Anyone here learning or have learned a new language?

vicwatson

Leaning Engrish

Morpork

I've been learning Japanese for about 6 years and counting. I wouldn't say I'm fluent, but I'm getting there.
I lived in Osaka for 2 years and met my girlfriend there who now lives in Ireland with me, so I can still practice Japanese everyday.

OP and anyone who is interested in learning Japanese writing I recommend playing Slime Forest Adventure if you're into games. It's how I learned 2000 odd Kanji in a relatively short time. www.lrnj.com
There's also another game on Steam coming out soon, but the name escapes me, sorry.

For some good early video lessons I used "Let's Learn Japanese Basics I & II" from the Japanese Foundation, featuring Yan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Learn_Japanese

dd972

Everlee Better Rider wrote: »

German here, I've only started in the last few weeks and to be honest I'm struggling but I'll stick it out.

I'm finding the hardest part is to have the confidence in speaking it with my German friends, but they're very good and very patient, and I feel like I'm getting there.

Ich versuche auch Deutsche zu lernen, aber ich find es ein sehr langweilig und kompliziert Sprache, geduld ist sehr wichtige. ( No google translate, honest )

Viel Gluck dabei

Tokyo

I've lived overseas in various countries for a good chunk of my life, so other than English I speak five other languages to varying degrees of fluency. Probably the one that looks the strangest to those that don't know it is Georgian - ვიცი რომ ქართული ძალიან კარგად. Learning it was through immersion - I ended up living on the South Ossetian border without a word of the language to my name and nobody there spoke English, but with lots of pointing and flashcards and figuring things out I picked it up slowly but surely. Took me about a year to be conversational, and it's pretty decent now, albeit pretty useless outside a former soviet country of 4 million people.

Falthyron

Italian doesn't look too difficult...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRskvLyCoU0

Links234

Morpork wrote: »

There's also another game on Steam coming out soon, but the name escapes me, sorry.

Influent?
Not meant to be great tbh

4zn76tysfajdxp

Has anyone here learned Esperanto?

dxhound2005

Eileen Down wrote: »

After eight years of living and working in Spain I'm still struggling to make myself understood. I'm aware what the problem is though.... I'm as thick as caca de buró.

Burro. You must know about the extra letters in the Spanish alphabet including the double r (rr). And the accent you put on the O would normally only be used on a verb to indicate that it was the past tense, not a noun.

I learned Spanish in 1979 from a Linguaphone course. Anybody remember them, are they still going? It was books and audio casettes and a correspondence course which meant posting exercises to London to be corrected and returned. In the middle of the course the Post Office strike happened (four months with no post or phones). Spanish is easy to read as the stress is on the second last syllable of any word unless indicated otherwise by an accent sign. I also found the pronunciation very easy including the lisped c and z sounds. "Aprende español, un idioma sin fronteras". (Learn Spanish, a language without borders).

I have an interest in languages and I like to think that I could recognise most of them in a few seconds from my years of listening to shortwave radio stations.

Eileen Down

dxhound2005 wrote: »

Burro

I rest my case.

Legs.Eleven

The auld Spanish will be work in progress for me forever. Easy language once you get the subjunctive and tenses down.

4zn76tysfajdxp

Legs.Eleven wrote: »

The auld Spanish will be work in progress for me forever. Easy language once you get the subjunctive and tenses down.

Sí.

Rhotheta

dd972 wrote: »

Ich versuche auch Deutsche zu lernen, aber ich find es ein sehr langweilig und kompliziert Sprache, geduld ist sehr wichtige. ( No google translate, honest )

Viel Gluck dabei

Ich versuche auch Deutsch zu lernen, aber Ich finde es eine sehr langweilige und komplizierte Sprache, Geduld ist sehr wichtig.

Fixed your grammar, couldn't resist, sorry.

Tigerandahalf

Spanish is a handy one to learn as there is always an opportunity to go on holiday there to practise it. I think you need to spend some time in the country to become anyway fluent. It also motivates you to learn more. You also pick up the little local phrases that you don't learn in a language class.
I did French and German in school but prefer Spanish. With it being the spoken language of South America it is handy to have it. Hopefully get to venture there one day.

Legs.Eleven

Emmalynn Unsightly Needlepoint wrote: »

Sí.

NO!:mad:

Slicemeister

I speak fluent German having learnt it through pure immersion. When I moved there first I took my bearings outside my apartment the first night and decided I could never get lost as long as I came back to Einbahnstrasse as the street sign said.
That went well...

The Diabolical Monocle

WikiHow wrote: »

Im contemplating learning Latin as things are so backwards, in the height of remoteness and the people are mad where i am working at the moment and the accent is so hard to understand it just might work.

