If yes, how’s it going? What do you like about it? What don’t you like? What challenges are you encountering? How are you approaching it?
I ask because my partner and i both decided last year we would start doing a little language learning in our spare time, and it’s been quite nice to have that “back to school” feeling again after so many years.
Felt the need to chime in since I saw no one talking about this: ASL (or, rather, the Brazilian equivalent of it, LIBRAS).
It’s mostly due to being something really different (the grammar is, sometimes, somewhat, kinda like Japanese?), and doing stuff like communicate with someone in a very loud club over a distance (did this, was really fun!).
I say this, mostly, as perks that are less obvious than being able to strike conversation with deaf people. But this is the most important part.
Also, it let’s me better understand deafness and deaf culture, as well as accessibility and how people often suffer under capitalism, mostly on what may or may not be classified as a disability.
I don’t remember if we have a quote from Helen Keller, but she as a great comrade on her own right, denouncing the horrors that capitalism subjects people’s bodies, and how that should end.
For those who do not know, she was deafblind from an extremely young age, but coming from a very wealthy family, she got a 24/7 tutor. She even got “oralized”. Media picked up the “miracle worker” and the “overcoming her disability” story. Then, when she radicalized, the media took her out of the spotlight.
Anyways, it’s been real fun!
Nice to meet a fellow Libras signer. Learning it is very rewarding.
I’m currently learning German for necessity and it’s quite annoying but pretty good at the same time. Doing grammatical work is super fun, and my new teacher teaching us by doing one informal test every week really makes it much easier to learn. I am on B2 currently tho, so many of the earlier issues are gone and I mostly struggle now with specific non common words and adjectives or adverbs/prepositions and some harder things. You could try what my teacher does to us, in 4 months with 4 days per week of studying you can probably go to the lower levels of the next A1/B2 level by yourself or almost double that for C1/2 so I heard
When i learned German what really helped me improve past the beginner/intermediate phase was to start reading books. I still didn’t really understand the grammar theory (still don’t know what a gentive is) but after a while i found i could just “instinctively” use the correct form…
At least if i remembered the gender of a noun, and that was the part that took the longest because a) there is no rhyme or reason (for the most part) and you just have to learn them, and b) my native language is also gendered so i would frequently make incorrect assumptions based on what felt “right” to me.
Currently, I am trying to learn… my native language: Russian. As counterintuitive as it might sound, I moved away from Russia while I was still a young child, so it never really developed much, and the things I knew got lost over time. Luckily, however, I retained a native accent and the conversational flow.
I began this seriously maybe a few months ago, but I usually go from periods of light study to periods where I don’t practice at all 😅 Nonetheless, I have definitely been progressing. I started by learning the alphabet, then by reading stuff whenever I got the chance (not serious stuff like books, but stuff like YouTube comments and titles), and once I got pretty good at reading, I began with studying the vocabulary and grammar.
Studying words is fairly easy, but grammar is really the part I dislike the most as of now, in particular, the cases. So many rules… I suppose there is no other way to master them than by doing a lot of practice and correcting yourself whenever you can. I recently downloaded a book onto my computer that is designed to teach you Russian by doing a lot of exercises, and I think that I will begin using it soon. I also heard about scientific studies that say that your brain is really good at acquiring grammar rules by itself, so listening a lot, reading books, and immersing yourself might be the best technique. Sometimes, I can even get the gist of a video I watch that is completely in Russian! Such a satisfying feeling.
As dialectical materialists, we know that progress is not always constant, so despite improving a lot, I sometimes (really often actually) still mess up the spelling of a word. It is important to have a growth mindset.
What language are you considering learning? 😄
I am currently learning Chinese and Russian. Very different languages with very different challenges, but because of that it helps me not burn out on one language by switching for a few days or weeks to the other whenever i get fatigued with one.
With Russian, learning the alphabet was the easiest part. It also has enough of a connection to other European languages that many words are not entirely new and i can connect them to words in other languages i already speak.
The grammar is definitely the most difficult of all the languages i’ve learned or tried to learn so far, just because there are so many cases. But even there i frequently find parallels and similarities in the forms and patterns with my native language.
Luckily pronunciation is also not too big of an issue for me because of my background, but i can imagine if you’re not from that part of the world and you are used to completely different phonetics it can get tricky.
What you say about acquiring grammar naturally over time is something i have always relied on when learning languages. Just drilling rules and forms doesn’t really stick for me, and i just need to use and hear them used in context over and over again.
My next task I’ve set for myself is to start looking into forming a kind of mental map of the ways that various compound words connect with each other and how base words change meaning through added prefixes, because i found there is a lot of that in Russian.
