Thread 213930184

Bengali edition

>What language(s) are you learning?
>Share language learning experiences!
>Ask questions about your target language!
>Help people who want to learn a new language!
>Participate in translation challenges or make your own!
>Make frens!

Read the wiki:
https://4chanint.miraheze.org/wiki/The_Official_/int/_How_to_Learn_A_Foreign_Language_Guide_Wiki

Useful links:
>Free language‐learning book archive:
https://mega.nz/folder/INlRkAQC#CthKI9-_kmDNyrOx12Ojbw
>Books on linguistics and language courses:
https://mega.nz/#F!Ad8DkLoI!jj_mdUDX_ay-8D9l3-DbnQ
>Assorted language resources and some nice visual guides:
https://pastebin.com/ACEmVqua
>Torrents with more resources than you’ll ever need for 30 plus languages:
https://archive(dot)ph/x0dFH
>Russianon’s list of comprehensible input resources:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wXd0V32TjCFsr1-F_en_lA4MI-i7JtyYf26cWLtPRec
>Massive collection of textbooks on various languages, sorted by family
https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Books/Linguistics/
>/lang/ inpoot torrents
https://rentry.org/inpoot
>Refold Anki decks
https://rentry.org/refold

Previous: >>213898169

>>213924704
>Feels like I should understand her, but I just don't at all.
Same

>>213930184 (OP)
Both the English and Bengali texts are grammatically wrong kek

Does it make sense to learn Arabic/Turkic/Farsi to be able to speak to ethnic minorities in Europe?

>>213931341
The Great Replacement is real. You should be learning how to shoot and make Molotovs, dumbass.

hot take, german is easier than french

>>213931589
French is super easy. I've seen motivated people reach B1 in just a couple months

ஒ bro why would you make this letter wtf indians, this sucks to write

>>213933492
That's a Squidward.

>>213933756
another letter kind of looks like an amongus if you squint: இ

>>213932784
Stop it. Don't give me hope
>>213931341
I heard that Farsi is easy, but Turkish and Arabic are not.

>>213930759
Elaborate?

क्या तुम्हारें नाम है?

आपका क्या नाम है?

>>213931589
only in terms of pronunciation and listening comprehension. everything else is harder, and it's not because of actually useful complexity, german is simply extremely irregular.

>>213930184 (OP)
Bump

Do Spanish actually have rules for when to use the θ sound instead of an s sound, or is it just a tendency that you have to have develop an intuitive feel for?

>>213931589
Certain aspects are easier, some are harder. French has a lot of English cognates so you'll need to do less vocabulary memorization and reading is easier, but developing listening ability is much harder because casual realistic French is just so much different from what you expect from reading and what they teach you in textbooks. German listening is easier, but I had to do a 5K frequency deck before being able to touch native-level content, they have their own words for everything.

>>213937210
z always and c before i and e are pronounced θ
s is always s

I need advice.
>Doing Arabic.
>Plan to do +1 thing alongside it. (MAYBE)
https://voca.ro/1kpOc9iwQN9P
What do you guys think?
I vocaroo'd it so you can check my accent (English). Is my English 100% OK for all intents and purposes?
(i.e., no NEED to sound clearer, right? As in, my accent is not PROBLEMATIC)

>>213937346
>s is always s
not really. it's voiced (english Z) before voiced consonants. in polish, we voice S before voiced consonants, but it doesn't happen before nasal or liquid consonants.

>>213937890
True, those are allophones, but it's the same place of articulation

>>213937890
I'm SFL and I didn't even notice this before

>>213937365
Why would anyone take your question seriously when you already admitted you've been trolling the whole time?
Not that it wasn't obvious, given the fact you never ask anyone else about their language progress and only talk about yourself

>>213935427
>useful complexity
what do you mean by this? Are you talking about the difference between things that are complex (eg irregular or with many forms) because they have to be compared with things that are complex that don't need to be complex?

>>213938065
are you ready for the very real possibility for him to reply with "Fine. What language are YOU learning?" again after being called out? devoid of all social queues, customs and norms?

I stopped learning Spanish and started learning French because I found a better Anki deck for it.

>>213939262
No problem, I got to B2/C1 Spanish within 2 years after learning French to C1.

>>213938012
Most native speakers don't notice it, it's no big deal. I'd go as far as to say they don't hear the difference. They're just allophones in Spanish (today, as they used to be different sounds a few centuries ago).

>>213937346
>>213937890
Good to know. I'm trying to learn only by audio (more or less following the Dreaming Spanish method), so I'm glad I can at least file away that there is a simple, regular pattern, and not think too much about it for now.

>>213938559
>devoid of all social queues, customs and norms?
In this we are more alike than different

>>213934613
The correct English message would be "Please don't wander around unnecessarily"

And there should be a hyphen between "ঘুরা" and "ফেরা" in Bengali message

How doesn't reading chinese hurt people's eyes?

