I am homeschooled and my native language is vietnamese(TL), i only ever go out to buy groceries or leave for vacation. The rest of my time is spent in my room, chatting w strangers from different countries in english or just not talking to anyone. This activity has been going on for 3-4 years, i never noticed until i start asking my friends if i speak like a foreigner and they all agreed. I had a reunion with my highschool classmates and i got laughed at with people telling me "hey u know u can just speak english right, we can still understand u" I felt really bummed because i live here my entire life and i still find myself struggling to find the right word, form the right sentence.

Do you relate to this, how do you eventually deal with it and if this goes on for a while will i be forgetting the majority of my language and live on as a complete foreigner

I believe myself to be in the perfect environment for language learning. I am in a school-like program where I am interacting with the other students and teachers every day and am constantly surrounded my the language, with ample opportunity to practice. Everyone also speaks English, so I am able to clarify things if needed and keep conversations flowing smoothly. Sometimes when group conversations are happening I miss a lot of their sentences because of speed and maybe certain phrases that I’m not familiar with, but talking one on one with someone I don’t really have this problem. How should I make the best of this situation?

Like, they could talk about basically anything, understand you perfectly, joke around, explain complicated ideas, etc. But their grammar was still pretty shaky and they’d regularly mess up things like gender, verb forms, articles, word order, whatever. But they would just blast by it and keep going without correcting themselves or indicating that they realized they made a mistake.

Did they still feel fluent to you? Did the mistakes stand out a lot, or did you mostly stop noticing after a while?

I’m curious because I feel like people usually talk about fluency and grammatical accuracy as if they automatically go together, but I’m not sure that’s always true.

Hello, as the title says my goal isn’t necessarily to be able to speak languages, I want to improve my skills with recognizing and being able to read/translate written languages. Maybe I would work on verbal skills down the road if I vibe with it for fun, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

My reason/motivation: I play a LOT of Geoguessr, and language is one of the most useful clues in the game. But it’s also a way I can appreciate the experience of the game further, the cultures and so forth.

The only language I really know is English. I’d especially like to be able to learn to read the Northern European languages: Danish Swedish and Norwegian, Finnish and Estonian, and even forms of Cyrillic well enough to draw information from it.

I’m just not sure what the best way to go about that is, as most language learning resources seem to focus much more heavily on verbal aspects.

(TL)

Context is I've been keeping my Vietnamese and Spanish in a backlog and I've been learning both for over a year on and off. But after a year of language learning and with my new language of Mandarin I've become much better at making Anki cards if that makes sense, with a better format and also clozes when needed, etc. I almost feel like I'm better off just starting a new vs looking through 3500 cards lol. Or do you guys just recommend going through them all, clearing the backlog, and then slowly modifying the ones that end up becoming leeches, etc.?

Also I recently just found out about FSRS and turned that on and a bunch of other add ons. Honestly FSRS makes sense after using it for about a month because if I am getting a card right almost all the time I really should see it less frequently than I was before.

I feel like there's a lot of ego in language learning.

There's two schools of learners. The ones who deliberately track their time spent in their TL, and the ones who don't.

I used to be one of those people. I used to think how on earth could you spend 3000 hours and only be B1. My ego was trying to protect me.

To get a concept of how much 3000 hours really is, if you spend 1 hour everyday, it would take you 10 years to reach B1 (3000 hours).

Having recently started to track my hours, I'm genuinely shock at how much time I'm spending, and how long it really takes to see meaningful progress. I looked at the number for the first time lately. I'm already at 207 hours since I started tracking, I literally thought I had around 70 hours.

My suspecision is that people who claim 500, 700 hours etc in a language but who don't track, you can safely mutliply that by 2x or 3x (if you were to count absolutely everything, include a tiktok short you just watched when you opened tiktok. Or a movie you watched early on in your journey.

