What languages are you guys learning?
I think learning new languages is fascinating, since you can get a taste of other cultures, and it enables you to talk to new people and speak in new ways. Currently I'm trying to become fluent in Spanish, and I'd like to someday in the future learn Russian and Japanese (but man is Japanese a fucking mess of a language, so I don't know when I'll do that). What languages are you learning or want to learn?

I'm going to give Japanese another try. I first attempted it a few years ago, but yeah, it's a hot mess - I became overwhelmed and gave up. I'm generally not very good at learning languages, so I have no plans to try any others.

>>2
I'm doing Japanese as well. I'm making good progress on grammar and vocab, but the kanji is just killing me. (I'm learning vocab in Hiragana for now, and practicing listening through j-asmr and listening to vtubers).

I'm going to continue my studies in Japanese and German in hopes to become fluent one day. I also want to learn Russian as well.

I've been practising Kazakh with some old friends from when I worked there. It is difficult, though I had a tough time learning Russian too.

I've *just* started learning Spanish, it's a beautiful language. I'd love to learn Japanese or Itaian in the future too, they both sound lovely and I'm really interested in the cultures that speak these languages.

At first I got really tied up in learning a "useful" language, but now I'm learning to appreciate the language and cultures themselves, regardless of their utilitarian value, if that makes sense.

Learning a language is a big investment of my time, so I figure I should just focus on one that I enjoy and appreciate.

>>6
Italian is a beautiful language. I learned French first and still find myself occasionally speaking Italian with a French accent when I practice it. I have heard that going from Spanish to Italian is easier than going French to Italian when it comes to pronunciation.

I'm going to start learning Esperanto this weekend. There's another Esperanto speaker in my town and it would be really great to make a friend in person.

>>7

I used to study French at school, and that's happened to me starting Spanish too!
The teachers I had really put me off French, unfortunately. But I think that's just in the way they taught it. Learning a language on your own is waaay different to learning one in class, definately better for me.

English, as always. I am no native speaker but internet/games/shows are a constant input that familiarize me with the language a little more every day. Unfortunately there's diminishing returns after a while if you don't seek out to actively improve yourself. And the main problem with only learning through media is that you never learn to properly speak.
Fortunately I vistied NZ earlier this year and my hosts were impressed by speaking which stroked my ego quite a bit.

But I really want to get back into spanish. I had 5 years of spanish in school but that's been 8 years already and I don't remember much. Since I never needed to know the language aside from getting good grades I never used it much.
Recently however I had a glimpse into latin American internet culture and I feel like I am missing lots of potential there. If I got my skills back up to a reasonable level to actually participate in spanish speaking online communities, I would learn much faster, like I did with English. Well, as you can tell, that's just me wanting to do it, not me actually doing it. Got too much stuff going on right now for that, I hope I'll get around to it someday.

>>8
Esperanto is wierd man. Too bad it failed though, the idea was nice.

mi pu la toki pona mi li pona ala lon tenpo suno ni

I'm using the official toki pona book to learn, but my toki pona isn't good currently.

>>8
sina kama sona e toki peranto la sina kama sona lon seme

You're learning Esperanto. How?

I'm learning Japanese right now, but at a very leisurely pace. My problem is that I discovered I just don't care that what I'm immersing in is raw. I don't strive to understand more. Most shows are really not as deep as you might think they are, and can be immensely enjoyable even if you don't know the half of what they are saying.

some more chillwave, pretty kino comp
No Limits (Synthwave - Retrowave - Chillwave Mix)
https://youtu.be/ji4939HuZ10

>>13
whoops meant to post it in the chill music thread
mods pls no bully

>>1
I want to learn Polish but I don't know where to start.

>>15
Why would you want to learn Polish? Out of curiosity...

>>16
Cultural reasons like the art scene, and I like languages in general. But the material available for learning doesn't seem to be that great.

I don't have experience with learning languages and I think my attempt to learn German is my first ever towards learning a foreign language. I wonder if there are resources out there that introduce you to something e.g., programming in German while teaching you German. I don't know how this process is called.

I noticed that I get more unmotivated when I'm learning/using examples I know aren't very interesting to me such as being a tourist and I'd rather hurry up and read things that interest me however I am still not great enough for that but I'd like a mix of both. Do you know any? How do you think I can get my hands on such content? To teach a language by introducing a concept.