>>213942741
why do you think they all have glasses?

>booked tickets to my TL country
>just 40 more days till I get to SHOCK locals with my PERFECT Korean

>>213942881
Someone doing Pimsleur level 1 knows more Korean than Xiaoman knows for a typical video, besides of course his Chinese and Spanish. Best of luck.

Sometimes, I think about all the people across the world learning English, and it makes me quietly sad. Billions of us, students, dreamers, wanderers, spend hour after hour repeating dialogues from dusty textbooks, practicing conversations with people who don’t exist.

Chris, Sally, Max, John. Peter, Tom, Angela. They live in the pages of a school book, in the exercises we memorize, in the imaginary classrooms where we stumble over pronunciation. We ask questions. We answer questions. We laugh, we apologize, we say “Nice to meet you.” And then we close the book.

And then we graduate. And we’ve never met a single one of them. Never heard a real accent, never shared a real laugh, never had a real conversation. All those hours of speaking into the void, building bridges that never existed.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans and maybe the English-speaking world at large, realize how vast this silent loneliness is. Not just learning a language, but performing life with imaginary friends, over and over, until we think we’re ready for the real world.

And yet, the world keeps turning, the textbooks keep being written, the dialogues keep being drilled, and we keep walking through life, fluent in a language that never spoke back to us.

A pretty girl said my name in my TL today

>>213937890
>>213940126
Another thing I noticed is a Spanish woman saying "eshto" for esto. I'm assuming this is a consequence of the Spanish s being more retracted than the English s. Is "eshto" just a tendency that sometimes comes out, sometimes not, or there rules where it said one way rather than another way? Or is it just that if you have a proper s placement, it will always sound like "eshto?" (I don't think it seemed like this women was consistently pronouncing "st" always the same, but I'd have to find the video and re-watch it to say.)

>>213931341
So you can beg for you life by pretending to be a part of the ummah next time you get shaken down? Most of them speak your language anyway.

>>213943977
Was it also the name of the person she was addressing?

>>213943343
I mean, I do have my TOPIK 3 (just a few points away from 4) from the last year, so there's that. I think I should be fine, and my Korean friend has been telling me that for the last year and a half, but I am still excited about the chance to actually use the language to talk to different people in different situations on a daily basis.

>>213943600
>Never heard a real accent
Don't ESLs watch/listen to a lot of English content?
>>213944563
No it was just a streamer who says hi when anyone new shows up
But my name doesn't sound retarded in my TL like I thought it would

>>213944445
Most Spaniards pronounce the s like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative#Comparison_between_English_and_Spanish

>>213933492
Pretty sure they wrote into leaves and bark using knives lol

>>213931589
>hot take, german is easier than french
Both are easy as shit. If you struggle with either in any stage <C1, you are doing something seriously wrong.

>>213937365
You sound found. Normal people won't really care that you don't sound white if you're not white. People on this site however...

>>213937329
>because casual realistic French
If you find this language in real life, it means you are hanging out with poor people. Grim.

>>213942741
I think they tend to set their text larger.
Also, even without being able to see the nitty gritty details of a character, you can recognize its general shape, kind of like being able to recognize the word "cannibal" with shitty handwriting or blurred.
Note that I'm learning Japanese, not Chinese, but the same principle applies to kanji.

>>213946258
Size 10 font Chinese is about the lowest I can read from a suitable distance from my monitor.

woman teaching ancient Greek stuff in modern Greek. cool
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXQMxenHfpj0v4uP-uclh5IsfHtWnQjdT

I spend years learning dictionaries by heart before really engaging with a language

What are you reading currently?

>>213947220
Based

>>213942881
Asian languages seem like the best to learn if you want to actually use them in a country where they're spoken, since most of the locals can't just switch to english.

>>213931368
you should learn how to buy a gun and kill yourself

>>213948124
Narziß und Goldmund auf Deutsch

Le prisonnier d'Azkaban en français

>>213950465
I don't think it's fair that I can just pick up any text in Latin and have little to no trouble reading it.

>>213950731
is any of it strange or surprising for a Spanish speaker?

>>213950465
ecce, duce. corona tuae.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuoP26t4Djw
yeah i'm thinking it's language learning time

>>213942741
works on my machine (brain)

i fucked up and meant dux, i forgor that only 1st declension nouns have a different form for the vocative

>>213951121
The only thing that surprises me is how little Spanish has deviated from Latin.

>>213951401
Was this in a letter to a conquistador

Have you ever met someone or known about someone who actually learned the Asian trifecta? (Chinese, Korean and Japanese)

>>213937329
>I had to do a 5K frequency deck before being able to touch native-level content,
Would you recommend it?
I probably don't know 5k words in German yet but I'm making my own sentence cards when I come across words I don't know.

