What languages will you like to learn?

[Theda Baratheon]

Cornish and Welsh would be the most interesting and useful for me at the moment! 

[Buckwheat]

14 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

French is harder, but of course it's easier to practice French than Latin. But then, you merely need to be able to read Latin, not to understand spoken Latin or to actually write or speak it. And even there, ancient Greek is tougher - same for Hebrew or Sanskrit, if only because they're farther away from current European languages. Of course, decent knowledge of English, Spanish or Italian (or even better, all three) helps a lot for French as well as for Latin (and knowledge of French helps for Latin, or the reverse).

I actually took a few years of French in secondary school. I mostly remember grammar and writing, but cannot really understand spoken French because I never practised that a lot. I imagine Latin would be somewhat easier in connecting the spelling to the pronunciation. But I don't know about all the declensions and cases, although, as a speaker of a Slavic language, at least I know what those are and what they are used for.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

6 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Learning German might be easier in Germany than in Austria.

Although if you are moving to an area where they still speak Plattdeutsch that might not be the case.

Have you considered watching stuff only dubbed in German to increase your vocabulary. 

Moving to Hamburg, so not exactly moving to the country-side of Schleswig-Holstein. 

I do try watching things dubbed or even some German-language programs on Netflix. 

[Toth]

7 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

When I was taking classes (and especially when studying in Tokyo) I was on promising track to competently read and write Japanese. I think at my best I knew about 1,000 kanji. But that's still not nearly good enough to read a newspaper.

Now, my writing has gone to hell, though of course keyboards help in that respect. But my reading is pretty terrible. There's some baseline of kanji that I'll always know well, and plenty others I can usually guess right, but I've given up on actually trying to read stuff. Not that I couldn't learn, but it's so impractical to do so! Even flipping through my kanji dictionary takes more effort than any other dictionary. 

So, my Japanese is limited to conversation, mostly of the casual variety. Reading in French is so much easier! Not that I'm good at it, but I'm more functional at this early stage than I ever was with Japanese, even at my best.

Amusingly, I'm learning it specifically to read, not to talk, so the polar opposite of your reason.^^ But yes, damn, the Kanji stuff is harrowing and it's sapping my motivation fast that it always takes so damn long to look up all the Kanji, identify the words and put them into my vocabulary list...

[dog-days]

Are there not loads of apps these days to help with learning Kanji?  

For a few months twelve-ish years ago I was given lessons in Hanzi while in China -- the lessons consisted of me copying out the characters with the correct stroke order again and again. I can't do any of that now, except maybe 'one' and 'person'. Also had to look up Chinese characters in a dictionary by radical. At a push, I could probably still recognise the characters for 'soup' and 'tofu' from my time spent looking for them on restaurant menus. There must be better ways by now. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

27 minutes ago, Toth said:

Amusingly, I'm learning it specifically to read, not to talk, so the polar opposite of your reason.^^ But yes, damn, the Kanji stuff is harrowing and it's sapping my motivation fast that it always takes so damn long to look up all the Kanji, identify the words and put them into my vocabulary list...

I feel ya!

One thing I do recommend for people trying to learn kanji is a set of physical flash cards. I got some from White Rabbit Press that are fantastic. 

https://whiterabbitpress.com/kanji-flashcards/

I would flip through these whenever I was on a bus or whatever, and they really did help to expand my knowledge set. If I had kept at it rather than going to grad school for neuroscience, I think I would have achieved fluency in reading.

[Toth]

1 hour ago, dog-days said:

Are there not loads of apps these days to help with learning Kanji?  

Of course, of course. Translators are so power you can even just scan texts by now, but that feels like cheating (and wouldn't get me anywhere when it comes to learning). So instead I'm using Jisho to search for the Kanji I'm seeing by radical and then look up the word among the ones it says the Kanji is used in: https://jisho.org/#radical

It's tedious, but I at least feel like I'm learning something while doing that.

1 hour ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I would flip through these whenever I was on a bus or whatever, and they really did help to expand my knowledge set. If I had kept at it rather than going to grad school for neuroscience, I think I would have achieved fluency in reading.

Oh, I have a couple thousand of those as well, but to be honest I'm learning even better when actually seeing them in use.

[Jace, Extat]

I'd love to learn greek so that I could read Anna Komnenos in her own language. I follow a youtube channel for learning it but I don't use it nearly often enough

I retain scattered bits of german from High School but that's it. 

 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

On 9/25/2023 at 6:04 PM, Jace, Extat said:

I retain scattered bits of german from High School but that's it. 

 

German? 

Είναι όλα ελληνικά για μένα. 

[Theda Baratheon]

On 9/25/2023 at 1:53 PM, Theda Baratheon said:

Cornish and Welsh would be the most interesting and useful for me at the moment! 

For those who don’t know these are two minority languages within the UK so I also see it as an important act of defiance against the last gasps of British Empire to keep them alive and going. Lol. Oh and they’re beautiful languages that help to contextualise folklore, history and the placenames. They link you to the past and also give you hope for the future. More minority languages should be learnt and preserved. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

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