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!

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Im doing Pimsleur to help with mr very basic Italian and it’s really helping.

Just started German on Duolingo to refresh my knowledge of it.

Once I hit A2 in Italian I might try and improve my French again. I don’t want to do it now as French words and pronunciation keep leaking into my Italian when I’m speaking.
 
I made Finnish one of my top 5 priority languages because of how badass it looks and I really wanted to know how agglutinative languages work. I am also hoping to tackle all the Romance and Germanic languages before I die.

I sound high pitch speaking Finnish while sounding low pitch speaking Arabic while I sound unchanged speaking Japanese.
 
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Lunar Eclipse Paradox said:
I made Finnish one of my top 5 priority languages because of how badass it looks and I really wanted to know how agglutinative languages work. I am also hoping to tackle all the Romance and Germanic languages before I die.

I sound high pitch speaking Finnish while sounding low pitch speaking Arabic while I sound unchanged speaking Japanese.
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Chris Chan, is that you?
 
I don't want to Double Post. But Angki is a really good flashcard app if you want to learn certain words and phrases in any language including Kanji, Chinese Characters, Abjads. Etc. It's not only for Languages but other topics too. The limit per day is set to 20 (which I find to be a reasonable limit) but can be set to different amounts according to your preference.
 
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The proper way to use anki is to set your limit to 40 a day and do that for a month. After that, become frustrated with your low retention rate and high review count. Delete your deck and start a new one. Repeat this until you die of retardation.
 
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残念。 said:
The proper way to use anki is to set your limit to 40 a day and do that for a month. After that, become frustrated with your low retention rate and high review cound. Delete your deck and start a new one. Repeat this until you die of retardation.
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So far I've been using it for French, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Mandarin. It should be an easy way to build up my vocabulary in these languages as I continue.
 
crossposting this from the Chinese learning thread. Some of the web extensions listed can also work with other languages.
crippling laziness said:
Here are some useful web extensions I'm currently using to learn Chinese:

Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary: Self explanatory. When you mouse over Chinese characters a dictionary translation will pop up. Very convenient.

- You can go to the Chinese wikipedia https://baike.baidu.com/ and read articles on topics you are interested in.
- Youtube has full length Chinese TV shows if you search using Chinese words. For example, search 電視劇 for drama series, or 喜劇 for comedies. If you filter for subtitles/cc, the extension will also work on the subtitles.


Language Reactor: I use this for watching netflix shows. It pairs Chinese subtitles with English translations together, and it also allows you to quickly rewind/jump through lines. I recommend watching Scissor Seven, that show is peak.


But what if the Chinese characters are inside of an image and you can't use Zhongwen to translate it? That's when you use
Copyfish: This extension is able to detect Chinese characters in screengrabs, much like how smartphone cameras work. You can then use Google translate to get the translation. Here are the instructions on how to use it: Link.

I mainly use this extension for reading manhua. Here's a good site: https://www.colamanga.com/. There are also sites for adult manhua like this one: https://www.freexcomic.com/ (NSFW obviously). Now you can goon and learn Chinese at the same time, which is somewhat more productive than just gooning. I'm ashamed to admit that this is what initially got me to start learning Chinese, but I have since branched out to other media.

I feel like this method of learning Chinese (viewing Chinese media) is way more effective and sustainable than the traditional method of rote memorization.
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Even though it may take me 2 - 5 years to finally be fluent in Japanese (depending on how lazy I am). I won't be stopping. I always wanted to learn something about every language. The studying of every language will keep going on so long as I am alive. It's really fun to just go back at words you missed and work on from there. I had the most fun with Spanish and East Asian Languages.
 
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I have this recent... drive to learn either Russian, French, or Yiddish, because one of my maternal great-great-grandmothers was born and or raised (maybe not specifically born) somewhere near me (West Yorkshire, Leeds kind of area) to Jewish parents, between the 1900s-early 1910s.

Actually, I have this goal in mind that applies to other parts of my family background, where, if I find out they're from a certain place, I aim to go there, even if it's gone/desolate/a complete shithole by the time I arrive. Sort of like making a Who Do You Think You Are? holiday (vacation) of it.

@Lunar Eclipse Paradox That reminds me: I watched the Uzumaki anime. Unfortunately, it was in English, but, on the brightside, Patrick Seitz and Roger Craig Smith were in it.
 
I've studied many languages (Around 50) but for most it's nowhere near the magnitude as Spanish and Japanese. But I wanted to master as many as possible before I die so I refuse to quit researching though I go at my own pace because stress. (I have generalized anxiety disorder unfortunately). Here's my information so far.

Navajo is one of the very hardest languages anyone could master even for someone raised by the tribe so godspeed to anyone teaching this to children in schools near the four corners. It's also pretty cool that Duolingo (as flawed as the app is) has courses for that language too. Navajo is a polysynthetic language where verbs and nouns change depending on the situation, aspect, etc. It's a language requiring so much mental math. Blackfoot is another language I have interest in learning considering it's close to where I live and it's a very endangered language (around 2000 speakers).

