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Baburra

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Everything posted by Baburra

  1. I wish I did. I grew up being trained in Chinese and as much as I appreciate it, I just prefer french a lot more even though technically it is a little less practical and useful for me since I have lots more people to talk to around me in Chinese than in french. Overall though I just like the language the most out of every other one including my own native one. Not that I dislike the Chinese language or my local one but I just have such an affinity for the french language that I sometimes wish I had spent the initial few decades of my life learning that instead.
  2. I'm in the process of learning it and I find it very difficult as the language is so far away from my native one. I am determined to learn it though as it is one of my most beloved foreign languages because it just sounds so good to me. I just hope one day I get to be fluent enough that I could speak it naturally without even thinking and that the pronunciations will come naturally as well, but I know it will take a lot of time since the pronunciations are very different from the asian languages I grew up with.
  3. I am trying to learn french so I am hoping to get to go to France someday so I can get some use out of my education and hardship. I just hope I am able to come close to the original accents and pronunciations as that is the one aspect that really appeals to me. The task of learning this language which is completely foreign to my own for now seems a bit overwhelming but hopefully with some time and a lot of discipline and practice I will learn and get to use it among the locals one day.
  4. It may be a good path to start off with learning their alphabet first. I haven't learned Japanese and I'm also still in the process of learning it but I did this with Chinese and after learning the alphabet I was able to read words and learn them on my own as long as there is an alphabet accompaniment to the words which most educational books do. I think the Japanese also use this a lot even in their shop signs and street signs to make it easier for foreigners living there.
  5. For me it's french since I'm asian so most other asian languages at least have a bit of familiarity to me whether it is in writing or with regards to accents. French is very appealing to me but sadly the accent is very hard to nail down as I have already trained my tongue to speak in a certain way which lends itself best to speaking most other asian languages but french definitely is very far from my own native speaking. I just hope I get close to an accurate pronunciation someday.
  6. I've never actively sought it our but I have come across a few children's shows in Spanish in the past and it helped me learn words that I still know today years later because of it and I wasn't even really trying to learn Spanish so I would say that it definitely would help since having something visual like a children's show can probably make the lesson and experience a little more memorable and also because they put it as simply as possible it's much less confusing and intimidating.
  7. I do think immersion helps a lot but I don't know if it would do much when time spent is limited. I have had a lot of foreigner friends in my country and a lot of them took years before they were comfortable enough just mixing in a few local words and phrases but mostly we still communicated in English. That's just anecdotal though and it might be completely different in your case as we all learn differently.
  8. Generally I think the easiest ones to learn are ones closest to your own language or ones you are really interested in so it's mostly subjective and I don't know if there are any particular languages that are objectively easier to learn than others. I did once see an infographic explaining how simple Korean is though I never tried it out myself it did seem simple enough and the way it was laid out did kind of make it easier to digest and learn.
  9. Thankfully no one around me does this but I have heard of and seen some examples of this and it really does sound like it would be confusing. Sometimes I have trouble keeping up with the new acronyms and text slang but at least nowadays you can just look up those things easily. What's also fun is when autocorrect messes up either my or my friend's messages and when that happens we always have a good laugh.
  10. I appreciate both and while I like British accents I do dislike a few of their pronunciations and spellings as well as some of the word choices but that's mostly because I'm a lot more used to American English since that's what we were taught and that's what I'm most used to and additionally I watch a lot more American media. Even in books I don't think I've ever read one that had British spellings and writing style.
  11. I never use it but the spelling that always felt more natural to me was geez because despite the origin to me the way it sounds I just always imagined it spelled that way. I don't think it's formally a word yet, if I'm not mistaken, so I guess unless they make it official we can use both or probably even if they do make it official since both are already widely used they will make them both acceptable.
  12. I am not an expert in this but I do think that the part of your brain you use for academics might be different from what you use for language, so my guess is that it's possible that there might not be much of a correlation, but at the same time I guess that in some people who are good in academics they might also coincidentally also possess whatever it is that makes it easier for some people to learn a new language, probably including patience and determination.
