I’m putting more effort into learning Spanish. It’s going pretty slow, or at least it feels that way. On the other hand I live in Mexico now and that’s going pretty well.
living in a country where they speak your target languages makes such a huge difference!
thats a big reason i want to learn spanish now
i would love to spend time in a Latin country for an extended period of time. CDMX is high on my list of dope places ive been too
Currently learning Nahuatl, just for fun, so it’s going slowly.
Ukrainian. I started shortly after my wife, who is Ukrainian, and I got married. It didn’t last long before I stopped/gave up since she wasn’t too interested in speaking it other than to her parents. Her family came to America when she was very young (and the youngest of 4), so she’s much more comfortable with English.
Fast-forward to last February where I picked it up again after Russia invaded. Got through the Duolingo course, but feel like I hit a plateau of sorts and need to get motivated again. I have a physical book, pimsleur, lingq, and anki cards–just need to practice and build up more vocabulary.
🇺🇦 Слава Україні!
I tried out Ukrainian aswell after the war broke out. Yeah, Duolingo sucks for Ukrainian, I hate to say it. The difficulty with the language is all of its grammar, declensions, conjugations, what not. Duolingo barely teaches that and only focuses on words, which in all honestly gets you nowhere. I’m hoping to pick up the language again, it’s beautiful.
I’m also learning Ukrainian, it’s really hard!
I’ve been studying Japanese for a few years. I was recently in Japan for about a month, and while I was able to read and understand a lot of what people were saying, I could barely speak. It was like my brain kept freezing up. It was frustrating, but I’m glad I got the opportunity to know where I’m at. I’m also starting to learn Spanish because I want to go to some South and Central American countries next year. For now, my goal is just to get the basics down.
I have been studying Italian for over 10 years now. I started because I was going on vacation there and simply fell in love with the language.
I’m using Duolingo daily to keep my active knowledge up, and I’m subscribed to two Italian podcasts. In church, I read along on a Bible app.
It’s a bit of a routine but it’s also a bit of a drag, because I don’t get any real life practice. Last time I was in Italy was in 2018. I feel like I’ve come a pretty long way since then but I’d really like to test whether I can have a normal conversation.
im trying to learn spanish but finding it really tough
i took years of it when i was a kid but fell off the wagon. now im trying to come back and finding it really hard to teach myself while staying engaged. i know too much for the beginner lessons to stay engaged but not enough to step up a level. ive used mostly duolingo (i know i know) but im not finding much success with some of the other tools ive often seen recommended
im sticking with it but finding it much slower going than i anticipated
I’m a serial duolingoer. I spend a month working on a language and then wander away. 6 months later I come back and start a different one. My hardest one so far was Dutch. I did not get very far!
ya im not so bad as taking 6 mo off lol but ive got a similar issue. ill build up my streak, then something comes up and i loose it then loose interest for a while and then have to start all over (to some degree)
i think its why i need slightly more structure or something
i just started https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish course and im finding it alright. just started tho so i dunno how much its helping
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Jokes aside, I feel as if I’m in the same boat. I took three years of Spanish in high school, and did great, but have barely used it in the 15 years since. In the past few months, I’ve tried re-learning everything with mild success. I majorly struggle with both vocabulary and listening comprehension.
As for what I do use, I’ve been using a verb app called Ella, and it’s been great at teaching tenses and conjugations. I occasionally use Duolingo, but I have trouble staying engaged with it. I’ve been trying to find something for vocabulary other than just reading/watching stuff, with minimal success.
I used to read /r/Spanish and /r/LearnSpanish a lot, and got some useful information from there.
ya we are in a similar boat
imma have to check out ella sometime, seems pretty alright. i like the gamey streak thing in duo but i find the complaints of it taking it very slowly to progress to be valid. i do feel its helped but i kinda want to take things more seriously
ive even thought of like, taking a college class just to have some accountability and structure but i live remotely so it would all be online anyways
I have been doing online private lessons through iTalki for Spanish learning and it’s really helped me to go beyond just Duolingo - it’s some conversation once a week plus some short writing exercises and I find that’s just enough to make it lock into my brain as a ‘usable’ skill. I would highly recommend something similar if you’re able.
iTalki
i think imma check this out fo real. i think it would be a great help to have that dedicated time to actually speak to someone who knows what they are talking about instead of the youtube, spotify and duo void
thanks for the suggestion!
how long have you been doing the tutor? is it expensive?
I started during the pandemic in 2020 and have been doing weekly since then, and it’s taken my language level from “I can vaguely guess what this text says” to “I can understand native Spanish speakers well and mostly make myself understood, although my grammar isn’t perfect” (so probably from about A1-2 to B2). The lessons seem to average out at about $20USD an hour (and I do an hour a week), although there are cheaper teachers on the service in the range of as well (just did a quick search and I’m seeing some in the $10-15USD range as well).
I definitely use it as a supplement to Duolingo and other resources - I haven’t abandoned those completely - but the interactivity seems to make it stick in a way that other formats don’t.
thats super reasonable
thanks for the heads up. ive got it in my language learning bookmark and will be diving in soon. its pretty much exactly what i asked for
How about listening to music or watching some TV shows?
ya ive started listening to music recently and finding that fun but having a hard time like, connecting the two if that makes sense.
