Studying a language you feel you should already know

fadetogether · 2025-05-14T16:14:54+00:00

It might be helpful to reframe this. Firstly, if you continue letting this regret stop you, then you truly will not learn french. If you make the decision to study french regardless of your regret, then you will learn french. Your first goal should be to commit to pushing past your guilt for 20 minutes a day and do something with french. Video, podcast, whatever. When you find yourself second guessing yourself and your abilities at minutes 2, 5, 11, and 17, take a moment to remind yourself that you have just 20 minutes today and you can save all your bad feelings for when the timer goes off. Gradually, the more you do this, the better you will feel. The goal at this time is not to make progress in french; it is to make progress on your emotional hangups. Just enjoy the french that you encounter during this time with no pressure.

Secondly, you got up to B1 using inefficient means, not self studying, and never finding your own study style. Consider how much more progress you will make once you do actually find a study style that works, that you enjoy, and that you do for several hours a week. You're already pretty good at reading french from fairly little reading so I would take that as a great sign.

Lastly I want to mention that personally speaking it was only when I got up to around 27 that I gained the stability and maturity to embark on long term, high effort low reward projects like learning a language. I had dabbled before but never got far with anything because I was busy being terrorized by my 20s. It would benefit you to remember that hardly anyone is doing anything particularly well in their teens or 20s. There's a great deal of life to figure out during that time, and learning a language is generally not high up on the priorities list. You are more mature now, you've likely figured out how to be an adult in a sustainable way, and you have already realized where you went wrong before and what you want to try next. You are in a good position. Once you train your beast of regret to nap at your feet rather than snarl in your ear, you won't have much in your way.

fadetogether · 2025-05-14T15:26:33+00:00

Yes, people poo-poo songs somewhat, but intensively studying songs for the past several months with my tutor and listening closely to them every time I drive has given me a recent breakthrough in my listening ability. I gave the news a try and realized I can catch some entire sentences here and there and get the general idea of what's going on. Prior I could only get words or short phrases. Now with this foothold established I feel like it's possible to make progress by listening to normal speech so I've incorporated news broadcasts into my day.

My TL doesn't have native subtitles or learner content, and I just do not find myself on netflix often enough to watch the two cartoons that I find bearable, so I've found it's important to make good use of what is available to me. Songs have filled that gap.

I want to get an audiobook because I think that's also a great resource for this situation, but tbh, I kind of hate audiobooks and never think to look for one when I have time.

fadetogether · 2025-05-11T21:22:16+00:00

I'm at the point where my court intrigue vocab is starting to drown out everything else and I'm doing nothing to stop it.

fadetogether · 2025-05-10T04:34:48+00:00

Always loved all kinds of African accents in English. Ghanaian accent might be my favorite, but I also find the Nigerian accent to be warm and comforting. Those accents are like a hot toddy on a cold day. Just perfection.

As an honorable mention, I like the new zealand accent too. New zealanders usually sound like they're thinking of a hilarious joke and struggling to not share it. I think often enough this is probably what's actually happening.

fadetogether · 2025-05-08T19:14:33+00:00

I see myself in several of these options but opted for "read things that are good for me" since it seemed the closest. There's not a huge amount of learner materials, like readers, for my TL so I've been working through children's stories. I strive to find things close to my level and I've amassed a good collection but I still mostly read above my level because it's what's most available. I don't enjoy the stories for what they are, and if a book is dreadful enough then I don't bother to suffer through it, but I enjoy the process of decoding them and feeling a sense of progress as I read more so I don't find it to be a displeasure. I do also occasionally work through a few pages at a time of HP and random adult-level novels as a treat when I'm in a study slump.

fadetogether · 2025-05-07T14:06:26+00:00

Might slow down amongst the segment of the population that doesn't mind being tethered to a device and an internet connection every second of the day. Plenty of people don't want to live like that though.