>>1

I'm very lazily working on my French. I studied it in school, so I already have a bit of a background, but it's been a while. I'm mostly motivated by France's strong intellectual and artistic tradition--for the former, I'm mostly interested in mathematics (and some philosophy), for the latter, literature and film. As such, being able to read it is probably more important to me than being able to hold a conversation.

>>11
Currently I'm using lernu.net and also (this is very silly, but) the visual novel The Expression Amrilato.
Toki Pona seems really interesting. I might try to learn it some day.

>>18
I don't know if there are any resources out their to teach you any concepts in a language that is not your native tongue. But you can definitely do something about boring sentences. Look into "sentence mining" and the anki plugin "morphman"

Anki isn't really ideal for learning things, just memorizing them. I think this is might be especially true for something like programming. However maybe something you could do would be take the text of a German programming book and run it through morphman. You should then have a lot of sentences that are comprehensible except one new word each. These sentences would be pertaining to programming, so hopefully interesting as well. I don't know how much it would make sense out of order, and maybe it would even give you examples of things not to do in the book and since it would be out of order it would be bad for learning programming.

J'ai un grand amour des langues et linguistiques, mais je n'ai jamais étudié n'importe quelle langue particulière.
Parce que j'ai aucune discipline.
J'sais même pas si ce texte en français est correct.

>>10
Disagree that Esperanto failed. Sure it's not the huge thing that Zamenhof dreamed of but there's a pretty large and great community out there, and I've had decent success in various European countries picking stuff up and pidgining about with my okayish Esperanto knowledge.

I've kind of forgotten a lot of it so I want to get back into writing songs or whatever in Esperanto. I discovered Toki Pona while looking up minimalist language ideas for my own implementation and fell in love so I've been doing a bit of that.

Some day I'd like to get back into German, and learn something like Finnish. For now, in a couple of weeks I'm starting Mandarin Chinese lessons.

I dislike constructed languages for two reasons.
1. They're spoken by weird nerds.
2. I know it's a meme but they are soulless. I don't like the homogenization of world culture through the internet and language should be natural. It bothers me in a weird way like simplified Chinese.

I studied Latin for quite a few months, but stopped due to other priorities. I want to get back to it soon.
Ancient Greek and Korean also picked my interest recently, but I'll take one step at a time.

>>24
This. It is such a waste of time, too. Instead of learning a language with which you can dive into a culture, read classics or even just communicate with its native speakers, people learn shitty, made-up languages.
The weird nerds are still the worst part, though.

>>25
I think Esperantists tend to be people who are interested in learning natural languages also. Speaking for myself as the first person who brought it up (>>8), I've also studied a few classical languages, and >>23-san seems to have broad interests.
It's true that there's to some extent an opportunity cost in spending time studying one language over another, or over doing some other sort of cultivating one's garden. But, from a practical standpoint, language studies compound on each other as your brain becomes more plastic, so it's not wasted time. From a more impassioned standpoint, I wonder if, as another person who studies dead languages, you might have gotten similar skepticism in the past about whether you're using your time wisely. What those languages mean to me is that the thoughts and feelings of people from across time and space, that Catullus' "od'et amo" or Sappho's "deduke men a selanna," reach me, in the form that they found to express them in those sleepless nights thousands of years ago, without intermediary. If someone thought the effort to obtain that wasn't something they were interested in or willing to commit to I would respect that, but if they thought it was worthless I would pity them.
To try to convey what I've seen in Esperanto so far, meeting someone who speaks Esperanto from another culture is very exciting, much more than someone from another culture who speaks English. Part of that is just being in the honeymoon phase of language learning, I'm sure. The more durable parts though are Esperantism, the idea that there's value in having this shared thing connecting that isn't either of our patrimonies, and, yes, that we're both weird nerds so we have that in common from the start.

>>26
I think people should learn whatever language they're interested in, be it Esperanto or Sanskrit. What baffles me is that, even though most constructed languages have their main point of interest being simply the fact that they're artificially constructed, Esperanto is still an attempt to create a lingua franca. That in itself sounds like an attempt to exchange culture for commercial facility (or "world peace").
I believe anyone who has seen Guarani being endangered by either Spanish or Portuguese, or Hawaii's struggles to preserve their own language, would feel slightly troubled over an artificial language. Preserving their language is a means to preserve their culture, and those artificial languages preserve no culture at all. Creating a language, in the eyes of the endangered one, is fabricating more threats.
And I don't mean that it is absolutely a waste of time, but that it is, in comparison to learning any other language, a waste of time akin to that of learning Klingon. But again, a man should do whatever he's interested in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Update from OP:
I've become a lot better at Spanish to the point where I could probably be dropped off in Mexico or Argentina and do just fine, albeit with some trouble.
I've also been working on learning Mandarin Chinese for months and can read a decent amount but can barely understand it when spoken. Still working on that. Got a Taiwanese penpal so he's helping me improve my grammar and writing.
Things are generally good.