>>213952190
no that too hard lol

>>213952316
It would probably take a dedicated learner around 6 years to learn one of them. Not considering the similarities between them, 6 * 3 = 18. Round it up to 20, it sounds hard but not impossible.

So I get this is funny considering my country and everything, but what the fuck is "Corporate English" and how do I go about acquiring it?

>>213952240
Yeah, I think it's worth doing for German. If you already have your own deck, get a copy of the Routledge Frequency dictionary pdf and just mine any new words you encounter. There's an example sentence included so you can make sentence cards too.

There's also premade decks with audio that are based on this dictionary.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1237183750

>>213952448
Lol

>>213952861
I still have a frequency dictionary pdf that jordie posted a while back.

>>213952448
corporate english sounds like it would be the sterile way that politicians, high positioned corporate husks and HR speak, never giving absolutes and always skirting around things.
>hey you just spilled some coffee
"at this very moment? as an esteemed partner at this firm i can say that a representative will be getting an associate to begin preparations into understanding how that happened, and within a short time there will be alternatives with the possibility of being considered to reduce the likelihood of potential future occurrences."
tl;dr, in my opinion acquire as many sterile sounding terms you can and be autistically verbose and never give absolutes or definites

>>213952448
>Corporate English

Hey team, let's circle back and touch base next Friday, I'm liking the synergy in the room right now but save your ideas for the brainstorming session with the CEO. I'll share a link to the Google Doc so we can get some of the low-hanging fruit out of the way. Hopefully we can get a Minimum Viable Product ready to present next quarter before we have a sit down with the shareholders.

>>213953140
The MostUsedWords one? It goes up to 10k, but I like the Routledge one more because it seems like it was done by academics and it has example sentences.

>>213953564
Yep, the Routledge one is really good.
Should I start learning German again? I swear I made good progress when I started. I still remember how to pronounce letters and my pronunciation (except for the ch in ich, it sounds like "sh") my pronunciation was great.

>>213953326
At it's core, I think you've captured it. However, there are jobs teaching Corporate English in Japan, and they offer greater salary than the alternatives for some reason.
Perhaps I should just try and get an interview, then blag it. The act would be some proof of proficiency in this case I guess.
>>213953564
And yeah, very understandable.

>>213953701
>Should I start learning German again?

Fine, you have my permission.

>>213953564
Yeah that one. Honestly what I really want though is a dictionary app like reverso or linguee but shows you the word's frequency ranking and also keeps track of how many times you looked up that word.

>>213953788
>there are jobs teaching Corporate English in Japan, and they offer greater salary than the alternatives for some reason.
i'd imagine it's for two reasons; 1. the japanese are notoriously all about business and formalities; and 2., you better be real good at obfuscating things for those foreign bound investors and negotiators considering that's where the big bucks are.

There are so many pretty and interesting languages and I can't stick to a single one, I'm learning 6 at the moment but it's progressing so slowly because I'm doing it all simultaneously
It's really, really frustrating
Do any of you guys also have this problem

>>213954847
No, I'm loyal and committed to my TL

>>213954871
What are you learning?
I could do mostly any language if I committed to it, but the biggest problem is singling one out and grinding it
Probably because I already know a couple and I have no need for any more, I just want to learn them

I accidentally generated this on chat gpt and I have nowhere to share it so I thought I'd share it here

>>213954847
get off that express train to nowheresville and hop on the slow chugging freight train to singularlanguageburg

>>213954871
Lifes too short to just stick to one ;)

>>213954847
I do, but I am at a point in all 5 of them where I am very competent at what I want to do in them to where I can maintain them easily.

However, realistically speaking it very heavily depends on your goals for these languages. You are likely going to be able to get all 6 to a point of being able to consume media and literature, and potentially have enough to get by in those countries using only that tongue - however only a one or two at most to a point where you can comfortably express complex ideas (or things you need hyper niche language for to express - think sciences for example) to natives.

>>213955555
All 5 of them you say? Hahahaha

>>213955373
>>213955414
Two at a time is okay, I've managed that before no problem but that's probably just turboautism doing its thing (even better if the languages are totally different from each other)
>>213955555
5 fives for 5 languages? Truly a blessed post
I'm already fluent in 3 foreign languages, getting to a point where I can read 2 more decently but listening is pretty hard still
The biggest problems are Finnish and Japanese I think, I could probably get any European language in a couple of months if I stuck to it, as long as it's Slavic, Germanic or Romance

>>213954990
Czech
>>213955414
I don't need anything else I can just keep learning this one

>>213955767
>Czech
Oof, how's that going for you? Slavic languages are hell for non-Slavs, funnily enough the only person I've met who speaks Croatian with no noticeable accent was a Hungarian from Budapest who had no ties to our country or language

>>213955824
I like it so I'm having fun
There's a lot of endings to learn between cases and genders but I'm fine with the concepts of botj

>>213939262
link plz

where is the challenge

Polish is SO HARD I literally believe it’s fake. I F*ing give up already

>>213953564
Nice. You sound at least B2 in Corporate dialect.

any resources for chechen?

