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I'm American, so English is my first language. I had 6 years of Spanish as a kid in school. I never practiced much afterwards so its pretty rusty; but I can manage. I'm going to Greece in few months with my brother and sister in law; family reunion on her side, mostly Israeli, so I started using google translate to learn some Greek. So far I'm working on "hello" and "thank you". I looked up Hebrew translations and even Google falls short. That language has some crazy letters. Google can offer voice pronunciation for Greek, but it doesn't have that option for Hebrew. I've found a couple of sites and will try to get the gist of it in 3 months (lol, I will fail). Share your knowledge of foreign languages Goons, and the tools/learning you use when abroad.
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May 31, 2023 22:33
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I took 4 years of Japanese in high school. I remember enough to apologize for being stupid, ask where the toilet is, and order a drink. We're trying to learn Bulgarian for our adoption, but the local class stopped during covid and never came back. Haven't found any good apps or online programs for it, either.
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May 31, 2023 22:38
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Dad's side of the family speaks Arabic and French I personally speak French (C1), Spanish (C1), German (B2) and a little Catalan (B1)
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May 31, 2023 23:56
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I was a weird savant kid with English but always struggled to learn other languages so when I was in school I got my language requirements out of Latin and Sign Language, which are both cool and probably more useful overall than most of the other languages that were available in school (French, German, etc. maybe not Spanish). But also I live in a US city with an abnormally large deaf population.
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 00:00
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its all nice on rice posted:I took 4 years of Japanese in high school. I remember enough to apologize for being stupid, ask where the toilet is, and order a drink. You can teach yourself with a grammar book and practicing flash cards that you make with anki. And then maybe find a conversation partner on italki
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Jun 1, 2023 01:00
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I taught myself to read the Russian and Ukrainian cyrillic alphabets this year.  I don't understand 99.9% of it, but I can read it, sort of like how I can read any language that uses the standard alphabet but won't understand what the gently caress is happening unless it's English. Which is why I always smile when I read slowly out loud what looks like a complicated Russian word, only for it to turn out to be just a loan word from English, but with a heavy Russian accent (which is like 25% of Russian so far as I can tell.) Aside from that, much like every other goon in this thread I also took 3 years of Japanese in high school, but I only remember the basics and how to rudely introduce myself followed by "I have a boner."
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Jun 1, 2023 01:54
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Türkce
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Jun 1, 2023 01:56
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I was able to make my way through six years of Japanese in middle and high school that I qualified for JNHS. Don't remember much of it though. In college I switched to German, and have retained enough that I'm still conversational. Taking in a bunch of German media certainly helps. Recently I started the Ukrainian course on Duolingo, so I'm golden if I ever discover I have an aunt named Toma or need to find out who this bread belongs to.
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Jun 1, 2023 02:14
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I've lived in China for a little over six years now and recently passed the HSK4 exam. It's taken me what I think to be an embarrassingly long time since I'm bad at foreign languages, but I feel like I'm fairly fluent in Mandarin now. Hoping to start focusing more on other languages like Japanese, French and Arabic after I reach HSK5. I studied Spanish in high school, but I've basically forgotten all of it now, although if I hear somebody speaking Spanish I can follow the conversation a bit at some parts.
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Jun 1, 2023 04:08
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I’m brown and naturally picked up Mexican Spanish from a lifetime of hearing everyone speak it around me, including both my parents. No one ever taught it to me so I can understand and speak it just enough, although I usually stick with Spanglish/Chicano slang around those that I know and answering back in English if someone asks me something in Spanish because I don’t consider myself fluent.
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Jun 1, 2023 04:30
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I can read and write basic Italian (shocker) but never really got an advanced knack for it. I've cycled through school, college, and my free time learning and then forgetting. Enough so that in college they tested me to see if I had to be in a higher class to middling results. I'd one day like to stick to it but modern language learning stuff really didn't work. Duolingo becomes a chore after awhile for example and I felt you don't retain much of you only do a few lessons a day. Also it was physically impossible for me to pronounce certain words like "gioielleria" and not having human feedback didn't help improve that. Putty fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 04:56
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Conversational Swedish. But when people speak it quickly (and they do) I can get lost pretty easily. Still prefer North Sweden's pronunciation of 'Sju' over Southern Sweden's. Samovar fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 05:15
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I have an ear for languages, but I can speak (and write) quite good French, German, and Italian. My aunt's in the tourism business and was the one that got me interested in learning languages beside English and the local languages here in India. Knowing French in particular gave me a nice head start when we could pick it from middle school on!
