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i gave a go at this a few years back. my ex is lao and i really developed a love of lao, thai, and viet culture. it was covid times and i was spending a lot of time at home alone when i wasn't at work and gave a go at learning Vietnamese. i did the first 2 (i think?) pimsleur programs and was doing some vocab flashcards. i got to a pretty basic understanding level where i could follow along with simple, slow conversation, but man a tonal language is hard for a native speaker of language with no (grammatical) tones. i kinda lost focus and fell off. tbh, it's hard to stay enthusiastic about it when there are no natives nearby to converse with and i otherwise have no practical, ideological or cultural reason to learn it. it was fun but i just couldn't stick to it, ultimately i want to try again, but with something simpler and closer to me, culturally. the obvious choices are - french - im ontarian so there are TONS of french speakers nearby, both quebecois and parisian french - german - i work for a german company, and we have lots of german born canadians here + german visitors all the time. also i will likely be going to germany for training and education at some point - italian - my cultural background. my dad's side of the family (who tbh i don't really associate with anymore), at least the grandparents, speak abruzzese italian leaning toward italian. i think the language is elite in terms of fun to speak and i also love italian culture, history, etc, plus the cultural component of it being "the motherland" to my colonizer family. my strategy this time is to use "Language Transfer" to get started, do the first chapter of "Coffee Break Italian" on youtube, then pick up a grammar book + practice vocab using Anki. then probably maybe continue with coffee break if it was enjoyable and try to listen to italian youtube and stuff anyone else learning a language? have any tips or strategies?
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Aug 4, 2024 17:53
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:have any tips or strategies? Immersion works great. If you study a language for a year or two, or whatever, go travel to a country where it is used. It really cements your learning into place. Hotels, shops, restaurants, etc., use the native language first. Fall back on English or whatever if need be; but diving into the language(and culture) for a week is worth months of studying at home. Plus, a fun travel vacation.
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Aug 4, 2024 18:04
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I tried to learn Spanish for a couple weeks using Duolingo last month, didn't work out.
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Aug 4, 2024 18:06
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I learned Latin a while back and I'm lovely at it now. I'm down to try.
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Aug 4, 2024 18:10
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I've been learning french for almost 2 years now. My SO grew up in random Canadian french schools but we live in the states. Pro tips. You can get Duolingo for FREE. Just say you're a classroom and create a room for your very real school. You don't even need anybody in it. No ads, 99% of the features. If you're doing french, "French in Action" is a must, it's free because it's from the late 80s but all the videos and resources are available. Last tip, uhh, do your language every day I guess. Take one break and you'll keep taking longer breaks (I stopped for almost a year). Watch tv in lang with no english subs, listen to music in target lang, etc etc.
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Aug 4, 2024 18:18
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Grey Cat posted:I've been learning french for almost 2 years now. My SO grew up in random Canadian french schools but we live in the states. I've never done any heavy drug deals, but I've been to a few amateur ones and that above, that feels set up-ish Edit: that is suspiciously simple nullandvoid fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Aug 4, 2024 |
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Aug 4, 2024 19:46
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As a professional interpreter and vague polyglot You just gotta smash a bunch of common words Check out how adjectives, verbs and nouns work re conjugation and gently caress you are half way there
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Aug 4, 2024 21:52
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just learn the swears you don't need much else
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Aug 4, 2024 22:05
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french if you want to be cool. german if you want to be a suckass. italian if you want to not actually learn much because you won’t be able to use it day to day
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Aug 4, 2024 22:09
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the real one to learn though is chinese because their part of the internet has the best comedy and it’s not even close
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Aug 4, 2024 22:12
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i practiced german for a little bit like 5 years ago. took 2 years of it in high school and it was pretty easy to pick up the basics again, but i was nowhere near fluent enough to have real conversations or read complex writing. stopped again after half a year or so. seemed kind of pointless because every single german person also speaks english. you'll get the most mileage out of french for sure, they're less likely to also speak english (or to admit it if they can)
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Aug 4, 2024 22:13
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Hi OP. I love learning languages. I've studied about 5 to various degrees of success (presently working on ancient greek). Here's my tips 1. Lots of input. You want something you can juuuuuust barely understand, ideally. Pokemon dubs are often brought up for beginners because it's simple familiar plots with lots of proper nouns. After that books, movies, TV shows, podcasts of your interest. I would rather blow my brains out than read children's books. 2. The fastest way for you to build your vocabulary is Anki. Download it and get cramming. Make your own cards, do not use someone else's cards. 3. Don't use Duolingo. 4. Remember you have been studying English for 30+ some years. The fastest I have heard people reading C2 that I actually believe is about 3 years of 3 hours/day practice. You'll be embarrassed and humiliated a bunch in your journey. Don't get discouraged.
