Hello,

I commute 2.5hrs a day in my car (VW GTI). When I plug in my phone (iPhone 16Pro) it quite easily uses Apple's CarPlay to navigate through iTunes, Podcasts, Google Maps etc. I would quite like to spend this relatively wasted time learning a language and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with Rosetta Stone in the car, and whether it will be use CarPlay when my phone is plugged in? I would be keen to buy the full Rosetta Package if it does.

Many thanks!

Hi, I am interested in speaking English and I recently saw an ad for iTalki. My English is not the best, I am B1. Do you recommend this platform to learn English?

I can't remember how I ended up hearing about Linguno but I'm loving it.

I was on the brink of giving up portuguese because of how confusing the conjugation system is. I would load up a premade list of how to conjugate and cross reference with it constantly trying to read and I'd be searching up words only to find out it's just a conjugation of the same word. This isn't working for me and leaves me confused and struggling. So I'm reworking my startegy a bit.

Linguno has a feature where you can practice conjugation with drills. I've been at it for about four days and already my confidence is up and my confusion is down (slightly). I'm still doing basic portuguese but my progress is speeding up and for the moment I feel like I'm clearing the first roadblock.

I do my usual routine but with conjugation drills added on top and I feel better for it. They've also got crosswords too, a more enjoyable source of vocab retention than just anki all the time.

It's free and I highly recommend it for anyone else who is in the same boat as I in english, french, german, spanish, italian and portuguese because that's all they've got so far.

I am setting up a business and was wondering if the name of it is difficult to pronounce for other languages.

The name is "Habisos".

In Spanish it can be pronounced easily, but I don't know in other languages like English, French...etc.

This is probably very subjective but… I’m a total beginner so I’ll ask anyway.

Looking to learn Spanish to help with work and a trip in Mexico.

I’ve read the FAQs, other subs, and bookmarked all the great resources like Dreaming Spanish, Language Transfer, Anki, readers, etc. But recently I’ve found continuing education courses at my local community college offer online Spanish classes from beginner to intermediate.

I’ve never done online classes… been out of school so long technology like that wasn’t really a thing and we don’t use any kind of video conferencing like that at work. So I have no idea if I like online classes.

There are a lot of resources out there for learning Spanish so it’s probably doable at home. But classes provide structure. Anyone have experience with continuing education classes vs self study? Thoughts?

Hi all,

I'm taking LL courses via Lingoda and really like it. One cool thing is that sometimes I get the same people in my classes and get to know them a little. I've found myself wanting to connect with them outside of class. Some of them seem really cool and like we have a lot in common, and it would be great to make friends to talk about this LL journey with. However, I feel like this is forbidden at Lingoda. No last names in the Zoom. No options to connect outside of class. I get it. I'm sure it could get weird, but I also feel like it's a lost opportunity.

I guess I could pop my email into the chat at some point when I see the people I want to connect with, or would that be super weird?

Hi y'all

I've been learning Spanish for a little bit but my listening kind of sucks. What's the best app to help with my listening skills?

I figured I'm probably not the only one who's currently trying to get back on track with a language so why not try to find like-minded people to help each other out?

If there's interest, I'll create a group chat here on Reddit where we can check in with each other daily to try to nudge each other along.

I've completely fallen off the wagon for Russian due to a lot of other stuff going on in my life, but I really want to get back on to it to continue my Assimil experiment. So I want to try to do some Russian every day this month, and would love to have other people in a similar situation as accountability buddies (doesn't matter which language and at which level you're busy with).

If you have something you want to get back on track with this month, let us know in a comment, and if you're interested in being added to an accountability group chat here on Reddit, let me know!

I have been learning Spanish for around 4 months and I am able to handle around 70% of what I hear. The main problem is with vocabulary. I feel like I'm growing very slowly.

Do you have any suggestion?

