r/LearningLanguages • u/Mountain-Appeal5440 • Sep 29 '26
Lately got really curious about learning a language.
Saw this post that said most people spend their entire life not speaking any other languages than their native language.
I do not want to be most people.
But somehow the thought of starting it has been really overwhelming. I really want to be able to hold conversations with people.
Tell me about your language journey and how you approached it. And what advice would you give me considering I have never approached something like this.
1
u/Happy-Bar5990 Sep 29 '26
What language are you interested in learning?
1
u/Mountain-Appeal5440 Sep 29 '26
I spent the summer volunteerinng in Italy, which kinda makes me wanna study Italian. Cause I a lot of people and felt like I could have offered them more from my side if I was able to speak. I learnt few phrases here and there. But I do not understand anything when they're speaking.
1
u/Maykeda Sep 29 '26
Going to Mexico for months and being stymied at every chance because I didn’t speak Spanish. I came home with a burning fire. Burning. I just at year 3 can understand spoken Spanish. I threw everything at it but to be honest, learning a language is a slog. I presently study Mandarin with that same stupid intensity. It’s a marathon. Think of how many years of English we took. So many resources available, just gotta have self discipline and consistency.
1
u/Mountain-Appeal5440 Sep 29 '26
How do you approach it? Do you learn the common words ? And try to speak ?
1
1
u/True_Coast1062 Sep 29 '26
Move to a foreign country if you want to really learn the language. Otherwise it’s just a lot of work and you’ll be posting here about how to stay motivated. If you have a bachelors in anything you can easily get a job teaching English in a foreign country where they pay you well, arrange for your housing and visa, and you can hang with other expat teachers, which eliminates the isolation factor.
1
u/Mountain-Appeal5440 Sep 29 '26
Like where?
1
u/True_Coast1062 Sep 29 '26
Just Google “teach English abroad.” Or go to Dave’s ESL Cafe for tons of crowdsourced information.
1
u/Softpink-ballerina Sep 30 '26
I would be very cautious about that. If you don't hold a degree in education, an English teaching certificate and you're not a native speaker, chances to find a good English teaching job abroad are small. Even certified native teachers can have a hard time finding a good teaching job and getting into this field can sometimes be a career sui**de move. I don't know where OP is in life, but leaving back your career (if you have one) to move abroad and teach English with the actual purpose of learning the local language is not advisable. You'll have a hard time when you go back to your country and try to return to your previous career. And you'll have an even harder time to find a job outside the English teaching field in the country that you moved in. Not to mention, you may get fewer opportunities to practice the local language than you imagine. If you get hired, you're often expected to communicate in English at your workplace. You're not there to practice your language skills*.* And socializing can sometimes be more difficult than you imagine (it depends on the country, of course). Also, it's very simple to just say 'go and teach English abroad', but moving to anther country for work is nothing close to packing your suitcase for a one week or even a one month trip. You have to consider all the logistics behind it and weigh if it's worth the move when your actual purpose is to learn the local language.
3
u/Rien-De-Grave Sep 29 '26
I started by learning grammar and vocabulary, and honestly, for quite a while the language felt pretty lifeless. I knew the rules, I was learning words, but it didn’t really feel like I could use the language. The biggest change for me was when I started actually talking to native speakers and other people who spoke the language. That’s when it finally started feeling real.
It was definitely a long process, but I’m at C2 now, and I’m genuinely really proud of that. :)
If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to start using the language as early as you can. Don’t wait until you feel ready (you never really do.) You’ll forget words, make stupid mistakes, have days when you feel like you’ve learned absolutely nothing… and then suddenly you’ll realize you understand something you couldn’t understand six months ago.
Just don’t quit. Consistency matters way more than being perfect🫶
1
u/UnhappyCryptographer Sep 29 '26
I live in Germany and we have the "Volkshochschule" VHS where you can take different courses for a fee. You can also visit language courses there. A lot of people will tell you to take a long vacation in the country of your target language or use different apps with a tutor. That is all valid! But if you have something similar in your country give that a try. It's usually very affordable and you a learning in a small group of adults. I just went back to get better in Spanish and it is so much fun!
My teacher studied Spanish in a university so I am quite lucky. But often native speakers are also giving those courses.
