Language Learning

Welcome to our Wednesday thread. Every other week on Wednesday at 06:00 UTC, In this thread users can:

• Find or ask for language exchange partners. Also check out r/Language_Exchange!
• Ask questions about languages (including on speaking!)
• Record their voice and get opinions from native speakers. Also check out r/JudgeMyAccent.

If you'd like others to help judge your accent, here's how it works:

• Go to Vocaroo, Soundcloud or Clypit and record your voice.
• 1 comment should contain only 1 language. Format should be as follows: LANGUAGE - LINK + TEXT (OPTIONAL). Eg. French - http://vocaroo.com/------- Text: J'ai voyagé à travers le monde pendant un an et je me suis senti perdu seulement quand je suis rentré chez moi.
• Native or fluent speakers can give their opinion by replying to the comment and are allowed to criticize positively. (Tip: Use CMD+F/CTRL+F to find the languages)

Please consider sorting by new.

Welcome to Babylonian Chaos. Every other week on Wednesday 06:00 UTC we host a thread for learners to get a chance to write any language they're learning and find people who are doing the same. Native speakers are welcome to join in.

You can pick whatever topic you want. Introduce yourself, ask a question, or anything!

Please consider sorting by new.

Every time I check this subreddit, there's always someone in the past 10 minutes who is asking whether or not it's a good idea to learn more than 1 language at a time. Obviously, for the most part, it is not and you probably shouldn't. If you learn 2 languages at the same time, it will take you twice as long. That's it.

Autocorrect has become my worst enema

It's like a little elf in my phone who's trying so hard to be helpful but is in fact quite drunk.

Being able to speak multiple languages is great and all until your phone consistently autocorrects to the language you are definitely not intending to use. THE GUY WHO INVENTED AUTO-CORRECT SHOULD BURN IN HELLO!

I live in southern rural USA and English is my first and only language, however I’ve been wanting to learn a new language over the summer to occupy my time. I’ve been trying to learn German recently and I’ve really been enjoying it, partly bc I feel like I actually understand it and its grammar functions. I can actually remember the words this time and can recall how to use them, etc. Pretty much the only reason I’m learning German is because my band teacher is a retired veteran that used to live in Germany and he would always teach me these random German phrases that I found interesting. I have no German family or neighbors or anything so if I do continue learning it it’ll pretty much become useless because I won’t really use it. The language I probably SHOULD be learning is Spanish because there’s a pretty big Latino immigrant population where I live and next year in school I’ll have to take my first Spanish class that goes on my college transcript. The thing is though, I genuinely hate learning Spanish. I’ve already tried before and it’s just confusing for me, unmemorable, and just never clicked. I studied Spanish for weeks before on my own time and I don’t even remember a single word that I learned. Best I can do is hola and count to 20.

Basically what I’m asking is, should I keep learning German, or stop and switch to Spanish?

and what would you do differently if you could start all over? alternatively, if you are learning another language after having already reached fluency in another studied language, what are you doing differently that you feel is making a noticeable impact in comparison with your methods learning the first?

i will define "fluency" as being able to generate extended day to day conversation in correct form without needing to pause to look up words or ask the person you are conversing with questions about how something is spoken. simple enough.

i will start. initially i listened to spanish podcasts as much as i possibly could. i read sometimes up to two hours a day. eventually i began to use tandem and i struggled a lot to speak without lots of pauses for a long time. i felt most comfortable with long format video calls and so implementing those as much as possible will be a strategy moving forward.

i would have not waited so long to implement long format conversations with native speakers. i also would have not given myself so much time to answer anki cards, aiming instead for 2~ seconds per card. i would have prioritized memorizing every day words and not so many obscure synonyms of more common words out of books. i would have also prioritized memorizing high frequency verb conjugations.

I'm a non-native English speaker, but I have a C1 language exam. I also have learnt German and have a C1 language exam as well. My NL is Hungarian and now I've been learning Korean at university for a year, minus the summer when there aren't any classes.