As for Chinese, it’s practically the diametrical opposite. Everything i find easy about Russian i find hard in Chinese and vice versa. The grammar is very easy if not trivial, but the pronunciation is trickier than Russian, and the listening comprehension is super difficult for me still because of the tones.
There are very few European loanwords, so most of the vocab is brand new. And where Russian has fairly long but mostly unique words that are not that difficult to memorize, Chinese has a lot of really short words and a ton of homophones, which means you are constantly having to add more meanings to sounds you already learned.
Also, as a beginner not really being able to hear tones well, that basically quadruples the amount of homophones for you, and you need to kind of look for context clues as to which word is being used.
Fortunately, in writing most of that ambiguity goes away (though not all, which has been an unpleasant surprise to discover), but learning to read it is a permanently ongoing task, and you are always learning new characters.
There are tricks to easier memorizing of characters and how they are pronounced, but that’s just mnemonics, in the end you still have to learn each one individually.
Still, i’d definitely say i have an easier and more fun time with Chinese than Russian, for now.
what are you using to learn russian, out of curiosity? ive dabbled in russian but i havent found anything equivalent to what i use for chinese (hello chinese and pleco, mostly)
A mix of things. Essentially whatever resources i can find for free. I started by trying out a few of the free apps and occasionally using websites to learn the grammar and now i’m slowly working my way through an e-book of beginner Russian.
I’m also in a really weird situation regarding Russian, albeit a different one lol. I speak Russian at a native level. I can read, write (though I find cursive difficult), understand, and speak with a Moscow accent, even though I was born in the US and never stepped foot in Russia, because I lived in a community of people who fled the former USSR after it was illegally dissolved, so everyone around me spoke primarily Russian. I’ve used it at work with others who speak it natively and invariably was asked where in Russia I grew up, and they were shocked to learn that I grew up in Los Angeles. However, the form of the language I know is frozen at the point where my family left the USSR, so for example I say бутерброд for all forms of sandwiches and don’t use сэндвич at all.
so for example I say бутерброд for all forms of sandwiches and don’t use сэндвич at all
Interesting. So Russian used to use more German loan words and now it has picked up more English ones?
Yeah, there are quite a few examples of that but I can’t think of any other ones off the top of my head right now.
Рюкзак, штаб (or генштаб) and штурм come to mind, at least from the limited vocabulary i’ve learned so far.
Yeah, those are good examples. Шлагбаум is another one from German.
That is indeed a German loanword but I actually had to look it up because i didn’t know what the word meant in German. Apparently it’s only used in some regions of Germany. We call it “Schranke” instead in the region where i live.
I’m learning Mandarin right now, and currently I’m at HSK3. I can read and write fine, but my listening and speaking needs more polishing.
Learning Mandarin is way easier than learning English for me. Mandarin gramer is surprisingly similar to my native tongue compared to English, which has completely different grammar and pronunciation logic. And learning hanzi is somehow easier than learning pinyin for me.
Since Mandarin is a word-based language unlike English, which is a letter-based language, I have to study it frequently to not forget the words.
I memorize sentences instead of words. That way, I can remember a word faster and I have something to say in a conversation.
I’m thinking of learning French this winter. Gross, I know, but it’s the easiest for a native english speaker and I already took it up until grade 9, and it can open doors for work here. And of course there are state resources since it’s an official language here.
I know a fellow Canadian when I see one 😉 hello!
hai! I’m in Ontarrible
I’m in BC!
I took French in school too, but i would need to expand my vocabulary a bit more before i could call myself fluent.
Same, I’m familiar enough with latin that it really helps (tho not fluent or anything) but my vocabulary is pretty small, and almost all of my grammar has faded away (if I even learned it at all; I got a pity pass the last class I took). My kitten’s name is a french word and I almost misspelled it until my friend reminded me that having an X would make it a plural 💀.
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It’s interesting though because if you ask, you know, a five year old, they’re not going to tell you any such thing. With the exception of cases where a kid is noticeably behind or nonverbal, something about the way young kids learn language appears to make it way easier compared to what adults are often doing in order to adopt a second or third language.
It’s something I want to research and understand better, but one concept I recall exploring (offhand, am unsure how much this is backed by research in the specifics) is to do with strength of associations. Like if we consider a little baby learning the word “mama” (or its various counterparts in different languages), they aren’t being handed flashcards and trying to memorize “mama” like it’s a textbook word that has no relevance to them until they decide to apply it in real life. They are learning to associate “mama” with all kinds of sensory information, physical needs, emotional needs, memories of events (hopefully mostly fond ones), and so on.
So I suspect where some of the friction lies is in adults trying to learn language words like they are learning historical facts; as distant snippets of information that are supposed to be memorized exactly as they are, so that they can be produced on request to prove their knowledge for a test. Whereas if they are learning them more in association the language’s culture, with interaction in that culture, or more generally, learning it in strong association with things like sensory information and others listed above, then it will feel like it’s being learned more naturally. But the question remains of how to do this in a world that is increasingly abstracted out to digital, with lots of people who are interested in learning additional languages but have no organic avenue to immersion.