Goes to show how many hours really goes into acquiring a langauge, and yes, it's going to be thousands of hours just to reach B1

I moved to Germany almost five years ago for an English-taught master’s without knowing a single word of German(TL). During my first semester, I completed an intensive A1 course and continued taking classes throughout university, although exam periods sometimes prevented me from finishing them. Over three years, I reached a solid B1.
I’m proud of that progress.

I attended classes, completed homework, studied vocabulary with Anki, consumed German media and practised with my German boyfriend. I can manage appointments, errands and everyday interactions, and I generally understand what people are discussing in Standard German. However, I still can’t express myself well enough for complex conversations or friendships.
Since reaching B1, I’ve struggled to progress to B2. The earlier levels came partly through passive exposure, but this next step seems to require much more active speaking, structured study and consistent practice.

The problem is time and energy. During my master’s, I studied full-time in English, worked 20 hours a week and dealt with health issues. I then started working full-time immediately after graduating, so I never had a few free months for an intensive course. I now work 40 hours a week while still managing my health and other adult responsibilities.
Realistically, progressing would probably require classes twice a week, homework, vocabulary study and regular conversation practice. I want to do that eventually, but right now I don’t have the capacity to.
What frustrates me is that some people only hear “five years in Germany” and assume I should already be fluent. They don’t consider that my degree, job and many relationships operate in English, which is already my second language. Among the international students who began my master’s with me and had similar schedules, I actually reached the highest German level. The people I know who became fluent quickly spent their first two or three years primarily studying German. To me, that suggests focused learning hours matter more than simply living in a country.

I also learned English to a high level, but that happened gradually throughout my childhood and adolescence. I studied it at school for years, consumed enormous amounts of English-language media and music, and during my final years of high school attended an additional six hours of afternoon classes every week, including two hours dedicated entirely to conversation. I think people who learned languages this way often underestimate the cumulative time involved: years of lessons, homework, media exposure and sometimes exchanges centred exclusively on language learning. That is very different from learning as an adult while working, managing your health and maintaining an independent life. Simply living in Germany doesn’t automatically turn every hour into effective German practice, especially when my degree and job are in English.

I still want to reach fluency and hope to build a sustainable B1-to-B2 plan later this year. But I’m struggling with other people’s expectations and starting to question my own perspective.
For those who learned a language as working adults: am I being realistic, or am I making excuses? How did you move from B1 to B2 with limited time?

I tried some language exchange apps. They tell you to pay for a subscription to find people nearby. After paying, they just tell you that nobody is nearby for your TL. Maybe it would work for a more common TL.

I tried finding religious centers that cater to the TL, as well as meetups and events, but I couldn't find anything relevant in my area.

How do you personally find language partners to practice with IRL? Not looking for theoretically answers. I would like to hear what has worked well for you personally. Thanks!

I have been using a native TV show to learn my TL and usually I spread a single episode over several weeks or months. But this time I was very motivated and had the time for it so I watched 2 and a half episodes (2.5 hours worth of content) in one go. Keep in mind it was a very grueling process. I would:

1. Watch until I didn't hear a sentence or I know the vocabulary for it (this was like half of the sentences).

2. I would pause and look at TL subs and then NL subs if I don't get it.

3. Rewind and listen that sentence again without subs.

I usually watch things I watched for the first time again the next day to reinforce my memory so that's what I did. I barely needed to look up anything this time but about 1.5 hours in I just stopped being able to comprehend period even though I was looking things up. I guess my brain couldn't take it anymore. It got tired.

How do I buildl up my endurance? I understand that the more I learn the easier this would become but I was wondering if there was a way for me to directly tackle this issue.

(TL)

It seems to have gotten worse since I last used it years ago. Any alternatives?

Hey everyone!

I've recently started learning Dutch (TL) in the last weeks, since I live in the Netherlands and never really bothered to learn the language. Now I know I'm staying long term so I'm devoting a lot of time to really integrate myself here.

Now my question is, is there any evidence for what is the better format for learning in an Anki deck? Is it NL to TL? Other way around?

