Learning to speak a new language as an adult (experiences, struggles, tips, stories)

Sundry Chitchat
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My brother had never been to Europe, but is fairly worldly in general and he speaks near fluent Spanish and a decent amount of French. He visited France for a week and Italy for a week (I was with him for the Italian part) and said it was super intimidating speaking in Paris and felt like he was constantly being judged. I speak basic Italian and it was actually a lot of fun in Italy b/c a lot of the workers like to joke around and seemed happy that an American even knew basic phrases.

It definitely makes a big difference the way locals treat you when attempting their language. Mexicans are super gracious as well, and that made learning Spanish there a lot easier. Luckily, I already had high intermediate French when I arrived to France, so I never really experienced any frustration with the locals, but it would have been intimidating arriving with a lower level.

My brother now seems interested in moving to Europe, but is super sensitive to the attitudes of locals, so even though he thinks Paris is the better city, he felt like he’d rather move somewhere in Italy. He asked me about some of the other places I’d visited and how the locals were in those cities.

I don’t know Czech Republic all that well, but I had to tell him that Prague felt way more like Paris. People kinda seem unhappy in general. Like on public transport, old ladies were always scowling, people raising their voices over minor things, etc.

In general, I’d say that Europe is just far more reserved and dare I say “unfriendly”. Italy seemed like an exception, although I only spent 10 days there so who knows. Greeks seemed very kind and Turks were super friendly as well. Those are the 3 main groups I’d put in the friendly category, possibly Portuguese as well.

But it’s all just generalizing, and to be fair, France is the only country I’ve spent more than a year in, and Spain and Turkey the only others I’ve spent over a month in. To be honest, the more abrupt style in France doesn’t really bother me at all. I loved living there, but others (like my brother) are more sensitive to that stuff.

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As for Duolingo, yah it can be fairly limiting, but my #1 rule is to have fun learning a language. So if Duolingo is fun (as it often is for me), then you’ll spend more time learning and can get a decent vocab/grammar base and solid practice reading/writing. The problem is when people use only Duo and then expect to speak and listen well. Even if you complete the entire Duo tree, it will hardly do anything for your speaking/listening.

My usual strategy with a new language was to use Duo like 80% when I was a complete beginner. Then once I could understand a decent amount, I’d move more towards 20% Duo and 80% simple listening practice and then Netflix series with subs in the foreign language. After that I’d move into one on one classes in italki to work on speaking, while continuing to work on listening, and only using Duo sparingly if I felt like it was still fun. Sometimes I’ll hit a wall with Duo where it feels like too much of a grind, so I’ll just focus on other stuff that I’m having more fun with.

I don’t tend to drill grammar textbooks like at all. Instead I’ll just watch series or take classes with a teacher and when certain grammar points come up that I’m interested in, I’ll just Google them and learn that way. I feel like this method works a lot better than me. OTOH, when I took a French language course at a university, nearly all the Asian kids (mostly Chinese) would drill the fuck out of all the grammar exercises. They would have like a C2 understanding of grammar, but then still struggle holding convos. The “western” half of the class was almost the exact opposite. We loved speaking crappy French with each other after classes, but despised the grammar stuff. So we could speak more fluidly, but also with tons of minor mistakes. I always found that dichotomy in learning to be pretty interesting.

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Honestly, nobody’s paying attention to other people here. No faux pas committed by a tourist will be remembered. There are an ungodly amount of foreign tourists and expats who come and go day in and day out. They all blend together into a blob of nothingness and are forgotten by locals as soon as they’re seen.

In general, Czechs aren’t known for their openness and friendly nature towards strangers. You gotta put in your time before locals begin to open up. Even then, it won’t always be much because why does it have to be?

As for the being super-sensitive to local response, see my first paragraph. Most people aren’t important enough to focus on. If he can’t get pas that and become more secure, moving pretty much anywhere outside of America is gonna be a challenge.

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I was prepared to have my mind blown away by this dude. It seems like his Chinese is clearly fluent, but he had some similar videos up where he does the same thing with a lot of other languages. I picked the Telugu one as my mind would have been completely blown if this dude could speak both Mandarin and Telugu fluently. I don’t speak either, but it’s clear from the the vids that his Mandarin one was very good, but the Telugu was not even close.

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Where Duo really excels is for super casual beginner learners like me. I’ve been doing a few Spanish lessons every day for the past two years plus a few Japanese lessons on the weekends. I can easily listen to stuff like News In Slow Spanish or the Unlimited Spanish podcasts and follow bits of Netflix telenovelas. That’s obviously not much, but I feel like I’m constantly making slow progress with minimal effort. Would not recommend for people who really need to learn a language quickly for job/life reasons. It’s not good for being able to converse in a language.

As part of my job I work with a lot of people from Eastern Asia, I’m kind of tempted to learn just enough Korean to know the alphabet and how to pronounce people’s names. Knowing a very minimal amount of Japanese is useful in this regard.

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Japanese is an incredibly stupid language for the same reason English is stupid: when you take two different language families and mash them together, the result is an impossible mess. In Japan they have two alphabets, which is weird but okay, but then they have 3,000 or so Chinese characters you need to learn for absolutely no reason. Plus most of those characters have two or more different sounds depending on the context that you just have to memorize. English has a grammar that’s so fucking stupid that even native speakers constantly fuck it up. An enormous number of American use “their and they’re” interchangeably. I know that “I caught the ball” is right but I “catched the ball” is extremely wrong but I couldn’t possibly explain why. “You should eat fruit and vegetables” is a normal thing to say but if you say “You should eat vegetable and fruits” I know right away you aren’t a native speaker. It’s an insane language. You just have to memorize thousands and thousands of grammatical irregularities because English is a product of jamming together Germanic and Romance and Celtic languages.