I’m conversational in Spanish, but I’ve recently been trying to put more effort into maintaining it/getting exposure to the language. I haven’t seriously studied it in almost ten years, so honestly I’m surprised I’ve maintained any of it.
About a month ago, I started trying to learn Japanese. It’s going better than expected, I’ve been trying to do 1-2 hours per day in stuff like LingQ and Language Reactor. I feel like I’m starting to understand some of it, though I still can’t say much more than “えきは どこ です か？” (where is the train station). Still, this is a lot more enjoyable than formal education, so I’m fine if it’s slow
I’m currently ‘learning’ French and Japanese.
The word ‘learning’ is in quotes because they’re both under some sort of a life-support right now. I’ve got Anki decks for both languages and try to do those decks everyday. However, that’s all I do. I sometimes challenge myself reading articles written in those languages, but that’s exceedingly rare.
I hope if time and energy comes back, I can put more effort, but at least, for now, I just don’t want my knowledge of those two languages to be forgotten.
There is a French learning community here, it is my first language so I can answer any questions there if you have any
Many thanks! I’ve already subscribed to the community. I’ll keep this in mind whenever I’ve got a question.
I have been learning Japanese for almost a year now. I am currently at a point where the best thing for me is to learn more vocabulary, since that will hopefully enable me to consume native media and which was one of my goals starting out.
For that, I currently use Anki, having done the Genki I vocab as well as the Tango N5 deck by TheMoeWay already, and working on the Tango N4 deck. After that, I think I might just start creating my own deck using the Animecards method.
As of now, I have put grammar somewhat on hold, since I am able to understand most simple sentences. I will eventually have to start looking at compound sentences, which looks very complicated. For grammar, I have mostly used Cure Dolly’s transcript, as well as some Genki I.
Outputting is an aspect I have no idea how to do on my own, and I have taken the Japanese courses at my university mostly to train my talking and writing skills and plan to take further courses.
I spent a lot of time on Mandarin, got to HSK3 level and then kinda lost the motivation. I’ll probably pick it up again one day, but currently I’m focusing on modern and ancient (attic) Greek.
I am currently learning Korean. I’ve always wanted to learn it and during the pandemic, I tried to learn some stuff through Duolingo but to be honest, the Korean course was pretty to be honest. Learning the alphabet was decent, but the grammar rules were never properly explained.
So I am currently following an IRL Korean language course at the learning institute of the local university and that’s going pretty great. I’m learning a lot and I hope to get some actual practice when I visit South Korea in September.
It’s ‘not going’ at the moment due to life events. I want to pick up Spanish and Russian again when I’m ready.
I’ve been learning German since October. It’s gone fairly well, when I focus on it I improve very fast, but I have motivation issues and have plateaued, or maybe even regressed a bit in the past two months.
what resource(s) are you using?
The most important thing of mine for learning German is I keep a notebook of every word I learn. I have pages dedicated to nouns, pages dedicated to verbs, and pages for everything else.
I always put the article of the noun before the actual word to remember gender. For verb pages, it is set up in columns so I can write down each conjugation of it, which helps with memory even if verbs are conjugated the same way nearly every time.
This notebook is vital in remembering, studying, and looking over German words. I suggest everyone does it.
To learn more words, I’ll use Duolingo every now and then, though I’m not a fan ever since they’ve axed the old tree layout. I also use the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-eDoThe6qo](Nico ist Weg) movies on YouTube that are made at each level of German, helps greatly. [https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman](Easy German) on YouTube is also fairly helpful. Besides that, I just try to interact with the language whenever I can.
That’s great! I have found memes are helpful to learn colloquial language too. I liked r/ich_iel and r/geschichtmaimais .
Oh I’ll try that out aswell. I follow [email protected] now and try to understand it more, day by day haha.
np! this is the one on lemmy: https://lemmy.world/c/geschichtsmaimais
I am trying to recreate it here lol
At the moment I’m only doing Duolingo because I don’t have time, money or energy for anything more in-depth. Duolingo doesn’t have the languages I’d really really like to learn, so I make do with selections from their best constructed courses.
I’ve been studying Italian for 3 months. I chose Italian because before that I was learning Esperanto. But the Duolingo Esperanto course became worse for some reason, and I figured Esperanto would help me to recognise a lot of Italian. I was right!
I started Portuguese a few days ago. Always wanted to try Portuguese, but the weird pronunciations discouraged me. Eventually I just jumped in and had a go. My ear is starting to adjust to it.
And when I’m bored with those 2, I revise my German. Mainly because I like the goofy voices on the German course.
I squeeze in lessons during downtime at work, and my colleagues don’t seem to like it. Oh well. They shouldn’t be so tedious to talk to!
I’m currently learning Mandarin, I started earlier this year so I think I’ve been at it since February? With a break of one month to focus on college in between. I started with HelloChinese (similar to Duolingo but better built) but later dropped it off, and started experimenting with different things. Right now I’m doing an Anki deck and going with the immersion approach, I’m working my way through a graded version of Journey to The West and I like watching Comprehensible input and Donghua.
In the future there are other languages I want to pick up but I want to be able to understand native content I’m interested in without too much issue beforehand. I don’t like studying it formally because it feels like I’m wasting my time, I have the most fun looking at content and looking up words I don’t understand. I feel like I learn more like this like I’d do with grammar drills, Duolingo, or speak early approaches