Indonesian has a reputation of being one of the easiest languages to learn because of how simple it is. However, for English speakers. It starts fairly hard but gets very easy once you get the hang of it. Also when learning Japanese. I realized it's extremely simple compared to English despite being an agglutinative language. I was able to get used to the agglutination and the SOV word order fairly quickly. Like Indonesian is pretty phonetic and is overall a much simpler language. The real complexity arises is learning all that Kanji (which I am barely starting to get used to). Mandarin is also extremely simple compared to English. It's why foreigners consider English to be the hardest language. Spanish is relatively simple compared to English despite being a Fusional language and it's more intimidating verb conjugation chart but is very complex compared to Indonesian. Russian is more complex than Spanish but less complex than English due to English having a larger vocabulary than Russian though Russian has a more intellectual grammar system.

Despite the thousands of symbols of Chinese and Japanese. Arabic writing has been taking more time for me to get used it. I haven't gotten very far in Arabic. Only a few phrases and words. However, Arabic has so many different dialects and it sounds different from one region to the next. Arabic also happens to have a vocabulary 100x larger than English. Arabic I can recall is a very complex language though Navajo takes the cake for it's complexity.
 
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To keep this thread alive. I'm gonna post something about how Learning Spanish does most of your work for Portuguese and vice versa. There's a reason why many Spanish Speakers can understand some of what Portuguese Speakers are saying and vice verse. They're pretty similar as so much of their words are loan words from each other. So anyone who has learned Spanish or Portuguese would have an almost completely effortless time learning the other language. With that being said, there are still plenty of words from Spanish and Portuguese that are completely different from one another. It's not all cakewalk here.

Like watching Funny Games (1997 film), I noticed many German words are similar to English. It feels like the same thing learning Spanish and watching City of God where many of the Portuguese words feel similar to Spanish and it just feels so much easier.
 
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Lunar Eclipse Paradox said:
To keep this thread alive. I'm gonna post something about how Learning Spanish does most of your work for Portuguese and vice versa. There's a reason why many Spanish Speakers can understand some of what Portuguese Speakers are saying and vice verse. They're pretty similar as so much of their words are loan words from each other. So anyone who has learned Spanish or Portuguese would have an almost completely effortless time learning the other language. With that being said, there are still plenty of words from Spanish and Portuguese that are completely different from one another. It's not all cakewalk here.

Like watching Funny Games (1997 film), I noticed many German words are similar to English. It feels like the same thing learning Spanish and watching City of God where many of the Portuguese words feel similar to Spanish and it just feels so much easier.
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You’ll also be able to understand a lot of Italian and a bit of French as all those languages are essentially dialects of Latin.
 
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Some of my language learning books.
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FedPostalService said:
It keeps tripping me up as I’ll accidentally fall into French pronunciation
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Tell me about it. Since I study Spanish and French along with Italian. I'm gonna expect that a lot.
 
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I've come to find that Mandarin Chinese is kind of the cheat code for learning Japanese. Since Mandarin uses Hanzi (Which is mostly similar to Kanji) with Pinyin, It mostly helps with remembering what each symbol means and the fact Mandarin's word order is more similar to that of English and is Analytic makes this more straightforward. However, Many Japanese Kanji and Chinese Characters don't entirely mean the same thing though which explained the "kind of" in the statement.
 
Just arrived in Mexico and I've been practicing Spanish with the locals. It went pretty well for the most part, I understood most things. 1 year of practicing Spanish got me fairly well. Will continue to practice Spanish while im there.
 
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I was told by a Mexican friend of mine that Spanish speakers have a better time learning Korean than English speakers do due to similar speech patterns. So learning Spanish will help you get used to Korean more.

Edit: I also find Korean to be rather easy now that I'm used to it. French on the other hand is rather difficult.
 
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I dropped all the languages I barely learned (for now) and focused on the Japanese language (while also making sure to retain what I know about Spanish). Focusing on so many languages simultaneously doesn't work well as I expected. After I become proficient in Japanese, I plan to focus on Mandarin and Spanish. After that's done, I plan to return to Russian, Ukrainian, Korean and Finnish and then the rest of the languages.

I wasn't having fun immersing myself in the Spanish culture of Mexico. Most people switched to English due to the breath of my accent and 1 month ago, I was nearly killed in a robbery attempt. Mexico (specifically Puerto Vallarta) got very expensive leaving me with little room to breathe. As much as I love the Spanish language. I shifted my focus away from it. But I do have language learning materials in Spanish and will be using it since I can read and understand it mostly so I won't forget it because I got so far.

The language I wanted to learn most (other than Spanish) is Japanese because I am a massive weeb. Spent like 4 hours learning it today and decided to immerse myself in that language by listening to Japanese music and watching Japanese streams. I have been to Japan before and I loved it there (as a tourist). But I don't want to renounce my Canadian citizenship to live in Japan (unless Canada becomes the 51st state of the USA (Not because the US itself but because of Elon Musk's stronghold over it)). Wish me luck. I am around 100 hours in.
 
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