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!)
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.
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
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 gotta boot up peppa pig in mandarin again - 你好小猪佩奇老师，我是你的学生！
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 learned 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 french but you kinda end up learning traditional French too along the way.
I’m about a year in, and I’m low-level conversational. Solidly A2 slowly inching towards B1.
Pokemon Z-A in French is perfect, lol! I’ve been playing to 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 near perfect language immersion games.
Also checkout languagelearning@sopuli.xyz foe this kind of discussion on the regular/p>
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
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)
Esperanto, very slowly, using Duolingo. Why? Just because.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
Your writing skills are way above-average. Well done!
Spanish. I’m not consistent and go through bursts but I know more now than I have before.
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.
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.
Same, have you tried WaniKani for learning the Kanji and vocabulary? It’s great.
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