Ask Lemmy

I started learning Swedish yesterday. My native language is Dutch. I started by reading a pronunciation guide, but (and this is so childish) I had to put the book away for laughing so hard after reading the Swedish word for meatballs: köttbullar.

Today I will make a second attempt. I hope I can keep it contained to a short chuckle.

Currently taking Japanese classes for fun. I'm about two years in and can have very basic conversations.

Took three years of German 20+ years ago and have German friends (and read German lemmy) so can practice sometimes.

I'm terrible at all of them and not that great at English either. I tend to "vomit language" moreso than speak well.

I’m learning French, when I remember to. I did not put too much effort into it until now, because I understand a lot from articles, conversations, youtube videos. It is similar to Spanish, which I learnt up to native level I guess, also mostly speaking without a foreign accent. But back to French, I find it very hard to write it, so many accents and ‘s and letters that are not read. I have what they call a “musical ear”, so I do distinguish a lot of sound variations and tones, but the writing in French is brutal.

Another language I will forever learn and not be able to get to it as with my Spanish or English is German. I mess up the articles all the time, I am sure, but I just keep going. I am perfectly comfortable reading German literature or having a conversation, but it bothers me that after so much time being exposed to it, I still make poor choices of articles.

I started at some point learning Portuguese, but I found it frustrating that it was so similar to Spanish, all the words would come in Spanish in my mind.

If I could, I would love to also know Greek, Danish, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic and many others probably.

I've been trying to learn russian but it's been hard. I mostly know how to read Cyrillic and a few words and phrases. Everything else has been pretty difficult to make it stick in my head.

I'm learning Python. Not bad, but I prefer C.

I'm learning Irish. My schedule is crazy busy, but I do a lot of driving for work so I listen to Irish speaking lessons. I also do this only while I'm on the road because my Irish boyfriend has no idea I'm doing this so I can speak Irish on our wedding day.

I can say things like where I've been yesterday, where I am today, where I'll be tomorrow, what are you doing, what were you doing, it was great craic, I don't know, I'd like a pint of Guinness, please.

I'll probably get made fun of for speaking the Ulster dialect (his family is all Dublin), but my favourite instructor that I've found is from Belfast and at least I'll be able to speak it. ☘️

I can't learn any languages because I have ADHD

2,337 days in on learning German. My goal is to understand all of the band Rammstein's library of work without needing a translator.

I've been learning Japanese for a long time now. The funny thing is that I started at the wrong end by learning kanji first and then moving onto grammar and vocabulary in that order. Avoid what I did unless you want to be proficient at reading it without understanding it!

Although not all is lost, because I'm getting used to reading news and Wikipedia articles without much aid or effort anymore, and spoken Japanese is slowly getting easier. Understanding it is still proving to be a bitch from time to time but that's on me!

Btw, does anyone know of great websites to read Japanese? I browse Gigazine.net quite a bit and many news outlets, but I'd like to mix it up and move away from politics and news in general. I'm still a bit shy about online forums, but maybe I should do that next.

こんにちは！日本語を勉強しています！

I'm 90 days into learning Japanese. Most of that has been learning kana and I'm now working on kanji and grammar. It's very different from English but I really like the way information is conveyed. I'm struggling with grammar stuff right now pretty bad, particularly conjugation, but it'll click eventually. Also the lack of spaces is definitely something to get used to.

Nederlands (Dutch), my native language is Portuguese and I also speak English.

"Hallo, ik ben Cally en ik spreek een beetje Nederlands." probably translates to "Hello, I am Cally and I speak a bit of Dutch."

I kinda suck at learning languages so I'm still at what I assume is A1 level, I think my pronunciation is ok, though. Idk how to speed up language learning but I have set my phone to Dutch and that kinda helps. For example, "Instellingen" means "Settings"

I'm learning English. I think I can manage. I'm reading more and faster than most native speakers.

Meine Muttersprache ist Deutsch.

I've been learning Portuguese for well over two years now. I think I've got a pretty good handle on sentence building. The grammar of verb tense is sometimes still somewhat confusing and I think I've got a lot of words to learn still.

But if I read posts on Lemmy in Brazilian Portuguese, I kinda get the gist of it.

I've been learning Portuguese (Brazilian) off and on for a while. I'm mostly okay-ish at reading it, but it's nearly impossible for me to understand it when spoken.

I’ve been learning Russian for a few years, I’ve also started learning Serbian and Ukrainian a little bit.

I can speak Russian pretty decently, it’s my girlfriend’s first language so I’ve had a lot of regular practice with it, I don’t consider myself fluent at this point but I can hold conversations with native speakers without too much of an issue

With Ukrainian I can understand quite a bit but I haven’t had much practice speaking it with other people at all yet. I have the basic phrases memorized, things like привіт, будь ласка, доброго ранку, добрий вечір, дякую, як справи, etc. but I don’t think I could hold a conversation speaking only in Ukrainian. I’ve been studying it kind of off and on for a year or so, and I listen to some Ukrainian music fairly often

Serbian I’ve been struggling to learn, I’ve been working on it for about 5 months. I think learning Russian first made it weirdly harder since the sentences are structured fairly differently. When it’s written, I can understand quite a bit, but if someone walked up to me and just started speaking Serbian I’d be completely lost

I’ve been learning Dutch, since the Netherlands seems like a nice place to go if I ever have to flee the US. Thinking about joining some Dutch communities here so I can get more “natural” language exposure.

I'm learning Esperanto because everything I do has to be esoteric. I understand the fundamentals of the language and my pronunciation is perfect i'd say. I've been learning for a few months and I can read and write basic sentences. I also want to learn Spanish (mostly to flirt) but it's hard to find the time. I'd also like to learn Indonesian, German and Afrikaans.

Edit: I'd also love to learn Polish but it's so fucking hard.

Edit 2: Oh and Finnish. I really like languages and I get excited about them.

J'apprends le français, C''est ma troisième langue. Il va ça va, et je suis A2 après ~8 mois, mais j'ai un amie qui m'aide aussi

はい、私は日本語勉強します。(Yes, I'm studying Japanese.) I've been doing it for the past year but not consistently. I can say and understand basic phrases but I'm far from being able to hold a conversation.

I'm learning English and a little bit of Czech (stopped a while ago because of my lazyness but want to start learning Czech again). I think I'm still speak badly in English but I understand it very good.

I'm from Ukraine btw

(Also does programming languages count? I love Rust)

I have pretty much been studying a language every day for the past 4 years, 3 years with Japanese and now 1 year with German.

Tried learning Spanish in school but I never really had a reason to stick with it or keep going. Recently started relearning some vocab and grammar and phrases because there are places I'd like to visit that would be much easier with even just some basic phrases and books I'd like to read in the author's original words and phrases.

I have been learning Polish on-and-off for a couple of years now.