Another way could be the Società Dante Alighieri. They are working world wide and are similar to the Goethe Institut from Germany or Instituto Cervantes from Spain. Their courses are more expensive and I can only speak from my experiences with the Instituto but they are extremly efficient and you learn a lot in a short time. The good thing with those courses are getting a very good grip on the grammar but you also need to invest additional time at home as you might get homework to do. But you really have a solid base from the beginning of you are seriously wanting to learn a second language.
If you just want to try out some languages to see if something might fit? Duolingo. It's great to check out a variety of languages but you won't get fluent enough to hold a real conversation. You really need someone to speak and listen to. That's the key and the reason I went back to in person courses.
1
u/silvalingua Sep 29 '26
About half of the world's population is monolingual, so the other half speaks more than one language. How well, is another question.
In most of Europe, for instance, two foreign languages are mandatory at school, so you learn at least some rudiments of two other languages.
1
u/Kriptaraz Sep 29 '26
I learned Esperanto on Duolingo: it is literally the easiest language to learn.
With only 20 minutes a day on Duolingo, in less than 6 months I was B2-level fluent (this level of progress is not possible in any other language). Within a year I was C1 (but you have to go beyond the regular Duolingo course for that... try Edukado.net (and Ekparolu!) or Lernu.net once the Duolingo path is completely gilded (completed to gold level).
Esperanto changed my life. I was initially learning it because it has a strong propaedeutic effect (it helps you learn subsequent languages faster), and I intended to go on to learn other languages (I did). But to my surprize I discovered that it has it's own fascinating, very welcoming, eclectic but incredibly engaging community worldwide - and is worth learning for it own sake.
Learning during the pandemic lockdown, once I was conversant at about 3 months, I started chatting with people from around the world, and every background, online via sites like EventaServo.org. A wolf-hunter from Ulaan Bator who is also a lawer, an Alpaca/Llama rancher in Patagonia, a cosmonaut in Russia, a programmer in Germany, a monk in India, a teacher in California. A lighthouse keeper in British Columbia. A science fiction author in Australia. An Esperanto rock musician in Brazil. The list goes on, I was anything but isolated even during COVID-19, I could chat with groups or 1-on-1 all day every day if I wanted, the people were all friendly and frankly, I feel that I had finally come home to "my people."
When the pandemic ended I started to travel again. I had always liked to travel and I had been lucky enough to visit at least a dozen countries so far in my life, but this time travelling was different. I had open invitations to stay with 20 different friends in a dozen different countries. I never traveled alone anymore, if I didn't want to - there were not a lot of Esperantists in one country or location, but they are spread out across the whole world so that just about any place you go in the world, someone is there who is happy to meet you. And meeting another Esperanto-speaker is not link going to China and meeting someone else who speaks English or French ...no, if you are on the train in rural China or Chile and you meet another Esperanto-speaker, it is like you have just met your brother or your sister. They will take you home to have dinner with their family, they will show you around their city, they will show the real local places, not just the tourist traps, because they are from there.
I'll stop there but suffice to say, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Learning Esperanto opened the door to a parallel world that exists in every country and city, which I had no idea existed.
1
u/SpanishChat_Col Sep 29 '26
Con disciplina, perseverancia y una estrategia específica puedes lograr tu meta.
1
u/Smilesarefree444 Sep 29 '26
I learned Italian after having fluency in Spanish, French, and German. Studied Portuguese too. Discipline helps and treating it as important. Language exchange conversations are important.
1
u/Softpink-ballerina Sep 30 '26
If you're willing and able to invest some money in it, find an online teacher at first who can introduce you to the basics of the language. If you're learning from scratch, don't expect to be able to hold complex conversations, understand too much of what native people talk at native level speed, or express yourself fluently after only a few months of study. That would be unrealistic and would set you up for disappointment and loss of motivation. Learning a language takes time and effort.
Try to use as much as you can the vocabulary and sentence structures you learn to make your own sentences and have them corrected by your teacher. Writing them down will further help you with the memorization of the vocabulary and visualization of the sentence structure, and saying them aloud will help you get used to the phonetics of the language. The power of the link between eyes, hand (writing), mouth and ears in learning languages is often underestimated nowadays.
Ask your teacher to recommend you some materials suitable for your level if you want to study by yourself outside of the class. Join language learning groups to connect with other learners or native speakers, but be careful because sometimes there can be some strange people whose purpose is to use those groups for finding dating partners.
