Language Learners

[Aquacorde]

Welcome to Language Club!

Like the weight loss/gain club, this is a hub for everyone who is learning a language! Here we can talk about our progress and our struggles, what methods we are using, how often we practise, all of that! Just a nice little place for us to come together as a group and help each other out~ To join in, just post and tell us what language(s) you are learning and talk about your primary study method!​

Member List

Aquacorde is learning Spanish
Nina is learning Japanese
colors is learning Spanish
EvilChameleon is learning Italian
dad is learning Spanish
BlazingCobaltX is learning Spanish and Italian
Starry Windy is learning Mandarin Chinese
ジュナイパー is learning Japanese
Staralfur is learning French and German
JaDe.X105 is learning Italian

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[Nina]

I'm going to soft sign up for learning Japanese. I know basics, but I'd like to remember hiragana by heart eventually. And maybe be able to order sentences properly.

 

[esperance]

I'm making an attempt to work on Spanish again. I stopped after graduating high school but I want to continue learning it!

 

[EC]

Was just directed to this thread. Put me down for Italian.

 

[dad]

quiero aprender español por favor! i would have said i will be learning spanish but i forgot the future tense whoops.

i took spanish for 4 years in high/middle school and now i'll be entering my second semester of spanish taking spanish 3. very excited, planning to minor in spanish and possibly do some traveling!

 

[BlazingCobaltX]

quiero aprender español por favor! i would have said i will be learning spanish but i forgot the future tense whoops.

i took spanish for 4 years in high/middle school and now i'll be entering my second semester of spanish taking spanish 3. very excited, planning to minor in spanish and possibly do some traveling!

Sounds like we're in the same boat! I took Spanish class for 5 years in high school and in the upcoming second semester I will be taking Spanish 3 and 4 (both lasting 8 weeks). I will be going to Madrid in September to study abroad and I figured following a course at my own uni is better than signing up for some paid course. I will be starting Spanish 3 in the second week of February.

I will also be studying Japanese, but not in a conventional way. I decided to tackle translating a Japanese visual novel on my own, since the chance of it getting translated at this point is -3%. I know this will be tedious and I will probably never finish this, but I am determined to get majority of it done. This is just like playing Pokémon back when I didn't understand English (kind of).

 

[Starry Windy]

Count me in this group, please!

Lately I've set my goal to mastering Chinese (Mandarin) language, and recently I'm having some time to study with my dad in hours ago. Usually in every Monday night, I tend to study with my teacher via homeschooling.

 

[dad]

Sounds like we're in the same boat! I took Spanish class for 5 years in high school and in the upcoming second semester I will be taking Spanish 3 and 4 (both lasting 8 weeks). I will be going to Madrid in September to study abroad and I figured following a course at my own uni is better than signing up for some paid course. I will be starting Spanish 3 in the second week of February.

I will also be studying Japanese, but not in a conventional way. I decided to tackle translating a Japanese visual novel on my own, since the chance of it getting translated at this point is -3%. I know this will be tedious and I will probably never finish this, but I am determined to get majority of it done. This is just like playing Pokémon back when I didn't understand English (kind of).

that is so cool omg! i was looking at studying abroad last semester but i figured i should probably wait until i earned a little money towards it first. good luck with your studies this year and i can't wait wait hear about madrid! how long are you staying?

 

[BlazingCobaltX]

that is so cool omg! i was looking at studying abroad last semester but i figured i should probably wait until i earned a little money towards it first. good luck with your studies this year and i can't wait wait hear about madrid! how long are you staying?

I'm planning to stay for five/six months, depending on whether I'm going earlier than the start of the semester or not. I've yet to receive a confirmation that I can apply to the university but my chances of getting in are honestly 99%.

It is going to cost a loooot of money yeah, but I decided to go despite that. I'll maximize my student loans, use personal savings and the little bit of scholarship that I have; it should work out according to the financial plan I set up. In what year are you?

 

[ジュナイパー]

Anna, this is a wonderful idea. Sign me up!

While I should be learning German because I live in Germany, put me down with Japanese. It has always been a huge goal of mine, and I'm slowly teaching myself with flashcards and the internet. ;)

 

[Aquacorde]

Hi everyone! I'm honestly surprised at how many others are learning Spanish here? I was expecting a lot more Japanese learners ;P But that's great! Are any of you at a point in your language where you feel you could hold a short conversation?

 

[dad]

I'm planning to stay for five/six months, depending on whether I'm going earlier than the start of the semester or not. I've yet to receive a confirmation that I can apply to the university but my chances of getting in are honestly 99%.

It is going to cost a loooot of money yeah, but I decided to go despite that. I'll maximize my student loans, use personal savings and the little bit of scholarship that I have; it should work out according to the financial plan I set up. In what year are you?

that's realllly good, i know it becomes hard t to travel for people straight out of college so traveling while in college is a great opportunity i'll hopefully be able to have. i should probably also set up some sort of financial plan so i can seriously do this thing. currently i'm a freshman entering my second semester, how about you?

Hi everyone! I'm honestly surprised at how many others are learning Spanish here? I was expecting a lot more Japanese learners ;P But that's great! Are any of you at a point in your language where you feel you could hold a short conversation?

absolutely depending on what the conversation is about! i used to practice w my friend in hs but currently i don't have anyone to practice with.

 

[BlazingCobaltX]

Hi everyone! I'm honestly surprised at how many others are learning Spanish here? I was expecting a lot more Japanese learners ;P But that's great! Are any of you at a point in your language where you feel you could hold a short conversation?

