I was learning Mandarin for a little while and started dating a girl who only spoke a Rural Colombian dialect of Spanish (I think, it was a little confusing the way she worded it) and wanted me to learn it, didn’t last very long, but hey, at least I can go back to learning Mandarin now, so there’s a silver lining right there

Currently, I am trying to learn… my native language: Russian. As counterintuitive as it might sound, I moved away from Russia while I was still a young child, so it never really developed much, and the things I knew got lost over time. Luckily, however, I retained a native accent and the conversational flow.

I began this seriously maybe a few months ago, but I usually go from periods of light study to periods where I don’t practice at all 😅 Nonetheless, I have definitely been progressing. I started by learning the alphabet, then by reading stuff whenever I got the chance (not serious stuff like books, but stuff like YouTube comments and titles), and once I got pretty good at reading, I began with studying the vocabulary and grammar.

Studying words is fairly easy, but grammar is really the part I dislike the most as of now, in particular, the cases. So many rules… I suppose there is no other way to master them than by doing a lot of practice and correcting yourself whenever you can. I recently downloaded a book onto my computer that is designed to teach you Russian by doing a lot of exercises, and I think that I will begin using it soon. I also heard about scientific studies that say that your brain is really good at acquiring grammar rules by itself, so listening a lot, reading books, and immersing yourself might be the best technique. Sometimes, I can even get the gist of a video I watch that is completely in Russian! Such a satisfying feeling.

As dialectical materialists, we know that progress is not always constant, so despite improving a lot, I sometimes (really often actually) still mess up the spelling of a word. It is important to have a growth mindset.

What language are you learning? 😄

I’m learning German because I now live in a German-speaking country. I’ve been doing it on my own by immersion, but the immigration authorities are now planning to force me to take a course that I will have to pay for myself in order to keep my immigration status. Luckily, the company I work for has agreed to cover the costs completely.

Malayalam at the moment. Native tongue, but unfortunately rusty in expressing things in without resorting to english words. Basically trying to go from native speaker who is fine with colloquial tongue to literature oriented, mildly fancier writing. Probably need to read a ton of literature.

Going beyond colloquial Malayalam is quite painful (kinda diglossic language). Tried to read some books and the frequency of dictionary look ups can be very demoralising lol (And a very specific annoyance of e-reader dictionaries sucking because its a heavily inflected language).

I’ve been wanting to learn other Indic languages (Tamil - sister language to Malayalam basically, Bangla, Hindi) and Spanish. I maybe getting too ambitious.

I’m currently learning German for necessity and it’s quite annoying but pretty good at the same time. Doing grammatical work is super fun, and my new teacher teaching us by doing one informal test every week really makes it much easier to learn. I am on B2 currently tho, so many of the earlier issues are gone and I mostly struggle now with specific non common words and adjectives or adverbs/prepositions and some harder things. You could try what my teacher does to us, in 4 months with 4 days per week of studying you can probably go to the lower levels of the next A1/B2 level by yourself or almost double that for C1/2 so I heard

I had taken a language class for my degree, Spanish, and I’m trying to keep up somewhat but have been focused on other things unfortunately. I try to read Spanish articles that get posted here, or lurk online in Spanish spaces, or listen to Spanish political videos.

The internationalist socialist forum that was held in Mexico recently is something I’ve been watching on an off, and trying to better my comprehension, as listening and understanding are harder for me than reading.

I’m honestly terrible at learning languages, as I get distracted too easily and forget vocabulary often. Though, in the future I plan to become fluent in Arabic and Farsi, and maybe Mandarin if it’s relevant to work.

I can already read and write Arabic, but I wasn’t given a formal education in it, and was taught by reading and memorizing Surahs in the Quran, as well as just being around Arab relatives. I speak Farsi the most naturally of the languages I have some understanding of, but I’m more adept at Spanish due to formal education. Since my mother often asks things of me in Farsi, and speaks to her family in Farsi (also since I’ve been in Iran for extended periods of time), I’m able to infer things about Farsi a lot easier then Arabic.

