I dropped Spanish which was the only language offered during my high school years. I regret it, and now I'm embarrassed to start learning as a uni-aged guy. I want to learn Mandarin because then I would know English and Mandarin which would cover like 50% of the populations speaking abilities.
Basically I just feel like a dumb American and being a Marxist I need to know another language.
I'll check it out. I've heard that Duolingo is a supplementary learning tool as opposed to primary, is that true? Are there any better resources? I know I've pirated Pimsleur courses in the past.
Mandarin does look hard as fuckkkk.
Yeah, duolingo is not great for fluency, but it can help build your vocabulary. I recommend the Language Transfer course in addition.
check out the pinned threads on /c/learnspanish@lemmygrad.ml
Everything is supplementary, there isn't the one tool that will teach you, but it doesn't matter, Duolingo makes it easier to start and you will learn stuff, the things it doesnt teach you, you can ask them elsewhere, immerse yourself in the language and so on.
LanguageTransfer is a really cool podcast so that also helps, i havent used many other platforms for indoeuropean languages.
Any category 5 language is hard if youre starting from a english speaking background (chinese (mandarin and canto), arabic, japanese, korean)
With cat2 languages. You can learn them on the side. Cat5 languages require active studying and maintaining to effectively learn them.
Of the cat5 languages, Koreans probably the easiest due to having a very modernized alphabet (to get you from not being able to read to be able to read(not necessarily understand) is the easiest due to having a significantly shorter alphabet(hangul)