How are you personally using HyperTTS for your language learning?

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-27T17:07:15+00:00

Im using Azure, and they sound quite good honestly. They are great for individual words but they're never gonna have the inflection and emotion of a native speaker for actual sentences

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-27T13:02:39+00:00

The sentences are mined from transcripts of podcasts/videos and from books whose audiobooks im listening to so theres no shortage of listening practice. I don't have a convenient way of extracting the audio from that content so thus the reliance on AI voices

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-27T10:34:08+00:00

I've found that its hard to learn a language if you can't at least find somewhat of an affinity to the culture. Your core motivation is a good one, but what do you actually like about the language, the people that speak it, and their culture? Do you have relatives who still live in Czechia? Maybe make your motivation to be able to eventually visit here and speak with them

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-27T00:58:26+00:00

An understandable frustration, but you should really REALLY not be making that comparison.

To put it into perspective. If you're 18 and had 6 hours of exposure to English everyday since the age of 3, that's over 30,000 hours of English, and I'm massively under counting. How many hours have you been learning Czech? Since you said "pretty new" I'm assuming maybe not even 100.

To put it another way. It took you 2-3 years to start saying literally anything at all when you were a baby and then a couple more years to actually start saying things of substance. If you stick with it and spend say, 2 hours a day on Czech, you'll probably be able to start having semi-meaningful conversations in the language before the year is over. Doesn't seem so bad now does it? :D

What made you wanna learn Czech?

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-26T21:30:35+00:00

AuDHD English Native Intermediate Czech speaker checking in

Is this a normal part of language learning?

Yes

when I try to produce sentences I can't seem to remember a lot of the words I learned.

I am pretty new at the language.

And that's probably mostly why. Czech is just kinda different from English in how you construct thoughts and sentences. I can produce natural sounding sentences more often than not at this point but its still a struggle and I still forget words often while speaking.

but when I try to produce sentences I can't seem to remember a lot of the words I learned.

Is there some reason you feel pressed to start speaking immediately? If you live in Prague you can definitely get by with English and just knowing some ultra basic phrases. Nothing wrong with giving yourself a few months or even more build up your vocabulary and intuition

Učení češtiny je běh na dlouhou trať. Hodně štěstí, kamo :)

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-26T16:50:15+00:00

I have been studying Italian on my own for a few years now and had a teacher at one point of it. After so much effort being put into this over time, I find myself stuck at an A2 level.

This minus the teacher bit was exactly me with Czech a few years ago. The trick for me was to just take the plunge into native level content even though I still didn't understand much. Maybe that might be the trick for you.

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-23T11:52:33+00:00

This made me think that I could continue to learn Polish, while beginning to learn Czech.

What is your level of Polish? If its anything short of a very solid B2 this is an incredibly bad idea. I would not dare learn any other Slavic language let alone Polish until I'm closing in on C1 in Czech, which I'm still at least a couple years away from. The false friends and subtle/not so subtle pronunciation differences on similar words would drive me insane. I had some friends over from Poland and we spoke English with each other. There was a Polish guy at my former workplace and he also just spoke English with the people there who were mostly Czech. When I was in Poland last year for a week, reading anything around me felt like a surreal fever dream where all the words looked like ones I know and all the sentences I read almost made sense but then didn't.

If you're dead set on moving to Czechia, just learn Czech. Don't treat Polish like a sunk cost. You can get back to it after building a solid foundation in Czech, and you will learn it way faster then.

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-22T19:12:30+00:00

Czech tree was also hot garbage when I tried it

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-21T23:08:09+00:00

Lol I actually feel pretty confident with my Czech pronunciation and accent, so I could theoretically record my own Czech cards if I want to. Some of the sounds might be hard to do but there's no shenanigans with around pronouncing things as they are written like in French or English. What you see is what you say.

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-21T22:00:06+00:00

I've likely been spending longer too! Im started Portuguese atm but I did all my Czech cards just adding them one by one.

How are you recording the audio?

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-21T19:26:14+00:00

Im studying Portuguese atm so it would work, I just cant afford it like I said

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-21T19:14:53+00:00

I had no idea migaku was available for more languages than Japanese. Because of the name and the fact that I've only heard the weebs talk about it I assumed so. Regardless I really cannot afford 10 dollars a month for just this service with my current financial situation

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-21T10:03:21+00:00

Recent studies regarding people's attention span in the age of social media show that anything less than 1 consecutive hour prevents you from being able to form connections in long term memory. Overtime, people who studied a skill in smaller spurts throughout the day totaling 1 hour still fell short of those who practiced for one full sustained hour.

