Starmen.Net

(In keeping with my promise to make a new thread, I’m bringing back this perennial GD topic!)

Post here about any languages you know or are currently learning! Show off your skills!

I’ll go first: I studied Spanish for several years in middle school/high school and still have a pretty good grasp of it, I think. I can still generally read/listen to stuff and understand what people are saying. (My speaking was never that great though honestly)

Also, 在大学我学了中文，可是我只记一点。It’s now been like a year and a half since I studied Chinese in my senior year of college so I’m getting pretty rusty.

Well, this might be cheating, but english IS the lenguange I learnt.

Spanish is my first language, and belive me, someone who live in a country where you could said "Zelda" and no one have heard about it, learning english was vital for talking about my interests.

I’m currently going for a degree in english, maybe the next year I will be able to take the exam and leave. Of course I will still use english in my life, but at least I won’t have to study it any longer.

¡Adiós compañeros!

I took French my last two years of high school. I hope to keep doing it in college though, I’d rather my new language skills not be forgotten.

BossCrafty:

I took French my last two years of high school. I hope to keep doing it in college though, I’d rather my new language skills not be forgotten.

I heard that having a second language on your resume when applying for jobs and stuff is super useful. While I think French isn’t a difficult language (as it’s Latin/Roman based like English) it’s still better than not knowing a different language at all in my opinion.
So keep up on your languages! : )

My secondary education saw me, without any consultation for preference over Spanish (the other MFL taught to year 7s), learning french. I’ll always be proud of my accent, even if my vocabulary has faded. I had to drop it moving into year 9 because the the way the building was set out. The MFL classrooms are allocated to a space on the top-floor of a tower block, which was 4 floors tall. No way was old me prepared to walk all the way up those stairs and back down for another year, oh-no! And you can count me out for GCSEs too!
Ah-h-h, to be young and a moron…
Now I’m in college I find my interest in becoming interesting renewed. I recently picked up the legends of localization, complete with passport to mother 2 (thank you, Clyde and Reid!) So somewhere down the line I’ll find myself with the smallest degree of Japanese fluency. It depends on whether I’ll be able to gain some kind of pen pal in the near future to test me.
My current focus however, is on C# (if you’ll forgive me for add programming languages to the mix) as my college course, despite being a computing one, has very little focus on programming. While I do find the theory fun, I feel like there should be a more healthy balance of practical work. (Plus, now I have access to Earthbound Rhapsody’s github since I’m now a programmer there.)

What I wanted to learn was French, and I did so for about two years, but then I realized the course I was using wasn’t very good, so I decided to switch (a bit begrudgingly, I must admit) to Spanish since everyone knows Spanish is super easy to find courses for. I’m still in fairly elementary stages of learning right now though, so it’s mostly memorizing verbs and verb conjugations and learning basic sentences. The part that sucks is that I apparently picked up more French than I thought before switching, so it’s kind of inhibiting my Spanish learning progress (I keep forgetting that I’m supposed to pronounce the -es and -ez on the end of words, since you don’t do that in French, for example).

Part of me wants to also learn ASL (I learned a really small amount of it in like middle school~early high school), but…I’m not even close to mastering a second language, let alone a third. And I’m finding language isn’t exactly my strong suite either.

Μπορώ να μιλήσω τα Ελληνικά, άλλα δεν βοήθησε πολύ όταν πήγα στην Ελλάδα επειδή όλοι οι Έλληνες μίλησαν τα Αγγλικά.

Vivo en Tejas, asi puedo hablar Espanol suficientemente bien a comprar comida de la Elotera.

I’ve been picking up French on and off this year, but so far the language that’s been hardest for me that I have some amount of grasp with is Greek. I learned most of the Spanish I know through listening to abuelitas argue with each other in the parking lot, and even though I’ve been studying French much less rigorously than I did Greek I feel like I know more French over the course of a few months than I did Greek my first year of studying it. I chalk that up mostly to the amount of shared vocabulary between English and the romance languages and also I didn’t have to learn an entirely new alphabet.

Edit: For some reason the Greek text made Starmen’s spam filter go off so I had to add that part of the post after I already made this post lol

Oh absolutely, in my adventures learning Greek I found out about this psychedelic metal band I really like called Villagers of Ioannina City which incorporates some instruments from traditional Balkan folk music.

There’s also Nefeli Walking Undercover which makes me feel like I’m gonna be whisked away by some Satyrs for a night of mystery and revelry

i’m from brazil. i learned english while playing my ps2 out of the blue.

I just want to say that i appreciate this thread because i often forget to do my Italian lessons, but this is a reminder every time i visit the forums.

Also, i really need those reminders because it’s been a bit more difficult to remember things since my brain injury, and regular repetition has proven to be the only reliable way to retain it.

(…Dang there were a lot of Rs in that sentence.)

Ffish:

(…Dang there were a lot of Rs in that sentence.)

ARRRRR Well wait untill ye try learnin’ the language of the buccaneers! YARRRR.

I like Duolingo. It’s not perfect but any means, but it’s pretty solid, lets you instantly catch up to whatever your current level is, and, if you don’t mind some (silent) ads, free.

