Language website

Vanity | 1-1-2023 | Self

[dfwgator]

It’s like those French have a different word for everything.

[Jane Long]

i still have the CDs, somewhere!

Old school :-)

[Susquehanna Patriot]

“Memrise is good for vocabulary”

Thanks ... will check it out.

[GOPJ]

Great advice...

[EEGator]

And having a computer background…potential spook.

[dfwgator]

I need to brush up on the umlaut.

[Jane Long]

Just spend a few minutes in a La Madeleine restroom....you’ll walk out speaking French :-)

[dfwgator]

Oh and I listened to shortwave radio and got a QSL card from Radio Moscow. I always wondered why there was a mysterious black van outside my house.

[EEGator]

I am unlikely to engage in video conferencing due to time differences and lack of resources in the area.

[Carriage Hill]

I’ve lost much of my Latin vocabulary to speak it, but almost every word in the world (except Asian languages in characters) has some basis in Latin, so I can still discern a lot in languages I’m not familiar with.

[Carriage Hill]

Well worth doing, I’m guessing.

[Carriage Hill]

How’d you do?

[dfwgator]

And plus just to make it interesting, the French like to say words in reverse, like “merci” becomes ´cimer’

[Vigilanteman]

Duolingo is good, but how effective it is depends on the language.

[MD Expat in PA]

From what I understand you can’t really learn a new language by passively listening to it. You must have interactive conversation with other speakers of the language to become anywhere near fluent.

Some of these apps allow you to do that to a point. I guess watching Telemundo or other Spanish language programs is helpful if you are learning Spanish, but you won’t learn the language by just listening to it.

[Jane Long]

Another option...

https://www.italki.com/

[Susquehanna Patriot]

For me to practice those umlauts ... all it takes is ... die schöne deutsche Frau.

[marron]

I studied Spanish all through school and continued at the college level, but I can say I didn’t really learn the language until I had the chance to live in Latin America, avoiding English-speakers as much as possible. And reading, and consuming telenovelas daily for years.

Since then in the last couple of years I tackled Portuguese via Duolingo. It’s a good tool, it gives it to you in baby steps, I did it in small bites to not burn out. Having finished the course, again I started reading, the New Testament, then novels, re-reading the first several. I’ve read now a dozen or so. It’s a slog but easier on re-reading. And listening to Portuguese speakers on YouTube at least a few minutes each day. My ear is still not tuned, so listening is a struggle. But some YouTubers are easier to understand than others, and I keep at it.

I know I will not master the language without actually visiting a Portuguese-speaking country and going through the same process I went through learning Spanish. But it’s doable.

[dfwgator]

The Spanish and French and German Duolingo courses are the “official” courses and are way more comprehensive than the other languages they offer.

[tenger]

Nothing beats the Defense Language Institute (DLI) for Russian language training. 6 hours a day by native teachers, plus 1-6 hours per night of studying.

If you wash out of the course, they will threaten you with driving a truck in Minot, ND or something similar. Our wash out rate was about 50%.

46 weeks and I'm able to let you know that tanks walk, planes fly, and target is locked on in Russian. Of course I exaggerate. The drawback was you had to commit 4+ years of your life to do it but they paid you for the privilege.