• 29 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 27th, 2025

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  • How? They quickly switch to a common language or avoid the situation entirely. When traveling, (only few concepts are required for tourists and workers) most concepts are easier to show by hand and foot than to be learned in the visited language. Even if they learned something during the visit, it’s about <0.1% of that language. Because adults share so many concepts already, they quickly understand and don’t even need to learn all the words and grammar to get around. So adult migrants immerse differently than children who still learn new concepts.



  • For Mandarin

    • Pleko = Swiss army knife for hanzi: dictionary, optical character recognition (OCR), vocab trainer, writing trainer, additional paid content like lessons, exercises, books
    • Anki = FOSS vocab trainer
    • Chinese In Flow = a fun gamified vocab trainer; Google removed it from the Play Store recently IDK why… time to release it on F-Droid
    • ChinesePod = daily in different flavors: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced (also available in your podcatcher)
    • Craig’s list, ebay or your local shop platform for finding online teachers or tandems.

    I cannot really recommend Duolingo as you’ll stop making progress at some point due to stacking repeatitions.



  • Breasts - Der Busen (Masculine! Boobs is masculine!)

    Die Brust (some parents give milk from it)
    != Der Busen (sometimes the full upper torso front, the chest)
    != Das Euter (breast of milk giving animals)

    I think each language has some trait that feels arbitrary, hard to learn. I think the purpose is, to be able to figure out foreigners who didn’t “drink the language from mother’s breast”. I believe, historically/evolutionary, language speakers had to quickly sort out infiltrated traitors.

    • how to speak written words in English
    • articles among central European languages like French, German
    • cases among eastern European languages
    • when to say “sk” like “sh” in Swedish
    • measure words in Mandarin

    Overall, false friends are everywhere because our brain works in associations.






  • English: For me it’s been my first foreign language. English is so common in Europe the motivation is self-explanatory. However I learned most after finishing school when I had time to binch-watch English movies and series online.

    French: During high school level we learn a second foreign language. Most of the time, French, Russian and Spanish are available. Polish and Mandarin are rather rare. I haven’t heard of any more languages available in schools. French was most common when I had to choose.

    Mandarin: I started in university (90min per week, 100 zi). It’s not enough for HSK1. My motivation back then: “Fach-Chinesisch” (= domain specific chinese) is imagined by Germans as the most difficult language. If you hear two geeks exchange their thoughts and you don’t understand a word, you say they talk Fach-Chinesisch. My motivation now is that more and more software is documented in Mandarin only. However, there’s no pressure to learn about that software, so my process of learning Mandarin slowed way down. My realistic milestone on the way to Fach-Chinesisch is to be able to understand Chinese Sci-Fi movies some day.

    Spanish: My fiancé is interested in learning Spanish. So I generated her a 800MB spoonfed Anki-Deck. So I join her from time to time for testing purposes. But I’m not really interested otherwise.