I am currently learning Russian and German on Duolingo
中文
Chinese from HelloChinese app is my main one that I consider important, that I want to eventually reach fluency on. But I am also at a point with learning through the app alone where I’m past the “leaps and bounds” phase, I’ve completed the course both with Pinyin visible and with only 汉字, and so a lot of it is just steadily continuing to learn through the stories and “immersive lessons”, and trying to eke out gains in comprehension and memorization and such.
So in order to handle that freshness wearing off, I also mix in learning other languages here and there. The main source of that has been Japanese and Korean through YuSpeak. I also spent some time learning the Cyrillic alphabet; I recommend the app “3 hour Cyrillic by ‘Russian Made Easy’” for this, it’s both free and it puts the letters in context of words they’d be used in. Then I’ve made some effort to learn the Arabic alphabet too, but haven’t really found an app that clicks well for doing so.
I wanted to get back into French, cause that was my original main attempt at learning a second language before I got into Chinese, but again, haven’t found an app that clicks well for it. I originally was learning French through Duolingo but quit it a while back when they pushed the “health system” that penalizes mistakes. Then I tried to get into it through Busuu, both in the past and more recently, but their course design is annoyingly inconsistent at this point, in both content and the length of a lesson.
Also the Cyrillic alphabet was one of the first things I learned when I decided to start learning Russian
Right on!
汉字
I can’t read that, could you please translate?
Sorry, that was me being a bit cute and showoffy with referencing it that way. 😅 汉字 translates to “Chinese character”, so I was using the Chinese for it to say I went through the course with Pinyin visible (the Romanization system for Chinese) and with only Chinese characters (Pinyin hidden).
Russian, using an 18 unit video course. It’s going ok to start, but I think I need to begin to supplement it with in-person classes to get the conversational practice going.
I’m trying to learn arabic. But by now i only got the letters/alphabet. and some words.
I started in Duolingo but aside from the lessons for the letters it is pretty unhelpful. Language Transfer ist great, although its focus in son speaking. For reading and writing i’m continuing with Arabic Unlocked.
As a native I will probably be of no use on how to learn it as a foreigner, but from my experience learning languages music and TV help a lot and I wouldn’t mind recommending songs and shows for you.
Thank you! When i get better shows and music will be great.
I’m a teacher, I got some native kids in my classes, or at least their parents are natives, from Iraq and Syria. The kids are very proud of me for trying to learn their language and that is great motivation 🙂
I’m mostly learning Arabic and Danish. With Arabic I’m learning Standard Arabic (FusHa) and Levantine dialect. I’m past beginners level but not further than that. My FusHa is better but hoping to learn more Levantine, since that’s what people actually speak. I’m almost fluent in Danish, I just need to focus more on listening skills and pronunciation. But I’m also doing one Russian lesson per day on Duolingo. I want to study Russian more in depth in the future, and want to pick up Mandarin and Hindi again.
I had German in school, and besides occasional lessons to brush up my knowledge I’m not doing anything with it.
EDIT: Forgot that I want to pick up Portuguese as well, but I’m already pretty okay at it
I’m learning Hebrew
Other than the writing system and some loanwords, it is very similar to Punic which survived in North Africa until the 7th or 8th centuries. I have an Ugaritic dictionary which I wanted to memorize, also similar to Canaanite Languages at least in vocabulary, I know the grammar and verb morphology differs.
Spanish. But it’s the fun part now as I can just read/watch/listen. I miss the odd word and I have to pick my materials carefully but otherwise I can just sit back and enjoy. It doesn’t feel so much like studying/learning anymore. Although I do need to brush up on my grammar, especially tenses, and practise speaking. Unfortunately, I’m not too near any Spanish-speaking places to get that practice in.
Mandarin. I’m in China at the moment so it’s a fun process that is happening all day.
Nice! How/where do you get the best practice there?
Currently I’m at the trying to communicate my intentions stage, so a lot of it is simply talking to shopkeepers and that kind of thing. However I do get to have a lot of fun banter at restaurants as people love too strike up a conversation in English, to which I respond in Chinese, which always goes down well. I’ve been bought a lot of beers already and given a lot of cigarettes (Chinese cigarettes are great).
I’ve just had a conversation with a mother and daughter on the bus which was really cute. The little girl’s English was really good.
I’m focusing on Japanese, but recent shake-ups in my life have knocked me out of my habits.
I should probably be working more actively to cultivate my Russian, I feel it’s getting rusty.
どうして日本語を勉強していますか。
今の理由は、アニメと漫画を翻訳したいのです。今は、ノルウェーには、アニメと漫画の99%は英訳だけから、英語話せない人はこれを楽しめなくて、アニメヲタクの移民はこれでノルウェー語を勉強できません。このシチュエーションはちょっと残念と思うから翻訳者になりたいです。
大変そうですね。頑張ってくれませんか。
Да, я буду ;-)
Now I’m just imagining some cracker clutching their pearls after mishearing you and thinking you’re talking about voodoo.
I learned the Cyrillic alphabet when I was younger — my piano teacher was from the Ukrainian SSR and left in 1991. I’d definitely like to study Russian more someday :)
Du burde! Russisk er et fantastisk språk.
Chinese on Duolingo. Moving there in a little over a month so trying to get a little head start.
Trying to learn Indonesian Bahasa but it’s not going well. I’m thankful the language uses Latin characters though. Terima kasih.
I kinda want to learn Dutch because it sounds funny
Why Indonesian, anyway?
It sounds pretty to me and a friend of mine is from Jakarta. I also like books and there’s a bunch of Indonesian lit I’d like to get into.
indonesia is a huge country with 280m population and developing rapidly, it’s a great language to learn.
Hmm, maybe after Tagalog… this language should be next. From what I’ve heard, no conjugation problem, just foreign vocab input, mainly as a problem…
That being said, your reason reminds me of this ever so inspiring quote.
China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.
Mandarin, spanish, and toki pona every day.
How have you found learning Mandarin in comparison with Spanish? Interested to hear how they compare to Toki Pona, too!
I’m much further along in Spanish, so it’s hard to say if mandarin would be more or less difficult at the beginning. Mandarin is much more logical than the romance languages tho.
epiku
mi toki insa e ni: lon ni la mi mute li jo e kulupu pi sitelen musi. mi o pali e sitelen musi tawa kulupu pali wan kepeken toki pona.
I speak a few languages, it’s like the one thing I seem to have a knack for.
I have been working on my Mandarin again, I studied it some in university but have not used it actively for years. There’s potential I could transfer to my company’s head asian office, which is based in China. My position wouldn’t require it, but living there I would want to improve my Chinese level. I should probably learn Cantonese too on that note.
It’s a pretty fun language to study, because after you are comfortable with the pronunciations it is all just vocab and idioms. The grammatical structure is like my favourite thing.
现在你用什么材料学习?
我有大学时的旧教科书 (汉语与文化读本 and Tuttle books),还收看当地的中文新闻广播。
您有什么建议吗?
没有什么建议。我大部分只用句子Anki卡。比如Spoonfed Chinese等。
Flemish
Is it that different from Dutch? Personally can’t quite differentiate, sounds more like an accent, and at best a dialect.
Yeah it’s not a real language lol. More of a dialect. I just find it funny to be able to switch between sounding Dutch and sounding Flemish.
Greek, but I haven’t been focused or committed for the past 9 months.