>>28

I've also been working on learning Mandarin Chinese for months and can read a decent amount but can barely understand it when spoken.

That's probably not your fault, a whole lot of Chinese people speak a weird ass regional dialect, so your Mandarin is akin to speaking Queen's English while they answer like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsUvcjk8J5c

I don't find languages interesting enough by themselves to pick up something esoteric on my own. For universal reasons that apply to any language I'd say: learning anything, unlocking new cultures and their works (aesthetic qualities of a language are not translatable) is fun.

I'm currently learning German: for broadening my job market in future (though I'm not sure about importance of this vs specific industry skills. Does studying German for a year gives better return than studying specific eg. IT skill for the same amount of time? Just a thought); I find it easy to learn; I have friends natively speaking German so I have someone to speak to for practice, for feedback and to edit my writings.

Possible languages I might learn in future (in that order of interest) are:
- Latin - again, some friends are already learning it + I find it appealing and interesting, also its importance in Catholicism and European culture increases its appeal.
- Japanese - I occasionally stumble on something completely Japanese and need to rely on translators or I need to prepare search phrases for merchandise, art etc., also general exposure to Japanese media.
- Russian - I have some small exposure to it. I might just learn alphabet and very basics like 1000 common words to get general idea of it and be done. Another possible reason would be better navigation on some piracy related communities.

>>15
If this is still relevant (unlikely) I left some email address for contact. However, I'm sure you found some learning material already or found some help from other native speaker, there's definitely presence of them on the net in random places (or you dropped the idea).

>>18
I think that natural method is the most fun one. I haven't seen modern book for other languages like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205) that would teach you language without relying on translations. That is very likely because modern languages have are in print so you can just try to find material aimed at kids and go from there. As a side note, imo, if you can form thoughts in a given language then you should stick to that. Translating is a related skill that requires practice on its own and at some level of proficiency people drop translating almost completely.

>>21
About Anki. It's true, it's trash for learning and great for memorizing. I found some use in shared decks for German by disabling new cards and only enabling those that I encountered while learning or reading something else. Also, morphman seems interesting.

Kein Französisch?

>>29
Ahahaha well that's a possibility

>>31
salut !

yo aprendo español, quiero hablar este lengua.
porfavor señores, algunas tips?

>>34
¿"Aprendo español" debía ser "estoy aprendiendo español"? (even in English, "I study spanish" sounds a bit weirder than "I'm studying spanish").
Pero sólo aprendí un poco en la escuela secundaria...

>>29
Do you mean dialects in the sense of Mandarin dialects?

>>36
I think that's what he means

>>34
Why are you learning it, for school, or for something else? It's important to have a reason for learning something or you'll invariably forget to do it and stop progressing. If you don't have a reason, find one, the best in my opinion is for travel.
Estoy aprendiendo español porque quiero visitar a mis amigos de internet que viven en america del sur. Por supuesto, no puedo vivir o visitar paises que no hablan inglés si no hablo sus idiomas, lol. Algo como esto debía ser tu razón para aprender.
I think things like visiting people who live in countries that don't speak your language are the biggest reasons for learning another language and sticking with it.

From only learning unregularly with absolutely no self discipline, I finally contacted a Japanese teacher and he told me to learn Hiragana until next Thursday so he doesn't have to convert everything to romanji. I left off at the M-series and now have to do the rest until next week but that's actually a great motivator.

That is a really weird thing that we are incredibly dumb about.
Learning to read most writing systems like the greek alphabet or hangul or kana should be incredibly easy if you set aside a day or 2, and yet most of us constantly require 'romanizations' just cause we can't be bothered.

>>40
Well I'm not in first grade anymore where I dedicate 12 hours a week to learn writing.
Once you're an adult with a full time job and a house to take care of, it's not that easy anymore.

>>41
Writing is a different kind of hell.

>>41
Also stop that. You are more capable you think.

*than
English is hard

>>27
Esperanto was designed to be a universal second language. Zamenhof dreamt of a world where peoples would use their native languages between themselves but use Esperanto with those who don't understand their first language. Since Esperanto is neutral, it would have avoided the situation we have today where native English speakers are unfairly advantaged over the rest of the world. It's also worth keeping in mind that when Esperanto was designed, it was still common practice for so-called nation states to attempt to forcibly assimilate minorities under their rule, which often took form of linguistic discrimination. Adoption of Esperanto would have prevented a lot of suffering and damage.