I had German in school some 15 years ago, but I never put much effort into it - I did enough to pass, but didn't think I will ever need it, as I was already pretty good at English. Also, I was a dumb teenager. After I finished high school, I never used German again.

Recently, I started working with some German people and I also travelled to Germany for work related reasons. As I walked into the hotel and approached reception, I though to myself - "damn, what I shame, I learned this language for 3 years and I cannot remember a damn thing anymore". So I started learning and discovered that I actually remember loads of stuff from school, and I just need to "unlock" them! For example, I learned loads of verbs and their conjugations, and even though I didn't use them for 15 years, when I speak, it's pretty natural for me to use the correct form. It's kind of insane how brains work.

I found a tutor online to have regular conversations and bought myself a good grammar book, and I am actually shocked that after 1 month of consistent study I am able to have a 1 hour long conversation completely in German and discuss more and more complex topics. What makes me really happy is that I realized that more often than not, when I don't know a word or a meaning of a word, I don't need to switch to English, but explanations in simpler German are sufficient for me.

Also, I found that German is actually a nice sounding language that's very cool to learn because of the consistency of the grammar rules. Next time I'm in Germany, I'm definitely pretending I don't know English and trying to do stuff only using German!

Hey everyone,

we're already in February (time flies) so here's your monthly check-in post!

What have you read in January? What did you enjoy most? What did you struggle with?

What do you plan on reading in February? Anything you're looking forward to in particular, or anything you're dreading?

***

I finally finished Il Futuro by Naomi Alderman a few days ago. Highly recommended! This book is amazing! The only reason it took me almost two months to read was my focus problems due to external circumstances. It's originally in English but I've seen several translations on the German Amazon (at least Italian, Spanish, French, and German, possibly a few others as well, and there may be more that aren't sold in their German store).

Now I've started with Onder professoren by Willem Frederik Hermans that I'm really excited about, and I also still have The History of the Latin Language that I wanted to have finished by the end of December already...which I'll try to continue this month as well. Besides that, there's still several graded readers for when I feel like it (mostly in Swedish and Japanese for now).

I am impressed with this interviewer's pronunciation:

youtu

As a German native I can immediately tell she is German, but her pronunciation is surprisingly clean for most Germans IMO. How would you rate her and where is she "off". Most importantly, what concrete tips would you give her to improve her pronunciation and prosody.

https://youtu.be/2DmVkaivKyw?si=Gs3wHBP5a4VTjqkn

Any of you use reality tv to learn/practice language? I normály hate reality tv, but I thought about it for some time and I guess if I want to learn and practice how people really speak to each other, it would need to be something unscripted and natural. And reality tv is in my opinion a good idea. After watching for 5 minutes I already learned my first slang word 😄(it is chanmé, means cool/crazy in french, it is a play on words-verlan- which switches the beginning of the word with the end. So chanmé is originally méchant, which literary means cruel but is used as a positive in daily life... This sounds like a mess when I try to explain it)

My question is , do you guys watch reality tv in your target language? Does it bring you less/more than scripted tv or podcasts or YouTube videos? I guess this would be for intermediate/advanced lerners.

I’m Hispanic, but I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish enough that I was fluent. I understand about 90% of it when someone speaks to me and my vocabulary is also about 90% there - if you ask me to translate a word, I can typically do it. I can also speak it on a basic/intermediate level—my Mother-In-Law doesn’t speak English and we communicate just fine pretty much daily.

However, I feel like I’ll never get to fluent. I don’t know how to say complicated things. For example statements like:

“I wish I knew what it took to speak better Spanish.” “Things that are promised are not always guaranteed.”

You know, sentences that are beyond basic structurally.

Are there any good apps or classes whatever to get over this hump? I just don’t understand how to do it. My husband speaks fluent Spanish, and so does my daughter. & I’m just here struggling 🥹

Hello!

So, I've tried falou app (free version), but when it comes to speaking exercise, it doesn't record my voice at all 😅

I have a Huawei smartphone, so you can guess that Google services doesn't work on it without helping apps (GSpace and ApkPure).