I got, “I’m sorry I’m not okay.” Multiple times, actually. Also, though this was from a word pool, I found the possible combination “Do you use the intelligent” pretty funny.

I realize this thread is a little old, but I thought I’d ask something.

So recently, I’ve been absolutely bogged down with French grammar ( the le, la, les, lui, me, te, nous, vous, leur, y, en, pronouns along with using past participle and auxiliary verbs) and I was wondering if there was a good way to practice grammar. I would consider my vocabulary pretty good, but when it comes to grammar, I am definitely not that great at it.
I’ve thought about doing some self-sustained practice (aka without electronic platforms like Duolingo because we all know we can get some weird things from Duolingo) but then I realized that I may not notice if I’m making mistakes or if I’m actually doing it right. I was recently thinking about writing short stories, but that doesn’t really help me speak it, considering that’s my weakest spot.

Do you guys have any suggestions? I know an online forum like this isn’t the best place to ask first, but was just wondering what you guys think.

Eh, while i’m not the biggest fan, duolingo or other similar apps seem to be the only real way to practice if you want immediate feedback. Otherwise, just find a textbook or take an online course? There are many free (to take, no credit) online courses on EDX and i imagine you’ll be able to find a French course at your level.

If you can find someone who’s also learning French, it can be helpful to practice with that person and you two can learn together, but if not I’m not sure what to tell you. That’s pretty much my only piece of advice.

Bon soir, je m’appelle Brood. Je ne parle pas de français. Je voudrais un œuf dans mon chapeau. Vélo.

We’re taking over this place, this is now the french thread

Bon soir, tout le monde. Je m’appelle Ethan, et je suis tout excité d’apprendre avec vous!

Darn, I should have brought my french class cahier with me to college. I’m forgetting basic vocabulary!

PSINightmareEmpower:

If you can find someone who’s also learning French, it can be helpful to practice with that person and you two can learn together, but if not I’m not sure what to tell you. That’s pretty much my only piece of advice.

I think having a foreign pen pal who speaks the language natively or someone who is learning the language is a capital idea! You learn and make a friend at the same time!
Also,

Salut! Je M’appelle Gregory Andonuts et J’adore EarthBound. C’est super! Et tois?
(Can you tell I didn’t need google translate for that?)

pio_dov:

Just use Google Translate for everything!

decearing egg

Je ne crois pas Google Translate; Je ne peut jamais le croire, parce que Google Translate dit beaucoup des mensonges. C’est mauvais!

I was always told that Google Translate was super evil — back in high school they always said “NEVER use google translate because it’s inaccurate and not a very good source!” which it isn’t. I remember just testing around with it and it told me that “my name is” was “mon nom est…” instead of “je m’appelle….” which is literally, “I call me….” or “I call myself….” (But that might’ve been fixed by now, but I don’t know for sure.)

Instead, though, they gave us this thing called Word Reference, which is a super cool word dictionary. I find it really helpful when I’m in a pinch and can’t remember that one word or something ridiculous like that. I remember during my test a few weeks ago, I forgot what “essayer” meant, and for the life of me I just could not ever remember…. until I looked it up afterwards.
However, unlike Google Translate, it can’t give the meaning of whole sentences, so you have to do some of the work yourself when it comes to translating and looking up the right words.

I figured, but it still reinforces the fact that Google Translate is super unreliable.

I mean, I know it’s the go-to for when people want to translate something from a language they have zero knowledge in, but the results can be…. less than stellar. All in all, I wouldn’t rely heavily on it, but just to get a generic translation is alright, I guess.

I mean, it’s fine when it comes to just checking some words, but if you use it to have a conversation with a native French person, there’s more than one thing wrong with that.

Speaking of which, I was talking with one of my colleagues in a non-language related class, and she was talking about how that in her 200-level Spanish class, one of the assignments is to have a thirty-minute conversation with someone who natively speaks Spanish; and this isn’t just a one time thing, it’s done at least five times throughout the semester. I don’t know about you, but that would scare me a lot if I had to do something like that.

Yeah, I feel like that’s pretty much where I am, haha….

And speaking of which, I just practically got screwed over by my review assignments for an upcoming test on Monday…
The problem I have is that when you get it wrong the first time, they don’t say what’s wrong with it and I have no idea how to correct it, only to get it wrong again.
Is it my spelling? Is it gender agreement? Is it contraptions? Is it some other obscure thing that doesn’t even make any sense? I’ll never know until it’s too late.

But also they manage to stick two of the most difficult concepts to grasp — that being past tense and pronouns (placement is super hard when you combine them together) — into one unit, plus a little of something else called “superlatives” and “comparatives”, which makes almost no sense and they don’t explain it at all…
Like, I still don’t know the difference between mieux and meilleur(e)(es), and between mal and mauvais(e)(s). It says that mieux and mal are adverbs, and meilleur(e)(es) and mauvais(e)(s) are adjectives, but doesn’t describe it more than that, and the examples they give for them are absolutely awful and hard to distinguish difference.

It’s just all super frustrating, but I know I can’t just give in and throw it all aside, because I actually have to know this stuff. It’s driving me crazy!

Oh. The only shows I watch are SNL, Impractical Jokers, and Octonauts. I don’t learn anything about language from those.