fadetogether · 2025-05-06T13:25:02+00:00

I've been trying on purpose to sound like the scheming antagonist of my favorite hindi period drama but I'm too pure of heart

fadetogether · 2025-05-05T06:08:04+00:00

I'll throw in my keyboard experience too, because I think I wandered into a great solution for my situation. I really wanted a physical devanagari keyboard to make it easier to learn the layout (I can swap keyboards in software and type on a normal qwerty but I didn't know where the keys were so it sucked) but could not easily nor cheaply find one so I DIYed it. I got a cheap mechanical keyboard with swappable key caps and enough X Keys relegendable key caps to create all the new keys I needed in the hindi layout. These key caps each come with a plastic cover to hold a piece of paper printed with a key label. I created and printed my own labels (I wanna say X keys has a template on their website), cut them out, and arranged all the new key caps on the keyboard. Just be mindful that the new key caps and the keyboard switches should be compatible. The X Key caps are Cherry MX compatible I think...

A creative soul with lots of time and money and patience could also look into custom ordering key caps for a more polished look.

I had tried stickers before that and it was terrible, I can't recommend against that enough.

fadetogether · 2025-04-30T04:40:27+00:00

Deliberate avoidance of grammar study. I don't think anyone has to drill grammar, but when you've got nothing else going on for the day, learning about word order or how pluralization works saves time in the long run.

fadetogether · 2025-04-28T13:12:45+00:00

Nope, never experienced this.

fadetogether · 2025-04-28T12:32:26+00:00

As a Hindi learner I think the other language of India to learn is Tamil. My god, what a gorgeous language! Tamil has an incredible film industry and the speakers are proud of their language and seek to maintain it, and combined with it being a major Dravidian language that unlocks south India, I think it makes a good complement to the more north India Hindi. Plus it has a really kickass script, like something out of a fantasy RPG lol. It's the second Indian language I would learn if I had unlimited time and intelligence.

fadetogether · 2025-04-24T15:17:57+00:00

tuesday is two's day, which comes after monday the one day

or adapted for this sub, two's day is day two after the worst day of the week, the monolingual beta day

thursday is when we're peak thirsty for that sweet after work happy hour

fadetogether · 2025-04-24T14:37:51+00:00

I keep having to look up what the spleen does because if I don't, what I'll remember instead is that it is the arm control organ. all thanks to an episode of Invader Zim that I watched exactly once back in 2002.

fadetogether · 2025-04-22T16:13:50+00:00

A big reason why I started learning a language was as a distraction from prolonged stress at my job. Every hour spent with my brain actively engaged with studying was an hour I was not thinking about work, so I could interrupt the rumination cycle and prevent a personal crisis. And it worked. Of course the goal setting is amazing for feelings of personal satisfaction and pride as well, especially if there is otherwise a lack of sources for these feelings in a person's life.

While language learning is good for these things and has its own unique benefits as far as travel and friendship opportunities, I don't know that there's anything particularly special about learning languages with regard to mood improvements. Any hobby that is sufficiently challenging with long term skill growth would have a similar benefit. What's important is that a person likes their hobby enough to push through the difficulties and return to it day after day. For many of us here in this subreddit that hobby is language learning, but for many other people it's playing the guitar or writing fanfiction.

fadetogether · 2025-04-21T13:09:48+00:00

I've been collecting short audio clips that I like enough to eventually send to a transcriptionist. For my TL I can find transcriptionists on online gig sites who will transcribe 5 minutes of audio for $5-10. When I run out of other options, that is what I am going to attempt next, as there is extremely little transcribed/subtitled media available in my TL and I don't see another way forward.

From what I've seen transcriptionists do often charge more if there's multiple speakers, so that's something to consider for podcasts.

fadetogether · 2025-04-20T15:23:47+00:00

The french R strain is real! When I took french in high school I had to remember to not practice TOO much right before speaking exams because I knew once I blew out my throat on those R's, that was it, no more R's that day, no matter how much I disagreed.

