, it has a lot of courses on grammar, kanji, kana vocabulary and others like test preparations in an already made course of course you can make your own course in it too, The Furiganizer sounds really useful and I think you should definitely use it I know I will. Using manga and such is a good idea if you've just started learning kana, but I don't think it will get you to recognise it pretty much instantly which is something that you would want otherwise learning new words will be very hard, time consuming and frustrating. ''My japanese coach'' it teaches you vocabulary, grammar, kana, kanji, word order and sentence structure through games that involve fast decisions in a short amount of time. It has been my 1# way of learning kana and refreshing it when it has gone rusty. Because you also get all of the new words in hiragana or katakana (depending on the word) and then have to test it with games like whack-a-mole, memorie, word search, multiple choice questions and other games you learn them by heart and faster and better then you would have with normal studying. If you don't have nintendo game device maybe you can find a version for the PC on the internet.
    0 voted
    November 18, 2015
    1
  • Corrected
    0 voted
    September 24, 2015
    0
  • Commented

    Diffirent ways or diffirent languages? With the last one I think I can help.

    So here are the ones I know: Dank u wel (Dutch -*DUH-), Thank you*, Danke (*German), djienkoeye (Polish - I'm slaughtering the spelling but I know how to say it -), Merci bourcoup (French), Gracias (Spanish -almost*-), Gracie (Italian), Efcharisto (Greek), Te'sekkür ederim (Turkish* - the ' should have been below the s and is pronounced as sh like in ship -), Dank on (Esperanto - I think it was something like this-) Shukran (Arabic), (I believe Farsi had something similar to Arabic but I don't remember), Koh kuhn (Thai), Cam on (Vietnamese), xie xie (Mandarin), Kamsahamnida (Korean) and Arigatou gozaimasu (Japanese*). I may know a few more but can't remember them or I know them without knowing that I know them. Any way I hope it's useful. (I came not as far as I had hoped. I gave myself a challenge to learn to be able to comunnicate in 30 languages by the time I'm 30. I have 4 years left and I only know the ones with an asterisk fluent or to some extent.)

    0 voted
    September 2, 2015
    0
  • Corrected
    0 voted
    August 31, 2015
    0
  • Posted
    Where would you look if you want to learn a rare (weird) language.

    Hi everyone,

     

    Now I know it says for learning English but frankly I think my English is good enough.

    I'm trying to learn a ton of languages, because I gave myself the challenge to be able to converse in 30 languages by the time I turn 30 and of course for some languages it is easy to find good resources that are cheap, easy, fast and fun to learn from but where do you look when you want to learn some more unusual languages?

    For example Ber solago (if I'm not butchering the name I'm not sure what it was called again.)

    is a language that isn't spoken but wistled and only used by about 22000 people.

    Don't think that makes it somewhat a bit harder to bump into one than Chinese or German or Spanish that you can fire your language skills at. Never the less I think that it sounds like a awesome language to speak uh wistle and there are other interesting languages that may be a bit more difficult to come across.

    Try finding a native speaker for Akadian might be quit a search I imagine as well as it would be with other dead languages.

    However even with more commonly spoken languages you can still have trouble finding great resources like with Tamazight, Dutch sign language or Dothraki.

     

    And then there are issues about obstacles within the languages themself.

    How do you make notes for Sign languages? Drawing?, have you seen my drawing?, most 5 year old can probably beat me when it comes to that. Or how would you keep the overview at what's what with for example polysyntathic languages. (languages where sentences consist of only one long almost unpronounceable word unless your a native)

     

    I am very curious to what your opinions and or approach would be to something like that.

    Let me know how you would tackle the problem, the unfindable resources and the tricky challenges inside a language.

     

    I'm looking forward to your comments.

     

    Kind regards,

    Wout.

    August 24, 2015
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