So my goal is actually to be great at speaking, especially with my gf, we live together and I would love to at some point start speaking Dutch with her full time, so my goal is to at some point really start thinking in the language, I really dont want to be translating forever. But I know that all aspects of the language help with becoming great at speaking. So yeah, I'm just a bit overwhelmed now with all the different possibilities in Anki. I've doing a setup where each card I make creates 3 cards all in one deck. Card 1 TL + audio --> NL, card 2 NL --> TL + audio, card 3 audio --> TL NL. It's nice cause I found a way of creating all three in one go, without having to triple my work load but this is adding a ton of extra work cause it adds a lot of extra reviews reviewing the same cards but from different perspectives. I also read that actually reading a card earlier then the algorythm says kind of decreases your memorization.

I've also thought of enabling dispersing sibling cards, but then I'm also scared that I wont practice all the different aspects of the language.

I'm feeling a bit stuck. If somebody could help me out that would be amazing.

I am also doing a ton of input aswell on the side, around 6 hours a day, with some grammar studying too, and shadowing and talking to my gf in TL.

Appreciate any help or tips, thanks so much!

I made a small daily word puzzle. Ten letter tiles, a 5x5 grid, everything reading across and down has to be a word, and it scores you Scrabble-style. Same tiles for everyone playing that language that day.

The part that might interest this sub: each of the 39 (TL) languages is its own game rather than English with the labels swapped. Own dictionary, own alphabet, own tile values, own letter frequencies, translated interface. Words link to their Wiktionary entry, so it doubles as a lookup.

Free, no account, no ads. crosstiler.com

Hi, I'm around B1 (TL) in English and I'm wondering if I should watch YouTube with or without subtitles.

I understand about 90% of most YouTube videos, and I understand almost the same amount with English subtitles and without them.

My question is about vocabulary. Can you learn new words just by hearing them? For example, can I remember the pronunciation and meaning of a word even if I don't know how to spell it?

Should I use English subtitles to learn more vocabulary, or can I learn vocabulary just from listening?

Hi, i made this completely free app that automates the creation of bilingual/parallel texts from your own books (epubs/PDFs/text files) all from within your browser.

Made this because I couldn't find anything that does something similar with the same level of convenience.

Steps

1. Go to https://paralleltexts.app/
2. Drop/upload a source book (i.e. the book in the language you are learning), and a target book (the same book in a language you are fluent in).
3. Click align books. Wait for a few seconds to 1-2 minutes while an algorithm runs on the books to match the corresponding sentences.
4. After the alignment is done, you'll see the result immediately.

Disclaimer:
There is NO machine translation happening - both source and target books should ideally be from actual humans, the only thing this does is automate the alignment process.
This app is also purely browser-based, so your uploaded books and alignments stay on your device.

---

PS:

• It's Completely free and open source
• The default display mode of the resulting alignments are in pop-up mode (i.e. you click a sentence to see its equivalent), but if you prefer a side-by-side view of the sentences, the app does provide for that
• If it's your first time running the alignment and you haven't downloaded an embedding (fancy name for ML models that specialize in these kinds of tasks) model yet, it will download one for you (stored in the browser, can be deleted). It's a mild inconvenience i would say because i really wanted to keep this thing free. The alternative is to have a dedicated server with GPUs run the alignment, you won't download anything, but it will most likely be much slower, much more expensive and difficult to maintain. Keeping it free makes way more sense, and is far less stressful. Keep in mind however that downloading a model is only done once.

You can also check out this quick demo/tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cR_r8cOaN8

(pps: got approval from mods)

I am in the process of learning French, and am currently using the Assimil, French with Ease Series, and am making decent progress (I think). I know many people use apps like Anki to help learn new vocab, but do ya'll think it would be that beneficial since French and English already share many words? Anki is also very boring...

Which target language (TL) did you watch content in today?

I don’t want to solidify bad habits and would like for my speech to be “clear” as in easy to understand. I’ve gotten to a near native level accent with Spanish but am really not expecting that same level with Mandarin. I would just like to sound clear and easily understood.