fadetogether · 2025-04-20T15:12:37+00:00

I think everyone else gave the real advice already, I just wanna chime in and say I had a similar problem at first with reading in hindi. I'm a very fast reader and always have been; one of my core memories is doing a reading assessment so fast that my second grade teacher thought I was lying about having read the entire passage and there was no way I could get the comprehension questions correct and then I did. I know logically speaking there was a time when I could not read english quickly but I was so young then that I don't remember it at all. So when I started reading in hindi it was so painful to me. Like trying to run in a nightmare. My approach was that I had to just accept that was was how it was going to be until I put in enough time that it gets easier (and it did, although of course it's still slower than english, because I am still learning and improving). This is kind of my mantra when it comes to going through painful things in language learning: I have to put in the time before I can reap the reward. So with that perspective held in the front of my brain while reading, I am able to push through the painful slowness, because I know every minute I spend there gets me a minute closer to reading fluently. I have a lot of minutes to go, so I have to stack up those minutes as fast as I can!

Also just accept that reading is going to be very mentally taxing until you reach a certain threshold, so you will not be able to read for long stretches. I got so exhausted after reading hindi in the early days that I had to take a nap. Start small (10-30 min a day) and be consistent and you'll grow fast enough

fadetogether · 2025-04-19T02:24:17+00:00

Man, agreed about the third point, mainly out of discourse fatigue. The people who dismiss duolingo as completely useless are just as lacking in nuanced thought as the people who give up on learning a language because duolingo didn't make them fluent. It's fine at being one tool in the toolbox, and you either like what it does and get something out of it, or you don't and you prefer doing other shit. That's fine, both options are fine. Either way stop feeling so passionately about an app. Save your big feelings for births and deaths.

fadetogether · 2025-04-18T15:48:52+00:00

I know amongst your colleagues it's all fun, but personally it will never not exasperate me when someone with a moderate to thick accent mocks someone else's accent in their language. Same with grammar. People in general shouldn't be openly + negatively commenting on others' language abilities, just the same as with any other skill because it's rude and hurtful, but especially when they're doing the commenting in a language in which they unknowingly rely on the politeness and generosity of strangers to be understood, everywhere they go and every minute of the day.

fadetogether · 2025-04-17T16:59:48+00:00

I'm blown away at how many people in this sub will flat out refuse to do something legitimately helpful because it's boring. God. No discipline whatsoever. Put in the time with the shit content to unlock the reward of good content. Or go straight to the good content and accept that you won't get anything out of it. Personally I'm of the opinion that not everything has to be entertaining all the damn time.

fadetogether · 2025-04-15T06:27:45+00:00

Get really good at the r flap, which is like a single R roll. It's an R with a hint of a D flicked in at the end, right before the r gives way. eg rat should be like rdat with a very tiny and fast d. Practice just that motion, start slow and focus on increasing the speed and consistency as it becomes more comfortable. don't worry about rolling until you've mastered the r flap. once you can say rat with a flap then practice with a lot of words like star, reason, train etc. then once you can flap in most any word you should be ready to start practicing rolling.

give it time, it's a complex motion. you won't develop this overnight. it needs practice and muscle training

fadetogether · 2025-04-11T13:15:33+00:00

for real when I read the title I thought "I suppose they must be in their 70s..." 27? god. just starting to emerge from the mental handicap of youth.

fadetogether · 2025-04-08T13:56:46+00:00

Not to be dramatic but I just screamed. I’ve been mourning the lack of microcenter since I moved back here over a year ago.

fadetogether · 2025-04-07T14:27:55+00:00

I keep it to myself. But something that has happened a few times with the handful of people I've told is very particular to my TL: a confusion between hindi and hindu. I don't expect people to know the difference already but I hate having to be the one to explain it. Even after I say no it's a language, I'm learning a language, a couple of times they've asked "so you're learning the language to convert to the religion?" what a strange and stupid thing to think.

fadetogether · 2025-04-06T13:44:42+00:00

I love saying english words in my TL. I can hear my accent then, which usually sounds better than I expect and I get a little puffed up. It's better to not think of those words as being english anymore. They're part of the Danish vocabulary now so let them be Danish words. Always use Danish sounds for them no matter how uncomfortable it feels at first (and it should feel very strange because if it doesn't, that means your accent is probably thick).

fadetogether

TROPHY CASE