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Aug 4, 2024 23:12
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Also worth noting only like 3 languages on duolingo are even worth looking at. The rest are trash without hardly any content or consistency. There's also a million language learning discords or language exchange discords. As long as your language has any online interest you can find one.
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Aug 4, 2024 23:40
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Arrhythmia posted:Hi OP. I love learning languages. I've studied about 5 to various degrees of success (presently working on ancient greek). Here's my tips thanks, good tips. exactly what i was looking for. point #2 - make my own cards instead of others, why is that? id have thought grabbing someone else's "1000 basic simple [language] words" would be great when i don't even know what i don't know yet Grey Cat posted:There's also a million language learning discords or language exchange discords. As long as your language has any online interest you can find one. drat, that's a great point actually. one of the rare times i will actually opt to "join the discord" (otherwise hate being part of like 100 channels). italian should have some good ones i assume
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Aug 5, 2024 01:29
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I would genuinely be surprised if there wasn't an Italian learning discord.
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Aug 5, 2024 01:30
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really strongly learning italian. french is really obvious yeah and i do have what i would say is like A2 level understanding already. enough that when im in rural quebec, i can converse with locals in mixed english and french and they reciprocate, and i can generally understand simple spoken straight french. but tbh i just have no passion or love for it. i feel like id easily lose focus on it. with italian too i can transition some of the language structure and vocab at a later time, no?
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Aug 5, 2024 01:34
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I have a child's understanding of Spanish but between that and a broad understanding of English I can puzzle out most romance languages
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Aug 5, 2024 02:31
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:thanks, good tips. exactly what i was looking for. point #2 - make my own cards instead of others, why is that? id have thought grabbing someone else's "1000 basic simple [language] words" would be great when i don't even know what i don't know yet Bunch of reasons. 1. you'll want to include various pieces of information in your cards and the deck you download won't include it, or vice versa. you'll just get pissed off if, say, you like to learn the genders of words as "le chat" but the cards give it as "chat m." 2. seeing the card in context for the first time will build stronger associations and make it easier to learn. plus without the context distinguishing shades of meaning in synonyms will be far harder. 3. this is more of a technical problem and I'm sure there's a solution but a lot of shared decks default as "alphabetical order" so you learn the 1000 most common a word in French, then b words,...
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Aug 5, 2024 03:25
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Italian is pretty cool. I feel it just matters more what your interested in of those 3. French is the one that will let you communicate on the most continents. But there's more reasons than that to pick one.
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Aug 5, 2024 03:52
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I just know all the languages, it's actually super easy cause often people are just saying the same things but with different words. Seriously tho, I did French at university and have like lovely/childlike conversational skills in a few others (I can help tourists find places with my broken skills plus their broken English) but I should really knuckle down and do some proper study to know them properly. I think one of my biggest problems is while I can hamfist writing or conversation in a few Western script style languages (romance and germanic languages mainly) I have absolutely no loving idea about any Asian languages because I can handle the romanised versions of words but the symbol scripts are completely out of my league. I should probably try learning one of them honestly.
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Aug 5, 2024 04:30
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:really strongly learning italian. french is really obvious yeah and i do have what i would say is like A2 level understanding already. enough that when im in rural quebec, i can converse with locals in mixed english and french and they reciprocate, and i can generally understand simple spoken straight french. you're absolutely right. if you feel passionate about sapmi or sanskrit it would probably be a better use of your tone than French
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Aug 5, 2024 04:31
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:anyone else learning a language? have any tips or strategies?
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Aug 5, 2024 05:05
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I already speak fluent Italian, please choose another one so we don't overlap hcotc
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Aug 5, 2024 05:20
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Toxic Mental posted:I already speak fluent Italian, please choose another one so we don't overlap hcotc Is there a spreadsheet so I can keep track of what languages I'm allowed to learn?
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Aug 5, 2024 05:21
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Grey Cat posted:Is there a spreadsheet so I can keep track of what languages I'm allowed to learn? All that’s left is Esperanto. Sorry.