I used to, but right now only if I prepare myself and get the time in a conversation to come up with an answer. So that's a no haha. There's two reasons why I am not at that point (anymore). First of all, my Spanish education was actually very bad. Of the five years I followed the course, only the final one was really useful because they finally used Dutch books as opposed to Spanish (like they did the past four years). You'd think completely throwing yourself into a language without any translations will make you learn it quickly, but I don't think that's an appropiate method for high schoolers. None of the people I graduated with was satisfied with the kind of education we got; it was absolutely useless, but the teachers wouldn't listen to our complaints. What I eventually learned were some common words and phrases and how to answer the exam questions without knowing what I was reading.

The second problem for me was my inability to remember vocabulary. Grammar, I aced, in all of the five languages I followed in high school. But in all those five languages I also had great difficulty remembering vocabulary, and that kinda was my Achilles' heel. While I learned a lot of words in my final year, two years later I forgot many of them. Because of that, while I would know in what tense someone is speaking and such, I do not understand the words people are saying without the help of a translator. As such, it also takes me a lot of effort to make sentences of my own without getting some kind of help. It's unfortunate, and I've yet to figure out why I suck so much at vocabulary haha.

that's realllly good, i know it becomes hard t to travel for people straight out of college so traveling while in college is a great opportunity i'll hopefully be able to have. i should probably also set up some sort of financial plan so i can seriously do this thing. currently i'm a freshman entering my second semester, how about you?

I am currently in my second year, also about to enter my second semester. First year is kind of early to start planning studying abroad, especially because you mainly need a certain amount of credits before you can start applying (in my case 60 ECTS). The first semester of the third year is the best opportunity for people here to travel because that semester is often completely free to fill in with courses of your choice, but going the second semester and writing your bachelor thesis there is also a possibility. Have you checked out your uni's International Office? We had a lot of information sessions and fairs here for studying abroad, I got almost all of my information there.

 

[aurevesque]

Oh yay! A language thread! I hope I'm not too late!

J'aimerais apprendre le francais (I'd love to learn French!). Also, I don't know how to do accents on here.
I've taken French as a foreign language since middle school, so... almost a decade, and I still can't speak it. Part of my goal is to listen to more French speakers, and read The Phantom of the Opera en francais. So far, I'm a quarter of the way done. After that, is all 5 volumes of Les Miserables.

I should also broaden my Mandarin. I know the most basics of basics: pronouns, 3 verbs and a couple of colors and nouns.
How is everyone progressing?

 

[ジュナイパー]

So apparently, the Nintendo Switch isn't region locked. Now I don't have to order everything from Amazon!

Are any of you planning to buy Switch games in a foreign language that you are learning?

 

[Aquacorde]

I've been keeping up with at least my Duolingo lessons! The bots they have on iOS are teally interesting to use actually~

I don't think I'll buy any games in Spanish for a long time haha but I might replay some in Spanish somewhere aling the line?

 

[BlazingCobaltX]

So apparently, the Nintendo Switch isn't region locked. Now I don't have to order everything from Amazon!

Are any of you planning to buy Switch games in a foreign language that you are learning?

Very happy they dropped the region lock, especially since the Switch is portable. I won't be buying the Switch, though, I was never planning to.

Can't wait for finals and such to be over so I can get back to translating~

 

[Nina]

So I had an idea, and it's a bit convoluted but hopefully it'll work well. The thing is, because my interest passes and wains, and more than anything I just want to write japanese characters randomly so I decided to print out a bunch of kanji worksheets on notecards! While I'm focusing more on remembering hiragana, going through them all and deciphering the word before I touch the kanji has been fun. So as to not waste as much paper, my plan is to laminate the post cards and get some fine dry erase markers. The back of the cards have blank spaces for the kanji, memorization obv. The back of the hirigana sheet has dakuten and stuff. Obviously it's all in Japanese, but there's a lot of children's worksheets on this site.

I've also started heart gold in japanese on an old dsi! I have to restart because my brain started hurting getting through oak's first lecture, but it was really nice to read actual stuff and figure out things and words from contextual cues.

EDIT: I had some extra cash so I went again and got laminate sheets and markers, I got the one that they used to use on the projector + transparencies at school because they had a finer point and work a little differently.
Because I'm a nerd I actually already have a heat lamination machine I bought in college, so I only needed to get the cheaper sheets. Though tbh it's under $10 to get what should be enough for all these notecards of the normal sticky ones.

I still need to notate the rest of them with more readable words and page numbers before I laminate them all, but hopefully I'll be able to create a tool I can use for a good while!! Also I just really like laminating things!!!!

 

[polymorphism]

Oh crap I came back to PC and find a language learning thread I might even become super active just because of this single thread. I hop back and forth between a lot of languages but I am currently brushing up on French (I took it for 5 years so I have a nice base) and devoting a lot to German. I switch a lot on the second language however.

Anyone want to exchange Duolingo accounts and become friends?
https://www.duolingo.com/Hrodebertt

Edit: Ah zut! Je suis désolé, je n'ai pas vu que vous avez dit, «Comment nous etudions»! Showing off a little aside I mostly use Duolingo supplemented with various random Google sites depending on my problem for both French and German. When it comes to actually typing in French and German I use Google Translate but not in the sense of I type the sentence in English and figure out the translation I type it in the language I am trying to learn and see how the translation comes out so I can adjust my sentences accordingly because it's easier to proofread and find problems in my native language and trace it back to the language I'm learning rather than find it in the foreign language.

 

[BlazingCobaltX]

I use Google Translate for sentence construction as well, especially for Spanish. No shame there, it really helped me back in high school.

Spanish class is starting in a few weeks, I just got added to the course on Blackboard. All the instructions are in Spanish and I'm already dreading having to ask people what stuff means because I keep forgetting words... Man, I really hope I won't be out of place there.

Regarding Japanese, I did some translating as a change from all the studying, and I was very pleased with myself that I was recognizing some kanji.