See title. I’ve been to quite a few local language meetups and saw lots of people IRL who are learning languages: wondering how are y’all doing too
For myself… learning French due to necessity. I am making progress, just veeery slow. I underestimated how difficult it would be (a lot of vocabs between English/French are similar… but the languages themselves are not!)
English, being born in non english speaking country significantly boosts your chances of being proficient in two languages. I understand everything I read on the internet pretty well, but my writing skills are not perfect, and speaking is the hardest part.
i found an easy and fun way to learn to speak it: take your favorite sitcom series, preferably a fast paced one with subtitles. pause after each sentence and try to repeat it. in the beginning you may have to learn the difficult sounds with help from youtube. went from being too ashamed to even speak it to fluent in a few months.
I’ve been doing this with 1670 (Polish). Though, I’m not serious about learning, just dabbling in learning about the language. It’s surprisingly a very helpful tool!
Your writing skills are way above-average. Well done!
I decided to teach myself Russian and Japanese when I turned 40. It’s been over a year and making good progress in both. Am still at a beginner lever but pretty happy with progress.
Well I think it’s cool! I studied Russian at uni and I’m taking Japanese evening classes at the moment, so I know both the struggle and the joy of learning both.
my russian classes are great. i really like the teacher/group i am with. they legit want to learn the language.
with japanese i haven’t found that. it’s frustrating. every class i take with Japanese it’s just people who want to be tourists and don’t really want to learn the language.
I’ve started learning Catalan, it’s going slower than I hoped because the class I’m taking is filled with people who already speak the language and spend the entire class discussing about technicalities instead of letting the teacher teach.
Hello,
If you are learning Catalan, feel free to join !barcelona@piefed.social , most of the publications there are in Catalan
Merci, a més de pel català serà útil per coses de la ciutat
De res!
Spanish and it’s slowww. I dont have a lot of time and I’m stressed out so it’s hard to consistently get listening exposure in.
I like language transfer and assimil and will be trying out dreaming Spanish for more listening but when I finally have free time I usually don’t want to do more learning lol
So yeah…it’s rough, I really need more discipline
Te recomiendo unos podcasts.
Por si no lo sabias los simpson son muy populares en latino america y el doblaje latino es muy bueno.
Oo gracias! Intento ver Pokémon in español pero después una día largo quiero ver mi programa favorita 😭
los simpson es una mejor idea
When I was in high school, the sequel to my favorite game didn’t get translated, so I convinced my parents to sign me up for Japanese lessons on the weekend. But I didn’t get all that far in it on account of having too much actual schoolwork to keep up with.
Last year I picked it back up again, just for fun, and I’m making a lot more progress using Renshuu than I did in a classroom environment. Earlier this year I bought one volume each of a bunch of different manga series, slowly working through the pile with the help of vocab lists from LearnNatively and Wanikani. So far I’ve finished Yotsubato, RuriDragon, and Look Back.
I’m speedrunning French, trying to focus on Québécois french but you kinda end up learning traditional French too along the way.
- Duo for daily practice and grammar, but it makes a lot of mistakes
- Work group to practice speaking
- Using various daily apps in French
- Recently been playing Pokemon ZA in French (extra fun since it’s in Poke-Paris)
I’m about a year in, and I’m low-level conversational. Solidly A2 slowly inching towards B1.
Pokemon Z-A in French is perfect, lol! I’ve been playing to for language learning too (Japanese). I think those games are pretty great for it, good low-stakes, familiar games that have a lot of text, but are also kid-approachable. Would be nice to have voice acting, but otherwise near perfect language immersion games.
Japanese. I’m not focused or committed enough.
fwiw i’ve tried to learn it 3 times. 2 failures were because the classes i was taking was full of tourists who dind’t really want to do the work. and the teachers sucked. it would take us like 4 classes to learn basic greetings.
i’m doing well now because i’m doing it alone and away from the tourist classes. just get Genki or Japanese for busy people and work on it an hour or so each day.
if you can’t do that you won’t learn it. it’s not hard, it just requires a lot of time commitment.
にゃ :3
😼
Not actively learning a language, but I have a degree in Spanish, though it’s been years since I used it professionally and I no longer regard myself as proficient. Before that I took Latin throughout high school (a rare treat in a US public school AFAIK), and attempted to learn Mandarin via Duolingo in 2019.
As it happens I also construct artificial languages as a hobby after the manner of Tolkien.
Before a 4 month stay in Vienna, I tried upping my German game: consumed lots of German-language media (news, books, videos), attended a language course, really tried immersing myself as well as I could. It was enough to get by okay, but I felt frustrated not being to follow along always or express myself precisely. Since coming back I haven’t been able to pick it up and in fact have come to associate the language with the sad realization that moving there for longer was a fantasy.
Esperanto, very slowly, using Duolingo. Why? Just because.
Vi devus kontroli ankaŭ clozemaster.com!
Ho, dankon! Mi certe iam kontrolos tion, kiam mi havos sufiĉa da tempon.
私は日本語を勉強します (I’ve been studying Japanese) I’ve been doing it just because it sounds cool and I want to go to Japan one day for a visit. I haven’t studied for a bit due to life getting in the way but I can form simple sentences but I’m far from being able to hold a conversation
Also checkout !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz foe this kind of discussion on the regular!
I’ve always wanted to learn Korean and I tried multiple times but never really stayed motivated enough to keep at it. How do you stay motivated?
I… don’t think I need motivation when my employer, my landlord, and even my government are legally obligated to establish all legal communications in French (facepalm)
I also suffered from motivation before moving here though, so I’d love to know as well
Let me guess, Quebec? Your experience is the intended effect of those laws lmao.
Brussels. Officially bilingual but most people speak French. I’m legally allowed to get things in Dutch (the other official language) but I know even less Dutch than French… I promised myself to start learning Dutch once I get to B1-B2 French
Due to historical reasons language is… a sensitive issue here. And since I work in academia (which were at the center of said language issue), my employer insists on communicating everything in French. For example I think half of the HR and IT teams don’t speak English
I see, the situation in montreal is fairly similar, so I assumed it was quebec, language is also a very sensitive issue here.
by just doing it.
stop ‘wanting’ to do it’ and just do it.
this is the secret to most things in life.
Spanish. I’m not consistent and go through bursts but I know more now than I have before.
German. I’m not that motivated nowadays but my level improved a lot from the intense work I did between February and June this year
German here too, off and on for longer than I’d care to admit. If I can put at least an hour a day into studying I feel like progress is being made.