Esperanto is pretty flexible and sometimes you can tell the native language of users from the way they use it. It can be pretty amusing. I don't think it poses the same dangers that the current dominant languages do. You can already find reports about new books being written in crippled styles that make translation into English easier, with the global market in mind. With Esperanto this would be a much smaller issue.

I think fear of Esperanto is completely misplaced. If anything, it could alleviate pressure on minority languages.

Started the M-Series today. I can write Tsunami now.
つなみ

>>45
keep in mind that esperanto can only be considered neutral for speakers in europe and the americas. esperanto should not sound neutral for speakers from africa, austronesia, and other indigenous people from other continents. a better candidate for a neutral language would be lojban.

and i don't see your last point. wouldn't learning esperanto prevent you from speaking a minority language? assuming the average person is only able to speak two languages at most, and therefore incapable of learning a minority language?

>>47
I meant that it is politically neutral. I am not sure what a neutral sound would be and why it would be desirable. Compared to lojban, Esperanto has at least two advantages. First, it is very easy to learn. It could be argued that it is easier to speakers of certain languages than to others, but that does not change the fact that it is easy for everyone. Second, it is a living language with more than a hundred year long history to prove that it works.

I highly doubt that the average person is capable of only learning two languages. Esperanto is easy to learn, it can be done in a year. After that you can learn any other languages that you like. If people learned Esperanto in school their success with it would probably encourage them to learn more languages. Unlike the current language learning experience for most...

Anyway, I don't think there's any hope for Esperanto to overtake English.

>>48
any language with a neutral sound, or more specifically, a neutral-sounding lexicon, would have to be politically neutral. this comes by necessity from the meaning of the word neutral, which is to not take sides. however, in order to do this, a neutral language whose neutrality comes from its lexicon would have to have a lexicon that accurately represents the worldwide usage of all living human languages. this is what a neutral language is, insofar of having a neutral lexicon.

in this respect, lojban is a more neutral language than esperanto because it proportions the number of root words to the number of speakers any language has. as a benefit, lojban's lexicon has the property of sounding as familiar as possible to the largest possible audience. this is not the case with esperanto, whose lexicon mostly comes from european languages, which limits its popularity to speakers of european languages.

but you're probably right. the english language (as well as the chinese language) are prevalent enough that it isn't practical to use little languages like esperanto or lojban as lingua francas.

I'm buying a paper copy of Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero to read. Its embarassing that I can still read Spanish relatively well, but my ability to speak it has gone down the drain. Not that I was very talkative in any language, but I miss those occasional conversations I'd have with native speakers.

If anybody has recommendations for literature in different languages, we should put them here too.

Had my first actual Japanese lesson today. My head hurts. Japs are retarded, why do they have a million counting words depending on what they count? ╰（‵□′）╯
Still it was quite fun and me sensei is cool so I will keep learning it. Until next week I will have learned Katakana too and then we'll tackle basic grammar.

>>51
Lmao get wrecked, son. Talking about counters in a first lesson is just glitter to 'wow' you.

They're not that bad once you learn their kanji and have something to associate with each category of object.

>>51
One would ask why english has different plurals for multiple animals – "herd" of cows, "flock" of birds, etc.

>>52
Yeah I found the placement really wierd too because it's before I have learned any other words, but he said I don't need to memorize all of it just yet, just know that it exists. My "homework" will be that he will ask me for the date and time next lesson so I should be able to say Thursday, 15th of April in Japanese by then.
>>53
True or like German has completely arbitrary genders "der" "die" and "das" for all sorts of objects and concepts without much rhyme or reason. Still, the counters felt equally arbitrary like "you use this for small, elongated objects, this for flat objects, this for ships and airplanes" and more. I will just power through it. I just dream of one day being as fluent in Japanese as I am in English which is also just a second language I learned.

So tomorrow is my second lesson. I got barely finished with Katakana (haven't practised the Y,R and Wseries enough to recognise them in under a second but I'll get there) but still, I struggled 2 months with Hiragana but if someone tells me to learn Katakana in 1 week I can do it. I just need external motivation, it seems. I wonder how fit my Japenese will be next year since I want to travel there in 2022.