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Would like to see the literature on this cause 7 vs up to 50 sounds hard to measure, especially across time. Like what counts as “learn” in the first place? Can recall it without prompting? Can use it in a sentence when prompted to do so? Organically uses it in a sentence without being prompted to?
I mean, there’s this thing that comes up often in language learning practices “spaced repetition”, but why would that be needed if you can straightforwardly learn up to 50 words in a day.
Use Anki! It’s yet another cue card app but it does varied spaced repetition so it codifies educational best practices built in. Sorry for sounding like an ad read but I swear by it lol
Chinese is the one I’ve kept after most consistently and am most dedicated to as a goal, but it is hard for me without the structure of a formal, in-person classroom setting. So I’ve mostly depended on different apps, which has had mixed success and I’m at a point now where the apps generally don’t do much since I’m pretty clear on baseline level of Chinese. But the jump from that to “everything else” is where I easily get lost. There is still an enormous amount of vocabulary I don’t know, or don’t know well, and a lot of grammar rules I only have a passing familiarity with. I also just don’t have very good listening comprehension and speaking confidence.
The latest is trying to keep after it with speaking practice via an AI conversation-based app, but I’ve been falling off lately due to distraction of helping with family-related caregiving.
I’ve also dabbled in a lot of languages via apps, but not stuck with any like with Chinese, and a lot of it I haven’t retained. The ones I probably got the furthest in apart from Chinese are Japanese and French, but again, without structure, it’s easy to miss on a holistic progression of learning and instead end up with a smattering of different levels of proficiency.
I feel you. I’ve been learning Chinese and anything beyond basic small talk is currently impossible to me.
Yeah, apps definitely have limitations. I’ve tried to branch out to educating myself through media consumption whenever i can. I would like at some point to take an in-person class but it’s tough when you have limited time and no language schools really close by.
Spanish. However, I’m bad at focusing at one language at the time so sometimes I flip-flop between Spanish and French. They are both Romance languages, so I can understand a lot (Spanish even more so since it’s very similar to Portuguese (my native language)).
I have a little strategy for reading theory books. I keep two translations of a text in different tabs. Whenever I start to get bored of reading, I switch to the Spanish translation. When I start to get bored again, I then switch to English. Perks of being bilingual lol.
Nice. I don’t know much Spanish beyond what you pick up just by speaking other Romance languages, but i did take a few years of French. I forgot a lot of it, but if someone speaks slowly i can understand enough to get by. Once in a while i will put on a movie in French (with French subtitles) just to not get completely rusty.
If you speak a Romance language natively it does make it fairly easy to learn others, though i have to say out of all of them Portuguese is the one i understand the least, especially when spoken. Like, i can half understand Italian even though i never learned it, and i can understand bits of Spanish, but Portuguese just really confuses my brain.
Compared to Spanish, it reminds me of how i feel when i hear Dutch knowing German: I feel like it should be somewhat intelligible – and it is pretty intelligible when written, i can usually get a lot of it – but when it’s spoken for some reason it stops making sense and i check out completely.
Maybe it’s the vowels. Portuguese has a lot of vowels and we mumble a lot. Spanish is painfully clear for me lol.
Maybe. I find the Brazilian dialect is slightly easier to make out. Portuguese Portuguese has a confusing sound to it that at first makes me think i’m hearing a Slavic language. I wonder if that’s how other Romance language speakers feel about Romanian.
I saw a video of some Romanians speaking. I think it sounds a bit like a mix of Italian and a Slavic language. Not to the same extent as European Portuguese imo. If I’m not paying attention, a Russian speaker sounds like a Portuguese speaker. I don’t know why.
I saw a video of some Romanians speaking. I think it sounds a bit like a mix of Italian and a Slavic language.
That’s a pretty accurate description. Italian is definitely the closest relative and this shows itself in some mutual intelligibility (though this is often one-way as Italians have a harder time understanding Romanian than vice versa – i’ve heard it compared to Spanish vs Portuguese speakers), but there are borrowed elements both in vocabulary and grammar from Slavic languages.
If i’m being objective i have to admit Romanian is probably the hardest of the Romance languages. I’m seeing now just how many difficulties a learner can encounter as my partner has been trying to learn it for the past year.
i’m hopping between esperanto, japanese and chinese, but after a while i’m kinda stalled because i need to focus in other things. i’m kinda noob in all three, but i can distinguish some kanjis (to feel as an illustrated weeb) and han characters, mi estas lerni esperanto kaj tio
Malayalam at the moment. Native tongue, but unfortunately rusty in expressing things in without resorting to english words. Basically trying to go from native speaker who is fine with colloquial tongue to literature oriented, mildly fancier writing. Probably need to read a ton of literature.
