Does anyone study any languages at all and have gotten to a decent level? Wondering if there are brains to pick about the whole process.
I’ve noticed there are like, a million resources for Japanese and Korean but the quality, fullness etc drops off very hard after that and English.
I studied French in school, not a lot of it stuck in my mind. Later in life I wanted to refresh it though, so I just started reading some of my favourite books (Ender’s Game, Game of Thrones) in French and watching familiar television shows in French. A few years of doing this improved my language skills far more than my classes did (though arguably I needed to classes to get to the point where I could read/watch on my own).
I’ve been using Duolingo to learn Welsh but it’s hit and miss when I can be bothered.
This is what I found with mandarin. I want to pick up Japanese, which I’m confident I could do without help (Chinese background means I can memorise the characters and their readings quite well already and already have from attending karaoke with Japanese friends - I can sing some songs already)
But I have some other languages I need / want to learn due to family and friends/economic opportunity. Namely Turkish(with Kurdish potentially coming later)/ Japanese-French-Spanish.
But I don’t really know where to find resources for the latter three that aren’t Japanese. There is a big programmer-anime enthusiast overlap that means the ecosystem for learning Japanese with technology is a lot more fleshed out
That and I want to take HSK 3.0 6 at some point next year, it makes the prospect of doing this a little harder. I’d be okay now with focusing on improving my Chinese (just word learning and a few grammar concepts) and adding Japanese/Turkish(similar grammar) alongside it with some more casual learning of French or Spanish.
I do Finnish with textbooks and lessons.
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewforum.php?f=15
This site is a great resource for learning languages, both in terms of resources and guidance on approaches. Some remarkably helpful people post often and I have found it an invaluable and welcoming community.
I was at one time near-native in German, although lack of use now means that my levels have dropped … I’ve been accessing this site frequently to hopefully get back to where I was before.
From my one search of Turkish seems to be everyone is trying to juggle 50 languages at once but actually spends no time in any of them.
When I picked up mandarin I was doing 20h a week of classes + daily study of 10-15 words and about an hour of Anki a day.
Do these people actually want to learn a language to usefulness or do they just want to be able to say Je suis X?
There are certainly a few participants who want to ‘collect’ a number of languages but do a little digging and you’ll find many serious people who are striving to get to very advanced levels in the language(s) of their choice.
Lots of resources - shame there’s nothing that stuctured for a lot of them. I’m not exactly sure how to go about learning a language without the classes involved in my prior learning.