Since this is just turning into my language learning blog I will start saging with these blogposts, to demonstrate some sage etiquette™️ :)

Last lesson was very nice. I had to stream my screen and open paint, he would tell me syllabes I had to then draw in Hiragana as a test and I got them right. Then we went back to numbers, weekdays, date/time stuff and he asked questions like: what weekday was the day before yesterday? Or: what time is it now? And I had to answer and then ask a question back.

After that we plunged into basic grammar with the particles wa, ga, no, ni, etc. and I was already able to form some sentences given the vocabulary. The grammar while very different appears to be very logical and systematic so far and since you don't have to conjugate verbs you get kind of a jump start compared to e.g. english where you have to learn be/are/is instead of just desu.

demonstrate some sage etiquette™️ :)

As the original mentioner of sage ettiquette in that other thread... gotta say, you're a cheeky bastard, Paperplane. Never change, pls

>>57
Haha, I was being serious though, I think this is a good example for non agressive saging. No need to keep my blogging bumped to the top.

Lesson Number 3.

I had to take a test. There were sentences where the particles were missing and I had to insert them. Particles like wa, ga, to, no, o, ni etc. and sometimes the "question" words like nan-,itsu,dare etc.
I scored 43/45 so pretty good, Sensei was amazed and said that I have a strong grasp on it and that I am learning quickly. That's terrible for my ego though, I told him. He should rather say I have more work to do so I feel more inclined to study on my own ^^'
After the test we went through a few greetings and goodbyes, some forms of adress (san, sama, kun, chan etc.) and words for father, mother, sister etc.
Luckily anime really does help a lot since especially the basic stuff like this you've heard countless times already if you watch anime and pay attention to the subtitles.
Oh and I also learned that there's countless words for I in japanese: watashi, ore, boku and many more and that you can kinda self portray. Ore is for confident men while boku is more humble. Some are only for women and some are only for monks. Super wierd concept but also nice to have a choice.

Lesson 4 was adjectieves. The i- and na adjectives to be precise as well as the present/positve, present/negative, past/positive and past/negative table and Lesson 5 was the absolute moloch of VERBS and their 5 forms, ichidan and godan verbs etc. But Sensei said that now I at least know all the very basics to form Japanese sentences and from now it's all about repetition, doing homework and learning vocabularies. Laying this foundations will help me greatly with all the advancements that are coming.

まだ始まったばかりです。
自分も多分勉強しなければ。。。
先生はどのような方ですか? 優しいかも

>>61
It feels good that I can at least read most of this, but don't ask me to translate. I only can get vague ideas of what's being said.
Not quite there yet.

>>62
Yeah since I didn't learn Kanji yet this is impossible to translate for me.

>>62
翻訳をお願いします。
>>63
言い訳しないで頂きたいのですが

jeg lærer norsk :D
jeg er ikke smart nok til å lære japansk...

Men det språket er dansk

I'm learning french.

I took some time earlier in quarantine to learn a bit of Latin. I dropped it after a few months but once school starts back up I think I'll take some Latin courses. It was actually a lot of fun seeing the different ways different languages piece together thoughts.

>>68

I was a classics (and history) major in university. I highly encourage you to continue your study, and once you've finished a course or textbook, force yourself to read genuine Latin -- at least a page to begin with, looking up any words or grammatical concepts you don't understand. If you're interested in ancient Greek, the same process applies.

Korean. Korean economic history is interesting because they're a fairly large world success story, but did pretty much everything the world bank/IMF tell you not to do.

I posted in here a long time ago and I'm happy to report that my mandarin skills are now usable for conversation, and I can read just fine!

i wanna learn alot of language at once

I'm still super anxious about speaking Spanish. I think its because that was the language I learned in school and there's residual academic pressure associated with it. If you learned a language through school, do you feel something similar?

I've been able to slowly bootstrap my way into French and Italian from knowing Spanish, but I have to really concentrate to get anything out of it. My pronunciation is horrendous, but right now I care more about reading. Its been really cool though because new languages have opened up my reading to a lot of older works freely in the public domain - their English translations tend to still be under copyright.

>>75

I totally feel your post-academic anxiety! I started learning french in ~2012, but throughout high school never really felt comfortable speaking it. The thing that helped me get over this the most was honestly just talking with people /in/ french. That initial barrier is the hardest, but once you find a group of people that you're comfortable around (and more importantly, around whom you aren't super self-conscious), you'll start to feel good about your skills :)

>>74
I would advise against that. At least for me I get pretty mixed up with words when learning multiple languages at once. Instead I'd recommend learning one language at a time.