Current Events > Anyone learned a language that isn't connected to your ethnicity/race?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Some people might not know how to speak their ancestors language but their parents might so they are familiar with the language but just curious if anyone here learned a completly new language they weren't exposed to daily or almost daily growing up. If so how you do it? I'd like to learn how to speak another language. I read some shit online but they don't give a plan to learn like how schools do. It's like they just say do this but not be specific.

All I learned was English. But it does seem like multilinguals are just exposed to the language more so they start to absorb it subtly rather than try to force it in with lesson plans.

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Esperanto, but I suck at it.

japanese. but im still learning it just like my first language

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im studying russian right now
i have two textbooks i got from amazon (Sputnik), i use phone apps (FunEasyLearn daily, i used Duolingo for a year but stopped a while back). i sometimes try to find russian people online to type to but it doesn't help much.

for me, it's all about constantly hearing and reading russian. the phone apps i use have pronunciation and grammar. and i've been watching a ton of russian movies. mostly with subtitles but lately i've been trying to watch really crappy children's movies with no subtitles to see if i can follow along. also can't forget listening to russian music and finding lyrics/translations.

because i don't have immediate exposure to it, i rely on anything on the internet to just constantly speak russian to me, just to get familiar with it on a daily basis. but i did only textbook/duolingo for about a year before i started expanding into other forms of media to get more and more exposure.

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I'm not fluent in either, but I took Japanese in high school and Mandarin in college.

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I know some Japanese, but I'm hardly fluent

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How did you dudes start learning though? See how a word is pronounced and what it means then repeat the word a bunch of times then eventually start practicing start sentences, see what it means then repeat a million times, etc.?

Oakland510_ posted...

How did you dudes start learning though? See how a word is pronounced and what it means then repeat the word a bunch of times then eventually start practicing start sentences, see what it means then repeat a million times, etc.?

first thing i learned was the cyrillic alphabet. getting used to the sounds, what they look like, how they relate to english (and spanish, which im fluent in). then it was very basic things 'hello' 'goodbye'. the textbook has step by step learning, so i followed along with the textbook.

but i've found, more than anything, it's all about memorizing new words. grammar is one thing, but i realized that i use thousands upon thousands of different words in english, and what i needed to get used to was just memorizing everything. food, objects, nouns, verbs. just constantly memorizing words over and over, using everything possible. grammar will come in time, but words...that requires lots of dedication, imo.

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I took French in high school and I'm learning Japanese right now.

My mom didn't teach me Spanish, probably because of my dad because my dad isn't Spanish. Almost every other Hispanic person can speak Spanish, but I couldn't because my dad didn't want my mom teaching me Spanish.
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I took German in high school and I can speak and understand the basic stuff. I wouldn't mind learning ancient Greek one of these days.

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I took Spanish in school because as someone in Colorado its obviously practical and I'm not at all hispanic so.... yeah?

I know a very small amount of spanish, and I did take interest in russian for a while but it didn't lead to much. I should probably start again.

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Neither Chinese nor Japanese are connected to my race/ethnicity. So yes.

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Well I speak Spanish but I didn't grow up speaking it, more of a communication necessity as my parents retired in Mexico. My dad is hispanic but we weren't a Spanish-speaking household.

I took two semesters of Japanese in college.

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I've taken some classes in Japanese

though tbh it'd be pretty cool to speak Ukrainian too ;>_>

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I'm learning Italian cause my girlfriend is Italian, and knows Italian, and her family is really nice, and I might inherit a fucking house by proxy if I put a ring on her finger.

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I was fluent in Japanese, but I never used it and so forgot it all.

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Latin?

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Puglia77 posted...

I took French in high school and I'm learning Japanese right now.

My mom didn't teach me Spanish, probably because of my dad because my dad isn't Spanish. Almost every other Hispanic person can speak Spanish, but I couldn't because my dad didn't want my mom teaching me Spanish.

Youre wrong, there are a lot of coconuts (Hispanic people that cant speak any Spanish) out there. My girlfriends family, everyone in the 35 and under age range is a coconut. While the generation above them, everybody can speak Spanish, and theyve always lived in the US.

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studied spanish in middle school, high school, and college

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that's a really weird way to phrase it

Oakland510_ posted...

just curious if anyone here learned a completly new language they weren't exposed to daily or almost daily growing up

does this include the languages i learned in school

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I dabbled a bit in QBasic. Well actually all I did was edit the snake game (Nibbles) to include Key Press cheat codes, and using the points you gain to award extra lives.

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masticatingman posted...

Youre wrong, there are a lot of coconuts (Hispanic people that cant speak any Spanish) out there. My girlfriends family, everyone in the 35 and under age range is a coconut. While the generation above them, everybody can speak Spanish, and theyve always lived in the US.

Fuck, that's what we're called.

I was the first of the lineage to be born stateside, every single person on record before then spoke Spanish. I was never taught, and I only learned conversational over time. Huge missed opportunity. I have "perfect" English to make up for that, but it stings sometimes.

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Spanish I was getting close to being fluent

Oakland510_ posted...

How did you dudes start learning though?

@Oakland510_
how did you start learning the first language you learned as a kid? 12 years non stop in school remember!!!
(seriously though thats probably how long it'll take me to learn this 2nd language because JP has a lot of letters)

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Ya English and German (am Brazilian)

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Well, I'm learning

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Russian, studied Ukrainian, Swedish and Spanish.

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