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!)
What’s the vibe like at these meetups you’re going to? What kinds of things do you talk about, what are the people who go like? Sounds fun, though I think I’d be too self-conscious to attend.
For my part, I’ve been learning Japanese. It’s been good, but very slow. Focused on mostly Kanji, Anki, and listening/reading this year (rather than staying with my textbook). Feel like my foundation is way more solid now, and characters I don’t recognize are the exception (by a slight margin), rather than everywhere always.
It just feels like any regular Meetup tbh. The Japanese one I’ve been going to obviously has a much higher proportion of ppl who are into, say, anime and manga (since it’s a group of ppl who willingly chose to learn Japanese without external motives), but other than that they feel like standard Meetup events
Japanese is not an easy language: good luck!
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.
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
German here too, off and on for longer than I’d care to admit. If I can put at least an hour a day into studying I feel like progress is being made.
Spanish. I’m not consistent and go through bursts but I know more now than I have before.
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.
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
Esperanto, very slowly, using Duolingo. Why? Just because.
Vi devus kontroli ankaŭ clozemaster.com!
Ho, dankon! Mi certe iam kontrolos tion, kiam mi havos sufiĉa da tempon.
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 😄
Living there.
Aah nice, yeah we’re sadly not at a point where you can get by in many social situations with English only just yet. And perhaps not for a long while if this nationalism trend continues :|
I assume this means you’ve got enough people around to practice writing with or direct questions to, but if not just shoot me a message (I speak it natively)
Same boat, preparing to move but without a date it is hard to find the motivation. I keep it in the forefront on lemmy by subscribing to stuff like !nieuws@lemy.nl
German and Spanish. It’s ok, though every time I think I have an alright though basic understanding, someone starts speaking way too quickly and it all just falls apart. Also, speaking is difficult, and reaching for the correct words in the correct language is even harder. Many times I want to answer in German if someone asks me something in Spanish, and vice versa
I’m on a strong streak with my Japanese self study. Been going for over a year and I’m somewhere around N4-N3 level. It’s very rewarding to understand long conversations, but it also feels like progress is slow. My grammar is pretty good now, but learning vocabulary and kanji is like a Sysyphian quest.
I’d say I usually get in at least 30 minutes of listening practice every day. I’m still not speaking much, but I think this is OK. I’ve heard VR chat is a good resource for that, but the timezone mismatch makes it pretty hard.
Overall I recommend immersion based study with a strong emphasis on input (listening + reading) before doing much output. Duolingo is a waste of time if you’re serious about approaching fluency. I’ve never seen a single comprehensive product that actually works for learning Japanese. You have to consume native materials, and there are some good tools that make it easier, but you need to be a bit savvy to stitch them all together into a cohesive workflow.
Also checkout !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz foe this kind of discussion on the regular!
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.
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
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!
Español, Deutsch, Français, a me ka ʻŌlelo.