  13. I like that there are different accents for English, because it's the international language and I think it adds to the charm. I am a lot more worried about pronunciation most of the time though rather than accent because some languages are far off from the native pronunciations so it's difficult sometimes to speak words with a bit more accuracy. French, for example, I find very difficult to pronounce a lot of the words and I think it's a difficulty for a lot of other people too because the way they speak is so unique to them.
  14. I'm the type that works better in a class but to be honest I think I would learn even better if I had a tutor that can teach me regularly. What I always found difficult studying in classes is it's sometimes difficult to learn or focus as much as I would like to when the teacher's attention is divided among a class of many people, but at the same time I guess it also adds to the interactivity and enjoyment.
  15. I would study Latin, probably. It's the most familiar to me and I think it would be the best for me because of that. I honestly don't know much about it but I've always been sort of curious and interested since I read some Latin phrases when I was younger so I guess that's mostly how my interest in it started.
  16. I'd say I am dedicated but in my own way. I don't tend to practice regularly but I learn bits and pieces here and there as I find that is my way of learning another language that won't make it feel too much like I am working too hard on it. I am dedicated in the way that it has been years of me just finding phrases to latch on to every week or so and I have retained most of those lessons and I'm still going and I don't really plan on stopping and that's partly because it's not such a huge weight on my schedule anyway.
  17. I think one of the best ways is to force yourself either by living in the locality where the language is spoken and if not then just sticking to a routine. If you have a regular schedule then someday it becomes second nature and the day feels like it is missing something when you don't practice. It also helps having some one around like a practice partner or a tutor to help you keep track of your lessons and milestones.
  18. I think the best way to retain it is to just use it everyday so maybe living somewhere where you need to use it daily helps a lot. If not then what I find helps me a lot is finding associations where certain words or phrases will be easier for me to remember such as when a certain foreign phrase sounds to me like a local word or if it sounds like a phrase in a song that I know. This method has allowed me to retain a lot of memories stemming back from way back from my childhood.
  19. I ink advice and advise is a little more forgiving when used interchangeably while price and prize are completely different. Advice is used when offering your opinions and thoughts whereas I think advise is a much stronger form of suggestion and also it is different in the sense that it is used as a verb rather than a noun which from what I know advice almost always is. Price is very different from prize and I think the confusion is just due to the spelling and how American and British spellings differ so sometimes this might be misconstrued as just one of those small differences but it's very different.
  20. I think Chinese is second to English in terms of being common internationally. It seems like much more people speak mandarin and Spanish but I suspect those numbers depend much more on locals rather than being an internationally used language and as far as that goes I think English still takes that spot. A few people around me have speculated that maybe someday Chinese would be the predominant language used but so far to me it seems unlikely.
  21. I agree. It's actually my complaint of most academia and not just in language learning as you are expected to pass and can pass with just memorization and little to no understanding. I have actually forgotten majority of what I learned in school and I'm fairly sure it's because most of them were taught in that exact same way so I never retained any of the lessons because I never really understood them and instead just memorized the answers enough to get me through the tests.
  22. Me too. Even when you have a lot of resources nowadays to hear it straight from native speakers it doesn't mean you could duplicate it easily. I think it really is one of the hardest parts to nail down as I have heard many foreigners who eventually learn to speak fluently but never quite pick up how to exactly pronounce or accurately speak in the native accent since most likely their tongue has gotten way used to speaking their own local way and it's not easy to adapt that into another way of speaking.
  23. I think it would mostly just depend on personal preference but when it comes to job opportunities I would assume there are a bit more there on the side of Spanish than any of the other language options you've mentioned since I see a lot more need for Spanish translations in general though I could be wrong. I just think that employment wise it may be a lot more sought after than french or Italian since Spanish has a wider range from what I know.
  24. I prefer being in a class as it provides a bit more structure and having specific milestones that a tutor puts out gives me a bit more to work towards whereas if I just set those up myself I sometimes tend to be a bit more lax and allow myself to delay it. Still,I think both methods can work equally as well just maybe depending on the person and which one works for them best. I think some people might do a lot better when they aren't around other students when learning.
  25. The earliest memories I have of learning English are nursery rhymes. I can't remember what was the first thing taught to us in our local language as I don't think it was exactly taught until later on since we all spoke it already so from what I an remember English was given a bit more emphasis in the early years.
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