Learning Languages

What Languages do you know? Why did you learn a second language? What languages do you want to learn? I'm looking to broaden my language skills, I grew up learning Vietnamese and a bit of Japanese, but have also dabbled in Russian, Finnish, German, Polish, and learned Spanish throughout high school and working in the part-time restaurant industry. Russian seems like the most useful to learn next especially considering the Russian Literature that is around, and it's a much more spoken language than the others.

>>62215 >What languages do you know? Latin, although I am very rusty I used to be able to read old texts with ease. I also know Irish, I am currently learning it, and have reached a very good level of passive ability. I read over 20 novels this year in Irish. I want to learn how to speak it well too. >Why did you learn a second language? I learned Latin so I could read medieval astrology texts and Catholic theology books. I am learning Irish because it is the native language of my country, and I feel a duty to master it. >What languages do you want to learn? Ancient greek, Japanese, Sanskrit, or mandarin. Maybe Arabic. I need to choose one soon, because I want to start a third language next year. Russian is very good to learn OP, the literature is amazing and there is lots of Russian content online. It is relatively hard, but worth it in the end I imagine. Maybe one day you can go to Russia too. It is very beautiful.

>>62222 > Irish Not OP, but that's awesome lain! Languages like Irish are really interesting because while they aren't dead languages, they aren't exactly commonly used either. It's fascinating really.

Know some Arabic. I'm pretty rusty but can read classical texts with a dictionary. I learned it in the seminary to read classical books of theology, philosophy etc.

What Languages do you know? Spanish (native), English (C1), German (C1), and Hebrew (B1) Why did you learn a second language? It's fun and healthy, I like fun healthy things. What languages do you want to learn? Finnish, and get better at the languages that I already know.

What Languages do you know? Finnish (nat), english and jap >Why did you learn a second language? I learned english from internet like evryone else. It was never my intention to do so. >What languages do you want to learn? I know enough japanese to be able to read novels and get an idea of whats going on but theres still a long journey ahead and it takes all my time so no plans for anything else. >>62251 Why Finnish? I'm just curious since I am finnish

>>62258 because it's cute, and strong. It's charming but sounds harsh at the same time. It's hungarian but better. Sorry I think I just have a fixation for finnish things because finnish people are quiet and reasonable and I wish everyone in the world were like that.

>>62258 > Why Finnish? OP back, I used to know a Finnish person online, and he introduced me to the language some time ago. I found it really interesting alongside some of the different cultural things. I always figured since then that it would be interesting to learn Also, kind of want to learn Estonian which would be easier to do after learning Finnish... I think.

>>62258 My mother language is Portuguese, I learned English from school and internet, and later started to learn Japanese. I'm maybe at a similar level, I can read novels, usually I go for the ones meant for kids to have an easier time. Spoken Japanese is at a level where I can solve all day to day problems without needing help from others, but my vocabulary is like kicking dead whales down the beach because I could not read books until recently. I wish I could learn Chinese, but I'm not sure if I will have much time once I get to a good level in Japanese. My wife is half Japanese half Chinese so I could use her help to practice it but Japanese will take all of my time for at least a couple of years.

>>62259 >>62262 Oh soykaf thats cool to hear! >>62263 >My wife is half Japanese half Chinese I'm envious

>>62215 I would like to learn Esperanto because it's (said to be) easy to learn and I think it's the most interesting one of all conlangs. What resources should I use for learning Esperanto? I only know Lernu and Esperanto12: >https://lernu.net/ >https://esperanto12.net/en/

>>62268 There's an Esperanto course on Duolingo. In the realm of easy to learn constructed languages, Toki Pona is easier to learn.

>>62268 >>62277 Nice to see other anons posting about conlangs, I've gotten really interested and been reading about Esperanto all week. Are there any resources for learning about linguistics and the philosophy of language? If you could construct your own language what would it be like?

>>62281 >>62277 >>62268 Since it seems there's at least a few lains with conlanging interests, I made a thread in /r/ specifically for conlangs >>/r/32208

>>62283 whoops, fuarrrked up the crossboard link >>>/r/32208

>>62222 would you like to discuss latin and the other topics you mentioned in real time chat? if so please join #linguistics on irc.oftc.net >>62281 if you want to discuss conlangs you can join #linguistics or #language