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Aug 5, 2024 05:34
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noticing that op did not include Goku in the choices, thinking to dock a point or two from my original vote
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Aug 5, 2024 05:42
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I'm learning the universal language of posting
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Aug 5, 2024 05:43
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Toxic Mental posted:All that’s left is Esperanto. Sorry. Esperanto is the Milhouse of languages.
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Aug 5, 2024 05:59
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I used to understand a decent amount of spoken arabic and speak real basic sentences, but a lot of that was because I wanted to know what my former in-laws were saying about the "majnoon amriki" i should try picking it back up, i always got poo poo from egyptians and saudis when i tried to practice with them because "i sounded like an american with a drawl (no loving poo poo)" and "spoke Arabi like a Palestinian (no loving poo poo)" so I ended up getting disheartened and gave up
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Aug 5, 2024 06:06
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MrQwerty posted:I used to understand a decent amount of spoken 
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Aug 5, 2024 06:10
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Phóg ma thóin, OP!  Haha, tá mé ag magadh! Conas atá tu, cócó te ar an tolg, mo chara?  ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yeah but the thing about Irish gaelic is that it's practically dead. I remember bits and pieces that I was taught in school but it's useless using it to talk to the few people left who still use it as a first language. We have little isolated pockets of native speakers called gaeltachts - and when someone from one of them travels to another they can't understand each other. Nationalists here in the north tried to get a gaelic language act passed and Unionists weren't going to let it happen unless there was an Ulster Scots act passed too. Ulster Scots is not a language - it's a dialect. Anyone who speaks english as a first language can understand it.   
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Aug 5, 2024 07:35
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I already know three I can't be bothered with more. I knew English and Afrikaans growing up and my German by now is pretty decent after like four years of learning it and not in the dinky DuoLingo way
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Aug 5, 2024 07:50
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There are already way more people that speak English than I care to talk with, why would I bother with another language? Think for a second, jeez.
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Aug 5, 2024 08:28
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Toxic Mental posted:There are already way more people that speak English than I care to talk with, why would I bother with another language? Think for a second, jeez. You could have so many more people to ignore the more languages you learn. It's the ultimate cold antisocial goon achievement, learning as many languages as possible only to never use them with another person.
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Aug 5, 2024 08:30
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gently caress it Learn Toki pona in a month Its great fun
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Aug 5, 2024 10:22
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Valko posted:Phóg ma thóin, OP! When I visited Ireland in 2016 I was told that children were starting to learn Irish Gaelic in school again as a way to help rebuild Irish culture and I saw it around pretty often, did that kind of wash out? It seemed cool to me for them to reclaim that.
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Aug 5, 2024 11:07
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In other Celtic news I think promotion of traditional language in Wales has been very successful? When I was in Cardiff I was shouted at by a gang of kids in Welsh 
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Aug 5, 2024 11:13
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je parle francais beaucoup...
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Aug 5, 2024 11:36
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Wertjoe posted:When I visited Ireland in 2016 I was told that children were starting to learn Irish Gaelic in school again as a way to help rebuild Irish culture and I saw it around pretty often, did that kind of wash out? It seemed cool to me for them to reclaim that. Was it North or South? I went to Catholic school in the North and we all had mandatory gaelic classes for the first three years of high school. After that you choose which languages (1 or 2) you want to advance in. I choose French thinking it would be more useful but later in life it turned out Polish would have been a great help (no option to choose that). Some people say they learned a bit of it in primary school but I didn't - probably their teacher taught them a few phrases and how to count to 10. Simple stuff like that. I'm not sure what it was like in the South but I was down there at a music festival in the early 2000's. When people asked where I was from and I told them a lot of dumbasses said "Dia Duit" to me hoping to confuse me. You should have seen the look on their faces when I answered back "Dia is Muire Duit!" That's a very formal way of saying hello to each other in gaelic - they both mean "God bless you" and "God and Mary bless you" I prefer to use "Conas ata tu?" which means "How are you?"
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Aug 5, 2024 12:04
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Valko posted:Was it North or South? I went to Catholic school in the North and we all had mandatory gaelic classes for the first three years of high school. After that you choose which languages (1 or 2) you want to advance in. I choose French thinking it would be more useful but later in life it turned out Polish would have been a great help (no option to choose that). Some people say they learned a bit of it in primary school but I didn't - probably their teacher taught them a few phrases and how to count to 10. Simple stuff like that. I was in the south. I remember hearing about this while watching TV at a bar in Dublin but also a tour guide type talking about it while I was eaves dropping somewhere in County Kerry.
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Aug 5, 2024 12:30
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