>>213955070
It kind of looks like tengwar

>>213953564
>>213953701
I have the Routledge one for Korean. It’s excellent.

have a bump before eep

>>213954847
Six languages is obviously way to many. Have you tried calling your local (balkan-netherlands) addiction helpline? I'd suggest cutting down to two or three languages immediately, see how manageable the withdrawal symptoms are and then go from there.

>>213961227
My method is to try hard in 1 and dabble in 5.

>>213954847
I'm learning 2 and even that is too slow.

>>213950001
I just say "I don't speak English" when they do that. I don't have an RP accent so they can't pick it up unless they've been to my region (no one comes to my region, it's a shithole) If they continue to insist on English, I give them badly pronounced, broken English so they're forced to stick to their native

Lying to strangers is fun, more people should do it.

>>213963094
>Lying to strangers is fun, more people should do it.
I do this with pollsters, I tell them I don't speak Spanish in either Catalan or Greek.

>>213952448
Speak like an elementary schooler without any semi-complex grammar, but use as many words no sane person ever uses as possible.

>>213952190
Best I've seen was Japanese and Chinese. It feels like most people just completely ignore the existence of Korean.

>>213963094
Where you from lad

>>213955555
What are your 5

>>213942741
you don't need to read every stroke in a character to understand it, you can just look at the general shape and know it from the context

>>213952190
I knew this absolutely insufferable Canadian woman at Peking University who learned all three
her entire life and personality was just learning these languages, and it was very funny because although she learnt the languages she knew nothing about the culture of each country
for example every time she went to Chinese class she bowed to the teacher, which nobody does in China, it's a Japanese thing
but she would bow to every Asian person

she also glazed the teachers so much and one time this super-nationalist teacher said "if you were Chinese I would recommend you to be a CCP member" and she was so proud of that she went around telling everyone like it was the greatest compliment ever

As an Englishman with no real horse in the race, I must say that Q Celtic rapes the shit out of the horrid little P Celtic languages, beauty wise.

>>213952190
another one of my friends at PKU learnt very good Japanese and OK Korean and she already spoke Chinese fluently but was not ethnically Chinese (Uyghur) and her native language was Uyghur, not sure if that counts
also I knew a few Koreans who spoke good Chinese and ok Japanese

>>213930184 (OP)
I cant figure it out, how is it possible to acqurie english skills from consuming social media through your childhood? How did you understand the difference between present perfect and present perfect continuous? And it is just simple grammar, not something advanced from english. These things are taught on the first pages of the b2 textbook, but even these things are incredibly complicated for a child's brain, how is it possible to understand grammar rules when you're a child..

>>213958025
Amateur

I do not give a fuck about /ɑ/. Actually as far as I'm concerned it's not a real sound in English and I will never pronounce it. Every word with this sound is inherently mispronounced and dialects that "use" it are baboonspeak.

>>213964703
How did the child learn to ride a bike? It doesn't even know enough calculus to calculate the exact weight distribution required to stay balanced at time t on surface S. There is no way that the child is successfully simulating what it needs to do. It barely knows addition and can only count to 7.

>>213952190
I know people who have tried to learn the three but only end up with two at varying levels of proficiency.
Frankly, you are either into Japanese and Korean media or you are into Chinese and Japanese media. Or you are into North Korea and China. There is not a real person who actually cares about all three of them enough to learn all three of them to fluency. Two at most.
Chinese is the best of them btw.

The Japanese -> Chinese pipeline is real and makes it super easy

>>213963094
Based

>>213966228
i learned how to ride a bike when i was an adult man.
riding of a bike is easier skill than english or any other language, ik why native speakers know their language, but when I hear that one lucky youngshit studied english by tv programs, it sounds so unbelievable. giwtwm

>>213966582
Monkey see, monkey do. I couldn't tell you how either of the languages I speak work, nor what grammatical rules exist; I simply copy until it sticks.
If you watch enough cartoons in a different language, assuming you are trying to learn, eventually you will have enough repetition to start linking sounds (words) to actions, objects and characteristics. The first time you see a dog run and hear "The dog runs", the sounds mean jackshit to you but given enough time you will hear "dog" in other scenarios, linking that to the object, you will hear "run" elsewhere, linking that to the action and through this be able to learn enough to piece things together through context.
Now, if you heard "the dog ran", you might not initially understand that this is a different tense but with enough exposure and context, you will link that to your own understanding of language (i.e. tenses in your NL) and understand that the dog that was running in the past but no longer is = ran
tldr just input more

>>213966582
The point is that it's easy when you approach it in the right way, and incredibly difficult if you approach it in the wrong way. For whatever reason, people think they can't learn languages without understanding linguistics - it would be like expecting someone to understand university physics before learning to ride a bike.