First I've tried to install it through the GSpace-->Google play, and microphone doesn't work in this wersion. I've tried to find in settings this app, so I can allow usage of microphone for it, but there's no this app among other apps.

Then I installed it through the Apk, and this wersion doesn't even opens properly 😅 when I open it, it's opening and after few seconds I see a dialog window that says that I have to check if my devise is supporting Google services or if my app is updated to the latest version 😅

Maybe someone had this problem and found a solution? Or there's any? 😅

Thank you for attention 🙏🏻

So yesterday I was playing a game with a French guy and we were on a Discord call, speaking French to each other.

This was our first time talking, so after about 10 minutes of talking, he asked me what I do for a living, and I told him I'm in university studying languages. He asked me which, and I said "well French is one of them, it's not my native language"

He deadass goes "Wait you're not French? If you didn't tell me, I could not guess that French isn't your native language"

I feel like I've made it and it's all downhill from here 😅

I've mostly been using comprehensible input + looking up grammar and referencing a grammar book, putting sentences into Anki. My comprehension is decent, I can consume stuff made for intermediate learners(looking some things up as I go) but I struggle with 1. Recognizing and comprehending grammar, like verb tenses. They all look the same to me in input or confuse me. 2. I'm annoyed by lacking the ability to speak or write or interact with the language despite the time I have spent with it and my lack of pronunciation skills. It seems like I'm just consuming content passively and relaxing through it lol and it's been quite a while since I started learning so this is beginning to frustrate me. I think I had this experience in English where I studied it at a language school for years, which didn't feel effective, then I started immersing and boom, fluent seemingly overnight. Learning other languages has almost felt like trying to speedrun that process

I've since tried changing my approach to including grammar drills, trying writing exercises for a1-a2(my grammar is bad and I can't recall genders of words either, which is crucial. Though I know an intuitive understanding of them comes with lots of input and that wiring and speaking get good when you stop needing to translate ime). That seemed a bit overwhelming, because my comprehension of those study books is high but I keep having gaps in knowledge.

I've been considering switching up to a normal course book(monolingual or bilingual, I'm not sure) and going through that level by level to fill any gaps. I've tried it so far, the monolingual ones seem to miss crucial grammar explanations and don't list all of the vocabulary you're learning(more class oriented?), the bilingual ones I'm not sure follow a structured framework and get you to speak and write besides just doing grammar drills, which is what I realize I want to be able to do. But maybe it's the course books I've been trying out idk

Any advice?

Hi guys, do you suggest any piece of software you use to keep track of your language journey? Or some essential software which may help people learn a new language? Either free or paid ! Many thanks !

How do you balance native language content with target language content? I like English TV but I am immersing in Tagalog content? I’ve been learning Tagalog on and off for 3 years and recently got back into it. Most of the content I’ve been consuming is in Tagalog. I can’t understand speaking too well at this point. (Feel like a bit of a failure considering the time I’ve been trying to learn this language). Some of it still sounds like gibberish. I do around 20 mins max reading a day and about 1 hour minimum of Tagalog YouTube videos. I do some Anki but it was the reason for me burning out multiple times. I am yet to find away to make Anki more fun. I have started mining some 1T sentences also. The problem I have is when I start racking up many hours spent in Tagalog content, that’s when I start burning out.

I guess I have raised a few questions. :TLDR -how to balance between target and native content? -how to make Anki more fun? -how to not get burnt out?

Legilo allows you to easily look up words in Wiktionary, associate a word with a lemma, and add your personal translation to the word and/or the lemma.

I think that a reading app such as LingQ, which highlights unknown words in a text and facilitates looking them up, can be a really useful tool for language learning. I have tried to use LingQ several times, and although the idea behind it is really great, there are some features that are very important to me that were missing. That's why I decided to make my own app that works in the way that I prefer. It's not at all a professional product, but merely a hobby project that I made for myself. However, now that I have made it, I thought that I might as well share it in case that someone else would find it useful as well.