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Jun 1, 2023 05:52
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English native Took french in school but hated it Taking German with Duolingo ( highly recommend) , and it's a lot of fun to learn, helps keep the brain active! There's a thread for people looking for family plan sharing https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4012804 I tried Rosetta Stone ages ago and didn't find it worked for me , but Duolingo is really good. Plus it encourages you to keep up on the leaderboards and compete against others (the competition is what drives me, gotta get number 1!) Blue On Blue fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 05:56
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My son attends a Spanish/English bilingual public school so my wife and I are now using Duolingo to learn Spanish. 489 day streak! I don’t expect to really become a fluent speaker but mainly want him and his friends to not be able to talk behind our backs when they’re tweens.
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Jun 1, 2023 06:05
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Just enough Swedish to ask if I can buy a Dala horse, but not ask where the bathroom is.
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Jun 1, 2023 06:30
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An inconsequential amount of French and I still have a few scraps of Russian and Swedish somewhere in the back of my brain. The Cyrillic alphabet is surprisingly easy to learn if your looking for a relatively quick language trick to pick up. Plus you get to have a stroke every time you see it used to give a Slavic flavor to English language text.
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Jun 1, 2023 08:38
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i speak english and bad english
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Jun 1, 2023 08:38
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numberoneposter posted:i speak english and bad english I'm impressed! I've always heard Dutch is particularly hard to master.
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Jun 1, 2023 08:40
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Samovar posted:I'm impressed! I've always heard Dutch is particularly hard to master.
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Jun 1, 2023 08:45
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Dutch, but not very well because the Dutch speak English really well and when they find out I'm "English" (no) they switch to English. The tip-off usually is that that a lot of Dutch words are also the same or same-ish in English so they hear my American-accented Dutchified English word they realize what my first language is and they say "You speak Dutch very well! How long have you lived here?" Honestly, they are flattered that as a foreigner I bothered to learn Dutch and try to communicate with them in it because not a lot of "expats" (a term I haaaaate) do. There's English speaking expat bubbles all over because they have a lot of foriegners move here. I'm better at reading and writing in it than speaking it though, because native speakers of any language talk way too fast.
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Jun 1, 2023 08:46
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English Obv I'm an interpreter in my country's sign language which is fun , but not technically foreign I had to learn Spanish for that job too so that was fun I grew up with a lot of tok Pisin and can receptively make sense of it And as a joke I studied Toki Pona, a ~125 word artificial language used for language studies because it's so quick to learn Real good fun, language loving rules, Monolingualism is lame
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Jun 1, 2023 11:09
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Native Norwegian speaker, so understand Danish and Swedish by default. Fluent in English. As in, have used written English more than written Norwegian for most of my life, have spent time living in deep immersion (a year as a foreign exchange student in high school, some shorter-duration stays later), can switch to thinking entirely in English, can speak with no identifiable accent. Basic German. Took it for some years in school, consume some small amount of German media, can mostly follow newsreaders or the dialogue in a movie (but need backup subtitles to make sure). Should really have spent more time on cultivating this. (German is kind of easy mode if you already speak English and a Scandinavian language, really.) Extremely basic Spanish. Like, mid Duolingo level. Barely worth mentioning. Can communicate simple ideas and concepts such as crabs drinking milk. Joke answer: Also I took a couple years of Latin.
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Jun 1, 2023 11:13
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INS is still trying to figure out which country to deport me to. There were a bunch of non-starters with the shipping crate to China poo poo, but it’s probably Greece now since they saw me eating a baklava and enjoying it. I don’t know I fully welcome the insane cop of the week with their insane theories, most of those assholes are doing life in America or Sweden, it’s like take your pick cocksucker hahaha. 
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Jun 1, 2023 11:15
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English indeed. As an American living in Switzerland I'm working on French right now, but they're all fluent in English and so switch to it at the first sign of trouble from me. I'm also doing Duolingo Italian for when I visit my family there, but that's just at the level of reading a restaurant menu, asking for directions, etc. But the Italians are far less used to foreigners speaking their language, so my last trip I'd try in my halting semi Italian and be met by rapid native speech and get immediately lost. And I haven't even tried to speak Spanish, the foreign language I was taught in school, in about a decade, so let's not even pretend there.
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Jun 1, 2023 11:17
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One of these days I’m gonna eat a spaghetti taco and one of these fuckers is just gonna start heating up and shaking and their head will explode. 
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Jun 1, 2023 11:28
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I speak English fluently as my native tongue. I studied French all the way through High School and got mediocre grades. So I can speak a little. On my trip to France 20 odd years ago I could barely get by. I was constantly asking people to speak slowly and use easier words. Which, in opposition to every Parisian stereotype, most people were happy to do. I still remember a little, and I am sure that if thrown back would be able to get back to where I was in a week or two. I am an ESL teacher, and have taught/lived in Korea for 7 years, China for 2 1/2, and am currently in Japan at around 2 years. My Korean is OK, my Mandarin is nearly nonexistant, (I know numbers and can point to stuff in a shop and say "I want that one"), and my Japanese is awful, especially my Kanji. My only hint on how to learn/keep up a new language is: talk to people, listen to the world around you. I learned most of my Korean by talking to old ladies waiting at the bus stop. My listening skills come largely from watching local TV and trying to understand it. You would think this is self evident, but the amount of expats I have met who can't speak a word of the local language and aren't even trying is disappointingly large. But seriously, just try to talk to people. Most people will see you struggling and try to accommodate you. And the feeling of achievement when you can say/understand something new is amazing. (I still remember the disproportionate pride I felt years ago when I asked a shopkeeper in a Yokohama supermarket "Where is the jam?", and also being able to negotiate the tax office in rural Korea without using English.). Not me, but my dad speaks Tamil, Kannada and English, whilst remembering a few Hindi words and phrases from his schooldays.