No matter what I do, I can't seem to keep up with my courses and barely pass my language classes. Unlike with German and English, when listening to Korean or even attempting to speak Korean, my brain doesn't seem to realise that it's a real language and doesn't pick up on any grammars, only a few words here and there. But when I'm looking at a text-book, I know I know the grammar, but when I try to use it, it just vanishes.

I've tried everything, like watching shows, talking to natives, only conversing in Korean with my classmates, writing a diary, and even paying to take an extra language course, but it's like my brain has decided to completely reject everything.

I'm not sure if the same would happen with another language, I haven't got any time next to university and my exams right now to try, but I've never encountered such a harsh block before with any language, even ones I've lost interest in before.

Does anyone have any idea what I could do to finally get over this block?

I want to know this to make sure that people would know how to pronounce something correctly

So what i mean is not something like anki and so on. What i mean is the Direction of learning. English -> language x or language x -> english. When i learn the vocabs it is easier if i See the for example german word and then to get to the english word. It is way harder the Other way. How Do you Do it and what is better?

I understand we all use CI to some degree when learning a language, but for people who have deliberately and specifically used this approach in a targeted fashion, how did it go? How long did you spend on it? What sources did you use? What was it like at first? Where did it get you to? How is your speaking in comparison to your listening? Etc

i’m 30 now and was originally a Japanese speaker and almost held back in elementary school for not being able to speak English well or not at all.

I stopped speaking japanese fairly early perhaps around 3-4 grade and I spoke english like 100% of the time.

i can still understand some japanese when i hear it but mainly just elementary stuff. i could probably understand all of An Pan Man.

my mother says my accent is fine but at this age i feel my mouth feels more awkward and i might potentially have an accent now ._.

i’m worried that at this age it might be difficult for me to relearn the language and whether there is a chance for fluency and native sounding accent?

How much of a difference does it make for someone who spoke it as a child to learn a language many many years later?

Thank you for your time and comments!

Which approach is better for language learning from an intermediate level onwards: reading with extensive re-reading and memorization of words, or reading at a much faster pace without memorization and re-reading? The former approach solidifies vocabulary, but the latter might be more beneficial by exposing me to a wider range of words, structures, and variety. What do you think?

Like I'm assuming an absolute beginner wouldn't be able to take full advantage of the comprehensible input of everyday interactions in that environment

For those of you use/have used Android language learning apps or web-based programs which include pronunciation feedback (recently), how well did that work for you? Is there anyone here who tried this feature on multiple apps?

I'm intrigued and I'm not sure if a pay-app or program would be better than one of the freebies, especially this aspect. I read that Pimsleur is great for that, but also there is a lack of visual-type learning, which concerns me.

If it makes a difference, my goal is to fluently speak Spanish (English is my native language) for work/business purposes.

I lived in various countries till I was 18 and I came back to my home country the same year and I'm living here up till now. I was raised in a family where my parents are both non-English speakers but me myself used English at school and with my friends. In casual talks, I'm okay with both. I am more comfortable studying and giving public speeches in English. Technically, if I go by order, English is my second language. But I started feel a discrepancy between my first language and my second language ever since I came back to my home country. I realized when it comes to academics English is my dominant language. So if I consider speaking both languages in both casual and formal settings, English would cover both while my first language would only cover the first case. But I am not quite familiar with idioms or colloquialism in English. I always identified myself as a native to my country and I am quite sure I also culturally align with my country as well. BUT I consider my language identity is English for I am more comfortable expressing and organizing thoughts. in it.

In an effort to seek an answer to this, I asked ChatGPT to evaluate my language proficiency of both languages. It said that based on the conversations we had for the past two days, it came to a conclusion that English is NOT my first language (ofc I shouldn't trust it completely). But the thing is that it made the judgement based on the fact that I spoke too formally and directly in a manner that native speakers wouldn't do in a casual conversation. But wouldn't the level of formality further prove that you are more proficient and fluent in that language? Do you think this is a valid reason to judge whether certain language is their mother tongue or not? As I mentioned in the earlier paragraph, I don't use many idiomatic expressions when I use English. But just because of that, does that make English my second language? What do you think?