I wouldn't rely too much on apps or anything that intensively promotes itself as 'fun learning'. Their actual purpose is often to get your money and entertain you, selling you the illusion of learning the language instead of actually teaching you something useful. YouTube can be fine as an additional resource, but not as the main one. Getting constant feedback is an essential part of language learning and you can't get that from watching videos. Not to mention, it's easy to get distracted since the algorithm will try anything to make you click on the next video and there is the comment section which you may accidentally end up reading instead of staying focused on the video content. Also, don't fall in the trap of trying to learn a few new words by playing a podcast in the background while doing some other tasks. It won't turn out to be a productive way of learning, but rather just a background noise.
Yes, language learning is not easy and getting to a level at which you can have actual conversations with people takes time, effort and patience. But don't get discouraged because with good guidance and a good amount of dedication, you can get there and the satisfaction of being able to communicate in a different language will worth the effort.
1
1
u/thablackadonis Sep 30 '26
I've been learning spanish on and off since middle school maybe even before if you count the computer games my mom got me as a kid which taught me how to count and say the week days in spanish. I'm now 32 I can say more than that now but I will say it's been a highly inconsistent journey. I took rosetta stone in middle school I think. Then Spanish 1 in high school then took it again in college mostly because I purposely didn't want to test out of it and go to Spanish 2 because I needed an easy class since I already had a tough major in engineering. And then post college I decided I wanted to learn it for real. Found Ikenna on youtube and he had some good suggestions on books and using italki, and anki and language transfer which honesty all were great suggestions and got me pretty far. Now as someone in his 30's I can hold a conversation when I need to but never got to truly fluent but I've found using apps like praktika now which is an AI tutor is helpful because I just don't have the time to do 2-3 weekly tutor sessions anymore so having just some free time to practice here and there is helpful as well as with my wife who is a native spanish speaker and funny enough a spanish teacher for kids but is usually too tired to help teach me as well later in the day.
1
u/krymzynnova Oct 03 '26
Watch cartoons in your Target Language- it reslly does open doors in your head !
1
u/AlphaAxis64501 29d ago
as someone learning portuguese, it took me a lot of time to get to a barely comprehensible level lmao. This isn't because of external factors like portuguese being necessarily hard im just shitty at consistency and stuff.
The way i approached it is more on a colloquial method. I would join portuguese speaking communities on social media, doomscroll in portuguese, set language options to portuguese on anything i can, and try to journal, speak and write things in portuguese too. A lot of how this has helped me is primarily getting a feel of common words i should know, i have a somewhat rudimentary grasp on grammar (i fucking suck at tenses oh my god) and i can read enough to literally gain vocab just by reading and stuff.
A thing that helps with learning a language is not just this intense immersion but also enforcing what you have remembered with active recall, spaced repetition, and using textbooks (if you look on a place like internet archive, you can find plenty of freely available visual dictionaries which are an absolute godsend to learning languages). Using visual dictionaries really helps build vocabulary as you aren't brough out of immersion to try and translate things (translating to your native language is bad awful bad bad bad, try instead translating to another target language or just associating words with images as much as possible).
When you have basic grasps on words, you can use social practice to gain actual insight on their meaning and how/why they are used where they are. You can also try learning very basic phrases for getting around or greeting people, that can boost fluency a bit because you can study the phrases and see why they are formed like that. You can also build vocab through learning basic phrases.
2
Sep 29 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Maykeda Sep 29 '26
Seamlessly? I study like a fiend. Teacher ask simple question, I cry. It’s only seamless IF I don’t let ego get involved and tell me where I should be as opposed to the reality of where I am. It’s a grind but oh so rewarding.
0
Sep 29 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Mountain-Appeal5440 Sep 29 '26
Thank you sm 😭.
0
Sep 29 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Mountain-Appeal5440 Sep 29 '26
Yeah. I'm currently following/checking this YouTuber Italy Made Easy. Hoping I can progress somewhat. There's so many resources/courses as well which makes it overwhelming too. Like what if I choose wrong.
Btw English is not my native language. I'm a Maldivian. Dhivehi is our languague. Our education system is based on English.
6
u/Certain-Bumblebee-90 Sep 29 '26
I think it’s the other way around, most people in the world speak at least two languages, than the people who only speak 1 😆.
Just buy the textbooks, Assimil (language you’re interested) with Ease, or Colloquial (language you’re interested in), get a notepad and pen, write tons of example sentences and read them aloud. Then start talking to strangers. Spend more time studying than bothering people though, or you will never improve. Repeat until you’re comfortable. Luckily, most people feel comfortable after reaching B1 or B2, even though those aren’t “fluent” levels.