Thought this article was interesting. Tries to explain what is actually going on in our brains as we learn new languages or have to switch between different languages. I particularly enjoyed the story about the guy whose commute took him through areas where three different languages were primarily spoken [German, French, and Dutch], and he always seemed to use the wrong one. Lol
3 Likes
Yah, for me it feels like my brain has 2 modes: English and Foreign Language
If my brain is in foreign language mode, then it defaults to whatever I’ve been speaking for the last couple months. So if I’ve been in Mexico, then it’ll be Spanish. It makes it super tough to switch to a 3rd language like French, which I used to be fluent in about 4 years ago. My brain just wants to keep thinking in Spanish, even though I’ve got the French vocabulary buried somewhere in my brain.
Worse thing is someone suddenly speaking Dutch to me here in Sydney as I never know what they said while if you suddenly speak English to me while I am in Holland I have no problem understanding you.
I’m just curious what would be the tell tale sign that a Dutch speaker comes up to you speaking Dutch?
Most times it is when I meet new people and say I am Dutch and they are also Dutch or Belgian and switch to Dutch to say they are Dutch as well and some other things and I don’t get any of it and go ‘What did you just say’ which makes them wonder if I am really Dutch.
Even worse when people that know like a single weird/funny Dutch sentence and just blurt that out. ‘Neuken in de keuken’ seems to be the most popular one.
2 Likes
Working my way through Spanish Duolingo so I don’t look like a douchebag gringo when I head to CDMX. I wish there was an option to put less emphasis on proper grammar and more so on using the language for tourism.
I feel like it’s working though. 3 months of an hour a day should at least allow me to look like I tried.
1 Like
Haven’t tried the Spanish one in a while but I think a lot of the early lessons do discuss things like food, locations (airport, train station, etc), and general pleasantries, so it should be pretty helpful for tourism. You might have to clear some grammar hurdles along the way but I think it’ll meet your goals.
1 Like
Yup. I’ve completed the initial phrases category and travel. Currently going through restaurants.
Una mesa para quatro, por favor. 
2 Likes
I feel like I’ve learned to read a surprising amount of Spanish by doing ~3 lessons a day. Doesn’t do much for speaking tho.
¿Qué?
3 Likes
Fortunately he’s never going to have to write it out.
2 Likes
Duo goo made her crumple like a plastic bag
3 Likes
Italian seems like it’d be a lot of fun to learn. Pretty easy if you have a background in another Romance language, and Italians seemed way more fun than the other Euros which made it more pleasant to practice.
The accent is interested. When trying to speak in the stereotypical Italian way "think “It’sa me Mario!” tone) it actually seemed like I was getting good reactions when I spoke. However, it feels really weird doing that and I don’t want to overdo it and be offensive.
Main issue with Italian is that it’s pretty useless outside of Italy. So while it was fun to expand my vocab a bit and nail down more of the pronunciations, I would never go further unless I were gonna live in Italy.
A couple days ago I started learning Thai, and holy shit, this is a whole different ballgame. Just learning the letters and then all the tone rules will be a big task in and of itself. It will probably be a few dozen hours until I’m even ready to start learning basic vocab, but I wanna be able to read Thai as well as speak/listen obviously. Luckily the grammar is supposed to be simplistic, so at least there’s one easy aspect about it.
Sadly, no Duolingo for Thai. Even though Duo isn’t the greatest in and of itself, it’s effective if used as a small part of learning and most importantly, it’s really fun for me. At least until I get to the more intermediate stages. I love picking off the low hanging fruit with new languages.
I am too lazy for learning I just like watching the white guy speaks Chinese on youtube. Its insane what he speaks now as well: Nigerian, Navajo, lots of the Asian languages. https://www.youtube.com/c/小马在纽约
He offers his own courses now too.
1 Like
Interesting watch, thanks.
Yah it’d be awesome to fluently speak one of those languages that they’d never expect a white guy to know.
China is fun because because if you can bust out a few sentences of C- minus Chinese they love it. But yea, like Thai it’s a steep learning curve in the beginning
1 Like
Luckily, Thai is one of the “easier” Asian languages. It’s still supposedly twice as hard as the Romance languages, but at least it’s not 4x as hard like Japanese/Korean/Chinese
Duolingo is useful for acquiring a basic foundation in a language. Beyond that, it is adequate as supplementary material to go with other things (courses, language exchange etc) when acquiring another language.
Learning a language can be a motherfucker. Czech is a bitch of a language to learn and there’s seems to be little sympathy for even simple mistakes among locals in my experience.