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Languages!


fretgod99

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Anybody here multilingual? I want to be. Hate that we don't push foreign languages more in the US. Started going through Rosetta Stone's Spanish program again back in March. I originally started it like 6 years ago, but got sidetracked after about 3 months. Been going pretty strong. Obviously, it won't make me fluent but it'll get me familiar enough to hopefully be able to start conversing with people so I can work on it from there. After I get through this program I'm planning on doing French.

Anybody want to learn languages with me? Tips, advice, warnings people who've learned multiple languages have for those of us just starting?

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I want to learn Spanish, but just keep neglecting to take the steps to do so.

I was never fluent, but I could get by in casual conversation the summer I worked for a landscaping company. I was the only guy that spoke English, so I had to pick up stuff pretty quick. 2 years in HS when I never paid attention and 2 years in college where I did was my background and I got by all summer.

Ideally I could find someone who knows about as much English as I do Spanish and we could teach each other. That's how I learned that one summer. 

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The wife and I are looking to start attempting to learn Spanish. I took it throughout high school, but have lost most of it. Figure it'll work better if we're both trying and can attempt to get used to speaking and hearing it around the house.

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9 minutes ago, titans0021 said:

The wife and I are looking to start attempting to learn Spanish. I took it throughout high school, but have lost most of it. Figure it'll work better if we're both trying and can attempt to get used to speaking and hearing it around the house.

That's what I'd like to be able to do; get to the point where we can decently converse in Spanish. Plus, if we have kids, it'd be nice to just teach them multiple languages from the jump. Rosetta Stone has been a good investment for me. It's not really all that expensive for all five levels and it's a pretty quality program. There are obviously other good ones out there, too. Duo Lingo is one I've heard about recently.

Really what it boils down to is making yourself to the work consistently. But for me that's really only been like 30 minutes or so a day. Once you get it to be a part of your routine, it isn't bad at all.

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I was semi-fluent in french for a while. Took french all 4 years of high school and my first 2 semesters of college. Haven't had much of a reason to speak it since then, though, so over those 7 years I've forgotten a lot. A few times I've though about trying to get back into it, but I don't know anyone who speaks french, and I'm not planning on travelling to any french-speaking countries in the near future, so I haven't done anything.

Plus, since there's no real benefit to knowing french specifically, I've thought about learning a different second language instead. No clue what language it would be though, so similar motivation/application issues with re-learning french.

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I was pretty good in Spanish 10 years ago. Our hs teacher was tough, but made us learn it. I could probably pick up sentence structure pretty quick again, but I forget most of the vocabulary. 

 

It'd be nice to know it, but not something I need bad enough to spend time on every day. I have enough things to take up my time. 

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10 hours ago, fretgod99 said:

Anybody here multilingual?

Yes, German. Read books, starting with children's books. While I was learning, I went through the Harry Potter series, for example. You'll pick up a lot of grammatical nuance that you miss in everyday conversation, and it helps build your vocabulary. If you have a kindle or some other type of e-reader, you can purchase change your language settings and download a dictionary that will translate words you don't know.

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21 minutes ago, Phire said:

I was bi-lingual as a child, but haven't been able to practice enough to keep it up. Chalk it up to being lazy, it takes a lot of work to maintain a language you aren't immersed in.

This is true, but there's also a certain amount of "muscle memory" with languages too, you can knock the rust off very quickly.

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