I’ve been studying Japanese for a few years. I was recently in Japan for about a month, and while I was able to read and understand a lot of what people were saying, I could barely speak. It was like my brain kept freezing up. It was frustrating, but I’m glad I got the opportunity to know where I’m at. I’m also starting to learn Spanish because I want to go to some South and Central American countries next year. For now, my goal is just to get the basics down.

I’m conversational in Spanish, but I’ve recently been trying to put more effort into maintaining it/getting exposure to the language. I haven’t seriously studied it in almost ten years, so honestly I’m surprised I’ve maintained any of it.

About a month ago, I started trying to learn Japanese. It’s going better than expected, I’ve been trying to do 1-2 hours per day in stuff like LingQ and Language Reactor. I feel like I’m starting to understand some of it, though I still can’t say much more than “えきは どこ です か？” (where is the train station). Still, this is a lot more enjoyable than formal education, so I’m fine if it’s slow

I have been learning Japanese for almost a year now. I am currently at a point where the best thing for me is to learn more vocabulary, since that will hopefully enable me to consume native media and which was one of my goals starting out.

For that, I currently use Anki, having done the Genki I vocab as well as the Tango N5 deck by TheMoeWay already, and working on the Tango N4 deck. After that, I think I might just start creating my own deck using the Animecards method.

As of now, I have put grammar somewhat on hold, since I am able to understand most simple sentences. I will eventually have to start looking at compound sentences, which looks very complicated. For grammar, I have mostly used Cure Dolly’s transcript, as well as some Genki I.

Outputting is an aspect I have no idea how to do on my own, and I have taken the Japanese courses at my university mostly to train my talking and writing skills and plan to take further courses.

At the moment I’m only doing Duolingo because I don’t have time, money or energy for anything more in-depth. Duolingo doesn’t have the languages I’d really really like to learn, so I make do with selections from their best constructed courses.

I’ve been studying Italian for 3 months. I chose Italian because before that I was learning Esperanto. But the Duolingo Esperanto course became worse for some reason, and I figured Esperanto would help me to recognise a lot of Italian. I was right!

I started Portuguese a few days ago. Always wanted to try Portuguese, but the weird pronunciations discouraged me. Eventually I just jumped in and had a go. My ear is starting to adjust to it.

And when I’m bored with those 2, I revise my German. Mainly because I like the goofy voices on the German course.

I squeeze in lessons during downtime at work, and my colleagues don’t seem to like it. Oh well. They shouldn’t be so tedious to talk to!

I have been studying Italian for over 10 years now. I started because I was going on vacation there and simply fell in love with the language.

I’m using Duolingo daily to keep my active knowledge up, and I’m subscribed to two Italian podcasts. In church, I read along on a Bible app.

It’s a bit of a routine but it’s also a bit of a drag, because I don’t get any real life practice. Last time I was in Italy was in 2018. I feel like I’ve come a pretty long way since then but I’d really like to test whether I can have a normal conversation.

It’s ‘not going’ at the moment due to life events. I want to pick up Spanish and Russian again when I’m ready.

I’m currently ‘learning’ French and Japanese.

The word ‘learning’ is in quotes because they’re both under some sort of a life-support right now. I’ve got Anki decks for both languages and try to do those decks everyday. However, that’s all I do. I sometimes challenge myself reading articles written in those languages, but that’s exceedingly rare.

I hope if time and energy comes back, I can put more effort, but at least, for now, I just don’t want my knowledge of those two languages to be forgotten.

I’ve been learning German since October. It’s gone fairly well, when I focus on it I improve very fast, but I have motivation issues and have plateaued, or maybe even regressed a bit in the past two months.

Ukrainian. I started shortly after my wife, who is Ukrainian, and I got married. It didn’t last long before I stopped/gave up since she wasn’t too interested in speaking it other than to her parents. Her family came to America when she was very young (and the youngest of 4), so she’s much more comfortable with English.

Fast-forward to last February where I picked it up again after Russia invaded. Got through the Duolingo course, but feel like I hit a plateau of sorts and need to get motivated again. I have a physical book, pimsleur, lingq, and anki cards–just need to practice and build up more vocabulary.

🇺🇦 Слава Україні!

Currently learning Nahuatl, just for fun, so it’s going slowly.

I’m learning Swedish because I’m moving to a Swedish majority speaking area soon. I would get by with my native language, but it’s just an excuse and I’ve enjoyed learning it a lot so far. Currently I am on 66 day streak on Duolingo. Along with that I am reading Swedish news and watching shows in Swedish on Netflix.

I wish there was a Swedish language community here on lemmy.

I’m putting more effort into learning Spanish. It’s going pretty slow, or at least it feels that way. On the other hand I live in Mexico now and that’s going pretty well.

im trying to learn spanish but finding it really tough

i took years of it when i was a kid but fell off the wagon. now im trying to come back and finding it really hard to teach myself while staying engaged. i know too much for the beginner lessons to stay engaged but not enough to step up a level. ive used mostly duolingo (i know i know) but im not finding much success with some of the other tools ive often seen recommended

im sticking with it but finding it much slower going than i anticipated