Ask Lemmy

I’ve been learning Russian for a few years, I’ve also started learning Serbian and Ukrainian a little bit.

I can speak Russian pretty decently, it’s my girlfriend’s first language so I’ve had a lot of regular practice with it, I don’t consider myself fluent at this point but I can hold conversations with native speakers without too much of an issue

With Ukrainian I can understand quite a bit but I haven’t had much practice speaking it with other people at all yet. I have the basic phrases memorized, things like привіт, будь ласка, доброго ранку, добрий вечір, дякую, як справи, etc. but I don’t think I could hold a conversation speaking only in Ukrainian. I’ve been studying it kind of off and on for a year or so, and I listen to some Ukrainian music fairly often

Serbian I’ve been struggling to learn, I’ve been working on it for about 5 months. I think learning Russian first made it weirdly harder since the sentences are structured fairly differently. When it’s written, I can understand quite a bit, but if someone walked up to me and just started speaking Serbian I’d be completely lost

I started learning Swedish yesterday. My native language is Dutch. I started by reading a pronunciation guide, but (and this is so childish) I had to put the book away for laughing so hard after reading the Swedish word for meatballs: köttbullar.

Today I will make a second attempt. I hope I can keep it contained to a short chuckle.

I'm learning Irish. My schedule is crazy busy, but I do a lot of driving for work so I listen to Irish speaking lessons. I also do this only while I'm on the road because my Irish boyfriend has no idea I'm doing this so I can speak Irish on our wedding day.

I can say things like where I've been yesterday, where I am today, where I'll be tomorrow, what are you doing, what were you doing, it was great craic, I don't know, I'd like a pint of Guinness, please.

I'll probably get made fun of for speaking the Ulster dialect (his family is all Dublin), but my favourite instructor that I've found is from Belfast and at least I'll be able to speak it. ☘️

jag lära svenska för många år sedan. but never been any more motivated so my skill is very limited.

I learned to read cyrilic last year because I had to read some papers about central asian history written in russian, but I didn't learn russian.

while at that, I found out that hangeul is a very simple writing system and it is, I figured it out immediately but I still had to look up the tables to write. russian cyrilic is still more intuitive to write. But I also didn't learn korean.

تعلمت اللغة العربية 10 سنوات. But then I never use arabic anymore. It's pretty cool somtimes to be able to read arabic writing and calligraphy. I used to won several arabic calligraphy contest.

and then I also can understand 2 local languages when people around talk, but I can't speak it well.

Basically I never get motivated enough to be good at anything even in everything not just language :/