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Jun 1, 2023 11:30
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BrigadierSensible posted:I speak English fluently as my native tongue. Oh ok. Learn Korean by being a bus stop prostitute. That was my next move. 
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Jun 1, 2023 11:34
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I bet my passport takes like an extra week when I go to renew it now thx guys.
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Jun 1, 2023 11:36
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BrigadierSensible posted:My only hint on how to learn/keep up a new language is: talk to people, listen to the world around you. I learned most of my Korean by talking to old ladies waiting at the bus stop. My listening skills come largely from watching local TV and trying to understand it. Yes, absolutely, on both points. The main thing that gave me an edge in learning English early was that I was a pre-teen and then teenage Norwegian nerd in the 1980s, got into home computers and TTRPGs and SF books and all that poo poo, and the pickings were extremely slim as far as Norwegian-language stuff relevant to my interests went. So I had to read a lot of English all of the time. In addition to the fact that they don't dub movies or TV shows for adults here, which meant a constant trickle of spoken English as well. Then later, of course, full-immersion in a place where nobody spoke anything except for English, forced me to develop native-level fluency in speaking it for myself. The last of these factors is not automatic for e.g. native English-speakers living in a place where most natives understand English. I've known adult Englishmen or Americans who have lived in Norway for years without learning the language very well. Some have expressed frustration that they don't get enough practice because people just default to speaking English around them. Because loving everyone speaks English here and it's only getting worse with each generation. (My 5yo daughter is basically fluent despite nobody actually trying to teach her, she just decided it was cool to teach herself from various available resources.)
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Jun 1, 2023 11:47
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I speak English natively, and I was born & raised in the United States, so I try not to get too arrogant about the fluency I have in other languages even if I might be more fluent than I think. I've always been a total language geek though, and languages were the only classes I consistently got A's in, because they were the only classes I actually put effort into.  Anyway, I studied Spanish in middle school, in a class filled with native Spanish-speaking kids, and I learned it well enough to read, listen to, and speak it. That said, if someone walked up to me on the sidewalk and started talking to me in Spanish, I would probably freeze up out of sheer self-consciousness. Norwegian is technically my fourth language (I studied Japanese in college, but I'm not fluent enough for it to count), but it's probably the non-English language I know best at this point, thanks primarily to EXTREMELY patient goons & goon-adjacent people.  I can read, write, carry on a conversation, listen -- not super duper well, but too well for Duolingo to be useful and well enough for Norwegian news radio to be decent practice. If someone walked up to me on the sidewalk and starting talking to me in Norwegian, I'd probably still freeze up out of sheer self-consciousness.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:21
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the bam margera language
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Jun 1, 2023 15:22
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Took Spanish in high school, speak barely any of that anymore though. Took Japanese for 4 semesters in college, but then proceeded to not use it at all. Now I've been relearning it through Duolingo for the past 3 and a half years since my partner and I are going to Japan next year and I'd like to be as useful as she was when we went to Mexico and she could speak Spanish pretty good. I really need to get into a class or something so I can speak it to other people.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:29
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english and local english.
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Jun 1, 2023 16:14
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i consider myself a citizen of the world and thus no language is foreign to me op
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Jun 1, 2023 16:20
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Bad Purchase posted:i consider myself a citizen of the world and thus no language is foreign to me op
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Jun 1, 2023 16:24
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Way too much high school Spanish so when a Peruvian friend’s mom is asking her toddler grandson if he needs to use the bathroom I understand. A friend’s mom is from Germany & taught her kids, so in high school he was able to talk to a German exchange student. It was interesting as he could communicate fine but was informed his German was very formal as he didn’t know any slang. Another friend taught himself Japanese for non-anime/video game/or tourist reasons. He picks up languages ridiculously fast and I’m jealous.
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Jun 1, 2023 16:37
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High school Spanish and French and a bunch of Mandarin Chinese in college, all in varying degrees of disuse. I'd say I'm better off for having learned them though.
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Jun 1, 2023 16:53
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On top of my native language, I can do office work in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Restaurant menu reading and food ordering is a go in Swedish and German.
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Jun 1, 2023 16:59
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Klingon but with with a jamaican accent
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Jun 1, 2023 16:59
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