Some important features are the following:

• Wiktionary integration: Wiktionary is my preferred source for looking up words in most languages. Instead of just getting a one-word translation without further context, I prefer to look up a word in Wiktionary to get a brief overview of information such as the gender (if it's a noun), common synonyms and antonyms, and alternative meanings. Legilo looks up the word in Wiktionary and presents the result in a nicely structured way directly in the UI.
• Lemma association: When looking up a specific form of a word, such as a conjugation of a verb or a specific case or number of a noun, I want to see and link it to the basic "lemma" form of the word (e.g. the infinitive of the verb or the nominative of the noun). The first reason is to be able to connect the different forms, and the second reason is to be able to look up the lemma form of the word in Wiktionary or some other resource. In Legilo, lemma forms can be associated to the looked-up word. If you have added a personal translation to the lemma, that translation is shown after it, so that you don't have to add a translation manually to each form of the word. The app tries to find lemmas automatically (using info from Wiktionary and natural language processing models), but you can also add and edit lemmas manually.
• Custom external resources: I want to be able to look up a word in several external resources, such as various online dictionaries, verb conjugators etc. by just pressing a keyboard key. In Legilo, you can configure several external resources so that a word is looked up in one of these in your browser when pressing a key. If the word is associated with a lemma, you can instead look up the lemma form in the resource by holding Shift when pressing the shortcut key.
• Controllable by keyboard: Although you can look up words by clicking them as well, it's possible to access all the functionality of the app using only your keyboard.
• Etymology: If available, Legilo also shows the etymology of the looked-up word from Wiktionary as a note, to further help putting it into a context, and to possibly give some interesting information for those of us interested in etymology.
• Example sentences: Legilo also tries to fetch some extra example sentences, since seeing the word in an alternative context than the one in the current text sometimes can help the understanding when it's not completely clear.
• Text-to-speech pronunciation: The program uses Google's text-to-speech to get the pronunciation of the word when looked up (this can be deactivated).

Some limitations and disadvantages compared to e.g. LingQ:

• No support for playing audio files: You can get text-to-speech for a word or a phrase, but the app has no support for integrating audio files that can be played with the text.
• Desktop only: The app is mostly tested on macOS, but should work on Linux and Windows as well (the text size and font might have to be adjusted in the config file for things to look nice). However, it is not available for other devices than computers.
• No built-in content: You can import any text you want, but no content is included in the app.
• No easy import from all sources: The app has some basic functionality for reading in text from an URL, an EPUB or a PDF. However, this is tricky to get to work well in the general case, so it's not expected to work in many cases. In any case, you can always just paste plain text into the program.
• No word practice functionality: The app doesn't have any functionality for explicitly practicing words using flashcard or similar. Personally, I like to repeat by just re-reading a page and guessing the meaning of each marked word before looking it up.

If any of the above features are important to you, and you can live without the Legilo specific features listed previously, I would recommend you to try LingQ instead.

Language support: I have tried the app with Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Croatian, and Swedish, but it should work well for many other languages as well.

So, if someone wants to try it out, at your own risk (there is no guarantee that it will work well, and there are probably many bugs left that I haven't found yet), you are welcome to do that. It can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/christianrosdahl/legilo/ . The README file on the linked page should contain all necessary instructions for how to install and use it. If someone tries it out, I would be happy to hear your feedback!

Before you think this is just another post asking if learning two languages at the same is possible, hear me out first. I've been studying French for years, I study it in university and I dedicate the vast majority of my time and energy to just learning one language. But c'mon, sometimes it's fun to spice things up a little. I may or may not be brushing up on my Italian skills on the side.

I'm curious if any other language learners out there have a "side mistress" language they stray to from time to time? 😂

I found a person online yesterday and we share a lot of common language learning skills and wants so we're planning to become language learning buddies. I just don't know what we can do, do you guys just message each other in a different language, share pdfs etc.?