I also learned English by watching cartoons as a kid, and I never bothered to learn the grammar terms because I just knew the right answer by ear. I helped other kids with their English homework because it was so easy to do. You can learn languages by watching tv even as an adult, you just have to approach it in the right way.

>>213966582
>have nothing else to do in the day except shit, piss, eat
>right in the middle of critical period of language acquisition
>literally surrounded by input in their TL, cannot escape it, practice it 24/7
the chetnik's point is that to learn a language, especially as a child, you do not need to be capable of abstraction, or of articulating grammar rules such as 'the 3rd person singular present tense conjugation of a verb in English is -s'. you just need inpoot, practice, and feedback from native speakers of your TL. overemphasizing textbook learning instead of inpoot for your TL past a certain point is like handing a 5 year old bertrand russell's principia mathematica instead of teaching them to add and subtract with their fingers.

anyway when are you faggots going to make a challenge
at least give me like 3-4 easy sentences to translate

>>213966909
>you just need inpoot, practice, and feedback from native speakers of your TL.
You can do this with your TL today, at any moment. Do you think the internet only exists in English or something?

>>213966582
Learning a language a language just by listening to it and watching TV will take thousands of hours. Those kids probably learned English over the course of like ten years or something without even meaning to, if they weren't immersed in it.
BTW, it's still totally possible to do this as an adult. Just look at those Dreaming Spanish people who don't study Spanish grammar at all. I don't think it's perfect, because even they still have accents and make grammar mistakes to varying extents, but they report that their self "monitor" is not that active and that they can speak without inhibition.
>inb4 the alg anon comes back
>>213937210
People answered your question already, but they are literally just different sounds in Spanish. Latin Americans lost it and just treat it as S, but it's literally no different to the distinction between other sounds, just like English as "s" and "th." Imagine all of England lost the ability to make "th" sounds and said "teef" instead of "teeth" and "dough" instead of "though." Americans would still say the sound differently. The equivalent of your question would be like if a Spanish speaker asked "Does English actually have rules for when to use the θ sound instead of an f sound, or is it just a tendency that you have to have develop an intuitive feel for?"
I'm not trying to bully you. It just seems like Latin Americans have successfully convinced Americans that the Spanish have a lisp and just speak funny, when in reality they just have the same θ sound that we do in English.

>>213937365
Sissy voice, someone take a dress for xer clitty.

>>213967973
>Latin Americans lost it and just treat it as S
Other than a few communities have it (or so I've been told), the majority of Spanish speaking Americans never had the sound so they never lost it. Most of the people who left for the New World were Andalusians, and all of them left from Seville, where "seseo" is more prestigious than distinción or "ceceo" (often associated with uneducated, poor people from the neighbouring villages of Seville).
> It just seems like Latin Americans have successfully convinced Americans that the Spanish have a lisp
While somewhat true, I think the main reason for this is that most people whose language uses the Latin script just have trouble understanding that a different language that also used the Latin script can have different sounds represented by different letters. Since c/s often represent the same sound in most of the IE languages that use the Latin script today, people think Spaniards have a lisp, whereas nobody would think the same of an English speaker or a Greek speaker.
Funny how Latin Americans can actually pronounce the following words correctly while the French and Germans are mocked online for their pronounciation:
mass math
miss myth
pass path
saw thaw
seem theme
some thumb
song thong
use youth
worse worth

>>213958025
It can't be that bad

feels so good when you randomly encounter a language you study somewhere and you understand it

>>213969592
>they don't know I understand them when they speak spanish

>>213967973
>inb4 the alg anon comes back
Did we successfully bully that retard away? Lmao

I'm going to learn Italian.

>>213967973
It appears you're right that "distinción" is an old and venerable feature of the language. Wikipedia even mentions "the six[!] sibilant phonemes of medieval Spanish."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives#Distinction

But you have to understand how it comes across to English speakers. In other Romance languages (as far as we know), the ci/ce spelling makes an s sound, or ch sound. Also the incidence of θ sound in these positions in English is very rare, so to hear this sound constantly in Spanish naturally sounds like a speech impediment to our ears. If they were speaking English it would be.

And I understand that my question sounds ridiculous to someone who already understands how Spanish pronunciation works, but I'm a beginner, and the rule wasn't obvious to me just from listening to just a few hours of input (mostly Latin American dialects anyway).

>>213968603
>in most of the IE languages that use the Latin script today, people think Spaniards have a lisp

You're right that the spelling (and familiarity with cognate words) is one cause for confusion, but it's also a phonetic thing. I can think of the words "thespian" or "theme" as an example of a word beginning with a Spanish-style "ce" or "ci" sound, but this is very rare, and it's similarly rare to have an unvoiced θ+e/i sound in the middle of a word, which are probably mostly in Greek derivatives, like "mathematics" or "pathetic." It's just an unfortunate coincidence that this happens to resemble an English speech impediment, but hopefully my ears will grow accustomed to it after listening to enough Spaniard input.