>What Languages do you know? Native language is French! Canadian french. The worst of both worlds :) Second language is English because when i was little i figured out (on the internet) a few words, unknowingly picked up a bit of the grammar and it all went down hill from there. a bit of spanish enough to go around that I learned recently in college. >Why did you learn a second language? I remember my drive to learn english was to understand what people were saying in the lil gray chat box in video games and why the mysterious fuarrrk word was used so often in those games >What languages do you want to learn? Preferably something like Japanese so I can pick up on nuances that translators can't even fathom to understand. Something that would be more practical in my environnement would be Innu. I work with natives and I'd like to be able to switch to that language for convenience sometimes. Toki pona is something i check every once in a while for fun. I really enjoy that conlang :)

>>62215 Birth language is English, but I know a small bit of Latin from a Duolingo Course - enough to get by with context clues. I only learned it because Latin phrases or passages turn up a lot in classic lit and I didn't want to keep pausing to look them up. Trying to learn Russian and Serbo-Croat as more serious "I wanna actually talk to people" languages, although resources for the latter are kinda lacking.

>>63894 please keep learning latin with "lingua latina perse ilustrata", also check out these books: Magoffin, Ralph van Deman and Henry, Margaret Young – Latin First Year Wheelock, Frederic M. – Latin, an Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors Orberg, Hans H – Roma Aeterna Orberg, Hans H – Colloquium Personarum Orberg, Hans H – Lingua Latina Simpson, D. P. – Cassell's Latin Dictionary I myself stopped learning latin because I just really like chinese and I've been focusing on getting better both at Chinese and English (my native tongue is some romance lang garbo), and I still have to learn both hungarian and hebrew for personal reasons, hungarian is actually not that hard if you have good resources and time.

My languages are Russian (native), English (internet) and Polish. The latter, however, is pretty rusty. I'm thinking about learning Ancient Greek or Latin in the near future, but have not yet been able to get up the nerve.

My native language is Russian, English was beamed into my brain from the internet and videogames and because i was pretty fluent at it when I was quite young I thought that learning languages was something I'm good at. Then I decided I would learn Chinese and I even ended up getting in a pretty good Uni at Moscow in the Chinese speciality. Now on the second year of my studies there I am realizing that I am complete soykaf at learning languages and I can't do as well as I should. Chinese just won't get into my brain on autopilot like English did and I really don't know how to force myself to overcome these unfortunate circumstances. I want to prevail over my laziness but it's so difficult..

>>63911 English shares indo-european roots with Russian so it makes sense that learning Chinese would be a lot harder.

>>63912 The hardest thing about learning a language is finding ways to practice, so it makes sense that learning Chinese would be a lot harder.

>>62215 >finnish >english >swedish >german >Why did you learn a second language? they started teaching it on the 2nd grade >What languages do you want to learn? japanese. i want to be able to read japanese car magazines, also i believe i'd be pretty good at pronouncing japanese words since both it and finnish are phonetic languages

>>63926 >both it and finnish are phonetic languages Huh? Please, elaborate.

>>62215 Russian (native), English (some people say I'm good at it), a bit of Japanese (started learning in 2019, learned some basics but since then it's mostly been just me trying to not forget what I already learned due to lack of time), also studied German in middle school (forgot most of it though but can get the gist of simple texts) and had a short Dutch period in 2018 which resulted in me having a tiny conversation in Dutch with Belgian football fans, it was really cool and they were extemely glad to find a guy who made an effort to speak their language. The languages I'd like to know are Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin), Korean, Spanish and Italian, but I doubt I'll ever get to them because due to being a wageslave I barely have enough time and power to keep my 日本語 in shape, and picking up a new language will reduce it even more and will probably do more harm than good. Languages are fascinating; I'm an avid supporter of linguistic diversity because each language is not merely a set of words and grammar rules, but an entire way their speakers see the world, formed by thousands of years of cultural thought, amongst others. I sometimes fantasise about what would our world be like if USA became a German-speaking country.

>>63931 >I sometimes fantasise about what would our world be like if USA became a German-speaking country. it will, unironically

>What Languages do you know? I'm only fluent in English, but I've tried to pick up German, Latin, and Japanese. German I've practically forgot, Latin I can still read some of, and Japanese I'm in the process of learning. It's just slow because I can't find any good beginner's material to practice with. They say you should practice by listening to movies or anime instead of reading manga or games, but those are harder to get ahold of. >Why did you learn a second language? I don't know, linguistics for some reason is just interesting. That, and for some reason I just feel ashamed of being monolingual. Like I should be more knowledgeable than this. >What languages do you want to learn? Japanese, even though I'm not that much of a weeb to begin with. I barely watch anime, have only read maybe 1 manga, and all the Japanese games I've had interest in have been translated already. And I sure as hell don't plan on living in Japan, what with their work culture. Maybe the language itself is just intriguing or I've spent too much time around actual weebs. Or maybe I have some unconscious need to prove myself by learning a hard language like Japanese.

