The Language Learning Thread - Interested in learning a new language? Already learning a language and wanna share your experiences? Need to find a partner to practice with? Come sperg here!

[Crex Crex]

Does anyone know where I can learn Akkadian or Sumerian?

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Because my younger sister is obsessed with German, I decided to learn some German so I could help her.

Does anyone know where I can learn Akkadian or Sumerian?

That's gonna be tough. I wanted to learn Ket however there are very little resources in learning it and many of it's vocabulary is lost to time. So Akkadian and Sumerian is gonna be very difficult to find resources.

 

[Deer]

tfw ontop of having to learn Russian I also have to learn Ukrainian because Ukrainians use both and sometimes speak in a thing called surzhik and I can't understand a bit of what they talk about when they start speaking in surzhik..

 

[Devout Muslim]

I really want to learn Mandarin so that I can visit China and read my xianxia web novels before they are translated

If you have the time and tenacity I would recommend it. China is a lovely country with very friendly people.

The grammar required for basic communication is actually pretty similar to English, it’s just the phonology and writing system which takes a while to wrap your head around. Obviously the more complex grammar could be difficult but I never got that far.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I decided I will be picking up any language on the way but keep my focus on the select few languages (Spanish, Russian and Japanese) whilst learning the other languages at a slower pace to avoid cramming, mixing and confusing them. I will switch the focus depending on the situation though. But I also decided to learn Turkish to help me with Arabic, Korean and Japanese as it's kind of similar to Arabic, has a lot of speakers and is agglutinate and SOV like Korean and Japanese but uses the Latin alphabet. (And because I wanted to visit Turkey one day). I'm still keeping my patience if my progress is slow but eventually knowing more languages make learning other languages easier.

Edit: Before learning any other language. I will see if I can maintain my Spanish, Russian, French, Japanese, German, Korean, Mandarin, Turkish and Arabic. I also avoided very small languages because they're much harder to maintain.

Edit: I also decided 10 or so languages is a reasonable limit.

 

[GratsTheat783]

I found this site called Omniglot. It has a bloody ton of information on different languages, writing systems, as well as pages for "Constructed Scripts" (basically a language made by one guy or group of guys).
It also has stuff on Old Languages, like Old English or Old Norse.

 

[Desu Mountain]

For those learning Japanese, I found an American conservative youtuber who makes videos for a Japanese audience, so now you can hear your politisperging in moonspeak.

 

[FedPostalService]

Anyone know an app that will help me conjugate Italian verbs that I can just sit and do it autisticly for half an hour a day until I remember it?

Busuu is ok for rules, but it’ll display that on one slide and then just punish you if you don’t remember it five minutes later.

 

[GratsTheat783]

Anyone know an app that will help me conjugate Italian verbs that I can just sit and do it autisticly for half an hour a day until I remember it?

Busuu is ok for rules, but it’ll display that on one slide and then just punish you if you don’t remember it five minutes later.

Maybe Anki. It lets you create and download flashcard decks to memorise things. You could probably make it work with that.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I've set myself 3 top priority languages with the other 6 as occasional learning so when I master one language, I have enough information to confidently learn the rest.

Top Priority Languages include Spanish, Russian and Japanese (Since I am most proficient in them and can actually say sentences in them). The rest are German, French, Turkish, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic.

Since our family has been thinking about planning future Japan and Mexico trips, I can use this to my advantage.

Anyone know an app that will help me conjugate Italian verbs that I can just sit and do it autisticly for half an hour a day until I remember it?

Busuu is ok for rules, but it’ll display that on one slide and then just punish you if you don’t remember it five minutes later.

Just learn the Italian vocabulary and the verb conjugations will catch up with you eventually. That's what I did learning Spanish and Russian. Also, any site that requires you to learn conjugations first is a flaw within the model so your best bet is to use Anki if that's the case. It's a small hurdle to clear.

 

[GratsTheat783]

Top Priority Languages include Spanish, Russian and Japanese (Since I am most proficient in them and can actually say sentences in them). The rest are German, French, Turkish, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic.

What resources would you recommend for German? I started with Duolingo, but am mainly using a site called Memrise, which uses clips of natives speaking. I am going to look into an Anki deck for it soon and I plan to use Todaii German to get learn to read it.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

What resources would you recommend for German? I started with Duolingo, but am mainly using a site called Memrise, which uses clips of natives speaking. I am going to look into an Anki deck for it soon and I plan to use Todaii German to get learn to read it.

I've used Mondly as it's a great resource for beginners of a language but unfortunately doesn't yet have resources for advanced speakers so I also recommend a vocabulary book as well. Once you complete it's course, you'll likely be good enough to interact with locals but it will still sound a bit like broken German. They do have lessons for certain occupations though. For Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic. I also had to buy books to practice writing them.