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Yeah, this is one reason why spelling bees are almost exclusively an English thing. It’s been a while since I checked, but I don’t think Spanish (for example) spelling bees even exist.

Chinese does have something similar where kids have to come up with the character(s) for a certain word, but that’s not quite the same thing, imo.

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Counterpoint: Japanese has two (2) irregular verbs and that’s all that you really ever need to worry about. That’s it. Also, you never need to worry about spelling because literally everything is spelled exactly the same way it sounds. When I read about a sumo wrestler with a goofy name like Wakatakagage, I know exactly how that should be pronounced and spelled in hiragana with even with a beginner’s knowledge. Japan doesn’t have spelling bee competitions because literally all of it is trivial.

How you actually write Wakatakagage’s name is another thing entirely! I have no fucking clue because the writing system is so jacked up.

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Ha, my girlfriend was just asking me about adjective order, and I couldn’t really explain why it’s important to do it a certain why, or even why that order exists, but if you don’t do it a certain way, then you’re immediately outed as a non native speaker.

Ex: That big old green house is for sale.

Order the adjectives any other way and it’s “wrong”.

Not sure if this phenomenon is common in most languages or if they are flexible.

And yah, coming from Spanish, which is a perfectly phonetical language and going to English, which is not, seems frustrating.

The other day my girlfriend was telling me something about My Chemical Romance and pronounced the Ch like choose and I couldn’t stifle my laughter.

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Yup. Those are the most annoying lessons to teach and the most annoying to learn.

For example, Czech has 14 different suffixes (declensions) for the same noun that are based on its case and number. Different gendered nouns have different declensions. In the case of masculine nouns, the endings are split based on whether they’re animate or inanimate objects.

There are also completely different endings for adjectives and there are more of them. They are also based on gender, case, and number. However, some adjectives are hard and others soft which creates another subgroup. The claim is that you can tell if an adjective is hard or soft based on listening to the ending but they sound the same to me. So I can’t tell.

I have no idea why the language is this way. I’m convinced some Czech proto-comedians created the language just to laugh at foreigners struggling with it.

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Not exactly related, but this reminds me of a super-pretentious dude who would, whenever possible, place his adjectives after the noun in order to sound more sophisticated. It was never grammatically incorrect, but it was always very weird.

He’d say stuff like “In matters financial, I recommend…”

He was definitely a native speaker. Just pretentious AF.

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100% this.

I have to use a translator to get a proper history from patients, but when shit is hitting the fan I can communicate in basic Spanish in a pinch because of Duolingo.

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The 1931 Spanish-language version of Dracula is a fun Hallowentime watch for beginner/intermediate Spanish learners and a cool historical artifact for film nerds. At the time, there was no dubbing or subtitling and they wanted a Spanish version of the film, so they just filmed a shot-for-shot second version on all the same sets with a Spanish-speaking cast. There is a lot of debate among film nerds as to which version is the best. It’s on Tubi and Criterion.

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Just noticed this thread. Began learning Japanese at age 24. Over half a lifetime ago. Within five years I was teaching and translating it on a professional level.

Still learning and will be forever, but I’m confident I’m well within the top percentile of foreign speakers in Japan–at least among those with a similar learning profile. Perhaps my only claim to fame in this lifetime.

It’s certainly possible to gain a high degree of fluency/literacy in a foreign language as an adult, but it takes an immense amount of effort.

Incidentally, I also nearly flunked out of Spanish in HS and can’t speak a word of it despite living 20 minutes from the Mexican border for 15 years, so IMO the most important trait for successful language acquisition is not ability, but rather, motivation to learn.

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Congrats on your accomplishment!

Agreed that motivation and having fun are the 2 most important aspects. I’m sure there are some language savants, who have ridiculous skill in learning languages (prob <1% of the population), but for the rest of us, it just comes down to putting in the work. I don’t think there is anyone who isn’t cut out for learning languages. They just don’t want to put in the work, and to be fair, it’s a ton of work.

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Small win - my wife is fluent in French, and I’ve slowly, slowly, slowly improved over the years, both just talking a little with her and using Duolingo (I hate the update). We went out to dinner with a couple that are semi-fluent in French, and they all talked a bit. I understood the vast majority of what they were saying as they were saying it - which is big for me because in the past I’ve had to repeat what has been said in my head and parse it.

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Duo with the weirdest sentence in quite some time.

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I’m taking a French class online from my local Alliance Française after doing Duolingo (full clear) up until unit 5. I feel like my verbal skills and comprehension skills are behind my other classmates at an A2 (2nd out of 4 classes for A2) level, but my vocab and grammar are better. I’ve given up on continuing Duolingo, but I can support this learning path if others are going to do it. I would definitely start getting into non-Duo stuff after like Unit 4ish though.

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Are you giving up on Duo b/c you’re frustrated at the lack of verbal skills or another reason?

Duo can still be a solid tool, provided you understand the limitations. It’s solid for reading/writing/vocab building, but terrible for speaking/listening. As you pointed out, once you get a decent base from Duo, it’s time to start working in other materials.

I love Duo though, so it’s fun for me to keep going for awhile. Once it gets to be a grind though, I’ll usually move on from it. If you’re enjoying Duo, then I’d say stick with it.

Bon courage !

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Not frustrated, just think that it’s not as valuable per minute spent on it. I’d still use it if I found it more as an enjoyable side thing or I thought it was still as effective as when I started

I could be underestimating it though!

Mercy buckets

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