I don't see any benefits in learning a language if you dont live in a country where its used as primary one...

>>63983 >he doesn't read books >he doesn't watch films >he doesn't have curiosity about foreign news coverages >he doesn't have foreign friends >he doesn't enjoy simple puzzels and challenges for their own merits >he doesn't have curiosity about etymology, language evolution, or linguistics generally >he doesn't have interest in history

>>63983 I think this is a pretty naive take. I think it's extremely important to learn of other cultures and expand your knowledge. With Russian and English in particular there is an incredible amount of technological history ingrained in the two languages. Not to mention the sheer size and influence of both languages. That aside, There is so much content and media in foreign languages! For instance anime is particularly popular globally, but the translations are very imperfect and some meaning is lost in translation etc etc etc. Feel free to reconsider this opinion, but if you still feel the same that's your life not mine.

>>63985 to clarify my position (this is me) I don't want tosay its important/essential/ur dumb if u dont but just there's obviously REASONS to do it. Maybe they dont apply to you, maybe you value it less for other reasons, but still there's reasons to do it.

>>63985 Books are too complicated type of media for my adhd brain to enjoy

>>63983 I learned a bit of ching chong ping pong in order to gain those free schematics and pcb layouts readily shared on gook websites

>>63995 I wish I was able to read books better, but in order to do so I have to hyperfixate on it and even then as soon as I stop reading I'll never pick it back up.

I wanted to learn japanese as a second language because I thought it would be fun and exciting, its not a hard language if you drill all the letters and keep something on you incase you forget a few, the grammar rules aint hard either. I know english as my main language, my other language im interested in is cuneiform drawn to it for some reason.

I know english, french and chinese, chinese is way easier than english, english seems easy because it's widely spread, and chinese seems hard because of the characters plus the alien sounds, but holy soykaf chinese is just so but like so simple, my level of english is b1, of course I've developed more vocabulary because everything I do online revolves around english, and all the books that I read are in english too, but my everyday speech is clumsy, I can get by but my subtle blunders humiliate me eventually. french isn't easy, but it's not hard either, I'd say it's kinda like spanish or portuguese, it's only hard because it has unnecessary stuff around itself, but that's it.

Didn't read any other posts in this thread but I already know there are some degenerate no lifes ITT who want to learn Japanese to watch anime better. I'd learn Russian so I can interact with black markets and hacker groups.

>>64284 How's it feel that 1000s of weebs have successfully learned japanese while you'll die monolingual? Anime wins again

>What Languages do you know? Quite a few to various degrees Russian and German natively, English C1/C2, French B2, Advanced Beginner in Ukrainian, Icelandic, Old Norse, Proto-Germanic (I'm a nerd) and Swedish. >Why did you learn a second language? I learned English and French in school so I guess I didn't have much of a reason to learn them besides doing as I'm told. Once I was proficient enough in 4 languages I ended up kind of addicted to the feeling and just started learning languages for fun. >What languages do you want to learn? There aren't really that many languages that interest me right now but probably Frisian, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, or just something completely different like Amharic because it's fun

>>63978 >They say you should practice by listening to movies or anime instead of reading I disagree that there's anything wrong with reading. Japanese is a very difficult language for a native English speaker, a bit like a puzzle, and reading lets you take your time and figure it out. Also Japanese pronunciation is very consistent, so unlike Russian or English where there's no way to know for sure how a word's pronounced just by reading it, you're unlikely to learn bad habits by reading Japanese imo. I mainly read, but I picked up an audio book of Japanese folklore for kids and learned to hear Japanese too. I'm working on being able to understand stuff at native speed, like youtube videos and stuff, but the limiting factor isn't my listening ability, it's my vocabulary and grammar (which you can mainly get from reading.) I say just do whatever is fun for you and keeps you interested, but don't avoid reading!

>>64586 That's encouraging. I actually prefer reading in general since I'm way better at it than listening. But the guides I looked at were all "bro no you should be listening it's more immersive" so that's why I felt like I should be looking for audible stuff.

>>62215 >What Languages do you know? English is my native language. I know Turkish, but I'm not fluent yet. >Why did you learn a second language? I live in Turkey. I have to speak Turkish in order to live in Turkey, virtually no one here speaks English, and the few who do speak it terribly. There is only one Turkish guy I have met who speaks English well. >What languages do you want to learn? I want to learn Arabic, I'll end up learning Iraqi or Levant. I'll learn Spanish and Portuguese. I might learn Farsi.