I’ve been studying Japanese for a few years. I was recently in Japan for about a month, and while I was able to read and understand a lot of what people were saying, I could barely speak. It was like my brain kept freezing up. It was frustrating, but I’m glad I got the opportunity to know where I’m at. I’m also starting to learn Spanish because I want to go to some South and Central American countries next year. For now, my goal is just to get the basics down.

At the moment I’m only doing Duolingo because I don’t have time, money or energy for anything more in-depth. Duolingo doesn’t have the languages I’d really really like to learn, so I make do with selections from their best constructed courses.

I’ve been studying Italian for 3 months. I chose Italian because before that I was learning Esperanto. But the Duolingo Esperanto course became worse for some reason, and I figured Esperanto would help me to recognise a lot of Italian. I was right!

I started Portuguese a few days ago. Always wanted to try Portuguese, but the weird pronunciations discouraged me. Eventually I just jumped in and had a go. My ear is starting to adjust to it.

And when I’m bored with those 2, I revise my German. Mainly because I like the goofy voices on the German course.

I squeeze in lessons during downtime at work, and my colleagues don’t seem to like it. Oh well. They shouldn’t be so tedious to talk to!

I’m learning Swedish because I’m moving to a Swedish majority speaking area soon. I would get by with my native language, but it’s just an excuse and I’ve enjoyed learning it a lot so far. Currently I am on 66 day streak on Duolingo. Along with that I am reading Swedish news and watching shows in Swedish on Netflix.

I wish there was a Swedish language community here on lemmy.

I’m currently learning Mandarin, I started earlier this year so I think I’ve been at it since February? With a break of one month to focus on college in between. I started with HelloChinese (similar to Duolingo but better built) but later dropped it off, and started experimenting with different things. Right now I’m doing an Anki deck and going with the immersion approach, I’m working my way through a graded version of Journey to The West and I like watching Comprehensible input and Donghua.

In the future there are other languages I want to pick up but I want to be able to understand native content I’m interested in without too much issue beforehand. I don’t like studying it formally because it feels like I’m wasting my time, I have the most fun looking at content and looking up words I don’t understand. I feel like I learn more like this like I’d do with grammar drills, Duolingo, or speak early approaches

I’m putting more effort into learning Spanish. It’s going pretty slow, or at least it feels that way. On the other hand I live in Mexico now and that’s going pretty well.

Ukrainian. I started shortly after my wife, who is Ukrainian, and I got married. It didn’t last long before I stopped/gave up since she wasn’t too interested in speaking it other than to her parents. Her family came to America when she was very young (and the youngest of 4), so she’s much more comfortable with English.

Fast-forward to last February where I picked it up again after Russia invaded. Got through the Duolingo course, but feel like I hit a plateau of sorts and need to get motivated again. I have a physical book, pimsleur, lingq, and anki cards–just need to practice and build up more vocabulary.

🇺🇦 Слава Україні!