Although I can’t actually read Farsi much funny enough, even though I can read Arabic (sorta). Because I was taught Arabic through the Quran, I only know how to read very formal Arabic with Tashkeel (I might be confusing the name) which indicate how exactly to say a word, something that Farsi doesn’t have.

To give an example of what I mean, let’s say you have the letter:

ب

Well, depending on the Tashkeel, that letter can make a variety of sounds:

• With a “fatha” بَ is read “beh”, or “bah” if followed by ا
• With a “kasrah” بِ is read “bih”, or “bee” if followed by ي
• With a “dummah” بُ is read “boh”, or “boo” if followed by و

There’s also “sukoon” بْ and “shaddah” بّ which connects it to the previous letter, either by ending it on the sound “b” sound for the former, or continuing with another tashkeel for the latter: بَّ، بِّ، بُّ

So you could get something like: “بِبُّ” which would read something like “bih’boh” where the end of the first sound connects with the second.

There’s even more with things called “Tanwin” بً،بٍ،بٌ which have the same rules as their singular counter parts, but the sound ends with “n” so it’s like: “ben”, “bin”, “bun”.

Basically, this is a long winded way of saying, none of this us used in Farsi writing, (or even in coloquial Arabic, I’m just educated in an extremely formal script that is the Quran). So, whenever I try to read something in Farsi or Arabic without tashkeel, I just stand their gawking like an idiot because I get blindsided by every potential possible sound.

I should also mention I’m not at all trained in Arabic grammer, which is an entirely different notorious can of worms.

I’ll probably become fluent eventually, when I have the means to do so, but until then, I’m a largely monolingual fool.

Spanish. However, I’m bad at focusing at one language at the time so sometimes I flip-flop between Spanish and French. They are both Romance languages, so I can understand a lot (Spanish even more so since it’s very similar to Portuguese (my native language)).

I have a little strategy for reading theory books. I keep two translations of a text in different tabs. Whenever I start to get bored of reading, I switch to the Spanish translation. When I start to get bored again, I then switch to English. Perks of being bilingual lol.

Chinese is the one I’ve kept after most consistently and am most dedicated to as a goal, but it is hard for me without the structure of a formal, in-person classroom setting. So I’ve mostly depended on different apps, which has had mixed success and I’m at a point now where the apps generally don’t do much since I’m pretty clear on baseline level of Chinese. But the jump from that to “everything else” is where I easily get lost. There is still an enormous amount of vocabulary I don’t know, or don’t know well, and a lot of grammar rules I only have a passing familiarity with. I also just don’t have very good listening comprehension and speaking confidence.

The latest is trying to keep after it with speaking practice via an AI conversation-based app, but I’ve been falling off lately due to distraction of helping with family-related caregiving.

I’ve also dabbled in a lot of languages via apps, but not stuck with any like with Chinese, and a lot of it I haven’t retained. The ones I probably got the furthest in apart from Chinese are Japanese and French, but again, without structure, it’s easy to miss on a holistic progression of learning and instead end up with a smattering of different levels of proficiency.

I’m learning Mandarin right now, and currently I’m at HSK3. I can read and write fine, but my listening and speaking needs more polishing.

Learning Mandarin is way easier than learning English for me. Mandarin gramer is surprisingly similar to my native tongue compared to English, which has completely different grammar and pronunciation logic. And learning hanzi is somehow easier than learning pinyin for me.

Since Mandarin is a word-based language unlike English, which is a letter-based language, I have to study it frequently to not forget the words.

I memorize sentences instead of words. That way, I can remember a word faster and I have something to say in a conversation.

95% of language learning is just finding a way to learn 12,000 words without wanting to die.

Felt the need to chime in since I saw no one talking about this: ASL (or, rather, the Brazilian equivalent of it, LIBRAS).

It’s mostly due to being something really different (the grammar is, sometimes, somewhat, kinda like Japanese?), and doing stuff like communicate with someone in a very loud club over a distance (did this, was really fun!).

I say this, mostly, as perks that are less obvious than being able to strike conversation with deaf people. But this is the most important part.

Also, it let’s me better understand deafness and deaf culture, as well as accessibility and how people often suffer under capitalism, mostly on what may or may not be classified as a disability.