Going beyond colloquial Malayalam is quite painful (kinda diglossic language). Tried to read some books and the frequency of dictionary look ups can be very demoralising lol (And a very specific annoyance of e-reader dictionaries sucking because its a heavily inflected language).
I’ve been wanting to learn other Indic languages (Tamil - sister language to Malayalam basically, Bangla, Hindi) and Spanish. I maybe getting too ambitious.
Fascinating. What script does Malayalam use? Is it also written in one of the Indian scripts like Tamil or Hindi or is it closer to the South East Asian ones like Thai or Khmer?
One of my secondary language learning ambitions is to learn to recognize as many languages as i can just by the way they look or sound, even if i don’t speak a single word of them.
Right now i can get the broad geographical areas mostly right but South East Asia in particular is still quite tricky because it’s very diverse.
The Dravidian languages (predominantly in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana) uses scripts that are similar (South Brahmi).
Southeast Asian ones like Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer are from South Brahmi.
Other Indic ones like Hindi (Devanagari) is North Brahmi I think.
Its similar to Tamil but different. മലയാളലിപി (Malayalalipi) is what we use to write Malayalam. This and tamil were written in vattezhuthu (zh/ഴ has no english equivalent), but later mixed it with grantha script and modified it heavily to create malayalalipi. Modern tamil script has a different origin, don’t know much about it.
Random passage I found online for example, script is almost phonetic: പണ്ട്, പറന്നു പറന്ന് ചിറകുകടയുന്ന നാഗത്താന്മാർ പനങ്കുരലിൽ മാണിക്യമിറക്കിവെച്ചു ക്ഷീണം തീർക്കാറുണ്ടായിരുന്നു. നാഗത്താന്മാർക്കായി പനകേറ്റക്കാരൻ കള്ളു നേർന്നു വെച്ചു. പനഞ്ചോട്ടിലാകട്ടെ, അവൻ കുലദൈവങ്ങൾക്കു തെച്ചിപ്പൂ നേർന്നിട്ടു.
The script got simplified again a bit for ease of typesetting by reducing the number of glyphs back in the 60s by the Communist Government here in Kerala. Since its digitised the old script is coming back. Most modern fonts (except the one rendered in the web, maybe Noto Sans) use old script.
it’s very diverse.
Tell me about it. When I visit my wife’s family on Java I have to bring dictionaries on 4 different languages to make conversation.
I’m trying to mostly expand my Japanese vocab and kanji recognition, but I’m also working on Mandarin and ASL.
I’m learning German because I now live in a German-speaking country. I’ve been doing it on my own by immersion, but the immigration authorities are now planning to force me to take a course that I will have to pay for myself in order to keep my immigration status. Luckily, the company I work for has agreed to cover the costs completely.
Taking a course can be very useful to place some structure onto what you already learn by immersion. I had very little formal teaching in German when i first moved and had to pick up a lot of it through media, friends and school.
That’s true, but I was already planning to do that, so them forcing me to take a specific one with a bunch of propaganda included is annoying and messed up a bunch of plans.
That sucks if they’re forcing you to sit through propaganda lectures.
french, portuguese and japanese. I’m at like a B1 level in portuguese and around A1-A2 in the other two. My progress has been super slow but I’m glad to be learning.
Surprising amount of people learning German here, when you consider the limited scope. I know the basics but could never be bothered to justify the effort. I feel the sense that mastering German would take as much effort as perfecting Italian, Portugese, French, and probably even Esperanto on top. Not to mention it’s significantly less applicable and practical than most. If you live in a German country I could see the use, but man it’s so difficult otherwise.
It’s not that difficult (Russian for example is significantly harder imo), but yeah there is limited use. I wouldn’t recommend learning it unless you have a good reason for doing so. Although interestingly, it enables you to read Marx in the original language he wrote in.
I guess it depends on what your linguistic background is. Probably if you are already fluent in a Germanic language like Norwegian or Dutch or whatever it might be less difficult, but if you come from speaking a Romance language or even something not European at all, It’s a lot to wrap your head around.
Karl Marx has caused the proletariat to suffer from three sources of pain:
- from teaching them a model of this duplicitous world
- from teaching them that their own sweat and blood fills the pockets of the bourgeoisie
- from making them learn German.
I am huge into linguistics and language learning. My main language is French, I’m becoming quite proficient in it after about 4 years of real focused study, trying to break into the CEFR C levels. I am also learning Mandarin and German; I’m almost to HSK2, and I haven’t tested my German CEFR but my partner speaks it so I’m making faster progress with that.
