I started my daily Chinese last December 21. I started with 3 months on Duolingo before I realized it's a terrible app for Chinese (no writing exercises, cartoony voices that make tones impossible to distinguish, no pinyin) so now I'm using HelloChinese and having a much better experience.
Learning hànzi has been daunting. I'm at the point where I'll sometimes see some characters I know so I'll try reading, but then there will be a couple that I don't know, and I don't even have any way to sound out at least with German I could read the word without understanding.
I live in my city's Chinatown (which btw isn't the place called "Chinatown") and like to try to read the shop signs as I walk around town, but most of them use traditional characters or cursive or both, which is a whole nother level of difficult for me.
I also took German back in college and still remember a bunch and am considering learning more, but that was 10 years ago and I think I want to focus on one language at a time. Chinese has caught my attention better because hànzi are fun to learn.
每天我学一点儿汉语。
你好同学们，我也学习中文。我觉得有点长，可是我每天十二十分钟复习。
我也用HelloChinese。它比Duolingo很好。
我总是做错，可是我永远试试看。
你应该看看HelloTalk。你可以跟学英语的中国人聊天。
Cursive chinese sounds fucking nightmarish to figure out lol. Didn't China almost phase that out completely, because everyone under 50 thinks of it as a waste of time to learn, to the point where the government had to implement a few different cultural programs to save it, since it's a lot of history to lose if no one can read the older texts.
Studying Chinese showed me how pointless and arbitrary all those articles and conjugations in romance languages are.
I wonder if Chinese speakers learning romance languages feel the same way when they get to drop tones/measure words/homonyms, and idiomatic phrases that read like the end of a 3000 year old games of telephone.
id like to start reading ancient greek again but im really out of the habit & dealing with too much mental illness to focus on it
latin was my best subject in high school so i majored in classics in college before dropping out. ancient greek classes at my school sucked though i didnt learn shit, ive learned more on my own but i havent been able to get myself to do any since i left school
also theres just interesting stuff to read i guess. not everything has a reason
What’re you planning to read next? I’m in between texts right now, too, so maybe we can motivate each other.
If I can get myself to I'll probably try to read some Xenophon, though I've also considered reading some Homer cause I've only read very little
What about you
I've been meaning to read the Medea.
Xenophon'd be a great place for you to get back in the groove. The public domain commentary of Anabasis is solid. Please feel free to message me if you want to go over a particular passage or a tricky piece of grammar.
the problem isnt really that im bad at greek its mostly just depression
tragedy real hard though one of my advanced classes was "reading" medea and we just like, translated random parts of it and talked about grammar, skipped large sections, and read the greek out loud but with a stress based meter and just ignoring the actual meter. fucking terrible
Stress-based meter?!?! What?!?
I'm with you on the depression. νῦν δ᾽ ἐχθρὰ πάντα, καὶ νοσεῖ τὰ φίλτατα. I'm trying to give myself micro-goals like five lines a day or something manageable until I can treat Greek as a daily habit and not feel like I have to work myself up to it. This guy's commentaries are good for that. Decent advice, too, that I keep not following.
steadman is great. i wish i could be comfortable reading stuff on websites cause e.g. perseus would make stuff a lot quicker
we actually used steadman's commentary on herodotus 7 in the fall semester. it was helpful.
Very cool. I haven't read Herodotus in Greek yet.
I like Steadman because he provides the convenience of Perseus without the crutches, like having the forms of every word available just a click away. His versions are the ones I use to get myself back into things after too much time off. (I've been out of school for a while now and fighting to maintain or improve my Greek is a constant struggle.)
i dont really view it as crutches cause my goal mostly is just to read as much greek as possible rather than like become a master at parsing words or translating or whatever. but i dont think this is a particularly common opinion.
thanks for all this btw its really encouraging i hope i do some today
edit: also herodotus is probably the easiest shit ive ever read in greek and he's really fun too
Spanish, I can't hold conversation but at least I'm sticking to Duolingo regularly.
Cute story from a Roe protest over the weekend: the organizers were teaching the crowd different chants and included a few spanish chants. Myself and the other non-spanish speakers tried our best, but usually only said one or two words before trailing off into mumbles. Eventually they just had us say "ABORTO LEGAL" and "ABORTO SEGURO" lol
I'm trying to learn Spanish as well and its so much easier written than spoken, for me. I studied Latin 20 years ago so its easier when I can see all the letters but with spoken words and tossing an accent on top its harder to hear the cognates and get it.
Agreed, my ear for it is bad but I can at least pronounce anything I read. Next event I'm suggesting we make some signs with the chants on it to help people.
Learned a lot french in school as a kid. I can't really speak it outside of maybe being able to get around a town with it, but my reading and comprehension is much better. I can listen to conversations in French and understand the general meaning, even if I don't get all the details, to the point where I can watch some movies in French.
Did a semester of Russian in high school, but only really learned how to curse bc my teacher passed around a "book of Russian swear words" expecting us not even to be able to read Cyrillic yet, but my friends and I took pictures of the pages and translated everything we could over the weekend. Got in trouble for that which killed my motivation to do well in that class, but to be fair I did call the teacher a "Мудак" to his face which is probably as close as I could get to posting PPB at him at the time.
Currently trying to learn mandarin (like 4 days into it, I know literally nothing), and I want to learn Spanish, Mi'kmaq, and Vietnamese. A lot of my co-workers are from the Philippines, so I'd like to learn some, but I haven't committed to sitting down and studying it. At my last job, there were two guys from India and one from Bangladesh, so I figured out a few words in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali just from overhearing conversations and with context, and managed to surprise them with my pronunciation. I used to know how to say "behind" "sharp" and "heard" in Shona from working with a guy from Zimbabwe but I've long forgotten them.
Every time I meet someone who speaks another language I want to learn how to speak it, which means I tend to jump around with which language I'm "learning" but realistically I can't learn them all, so you see my dilemma
Language learning is a big hobby of mine.
Minored in Russian in college and studied abroad there. Married to a Mexican so Spanish has gotten pretty good. Also learning French, Italian and German as well. Am able to watch shows on Netflix without English subtitles in those but have basically no speaking practice. I use Clozemaster, Duolingo, and Netflix to practice. Try to get at least a couple hours in every weekday.
I am not currently learning any languages but my new coworker does not speak any English and I now see a very sudden need to learn at least some basic Spanish
Nim looks pretty sweet, it's easier than rust while checking a lot of the good checkboxes like rust.
working on Russian. would be going better if I wasn't also working on programming.
Fluent in Spanish, German I'm at a very basic level, Chinese is on pause, actively studying a bit of Guaraní. Working on Javascript haha. I also love languages.
I've been learning Spanish since I was a youngster, and I've recently taken up Yiddish.
knocking the rust off my welsh and french myself
going pretty good
quite a few, originally learned from welsh friends, but am now using duolingo to brush up
there's quite a lot of resources online, plus every government website here is also translated into welsh, so there's plenty of material to practice reading
Learning french, have a streak of over 150 days, so thats cool. My pronunciation is probably still shit tho, but i feel like i’m getting a minor grip on things
ive been doing mandarin with duo and the anki domino deck for 60 days and im reaching the point where i painfully fail to recall old stuff and cant retain new things and will probably give up very soon