I don’t remember if we have a quote from Helen Keller, but she as a great comrade on her own right, denouncing the horrors that capitalism subjects people’s bodies, and how that should end.

For those who do not know, she was deafblind from an extremely young age, but coming from a very wealthy family, she got a 24/7 tutor. She even got “oralized”. Media picked up the “miracle worker” and the “overcoming her disability” story. Then, when she radicalized, the media took her out of the spotlight.

Anyways, it’s been real fun!

I am huge into linguistics and language learning. My main language is French, I’m becoming quite proficient in it after about 4 years of real focused study, trying to break into the CEFR C levels. I am also learning Mandarin and German; I’m almost to HSK2, and I haven’t tested my German CEFR but my partner speaks it so I’m making faster progress with that.

Yes, I’m learning Arabic (MSA)! I’m Arab but never picked up the language before. The basics are pretty straightforward but we’re (my tutor and I) getting to some of the more technical grammar (e.g. verb forms and how they modify meaning, idafah) and that’s much more difficult. Hopefully I can reach a level of fluency where I can communicate with my extended family solely in Arabic (even if I’ll sound like a news reporter) as well as travel and read 1001 nights.

I’m thinking of learning French this winter. Gross, I know, but it’s the easiest for a native english speaker and I already took it up until grade 9, and it can open doors for work here. And of course there are state resources since it’s an official language here.

I’m studying Chinese and I plan to study Spanish next, then Japanese and Vietnamese, then maybe Greek. I studied Latin in high school but the learning system in place was bad. I’ve heard Language Transfer is a good free course for the languages it has, which Chinese is not among. https://www.languagetransfer.org/

For Chinese I find that the most difficult thing is coming up with something to say quickly and with fluency. I’m using an AI-based and vibe coded app that costs a ridiculous amount of money every month to improve my fluency, with good results so far. https://www.chunkingchinese.com/app/ <=the app. But I should really get some lessons from a teacher as well and try to make some friends in Chinese, since the app has gotten me to the point where I can just barely string a sentence together. It gives pronunciation feedback and when my pronunciation of a sentence is bad, I retry it once to make a little progress.

I also use Dong Chinese to get podcasts and videos generally targeted to an audience of learners that’s about on my level. You can use it to learn new characters as well, it has transcripts and quizzes and you can click on words you don’t know which it will have you review in context. What I like about this app is that it’s easy to target words you remember weakly. Dong Chinese is much cheaper, and I’d recommend it for just about anyone.

One of the best podcasts on Dong Chinese for lower intermediate learners is Teatime Chinese. The speaker, Nathan, is from Shanghai and talks clearly and slowly about a variety of topics. For words that are likely to be new, he gives a definition in Chinese and then English after using them a few times, which means you can listen without a dictionary. The podcasts are free on YouTube. I mostly find them too easy now, but I recommend them highly for Chinese learners.

I also study reading and listening using Little Fox. Right now I’m watching a series about an elementary school girl who flies around the city on rocket boots and shoots lasers out of her eyes. I don’t recommend trying too hard to learn every word the first time it shows up on this site as some of them are less common. What I do is copy the transcript of the episode I’m going to watch next to the Pleco reader (you can use something like Pleco file reader and Syncthing) and scan it quickly before watching the episode to find unfamiliar words that occur or have occurred frequently, that it seems I’m partially familiar with. I guess at the pronunciation and meaning of the words and the sentence they’re in and then puzzle it out quick like with the Pleco definitions. I do this a few times per episode to improve comprehension of the episode ahead of time, then I watch the episode and do the quiz.

I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with Chinese. It’s not easy to learn but I feel like the Chunking Chinese app is especially helping at this time, since it forces me to output at a level that’s achievable and the output is novel to me, and since it gives pronunciation feedback that is mostly pretty good. I find that I can put a sentence together more easily than a lot of other Chinese students, although I still have trouble speaking at length on a particular topic and I still struggle with fluency to an extent despite making some progress.

Overall my approach is to focus less on spaced repetition and focus more on encoding new memories and targeted input and output practice around my current level. The apps I use often have spaced repetition built in to some extent but it’s not as essential to use it in every context that you use the language.