I know this question has been asked before but I wanna have one on one discussions with the people who may comment, so I can kinda figure out a plan

I started learning French and for 2 months I was doing really good. An hour a day (which moved to an hour and a half), but I ended up dropping it because it was just a hassle and I would get bored.

It’s been a few weeks since I stopped but I find myself missing it a lot. I was talking to a friend about and it made me realize I wanna keep going. He suggested do 30 min a day since it’s shorter. Do yall have any suggestions

So I was listening to Harry Potter in Spanish and really enjoying it. But half of the time I'd try to use a word or two that I learned in it to speak with my neighbors and it was apparent that they didn't understand me. For example, I used the word "alacena" and two of my neighbors were like...

So, I'm thinking about continuing reading Harry Potter but adding reading transcripts of series and movies in my repertoire. I guess it would help a lot with specific usage of vocabulary, slang, etc.

So besides Glossika, I'm now thinking of reading and sentence mining as many transcripts of Friends episodes that I can that have been translated into Spanish.

I tried watching the dubbed series but couldn't understand it, so I figured reading the language as it's spoken would be helpful.

Any thoughts? I'm tired of formal sounding podcasts. Then when I go speak with an actual person I sound like a robot. And I've been at this language for 8 plus years now. I wanna sound like I've been practicing for 8 years, not like a robot lol.

so i was thinking about studying a new language but i wanna see if i need to improve in any other language first. for example, i speak greek but sometimes i read a bit slow and my vocab can be seen as small, but i can handle a conversation in greek really well, is that being fluent?

what many people consider being fluent is being able to speak the language perfectly or almost perfectly. which means having a huge vocab, perfect grammar, perfect pronunciation, basically being able to blend in with native speakers.

though ive also seen that being fluent is being comfortable with the language, like not having to always "translate" what you hear or being able to speak the language at the pace you normally speak in your native language. sometimes knowing the language well enough to understand its slang can be considered reaching the "fluent speaker" level.

so what exactly can make someone be considered a fluent speaker in a language?

btw sorry for possibly using the wrong tag if i did use the wrong one

I've been trying to learn Mandarin for 3 years now, and I am not fluent but I am sort of intermediate. Then I see videos like this and become extremely discouraged. How is it possible that someone is learning a language in 24 hours? Is this real? Is this guy just a genius? I don't understand, because I still can't read articles in Chinese online, and I would def not call myself fluent... Maybe I just don't have what it takes.

How I Learn to Speak Any Language in 24 Hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSpYBTGa8t8

For example you're watching TV, and say "this is funny." Do you have to have a noun in mind (movie [female], or program [male] (as example)), or can you describe things generically with male adjectives, as long as the noun isn't mentioned by name?

I'll start with English: there's no wiggle room. "He" strictly refers to "man" or "boy" and objects/females NEVER get this pronoun.

I was curious. As a child, I was taught English grammar in English, even though it was not my native tongue. We were taught using the A1 Ladybird book series. Now, as an adult, I'm trying to learn new languages, and I'm curious about how others study grammar as adults.

I love listening to songs in foreign languages so much but only languages I am learning. They just hit way different. I don't really listen to many new English songs anymore and just enjoy the ones that I like that I've already found now that I've finally found enough artists in Spanish that I like.

I am learning German and I want to practice, can you suggest me a website or an app from where I should practice?

Im sure this gets asked all the time.
I am trying to learn Japanese. Mostly because I want to be able to watch Godzilla movies and understand the dialogue. (Im a huge nerd I know) ...(I also know this could take years to learn)
I have tried a few different apps to learn but none have really helped me learn enough to even understand dialogue.

I am really curious if anyone has used Pimsleur? Is it more effective, or has anyone had luck with it?
I want to get some opinions before I pay for it.

hey, i’d love to learn mexican spanish slang and real life vocabulary. i mean worlds like homie, bestie, bands (money), hookup and things like that. hope u get it