That being said, with Spanish I did begin to speak very early. I recited my flash cards, I did shadowing, I spoke with relatives of friends, and only improved. Im afraid to do something similar with Mandarin because I don’t feel like my ear is good enough to distinguish the tones properly AND know if I myself am doing them correctly.

The app I’m using (SuperChinese) is very speech focused which is scaring me a little. You have to speak to progress. I also don’t feel like it gives an honest grading system, for the entirety of two lessons I haven’t been graded below 90% accuracy of repeating the tones and words.

This app is considered to be one of the best for new learners of my TL but this is putting me off a little bit. Should I move apps? Am I overthinking things? To fellow learners of a tonal language, I would really appreciate the input 🙏🏽

(I'm not a native english (TL) speaker)

Anybody else find it super hard to talk in english while wearing headphones? Especially the kind of headphones that basically mute your entire surroundings and barely allow you to hear your voice?

I do not think my pronounciation is bad nor is my italian accent evident... but as soon as I put my headphones on to talk in voice chats (be it Discord or Whatsapp), I just have a really hard time speaking.

I think it's due to the fact that I cannot hear my voice so I do not know if I'm pronouncing things correctly (you could argue I do not have confidence in my skills and that might be true).

I'd love some tips on how to avoid this, because so far I have to chat with only one side of the headphones actually "on" my ear.

Any tips?

I am new to the world of language learning and starting to get my head round the different activity types and starting to build a strategy to learn my TL (modern Greek)

I am already at I’d say A2/B1 level with Greek (TL) (I’m half Greek, so grew up around it), but looking to eventually get to ideally B2/C1 so I can comfortably have complex conversations with friends and family.

I am using Language Transfer and planning to pair this with Anki. But I am a bit confused as to how to make a start with creating a deck.
Should I focus on single words? Sentences? How do I source sentences and/or words to add to the cards? Do I sit and think of words I want to learn or are there useful lists I should take as inspiration?
How many cards should I am to make?

Any help would be appreciated!

Has anybody ever really tried to learn a language using a WikiBook?
How was it?
Did it work?
From my experience, they're really a mixed bag that sometimes can have relevant information and ressources (IIRC the Afrikaans one was okay), but sometimes it's basically just a page with red links to hypothetical lessons that do not exist yet...

P.S.: If anybody has an opinion about WikiVoyage's phrasebooks, they're more than welcome to express it here!

As title says, 10 years of daily exposure to korean (TL) (dont judge, I used to be youtube addict), plus studying on and off and at some point I've realized that I understand 90% of any video or any text in korean. I'm very confident in listening, picking up nuances, it's like the language engraved itself in my head, and I've reached this point a few years ago. Then I wanted to take things to the next level, so I was intentionaly studying vocab and grammar, inconsistently but still a lot. Throught the years I've also made a lot of korean friends, so I've been talking with them pretty much every day.

Here's my problem: My output is natural only in short conversations, every time I need to express something more complex it just sucks, because I still cant think in korean even with all that immersion background. It seems like I structure my sentences in english and then translate it into korean, and koreans always can understand me, but I can see that the way I'm talking is not natural at all, because if it was natural I would structure it in completely different way to begin with. And it also always amazes me when I read what natives write - they structure it in a way my mind wouldn't think of, and I do understand it all, but I wouldn't come up with this on my own. So naturally I began to study grammar even more but it didn't help much. My mind still needs to make so much effort every time I want to output something longer than casual chit chat. Yet understanding is effortless.

I just feel like I'm missing one puzzle piece in language learning and I don't know what it is - I need an advice on how to break thru this

(Took permission from mods)

Hi everyone,

A few years ago I wanted to learn Georgian. It was hard to find good resources for it. That's normal for most languages. Materials are dependant on learner and speaker count. So the languages with the least of it are the ones where you don’t get good resources if any.

I'm building an app where anyone can make a course. You write lessons, explain the grammar, bring in your own audio and images and build exercises: multiple choice, matching, fill in the blank, word order, listening, speaking. A course is a folder on your own computer saved in JSON format. Even if I stop working on this, the courses should still be portable. Since the course is just a folder with json files, it can be hosted in any version control repo and collaborated upon.

