Sup fuckers! :honk:

Hope you practiced today! I've been busy with other things but I'm about to get to it. Gonna go buy a burrito and listen to Language Transfer in the car on the way there/back and then maybe do some duo-lingo lessons. I don't know, not every day has to be an hour plus, right?

Is daily too frequent? Not frequent enough? We could make this a weekly thread like they have in some other communities, but we gotta get HYPED for the first week at least I think.

We've had really positive engagement so far. Maybe we can get one of these posts featured/cross-posted to main, let other comrades know what we're up to. I dunno, we'll feel it out as we go!

      • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Cool. Are you doing it informally, or are you in a school program? I think we've had some interactions on here before, but maybe not about Russian.

        • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Oh how it fills the cockles of my heart with joy to see the daily threads making connections. :Care-Comrade:

          Congratulations Rod, you're on the peer pressure ping list for tomorrow! (if Rnai gets back to you he's on it too!)

        • RNAi [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          nah just duolingo and re-starting it by twelfth time

          • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            I learned a lot as a young student, and then dropped it completely for probably 15 years on the advice of my Russian friend that I now (ironically) speak to weekly in Russian.

            I got back into it using Mango Languages through my library. I'm actually making more progress than ever. I'm sure my brain worked better as a kid, but I'm better at studying now. I understand my motivation better too. A native friend of mine put something on Facebook about the importance of keeping your ancestral language, and I realized I really did crave that connection with my past relatives.

            • RNAi [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              keeping your ancestral language

              My family do has an ancestral language that my grandparents spoke daily basis, my parents understood it, but never passed to us. Now the language is dead-ish worldwide. It's really frustrating cuz I would had love to be native bilingual, but now no matter how hard I try it wouldn't be native to me and it's pointless anyways.

              • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
                ·
                3 years ago

                You're teasing me. I want to know the language, but don't want you to dox yourself. I'll just pretend your grandparents were speaking Latin for some reason.

                • RNAi [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I wish, that way I could at least summon demons, but this stupid language only allows you to get in heated discussions with really old fr*dos.

      • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I talk with a native speaker friend of mine once a week. This week we'll be discussing this video:

        https://youtu.be/OPGDvd3HAKE

        I don't understand every word of it, but I think I caught all of the jokes.

    • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      ping it up.

      finished up another chapter of duolingo, did some listening practices. need to get at the cards but had to do some house repairs so today has been kind of light tbh. might try to find some kind of spanish shows to watch tonight, if anyone has any recommendations, hit me with them! :heart-sickle:

    • MoralisticCommunist [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Getting pinged in the comments is cool with me haha. I'm still doing my daily Duolingo and Drops practice in Mandarin. Also I just got up to Diamond League in Duolingo with is pretty cool!

  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    (I really need to go back to browsing /new again--I can't believe I didn't know this comm existed!)

    Hi all! I have a number of language ambitions actually, and it can't hurt to have something else to do. So I think actually buckling down and learning a language would be a good thing to do.

    I guess I could use some advice to begin with, though. I speak some French from school (including college) but I'm really rusty with it at this point. Not sure I want to get back into that specifically right now (I think I'm at the point where I could get along in a French-speaking country without too much trouble) but I've also wanted to learn (in no particular order) German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Arabic at various times in the past (some of these to the point of actually seeking out books/lessons). I could use recommendations on which of those to tackle first, if anyone has any. Recommendations on resources for any/all of these would also be appreciated (online ones are obviously preferred). I did see several of those in the stickied language index post, so I'll be checking those threads out too.

    • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Welcome to the super secret club! We'll need you to sign in blood on the dotted line.

      I'm cautiously going to say become fully proficient in French before jumping along, the point of a language is to be able to speak it in earnest, but that's my philosophy and why I'm returning to Spanish. I figure it will be easier to learn my follow up languages (French and German, maybe mandarin) once I learn the skills and discipline required to complete a project!

      But I'm sort of starting at the beginning with Spanish myself. If you're familiar with French and English you might have a real easy time of getting up to my level, and then we could be practice partners if you like. It's your choice of course, so let us all know what you decide!

      • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Hey, thanks for the reply!

        I can definitely understand that philosophy, but I think I'd rather finish learning French by moving to a French-speaking country, if I'm honest. That list of mine is too long to keep deferring if I want to make even a dent in it, particularly since traveling and seeing more of the world (in the sense of moving to other places and living in them for a while, rather than the tourist sense) is truly my strongest motivator for learning languages. I've also always been told that immersion is the most effective way to push yourself to fluency in a language, so in my view what I really need is enough of a grounding in a given language to be able to get through a day in a country where that language is spoken. (Then I need the Covid vaccine so I can actually go places, lol)

        But yeah, Spanish is probably a pretty easy reach for me (I think once or twice I've read Spanish text and been able to pretty much understand it solely from my knowledge of French and Latin roots), and it's probably best to get used to learning languages with something relatively straightforward, so I think I'll give it a go. I'll go looking for resources tomorrow (it's getting a bit late here), and then check in on the new thread tomorrow night.

        Thanks again!

        • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Sure thing! Check out "Language Transfer" on SoundCloud. Several members recommended it to me and I'm finding it very useful. Start your streek on duo-lingo, and in a month or two we might be ready to practice together!

  • ami [they/them,he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Any good resources for learning Japanese? Seeing if anyone here has any good recommendations before I spend money on a class.