>>213970073
The petitalian has also been btfo, but not before downloading a 4chan extension so that he could filter the portuguese flag because he couldn't handle the bants

>>213937210
there is no theta or z sound in Spanish. only S.

if you choose to talk like a faggot or go into medieval Spanish history to be a racist faggot, that's on you.

speaking of Spanish history, ceceo and its variants has always been talking funny. its about poetry or something to do with the king.
therefore ceceo is NOT an accent and unnecessary funny speaking. speak correctly if you want to be taken seriously, you could and should end up in a mental hospital for being a huge faggot with your Argie Colombian Andalusian Spain man from taured shit

>>213964703
I might be nitpicking a detail that you only meant as one example, but native English speakers hardly think about verb tense, except maybe in terms of past, present, and future. I wouldn't know what constructions "present perfect" or "present perfect continuous" even refer to without looking it up. The total number of inflected forms of almost any verb can be counted on one hand, and for most verbs, all the forms of the verb can be known from any one of the verb's forms. The other "tenses" are just constructions that use either the present or past form where the tense is supplied by other forms of the verb.

What's the difference between the construction "I'll <verb>" and "I'm going to <verb>"? Do they even mean anything different? I couldn't tell you except by thinking of an example and considering whether I perceive them differently or not. If there is a difference, it must be a subtle one, and maybe one that changes depending on the specific example? How else could you possibly learn this other than by mass exposure to examples to the point where you have a feel for it?

Same thing with "it rained" versus "it was raining." Is there a difference? Not necessarily. "It was raining" is a more vivid expression. But if there was a place where a native speaker would tend to use "it was raining" and you said "it rained" instead, it wouldn't mean something fundamentally different. On the other hand, if I said "I was killing him," that means something very different from "I killed him." The latter is a simple statement of fact. The other has various possible implications. Maybe I was stabbing him over and over again with a knife instead of dispatching him with a single blow. Maybe I started to try to kill him but was prevented from finishing the act. Maybe I'm phrasing it that way because I'm preparing to narrate what happened in more detail. You can't easily break this down into abstract grammar rules about "verb tenses" without reference to concrete examples.

>>213940699
>"Please don't wander around unnecessarily"
Normally, in English a sign conveying the same message would just read
>no loitering

>>213973013
Yeah, if I ever get to the point of speaking Spanish, I would probably try imitating a Mexican accent, being in the US and all, but I'd like to learn at least how to listen to Spaniards without thinking of them as lisping homosexuals.

>>213969057
a Slavic language? I take Russian it IS that bad.

the funniest part is Polish is even more useless than Russian since they will not be conquering the world any time soon, or ever.

same goes for NOT German languages in Scandinavia and other off brand Pepsi shit like portuguese, Cantonese, and all other chink shit that's not Mandarin, Thai, Japanese etc.

or the difference between Turkish and Arabic. if you're learning a dead language or one of the ones that is not a major language, you are a fucking retard. at least Brazil has hot women and a large number of people that it beats France and French

>>213964703
>How did you understand the difference between present perfect and present perfect continuous?
>present perfect
it's over
>continuous
it's still happening
A clear distinction even a small child can intuit through exposure. I suggest scriptorium

>>213973363
hey, don't learn diccion don't listen to me and my Nazism, I'm in the wrong normie.

by all means watch Caracol Colombian soap operas and immerse yourself in Argentina too and knock yourself out. unless those 2 Latin American countries are not gay enough, then I don't know what to tell you. Reading Shakespeare I mean Gabriel Garcia Marquez may be good for you.

and I'm not saying they're faggots or that whatever you might infer, I'm just saying they're wrong. do educate yourself though, you decide.

as for Spain, not modern Spain but old Spain has nothing but good things to offer and to learn from. it all stems from wanting to be lawful and proper and white... ...ooops there's my socialism again.

if I learn Spanish or Portuguese, I'm going full European and larping that it's more aristocratic, I don't care about the Americas

>>213964703
Russian cases are hard as fuck. aren't you supposed to be smart? literal subhumans I went to school with butcher the English language like they're the Irish with their Boston Blaccent, so even a retard could do it.

>>213973731
that worked well with French for you didn't it bandu dopinder?

>>213973829
I barely remember any French from school but I probably have to go Quebecois there

>>213972114
>It's just an unfortunate coincidence that this happens to resemble an English speech impediment
Well, there's plenty of words that include both 's' and 'c', so that always made me think if the same people who thought Spaniards have a lisp were just ignoring al those 's', which Spanish has plenty of too.
>"the six[!] sibilant phonemes of medieval Spanish."
That was absolutely crazy, to go from six sibilants to just one.

