steve1

I love Shawshank Redemption. The actors did so well to express the emotions in the movie that I was in tears at the critical parts. It really highlights some great issues with the prison system and corruption and pulls it all together in an amazing story. Oh, and Morgan Freeman narrates some parts of the movie.

I'm guilty as well. Originally I used "lol" as what the acronym stood for, but now I seem to have replaced the filler words like "uh" and "um" with "lol" online.

For me, it was the unique peculiarities of each language. For example, Spanish has the "r" tongue rolls and the "n" wave sounds. These threw me off a lot when I first started learning the language and really deterred me from speaking for quite awhile until I got used to them.

I agree with you about it being easier to read than to listen. Reading you can do at your own pace, and there aren't any local accents that can throw you off. Most native speakers tend to speak relatively fast and make it frustrating, albeit unintentionally, for people trying to learn the language.

Parents should definitively teach their children another language at a young age. Both of my two languages from my childhood, English and Chinese, are deeply ingrained in me and I can use them fluently. As children grow older, their schedules are more and more filled, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find the time and energy to learn another language.

I feel like, if you have learned the language well enough, there are certain fundamental words and phrases that you will never forget because they are used so often. However, the lesser used details will slowly disappear if you do not use the language.

This will also vary depending on what age you started learning the language. Chinese is my native tongue, and, even though I only use it now a couple of times a year with my family, I still know the language well enough to converse and read a little. However, I lost a lot of progress from Spanish, which I started in middle school, when I barely used it for two years.

I have been using duolingo. They offer Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and German. They have a really nice initial setup; if you already somewhat know the language, you can take a short test so you won't have to sit through those lessons. Duolingo also incorporates speaking and listening into their lessons as well, which really helps with becoming familiar with the language.

This has happened to me plenty of times. Sadly, I do not really speak my native language much anymore after living at my university (away from my family). I have found that sometimes I can easily know what I am trying to say in English, but cannot seem to be able to articulate my thoughts in my native tongue. Occasionally this is because of impossibilities in translation, but often times this is the result of me not speaking in my native language enough.

The next language on my list would probably be Malaysian. I plan to travel through most of southeast Asia, and learning the language would be a lot better than trying to get by with vague hand gestures. However, I found that my Spanish is still barely passable when I traveled to South America this year, so I think I will first try to become more fluent in Spanish first before trying out Malaysian.