Started learning Mandarin Chinese because I'm dating a girl from China. Our first date was the beginning of December and I started learning on some apps within the next few days. I still have barely any oral comprehension skill unless she slows down a lot (tones are hard). But I can text simple sentences, and if I don't know a character I can look it up on the fly. The other night while texting we had an exchange of maybe 10 messages back and forth where we were discussing our favourite pizza toppings. The longest message I sent her was "我爸爸做非常好吃的比萨。他有一个比萨烤箱" (My dad makes really good pizza. He has a pizza oven).
She tells me she's really impressed with how quickly I'm learning.
Seems impressive indeed!
I have great motivation because I really like her, and she's a great practice partner. Yesterday she asked me a question and I wanted to answer "it depends". That sort of sentence fragment isn't easy to look up, so I took my best guess and said "要看…" which literally is like "will depend..." It wasn't the right way of saying what I wanted to say, but she got my intention right away, told me the right way to say it, and said my mistake was so cute.
I get it because frankly I find her mistakes in English super cute as well. Like she gets her Ls and Rs mixed up orally, which I already knew was a thing, but I didn't realize Chinese people could mix them up in text as well. The other day she asked me via text if I've seen the movie "Purp Fiction" and my heart just melted a bit from cuteness.
I had 6 weeks of exposure when I was in Argentina, but in the couple of weeks I've been back, I haven't done much :/
Feel free to join !esp@lemm.ee, I'm trying to post content there every day!
Ya soy miembra :)
I wanted to learn Dutch because I wanted to move to the Netherlands.
... Suddenly there may be an opportunity in Germany lol.
In any case, now I've kind of started to enjoy Dutch so I'll keep at it anyway. I moved on from just Duolingo and have started studying actual grammar, but not as much as I should. I was bored a while ago and decided to watch the old episodes of the Pokémon anime in Dutch - I found a browser extension that allows you to watch a show in your target language with subtitles in both your target language and a language you already know, with the possibility of highlighting single words to get their meaning, which is great, and I'm having fun while learning new vocabulary.
(this extension is only available for Chrome, unfortunately, which means I keep it installed alongside Firefox just for this!)
I wanted to start dedicating time to actual language study instead of these fun, barely educational activities, but work is not letting up (writing this from work right now, left here at 21:00 yesterday...). My lab will close for maintenance next week so I'm going to have much more time (and energy) soon.
Enjoy! Dutch is an interesting language, the grammar is very easy (rules are simple, almost no exceptions), and no declined forms compared to German
Managed to have a few social gatherings completely in my target language, quite happy with myself.
Played the Spanish version of Cards Against Humanity yesterday, that definitely required some context based translation ha ha
Honestly pretty slow lately
I've gotten to the point that I can talk to people and stuff in my target lang and I find it hard to progress from there
I also want to start learning Yiddish, but after quitting duolingo and not having money for anything else, it's difficult to do much learning at all