>>213973785
Do you think Russia doesn't have retards who can speak?

>>213975324
they're one of the few people I will be nice to, nigger. you got a problem with that?

>>213975087
You just have to slip up once. It's like if someone otherwise spoke normally (in English), but accidentally mispronounced the r sound in a word, like "I'm very tiewod." Despite the fact that he pronounced "very" correctly, everyone would point and laugh at him and call him a baby.

>That was absolutely crazy, to go from six sibilants to just one.

If you're trying to be sarcastic, remember that I'm functionally retarded and your point is going to be totally lost on me. If you're trying to imply that modern Spanish still has all those six sounds of medieval Spanish, the Wikipedia article states otherwise, saying they merged from six to just three or two.

"By the early 1700s the six sibilant phonemes of medieval Spanish had all merged into three phonemes in the dialects with this distinction and two phonemes elsewhere..."

>>213931589
>hot take, german is easier than french
Avis chaud: l'allemand est plus facile que le français.
>>213932784
>French is super easy. I've seen motivated people reach B1 in just a couple months
Le français est super facile. J'ai vu des personnes à grande motivation atteindre un niveau B1 pendant seulement quelques mois.

>>213976759
Nah, I was merely stating that it was in fact crazy to go from six to one sibilant, the image was part of a uni course I took on the history of Spanish which is why it depicts those first six sibilants.

what's the most interesting minor Romance language?

>>213979098
Occitan

>>213979098
Sardinian
It's literal caveman language

>>213964585
Welsh has the cool Ll sound, more consonant mutations and its orthography doesn’t get cluttered up trying to accommodate palatalisation. Why do you say that, if I may ask?

>>213966443
Isn't mattvsjapan learning chinese?

>>213954871
based and monogamy pilled

>>213930184 (OP)
Is there a term for when English speakers use a phrase in another language to sort of exaggerate? Like when an English speaker says "Numero Uno" instead of number one.

>>213984700
Idk if there's a specific word for using foreign words. If I had to describe it I would just say they're doing it for emphasis.

>>213967973
if I were younger and had the time I would like to just sit in a room and watch japanese tv and drink for 16 hours a day for 3 months straight and see how far I got doing that

Yomitan dictionary download is broken, goddamn it

>>213986705
Are you having problems with actually downloading a dictionary, or just importing it to Yomitan? I used this guide like 2 years ago and it worked fine for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbC9LL8kNo4

>>213987750
Yes all the download links are down
https://github.com/yomidevs/kaikki-to-yomitan/blob/master/downloads.md#downloads
And the downloader tool for recommended dictionaries doesn't work

>>213987776
Have you tried any of the dictionaries on this page?

https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tTdLppnqMfVC5otPlX_cs4ixlIgjv_lH

im finna go full meme and learn Proto-Germanic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xnglmDFpkc

>>213987935
Not looking for Japanese dictionaries sorry
>>213988535
Well you should learn Old Norse first and then Gothic

How the fuck do I get any motivation for this shit?

>>213988561
You visualise the texts that you wish to read in your TL and force yourself to become excited

>>213973785
English has strict word order compared to many other European languages, and I'd imagine Russian, with its cases, relies a lot less on a strict word order. That can be hard to learn for people whose native languages are more highly inflected and have a very free word order.
It's also just hard to pronounce.
Another thing I've heard can be hard is how it's not immediately obvious what part of speech a word is. For instance, the word "walk" can be a verb (e.g. "He always walks on foot") or a noun (e.g., "I took a walk," "I like taking walks"). In another, more inflected language, the noun and the verb might share a root but have endings to make them a noun or a verb. In English, you just have to know by parsing the rest of the sentence perfectly.

>>213988621
Reading is for nerds

>>213979098
Half of them are made up. You can basically divide it into Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan/French/n. Italian/s. Italian/Sardinian/Romanian and leave it at that. Everything else is a dialect or something in between other languages. Romanian is obviously the coolest for having noun cases btw.

>>213988959
Whats a noticeably hard sound in English other than "th?"

>>213989190
non-native speakers can almost never say "strengths"

>>213989256
Probably cause the "th"
Anything without a "th?"

Duolingo is fun again now that I started skipping ahead by testing out of sections

Started out with Spanish but feeling like Mandarin might be more sensible. Given that China is a place I'm interested in exploring.

>>213990024
Do both. Spanish is fairly easy anyway

>>213952190
Apparently a lot of the joseonjoks (chinese koreans) do. Since one major obstacle for koreans to learn japanese is kanji. Joseonjoks don't have that problem.

>>213988959
1 you are wrong, the cases give a free flow of word order in Russian.