Verbane "horreum nigrorum mortuorum" extra scripta sunt?

Sh1tbag OToole

rwg wrote: »

Heads up, dont learn php, predicted to be obselete within 5 years

People have been saying that for 10 years or more

kingcobra

I'm doing a bit of French and Chinese at the minute, and I'm thankfully I'm able to take them up in college while doing an engineering degree. Once I get those nailed down I'll get around to Spanish maybe, which is never.

mosstin

Emmalynn Unsightly Needlepoint wrote: »

Nobody spoke Latin in Greece after the Romans came then, did they?

That is correct.

pconn062

Learning German for the last 15 months or so (after doing it for 5 years in school and not really learning anything). I don't get many opportunities to speak it (any volunteers? ) which is an issue but I love the language and enjoy learning it. Going over to Berlin for a few weeks during the summer which should hopefully help.

The Diabolical Monocle

Eddie Izzard is a good man on the topic of learning languages.
He makes good points about how there are no 'hard languages' how can there be - everybody in that country speaks the language, they've all managed it.

Humiliation is what holds back language learning, kids up to about 6 dont get humiliated cause they simply dont understand humiliation and can so pick up languages without the fear of saying something stupid. (or words to that effect) (Izzard)


This man too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0

osarusan

The Diabolical Monocle wrote: »

He makes good points about how there are no 'hard languages' how can there be - everybody in that country speaks the language, they've all managed it.
]

yeah, there isn't much substance to that.

Regarding your second point, language acquisition as a child is massively different to deliberate learning as an adult (or even as a child).

Regarding your first point, a language being 'hard' is relative. It will be a lot easier for a native speaker of Italian to learn Spanish for example then it will be for a native speaker of Japanese. This is because of the similarities in vocabulary and grammar. Also, there is no need to learn a new script.

From the perspective of a Chinese speaker, Japanese will be less difficult to learn, ad they already know the meanings of the vast majority of kanji, even if they don't know the pronunciation.

A language being hard or not so hard to learn is relative to the linguistic capital of the person learning it.

asteroids over berlin

Couldn't be arsed. Gaeilge & Hun is enough! Plus I have google translate now!

Sir Arthur Daley

The Diabolical Monocle wrote: »

Verbane "horreum nigrorum mortuorum" extra scripta sunt?

Is that Latin or west Clare lingo?

QuiteInterestin

Just back from holidays and as always, in awe of all the europeans that can speak so many languages while I can just about speak English. Based on that, I'm hoping to relearn French (did it in school but nothing since) and try and get up to a decent enough level so I could at least hold a conversation. Had the same good intentions last time I came home from holidays, so hopefully this time I'll follow through.

yellowlabrador

I'm teaching myself Japanese too. I use youtube and I've a few apps on my phone too. I love it. I've learned so much in the past few months and when I hear Japanese spoken, I sometimes get the drift of the conversation and I am amazed at how much I understand. I'm finding kanji difficult but I'm slowly getting there. I'm hoping to go to Japan next year so I want to at least have the basics.
There's a great expat community on youtube who are very helpful and there are regular google hangouts where you can practice your spoken japanese.
I basically started it as a brain exercise and now I can't stop.
When I was younger, I taught myself arabic too because I lived in Abu Dhabi in the early 80's.
I tried mandarin first but found the pronunciation beyond my abilities.

Sir Arthur Daley

I wouldnt mind relearning the French language, the del boy french i have do be inadequate times

SmallTeapot

I studied French in school and have a diploma in it as well, but I'm very rusty now.... much to my dismay I want to get back into speaking/learning it again, as it is a beautiful language that I really enjoyed speaking.

Otherwise, I would also like to take up Italian, another melodic language.

If I were to be truly honest, I dream of being able to converse in several languages akin to mainland Europeans.....that would be fantastic

If you want to be inspired/awestruck, check out this guy called Timothy Doner on youtube who can converse in multiple languages.

Links234

yellowlabrador wrote: »

I'm teaching myself Japanese too. I use youtube and I've a few apps on my phone too. I love it. I've learned so much in the past few months and when I hear Japanese spoken, I sometimes get the drift of the conversation and I am amazed at how much I understand. I'm finding kanji difficult but I'm slowly getting there. I'm hoping to go to Japan next year so I want to at least have the basics.
There's a great expat community on youtube who are very helpful and there are regular google hangouts where you can practice your spoken japanese.
I basically started it as a brain exercise and now I can't stop.
When I was younger, I taught myself arabic too because I lived in Abu Dhabi in the early 80's.
I tried mandarin first but found the pronunciation beyond my abilities.

I'm using WaniKani for learning Kanji, it seems to really work.