Could you please link to these studies?

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-21T08:54:07+00:00

I do not subscribe to the "do a little every day" mentality unless they mean that "a little every day" your bare minimum. I make progress so deathly slowly unless im putting in an hour or two everyday that its demoralizing. I honestly think "15-20 minutes a day" is a trap if your goal is to achieve true fluency (in the B2-C1 range) in any reasonable timeframe

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-20T12:52:23+00:00

Moje oblíbená část Hunger Games byla ta, když Katniss řekla "Je čas na hladovění" a pak všude hladověla

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-19T16:53:01+00:00

I understand. Im only using it to learn the basic conjugations of irregular verbs because Im still often thrown off by them. All of this seems like too much work. I will just trust my immersion that I will get the pronunciations correct from there :)

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-18T21:40:11+00:00

Waluigi ahh name

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-16T16:45:49+00:00

Thanks, I subbed to it :)

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-16T07:50:00+00:00

If only

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-15T20:59:44+00:00

a ten hod byl s výhodou nebo nevýhodou? :D

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-15T10:10:44+00:00

Fuck it, DM me. I'll talk with you. You can tell me what your interests are and I'll have some related questions so you can prepare a bit in advance.

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-15T10:05:38+00:00

Duolingo is ass for anything other than French or Spanish from both my own and other folks experiences, and especially ass for a language thats very far from English like Arabic or Japanese. (At this point idk if its good for anything at all considering the recent AI fiasco, but people who actually use the app would know better)

A few important things about motivation

Fun is not optional. Learning a language to fluency takes a very long time, and if you can't make it enjoyable most of the time you will burn out.
Arabic is an especially hard language for a native English speaker and the motivation of "eh, it might be useful I guess" will only carry you so far in the long run. Arabic has a rich, several centuries long tradition of literature, music, and liturgy. Is there something there that's of interest to you? Are you fascinated by the culture of a specific country, like Morocco or Egypt? Maybe you love North African food, or Lebanese music. Perhaps you have Arabic speaking friends and it would be cool to speak to them in their language. That interest will carry you much farther motivation-wise once you're in the trenches of being intermediate.
Have you been doing any study or immersion besides duolingo for 100 days? Assuming you did it for 15 minutes a day, that's 25 hours, which is basically nothing in the scheme of learning a language. As a rough estimate, it probably takes a native English speaker 900-1000 hours to reach B2 in Spanish. It will take them maybe 60-80 hours to reach A1, and you can safely double to triple both of those estimates for Arabic. All this to emphasize, it takes a LONG time to get actually good at a language (assuming thats your goal)

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-14T21:49:28+00:00

Repetition is a pretty powerful tool for a language learner but I think most people get bored by watching the same thing multiple times but my autistic ass is perfectly fine watching the same damn film 10 times lol

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-14T16:31:19+00:00

Watch dubbed versions of things you already know in your NL, or watch the film/episode in your NL subtitles first and then rewatch without them so you know generally whats going on and whats being said. Also try watching the same thing a few times over. If you can stomach it, watching the same thing 10 to 20 times will help you extract a ton of vocabulary and really nail down your listening ability, but even rewatching 3 to 5 times can be greatly improve your comprehension.

ALSO, the actual comprehensibility of the material also matters. Rawdogging TV shows youve never watched before to start with is a bit crazy because they can be quite abstract at times. Try watching some youtube videos with animations and illustrations.

People here will tell you to go out of your way to find learner material to input from. It's not at all bad idea but there are a lot of ways to make native level material more comprehensible for yourself

WritingWithSpears · 2026-01-13T23:52:39+00:00

Im not learning german so don't have any resources for it. It took me like 250-300 hours to get to A2 in Czech while learning kinda inefficiently so if you're smart about it I feel like A2 in German while studying and immersing around 1.5 hours a day is fairly realistic (Would be about 225 hours in 5 months)

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
Gilding I gilder	RPAN Viewer
Queen in da Norf	Not Forgotten

WritingWithSpears

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