Language Learning

Any experiences? At home or abroad.

My recent experience:

Tried to talk to someone and it was going well until they said 2 sentences really fast and I had no clue what they said.

I must've looked confused, trying to mutter something, ANYTHING! What were the words I'm supposed to say?! I forgot the polite "sorry, could you repeat that" in every language I know.

They caught me off guard, damn it. Then came the killing blow: "English?".

In my moment of weakness I submitted and gave them a nod. From there on we were talking as equals, but my pride had taken a hit. I was defeated. I must go back to my books and duolingo and hide until I have courage again.

(Sorry for the dramatic text, wanted to make a boring interaction sound bit more interesting)

I love anki but it's hard to find a quality deck imo, mainly because the search is bad. What are your favorite decks, and for which language?

Thanks!

PS: this community is moderated again, thanks to lazycog :) He added me as a mod, too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25565846

WHY

I want a free app to practice and memorize vocabulary but one that also teaches grammar and audio comprehension (I can barely understand sometimes, especially since I don't use Duolingo every day) better than Duolingo does and doesn't make you lose hearts or anything.

Wanted to ask for some tips since I'm really struggling with this trying to learn German.

I know there are certain ways to guess the gender (e.g. -er endings are usually masculine, -ung feminine and loan words neutral) but often times I'm just butchering the whole sentence by not knowing the correct articles.

Let me demonstrate my frustration: in many cultures the moon is considered "feminine", but in German it has masculine article!

Bitte, hüfe!

For people interested in learning Old English, Osweald Bera is an introductory book written by Colin Gorrie that, if I recall from his prior announcement about this, leans on a method called comprehensible input to teach the language. As far as I can tell from watching some of his youtube videos and reading his other online material, this looks like it could be useful for folks that are including "Learn Old English" as an item on their New Year's Resolution list.

The preorders were just announced. They are saying they intend to begin shipping the books themselves mid-November.

I'm really rooting for this project; it has a lot of promise. It's crowd-sourced and plans to be ad-free.

If you're more curious about details and future plans for the app, the creator did an AMA on Reddit recently.

There isn’t much lesson time for international languages.