2 English is a meme language, even a retard could do it. nice try at bullshitting me though

>>213952190
oooh, I don't want to talk smack about Korean but I heard south korea is feminist hell. their martial arts suck too. at least Kung Fu is cool and some Japanese Judo works.

anyway, I choose Mandarin over Weeb as my starter pokemon. I have no need for such a strict society.

I'll do you one better: I have shown interest in Cantonese and Thai, but I put some Netflix anime in Thai to give it a spin and it sounds too 3rd world retarded.
as someone pointed out it is too much work.

>>213990452
Korean is the Bulbasaur of east Asian languages.

Chinese = Charmander. The most obvious choice. Very normie coded but still solid and useful.

Japanese = Squirtle. Seen as the alternative choice for people who are "too cool for Chinese". Still quite common, and is the main contender to Chinese.

Korean = Bulbasaur. The least popular choice. Mainly used by autists hyper-fixated on Bulbasaur / Korean culture, and people who know Bulbasaur is the most optimized choice (Korean is less oversaturated than Japanese and more specialized than Chinese). Like Bulbasaur, Korean has been growing in popularity recently.

I am taking the Janusz pill and continuing to learn german

>>213991034
sometimes I whack it to the German lady being a fat gringo wife who does nasty things during sex

>>213990719
agreed bro I thought so too that its a Bulbasaur.
I guess Jung Hoyeong is kind of cute with a tight Asian body. I would say Korean food is nothing to write home about, but I'm spoiled.

what can I say, people want to alk to the main character, not an NPC. my time in this life and ability/might is limited to be learning Korean. sorry.

>>213991034
Good for you, I know a few YouTube channels that I copy everything they say on grammar on paper and pencil.

my favorites are learn German with natives, and conquer your voice. she looks like a Latina and her German is understandable.

I am at around that level where I can watch an episode of easy German and understand most of it, but past the training wheels of Deutsch verstehen. I don't miss an episode, those are the basics before I do a full immersion.

at least my German is better than my russian though

>>213990373
>1 you are wrong, the cases give a free flow of word order in Russian
I literally said that word order is free because of the cases in Russian. That's why English word order can be hard.
>2
Everything in my comment is stuff I've read online from people saying what parts of English can be hard. A Finn, for example, said that the longer their sentence, the more likely they'd be to make a word order mistake.
>English is a meme language
Spanish and English are really similar in a lot of ways. People who speak languages that are more different struggle more with it. It's a greater feat for a Russian or a Chinese person to learn it fluently than for a Mexican to do so.
>>213989190
The R sounds.
The vowels can also be hard to differentiate from each other, let alone pronounce. Obviously there's the ship/sheep thing, but I've also witnessed people who thought that "man" and "men" were pronounced the same. Some also struggle with distinguishing the vowels in "rut" and "rot."
Finally, the consonant clusters can be challenging, like another anon pointed out. Stuff like "strengths" or "intercepts."

>>213991532
you did not, you got BTFO at your ignorance. I could lie at this point to make you look even more stupid.

no they are not similar in any way. my language is a romance language, yours is some shit from conquered peoples to this day. Meme language.

best compliment I can give English is that its saxon memes with French memes and in that way it has something in common with Japanese.

or some shit I read on here.

>>213991532
> Even a Mexican could do it

Fuck you.

>>213991638
>you did not, you got BTFO at your ignorance
You know you can just read my comment lol
>English has strict word order compared to many other European languages, and I'd imagine Russian, with its cases, relies a lot less on a strict word order. That can be hard to learn for people whose native languages are more highly inflected and have a very free word order.
In simplified English: English has a strict word order. Russian has cases. Russian relies less on a strict word order and more on cases to convey information. A strict word order can be hard to learn if your language has a free word order and not a strict one.
>no they are not similar in any way.
There's tons of vocabulary overlap, often little phrases can be translated word for word, the tenses are usually directly translatable (haber being like have), things like that. This is why Spanish is considered to be among the easier languages to learn for an English speaker, as opposed to say, Russian.

Brahmi script > any modern indian script

>tfw learning my target language by sexting with chatgpt
Based or cringe? Idk it's pretty fun desu.

>>213993007
I don't get why Devanagari has the line on top of everything

>>213935427
>german is simply extremely irregular
How so? IMO both English and French are more "irregular" than German.

>>213937329
>German listening is easier
Not when you factor in all the dialects or accents, but then again I had the misfortune of living in the south only knowing Hochdeutsch.

>>213989371
anything with an American R.
also "category" for the stress, and any word with more than 4 syllables

>>213989371
water is the hardest word in the english language.

>>213988561
What motivated you to write that post?

I can't make voiced aspirated stops

>>213991638
you write like a queer

i want to learn how to speak chinese properly. what should i be looking for, phonetic guides?
i don't care about reading or anything else, i just want to be able to say chinese words properly so i can string sounds together to sound like i know chinese