Wacker The Attacker

Sehr Gut

Wacker The Attacker

Links234 wrote: »

I'm using WaniKani for learning Kanji, it seems to really work.

I'm using winkywanky

Links234

Wacker The Attacker wrote: »

I'm using winkywanky

That's not even a thing

yellowlabrador

Links234 wrote: »

I'm using WaniKani for learning Kanji, it seems to really work.

I'll give it a go
It's great to know I'm not on my own. I went to the library but there wasn't much available.

Wacker The Attacker

Links234 wrote: »

That's not even a thing

It does bear a certain resemblance to the yoke you're using

Links234

yellowlabrador wrote: »

I'll give it a go
It's great to know I'm not on my own. I went to the library but there wasn't much available.

You know there's also the 日本語 (Japanese) forum here, although it's a bit quiet, I've wanted to try and kick it up the bum, get a thread for little questions, etc. There's so many great resources online now, it can be a little hard to navigate sometimes, but it's way more interesting learning now than when I first tried.

Sir Arthur Daley

How long will it take you to be fluent in Speaking Japanese OP as it looks to be very difficiult?

steddyeddy

I can speak Kiswahili and Italian pretty well and I have conversational German. I would be interested in learning enough Italian to be able to read Italian literature. If you want to learn Kiswahili don't use Google translate as it doesn't translate at all. If I seen you walking down the street and I wanted to say "Hello brother (everyone's family in swahili) how are you?" I would say "hujambo caca habari ghani?". Google translates that as "hello brother reciting news".

Links234

WikiHow wrote: »

How long will it take you to be fluent in Speaking Japanese OP as it looks to be very difficiult?

No idea, probably a good few years, and even then I don't know if I'll gain fluency. I'm going to look into taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test or JLPT at some point, but the kanji I know isn't even at the N5 level yet. Really I'm just kinda aiming to be able to have decent conversational Japanese, and if I can get better than that, awesome. But I'm just gonna keep plugging on.

I got a couple of manga from Japan recently, in the original Japanese just to see if I can manage to read them. よつばと！ Being a pretty simple one to start with... It's for kids really! I can just about read and understand the first couple of pages though. :pac:

sopretty

My wee nieces are learning French and Mandarin.

My wee daughter is learning a cupla focail.... She likes it though, so I don't throw too much of a tantrum lol.

WilyCoyote

Yes - three. English, Yiddish and Rubbish

Sir Arthur Daley

Links234 wrote: »

I got a couple of manga from Japan recently, in the original Japanese just to see if I can manage to read them. よつばと！

Do you find it difficult to write it as it looks really intricate.

Mudmask

Decided last week to give French another go. I did lower level all through secondary school but I think without being forced to learn in a certain way I could manage it

Links234

WikiHow wrote: »

Do you find it difficult to write it as it looks really intricate.

Yup, mine often end up looking squigly, warped and lop-sided, and I don't really practice writing anywhere near enough. Learning to recognise and being able to read the kanji is way more important than being able to write it though, so I just focus on that.

But wanna know a little secret that a friend let me in on? A lot of Japanese people nowadays can't write that well either! Think about it, with technology, PCs, phones etc, there's very little call for actually writing something. Even writing your signature, lots of people will have their own little personalized stamp, so if they need to sign something, they'll use that. Interesting, huh?

That way I don't feel so bad about my writing being sloppy! :pac:

WilyCoyote

Mudmask wrote: »

Decided last week to give French another go. I did lower level all through secondary school but I think without being forced to learn in a certain way I could manage it

Bonne chance Masquer de Boue

yellowlabrador

WikiHow wrote: »

Do you find it difficult to write it as it looks really intricate.

this is one of the videos I used.The letters represent whole sounds of vowels and consonants.
I also learn to write a word as I memorise it. A lot of words are adaptations of englisgh words'

Sir Arthur Daley

Links234 wrote: »

Think about it, with technology, PCs, phones etc, there's very little call for actually writing something.

Would schools in Japan be using technology more than paper and pen in teaching kids do you know?

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

Oat23 wrote: »

I wanted to learn Japanese. I wasn't smart enough so I learned Korean instead.

That's difficult enough in itself, I have failed to learn it despite a year of living here!

I'm learning some Portuguese at the moment as I'm going to Brazil for the World Cup.

steddyeddy

Duffy the Vampire Slayer wrote: »

That's difficult enough in itself, I have failed to learn it despite a year of living here!

I'm learning some Portuguese at the moment as I'm going to Brazil for the World Cup.

Gostosa will get you by with the women

WilyCoyote

steddyeddy wrote: »

Gostosa will get you by with the women

Pray tell, Senor Eddy?

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

I made sure to learn '남자 친구 있어요?' quickly here.