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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.
Well I think it's cool! I studied Russian at uni and I'm taking Japanese evening classes at the moment, so I know both the struggle and the joy of learning both.
my russian classes are great. i really like the teacher/group i am with. they legit want to learn the language.
with japanese i haven't found that. it's frustrating. every class i take with Japanese it's just people who want to be tourists and don't really want to learn the language.
I'm not sure how long you've been doing Japanese, but I find that as you stick with it, the people who are less committed will drop off. When I started Japanese classes last year, there were about 20 in the group, but now there are only 6 left (including people who joined along the way) If you're able to self-study, you could also do that for a bit and join classes at a higher level
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.
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.
i found an easy and fun way to learn to speak it: take your favorite sitcom series, preferably a fast paced one with subtitles. pause after each sentence and try to repeat it. in the beginning you may have to learn the difficult sounds with help from youtube. went from being too ashamed to even speak it to fluent in a few months. and i used the office and brooklyn nine nine.
Your writing skills are way above-average. Well done!
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.
Hello,
If you are learning Catalan, feel free to join !barcelona@piefed.social , most of the publications there are in Catalan
Merci, a més de pel català serà útil per coses de la ciutat
De res!
Japanese. I'm not focused or committed enough.
fwiw i've tried to learn it 3 times. 2 failures were because the classes i was taking was full of tourists who dind't really want to do the work. and the teachers sucked. it would take us like 4 classes to learn basic greetings.
i'm doing well now because i'm doing it alone and away from the tourist classes. just get Genki or Japanese for busy people and work on it an hour or so each day.
if you can't do that you won't learn it. it's not hard, it just requires a lot of time commitment.
にゃ :3
😼
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.
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
Te recomiendo unos podcasts.
Por si no lo sabias los simpson son muy populares en latino america y el doblaje latino es muy bueno.
Oo gracias! Intento ver Pokémon in español pero después una día largo quiero ver mi programa favorita 😭
los simpson es una mejor idea
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.
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!
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'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... don't think I need motivation when my employer, my landlord, and even my government are legally obligated to establish all legal communications in French (facepalm)
I also suffered from motivation before moving here though, so I'd love to know as well
Let me guess, Quebec? Your experience is the intended effect of those laws lmao.
Brussels. Officially bilingual but most people speak French; English is commonly spoken but not official. I'm also legally allowed to get things in Dutch (the other official language) but I know even less Dutch than French... I promised myself to start learning Dutch once I get to B1-B2 French
Due to historical reasons, language is... a sensitive issue here. And since I work in academia (which were at the center of said language issue), my employer communicates everything in French, despite the fact that academia itself uses English (probably funnier at the Dutch-speaking unis but I digress). For example I think half of the HR and IT teams don't speak English at all so all my work emails to them have to be in French...
I see, the situation in montreal is fairly similar, so I assumed it was quebec, language is also a very sensitive issue here.
Spanish. I'm not consistent and go through bursts but I know more now than I have before.
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.
Check out KanaDojo. Its a cool little web app that will help with hiragana and katakana.
Ohh nice! If you happen to be interested in manga: someone at my local Japanese language exchange recommended よつばと! which seemed like a cute & quite useful manga series for learning Japanese
Yeah, that's what plan to do once I can read without too much active thinking. I got ons of manga I want to read in original!
japanese children only learn 2000 characters by the time they are out of high school.
there are 3000 daily kanji, and 50,000 total.
but only 1000 kanji make up 90% of kanji you would typically use/see.
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.
My shameful secret is admitting that LLMs are great for things like getting comfortable with a programming language. They're generally trained on the same publicly available samples as these courses and the conversational extrapolation is great for identifying concepts you forgot the technical terms for (ie. "How would I do this in python: [Java code]")
Vibe coding sucks, but walking through some examples with an LLM and a REPL can save hours of navigating docs or Hello World blog posts.
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.
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
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
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.
Español, Deutsch, Français, a me ka ʻŌlelo.
我正在学习中文。中文很难！
I took a break from learning Chinese for a while due to personal stuff being busy and am trying to get back into it. Chinese is a very logical language, I think, and learning it is fun and interesting but challenging. I was just about HSK1 level, I think, before I stopped. I gotta boot up peppa pig in mandarin again - 你好小猪佩奇老师，我是你的学生！
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)
Dutch and badly.
Ik versta jou niet! 😇
What's your motivation? The goal of most people that speak Dutch is to learn something else so we can also be understood by the rest of the world 😄
