See title. I’ve been to quite a few local language meetups and saw lots of people IRL who are learning languages: wondering how are y’all doing too
For myself… learning French due to necessity. I am making progress, just veeery slow. I underestimated how difficult it would be (a lot of vocabs between English/French are similar… but the languages themselves are not!)
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.
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.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
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"m pretty sure that the voice of the instructor is AI, it bugs me so much lol. I’ve been trying to avoid AI as much as possible, so if I’m really struggling to find more info on what I’m looking for, I’ll resort to it maybe.
@zlatiah@lemmy.world @asklemmy@lemmy.world
As strange as it may sound, sometimes I try to learn Akkadian and Sumerian. Even though little is known about the grammar, the “Sumerian Lexicon” from John Halloran has quite a extensive list of transliterated Sumerian words and their meanings. I try to focus on learning the transliterated words rather than cuneiforms, although I do know/recognize some cuneiforms.
Why do I do this? Well, it’s mostly for spiritual purposes: my current, syncretic belief involves the Mesopotamian pandeam (feminine pantheon), with goddesses such as Inanna, Ereshkigal, Tiamat and, mainly, Lilitu/Lilith (nínna-mushen / nínna-mušen, the terrifying Mistress-Owl, with nín being “Queen, Mistress, Lady”, here duplicated to signal a terrifying Mistress, alongside the term for predator bird “mushen”). To me, they’re manifestations (think of Qlipphots) of the same underlying principle, the Great Goddess.
I managed to both memorize a few terms, and I also tried to build some Sumerian phrases/epithets using the transliterated words as building blocks. Again, little is known about Sumerian grammar, but the current knowledge about it feels enough for me to try and babble something.
And why Sumerian/Mesopotamian pandeam? It’s the first belief system ever written. It’s the “chronologically closest” we have to the Venus figurines from Upper Paleolithic (seemingly an Goddess worshiping). The Goddess was forgotten, demonized, concealed from us, but things can’t stay concealed for long. The Primordial Goddess must be revealed to the world again, and must be worshiped for the Great Goddess She is. And the Sumerian records seem to be the closest written records we have to Her.
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.
I’ve been doing this with 1670 (Polish). Though, I’m not serious about learning, just dabbling in learning about the language. It’s surprisingly a very helpful tool!
Your writing skills are way above-average. Well done!
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.
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!
Español, Deutsch, Français, a me ka ʻŌlelo.
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
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 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!
Pokemon Z-A in French is perfect, lol! I’ve been playing it for language learning too (Japanese). I think those games are pretty great for it, good low-stakes, familiar games that have a lot of text, but are also kid-approachable. Would be nice to have voice acting, but otherwise fantastic language immersion games.
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?
by just doing it.
stop ‘wanting’ to do it’ and just do it.
this is the secret to most things in life.
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…
What made you want to learn Korean in the first place? Try to think about what you could do if you knew it, and set up goals that you want to reach.
I realized when I was young that I’d like to learn Japanese. But I put off serious learning for so many years (decades, tbh), and now I think a lot about how I could already be using it for all sorts of day to day (web browsing and entertainment) tasks if I had focused sooner. You learn a language, you can learn or do your other hobbies/interests in that language.
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.
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.
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
Same, have you tried WaniKani for learning the Kanji and vocabulary? It’s great.