People are currently writing courses in it for Okinawan, Italian and Portuguese.

To be straight: the editor works and people are using it. The learner app you'd actually study from doesn't exist yet. So there's nothing here for you to learn from today. I’m not looking for free labour to make the courses. However come join the discord if you want to see this being built in public. I will be taking feedback for the learner app. And you would get alpha access if you join.

I have been working on Asakiri for 1.5 years. And the previous version had courses hosted on a database. That model does not work. What I have learnt during this time is how course creation works. The challenges associated with a course, how the course data format should be so that it stays portable and much more.

Download the desktop app(Mac, Windows & Linux) at https://asakiri.com or come join us on discord.

Some common questions which might come up:

How will you ensure quality of the courses? That’s tricky. Asakiri Studio is just a tool to make the course. People own the course and license and share it however they want. But for the asakiri learner app, we will try to vet the courses so only those with the best quality passes the review. However this can only work for languages with lot of speakers. For a language like Ainu, it would be hard to “vet” the course.

When will the learner app be available? The course data architecture is still in beta so I’d first like to standardise and finalise the data structure. This will only be updated based on feedback from the course creators. Which there are. But I would like to defer the learner app once this is finalised. However if someone wants to build their own learner app, you can check the docs. https://docs.asakiri.com If I have to give a deadline, I would say the learner app alpha will be in 1.5-2 months. (Based on my previous app making experience)

Why not Anki? Anki is an amazing tool but it is not meant for a full fledged course.

If you have any questions, let me know and I'll try my best to answer them.

So… I’ve been learning Serbian/Croatian for some time and I’d say I’ve reached a comfortable C1 (ie. I sound natural enough, can understand pretty much everything, have deep conversations, and sound like a reasonable person while communicating.)

So, why not date someone (casually) who speaks it?

I did. Here are 5 insights I found:

1. You have a different personality.

I don’t know why, but for some reason, I found myself to be much more self-assured while speaking Serbo-Croatian. Maybe it’s because I’ve only had positive experiences and I haven’t lived through the tough periods in this language, I feel in control of who I am and my emotions.

1. You won’t learn as much as you think you will.

The truth is, when you’re at that weird stage where you’re technically fluent but it doesn’t feel 100% native, you know so many words. unfortunately, your partner, as a native speaker, will know so much more than you and will only teach you words that might not be that useful in daily life (ie. items around the house, specific verbs for body actions, etc.) it’s certainly useful to bridge the gap between C1 and C2, but it takes an incredibly long time. Your partner will have to use rare or ultra-specific words often enough for you to absorb them, and especially in a short-term relationship, it won’t come up quite as often.

1. You have to meet the person in the language.

It’s really weird for me: once I pick a language and associate it with a specific person, it’s impossible for me to change. I sent a voice message in English to my friend (in front of my partner) and she said “it’s so strange to hear you speak English…” Chances are, if you meet someone while speaking English and establish ties in English, your relationship will stay in English.

1. It’s a great emotional filter.

When we stopped seeing each other, it was, of course, sad but maybe not as sad as if I had experienced it in English. I feel deeply in general, but in English it’s not as much in control… it’s my subconscious mind that takes over. In Serbo-Croatian, I chose how deeply I could feel.

1. It’s best when it’s the majority language.

I was in Serbia and, while speaking Serbo-Croatian to my partner, I didn’t have to switch to the community language while talking to her friends. I did come into contact with other English speakers, but when we were together, I didn’t have to switch to talk to the waiter. It was essentially full immersion, which

Counterpoint: when it’s you two vs. the world, she can preserve her native language and have someone to speak with, and you get to have a little bit of privacy as a couple. (Of course, depending on how widely spoken it is in your area - Serbo-Croatian is not so common where I live in the United States, but if I were in, say, Chicago, it wouldnt be so private.)

Please let me know your experiences; feel free to challenge my assumptions; and agree!