I'm not a fan of Duolingo though. Their idea to removing useful features to turn it's site into an addicting dopamine app rubs me the wrong way but I do like how it includes the Navajo language. A language Mondly doesn't have, though Mondly does have Thai.

 

[GratsTheat783]

I've used Mondly as it's a great resource for beginners of a language but unfortunately doesn't yet have resources for advanced speakers so I also recommend a vocabulary book as well. Once you complete it's course, you'll likely be good enough to interact with locals but it will still sound a bit like broken German. They do have lessons for certain occupations though. For Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic. I also had to buy books to practice writing them.

I'm not a fan of Duolingo though. Their idea to removing useful features to turn it's site into an addicting dopamine app rubs me the wrong way but I do like how it includes the Navajo language. A language Mondly doesn't have, though Mondly does have Thai.

I've heard a lot of mixed feelings about Duolingo. Particularly, I've heard it's not good for Asian languages. From my own experience, I would get frustrated with it since it ended up being a gate for the rest of my day, the English translations were all over the place in terms of strictness and I would always forget stuff immediately after finishing a lesson. I also just don't like the cartoons on it.
I also agree with you that the old version of it was better.

Since you're doing Spanish, Russian and Japanese, I would recommend trying Lingodeer. It has all those languages and I found it quite good for Japanese when I was interested in that. The only reason I stopped is because you need to pay for it and it's quite costly over time.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Japanese is actually a fairly easy language to speak. It's just a very hard language to read and write.

Also if you want to understand the Japanese sentence structure better.


Also, Korean is a fairly easy language to write but a very hard language to speak.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

I found this site called Omniglot. It has a bloody ton of information on different languages, writing systems, as well as pages for "Constructed Scripts" (basically a language made by one guy or group of guys).
It also has stuff on Old Languages, like Old English or Old Norse.
View attachment 6206744

Omniglot is still around?? I remember browsing that in like 2002. They even still have the pages on Hylian script

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

One of my friends suggested that I learn some Greek since he lives there so that's what I did. I decided to learn some Italian too and it is very similar to Spanish. I kept my priority languages at only 3 so I learn them faster but I'd pick up the others along the way. That way I learn the languages I really want faster while still retaining knowledges about the other ones just in case. I also decided to try Polish and it's very similar to Russian. Just has a Latin script though.

Edit: I decided to learn 3 at once. (Spanish, Russian and Japanese). These languages are my top priority. But I plan to learn as much as I want. Just these other languages are done in a much slower pace and is used to compliment the languages I am learning. Ex. Compare Russian to Polish and etc. I'll learn a different language faster if I plan go to said area, Ex. Learn Swedish faster if I plan to go to Sweden and etc. That way I don't overwhelm myself.

Realistically though. I am most likely gonna spend the rest of my life trying to maintain Russian, Spanish and Japanese.

 

[The Holy Empress Theodora]

This is a short book about acquiring a new language instead of learning it, I haven't tested the suggestions yet but the theory is interesting.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Although I've tried more than 40 languages. The ones I truly focus on are Spanish, Russian and Japanese and I have been getting enough progress to the point that other people are saying I am able to speak these languages.

Of the rest of the languages I am not as focused on I still learn them occasionally to help me with the languages I am focused on. For example. I like learning Finnish and Arabic because these languages are very interesting to me. I get interested in learning Ukranian, Czech, Polish, etc dye to it's similarities with Russian.

Then I also discovered English finishes much of the work with Dutch, Afrikaans and Norwegian making them extremely easy to me.

The languages I find to be the hardest for me are Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, etc. Indonesian isn't as easy at first but I heard it becomes much more straightforward later.

With that being said, I don't know if I would know over 40 languages in a long period of time or would just be stuck maintaining Spanish, Russian and Japanese (with maybe another language like Finnish or Polish if I am lucky).

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I decided to put Korean in my top priority language because a lot of people I follow speak that language as well as it complimenting Japanese pretty well and I have someone wanting to learn Korean.

My medium priority languages depend on what I feel like learning. One time it was French, another time it was Finnish and another time it would be German.

I keep top priority languages for a select few. If I can only maintain a few languages, I will keep at that.

 

[Welsh Catgirl Enjoyer]

So I'm potentially at JLPT N5 level after about 4-5 months. I still want to go through the rest of Genki 1 but I've exhausted the JLPT N5 lessons, vocabulary and kanji on the site I'm using, plus I've exhausted the Genki 1 Anki deck.

Feeling pretty good considering my last language learning experience was over 10 years ago in school doing 1 hour of french a week. And that wasn't really a subject I gave a shit about. So it's cool I can now form basic sentences like:

自分には日本語を教えています

and

時々で日本語はむずかしいとおもうます