Ask Lemmy

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.

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

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 you kinda end up learning traditional French too along the way. This is my third language.

• Duo for daily practice and grammar, but it makes a lot of mistakes
• Work group to practice speaking
• I switched various daily apps to French
• Grabbed a few comic books in French, happy to say I'm now past those :)
• Québécois friends for slang and informal reference
• Recently been playing Pokemon ZA in French (extra fun since it's in Poke-Paris), quite pleased with it!

I'm about a year in, and I'm low-level conversational. Solidly A2. Basically just taking any resources I can find, I plan to look for a proper class soon.

Le chemin est très agréable, je le trouve bien!

Japanese! I originally thought I might make quick progress, but there were surprising number of characters I've never seen before. So I just decided to learn everything from complete scratch so that I don't ever have to backtrack. Everything is written in hiragana at the current stage, and that's throwing me off a lot too. But I have to learn how they're read anyway so, oh well.

Spanish. I'm not consistent and go through bursts but I know more now than I have before.

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 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.

what sucks is when i tell people this they think i am weird or mentally ill. nobody i know or have met in the past year has seen it as a cool or fun thing.

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 check out !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz for this kind of discussion on the regular!

Esperanto, very slowly, using Duolingo. Why? Just because.

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

Japanese. I'm not focused or committed enough.

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 it's behind me.

Edit: just a positive note, I can now easily follow along with German-language talks, musicals, articles etc which feels like a superpower!

I’m also learning French right now. I took Spanish in high school, which helped a lot with understanding Romance languages and the basics of learning another language. I’ve found that learning vocabulary French is fairly similar, but listening and understanding is so much more difficult because it’s so much less phonetic than other languages.

Dutch and badly.

I moved to Denmark, so I'm learning danish now. It's one of the languages of all times for sure. Pronunciation is hyper specific and very different than the written words.

But, depending on the day, getting there. I deal with a lot more of it at work than most in my situation, so it's expediting my learning (and a massive imbalance to my free time)

Español, Deutsch, Français, a me ka ʻŌlelo.

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.

Does Python count? If so, it's going okay.

I keep bouncing around on the sources for where I'm studying from. I started with w3schools, but didn't like it. I went to https://programming-24.mooc.fi/ and I like it. I'm currently also watching these videos being used for prep on a certification, but they're not great - the slides sometimes will have errors (print statement without closing parantheses for example) and sometimes the instructor will read one thing but the slide says something else (instructor says "max" but slide says "min" - luckily this time it was just the names of variables rather than actual functions or something). They also don't go in depth on a lot of methods, and there's no good exercises or anything. But at least it'll get me a cert if I pass the tests, which is paid for by my work.

German and Spanish. It’s ok, though every time I think I have an alright though basic understanding, someone starts speaking way too quickly and it all just falls apart. Also, speaking is difficult, and reaching for the correct words in the correct language is even harder. Many times I want to answer in German if someone asks me something in Spanish, and vice versa

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.

What's the vibe like at these meetups you're going to? What kinds of things do you talk about, what are the people who go like? Sounds fun, though I think I'd be too self-conscious to attend.

For my part, I've been learning Japanese. It's been good, but very slow. Focused on mostly Kanji, Anki, and listening/reading this year (rather than staying with my textbook). Feel like my foundation is way more solid now, and characters I don't recognize are the exception (by a slight margin), rather than everywhere always.

I need to learn German, it's literally life or death situation for me, if I don't learn it very soon, I will not be able to remain where I am, and if I go back to the country I'm from they will kill me either slowly or quickly, but not pleasantly for sure.
The learning process is going not great. Not great at all.

I'm on a strong streak with my Japanese self study. Been going for over a year and I'm somewhere around N4-N3 level. It's very rewarding to understand long conversations, but it also feels like progress is slow. My grammar is pretty good now, but learning vocabulary and kanji is like a Sysyphian quest.

I'd say I usually get in at least 30 minutes of listening practice every day. I'm still not speaking much, but I think this is OK. I've heard VR chat is a good resource for that, but the timezone mismatch makes it pretty hard.

Overall I recommend immersion based study with a strong emphasis on input (listening + reading) before doing much output. Duolingo is a waste of time if you're serious about approaching fluency. I've never seen a single comprehensive product that actually works for learning Japanese. You have to consume native materials, and there are some good tools that make it easier, but you need to be a bit savvy to stitch them all together into a cohesive workflow.