Native Lebanese/Levantine-Arabic speaker (English educated, French & Greek as second & third languages respectively) here.

I was wondering if your native language has a sort of "dumbed down" version of the spoken variant for non-natives to speak.

In Lebanon (to a certain extent) and mostly in the Gulf countries, there is a version of broken-Arabic with "normalized" incorrect grammar used, that is generally used by Asian migrant workers. It has been around since the 1970s and 1980s ...mostly prevalent in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and UAE where I live.

It has become so normal, that when I travel to Saudi Arabia, the when a (migrant/Asian) person finds out I'm a native Arabic speaker they bust out full on broken-Arabic sentences which is this bizarre melange of Modern-Standard + Gulf-Arabic variant, used with completely incorrect and disregard to gender/first person/third person tenses etc.

It sounds so funny at first but the issue i have with it is that it has become so normalised that fluent / native Arabic speakers consciously "dumb down" their vocabulary and sentence structure in order to maintain a two way understanding.

I was wondering, does such a phenomenon exist in other countries? (I want to call it pidgin Arabic but...I would say it's not exactly that but it's the closest comparison I would make)

Like does German, or Spanish, or Chinese, or Russian etc. or any other language "suffer" from such a cultural impact?

Going down the old fashioned route (I know, such a boomer I am) instead of apps like Duolingo/Babbel etc., I would like to ask about the Teach Yourself book series as a language learning/activity type of resource?

https://ibb.co/fV89m5sR

For additional context my Greek and French are both beginner~intermediate conversational level, with basic capability of going into details about a concept or feeling.

I want to perfect that so I can get to an advanced capability and hopefully attempt a language certification (like DELF or an equivalent)..

Thanks.

I studied Mandarin for 7 years from middle school to high school but I'm not fluent and I'll be visiting family in Xiamen this October. They speak Hokkien and I wanted to learn as much as I can before our trip. I know a few words but definitely not enough to keep a conversation.

Would appreciate any help!

Hi everyone! My husband speaks both English and Danish natively, and I am trying to learn Danish.

My mother-in-law is visiting us in the US for 3 months, and I would like to take advantage of having another native speaker in the house. She and my husband default to Danish together, but default to English with me. My language is still at an A level, so partly it is because I can’t understand and it’s a bit easier since everyone is fluent in English.

Any tips for overcoming this? Do you set specific times of the day to speak in the language? Do you pick a topic to learn vocabulary?

I know part of the hang up is to have the courage to speak more, but it’s a bit hard when I feel I am slowing things down and they both have a difficult time understanding my pronunciation. I’d really like to use this time to advance to more conversational B level if that is possible in 3 months.

Wanted to get some opinions on an idea I’m considering. Basically, I have been dipping my toes into Mandarin the last few weeks and, although I really enjoy it, I think a teacher would be helpful. The goal is mostly to get some guidance on what I should be studying and someone to make sure I’m not picking up bad habits early on.

I figure I’ll get a teacher on iTalki, and I found one that seems to fit my needs quite well. I noticed that they also speak Spanish fluently and, since I speak Spanish at a high level as well (probably upper B2 but hoping to take a C1 test by end of year), I thought I might could get extra benefit out of my time if our lessons were conducted in Spanish.

Is this dumb? I recognize there’s a possibility it will make the lessons less efficient for learning Chinese, but I’m honestly in no big rush to get to any particular level in Chinese anyway. Unlike with Spanish (which I need to know for professional reasons), I’m just learning Chinese because I’ve always wanted to.

I’ve been obsessed with Palmyra for a while now and I would love to learn Palmyrene Aramaic, though i can’t find any sources for it!

Not any one language in particular, but in general.

Specifically:

• Average time it takes to learn a language to a C1 or C2 level

• Fastest time an average person can realistically learn a language to that level

• The fastest time ever to reach fluency