Enlil

Sure, if there's room for it. In a school in the United States I think Spanish and French are clearly the first choices. If you have both of those (my high school only had Spanish) then I suppose you'd want either Mandarin or German next. I would definitely have taken German if it had been offered.

I mostly just do it out of fun and curiosity. I never really had to learn much in school but have decided to study a foreign language on my own. I like getting immersed in a new culture and trying to use my language as basically a new way of thinking. You can also impress others with your knowledge, you never when it will come up. And finally I intend to travel someday so it will definitely be useful then. But most of all I just enjoy the process of trying to learn and slowly improving at a whole new method of communication.

Google translate can be a very powerful tool, you just have to know what you're doing and be able to critically examine the results given as well as use other tools. I find that it usually works best with one or two words. It can also be a great help if you recognize most or all of the words in a sentence but can't quite figure out what precisely it's trying to say. A Google translation combined with your own knowledge of the context can frequently break the case, or at least that's been my own experience.

Thanks for this Megshoe, these are extremely helpful. This is way more convenient that what I've been doing which is usually to just type it into Google search bar.

I definitely get into a habit where the foreign word is more readily available in the mind than the word in my native language. Sometimes when I talk to my family for example my brain automatically tells me what I want to say in German and then I have to stop and translate it back into English and it can cause a bit of a delay when I'm trying to get back into the habit. That said, I don't think I've ever completely blanked on a regular word.

This may be strange but I actually feel great before an exam. As long as I'm prepared I like going in there and showing what I know. I also find regular class lectures extremely dull so when I get to put my skills to the test and work at a more brisk pace I actually rather enjoy it.

I think sometimes people overstate the importance of prior exposure. Keep in mind just how monumentat a task learning a new language actually is. You're going to be spending years doing it so a little head start is great but I don't think it will make a dramatic difference. I've always heard that English is pretty difficult to learn due to it's spelling and odd pronunciation rules. But I think barring a uniquely difficult feature (like scripts that have a symbol for every workd, etc.) most languages are on about the same level just because of how much time is necessary to become fluent.

If I could just snap my fingers and be fluent in five new languages I think I would have to go obvious and pick Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Mandarin. I don't think I'll ever have the drive, the time or the memory capacity to learn all of these but it's fun to pretend!

Yeah, I got a hundred percent!

Of course English is my native language so that's probably a good thing. This seems like a great test for beginning English learners since the spelling in out language doesn't make any sense.

As a German student I don't think it sounds aggressive at all and I think the idea that it does mostly comes from movies and from old video of Hitler's speeches. He spoke in a style called "Hard German" that was a rhetorical technique to get the crowd excited and in no way reflects how people speak German regularly. I think German sounds a lot like English myself in terms of how harsh it sounds.

You mentioned Chinese. What little Chinese I've heard (not sure which dialect) sounded like people were always yelling. I guess it's the intonation but yeah that one sounds a little aggressive to me.

I haven't but I certainly wouldn't consider it a waste of time like a lot of people are saying. I think the flawed assumption they're making is that your two choices are learning a fictional language or learning a real language, but this is wrong. It was a specific interest that drew the person to the fictional language and if they weren't learning it they would be using that time for another hobby, like playing video games or watching TV or reading a book, not something they would consider work. So if people think it's fun they should go ahead and learn whatever they want to learn. Fortunately I think learning real languages is also fun.

I try to use a lot of different sources to get as much experience as possible. I also try to go for things that are entertaining. So I have a regular textbook but I also watch movies in the language (German for me), usually with English subtitles, or put German subtitles on an English movie I was going to watch anyway. I listen to a lot of music in the native language and memorize the lyrics. I've also gotten a lot of mileage out of watching YouTube Let's Plays in German. That's probably only a good option if you already like those but the options are really limitless. For more focused study I prefer reading stories and books that are in both languages and I also memorize poetry in German.

I certainly can't roll my "r"s as a native English speaker but I don't think I'd worry about it too much. This is a pretty standard problem when it comes to people learning other languages: different languages have different sounds. For a lot of people properly pronouncing a sound they didn't learn when they were children is next to impossible. A good example of this is speakers of certain Asian languages cannot pronounce the "l" sound in English the way native speakers can. Of course if you can pick it up then that's great but I wouldn't focus on it as a big stumbling block unless for some reason you're trying to pass as a native speaker.

Only you can decide whether or not learning another language is right for you. I think I can say this: if your heart isn't in it then you won't successfully learn the language. I've known people who've taken eight years of Spanish, gotten good grades in all those classes, and still know next to nothing because they just don't care about learning another language. Unless it's extremely important career-wise I think the only people who stick with it long enough are those that find studying the language enjoyable in and of itself. A lot of people really like the idea of knowing another language but hate the actual act of studying it.

So ultimately, learning a language is a ton of hard work and if you have to ask whether or not it's worth then it probably isn't. Find something else productive to do that's more your style!

I found popular music to be hugely helpful to learning German. Especially when I was first starting I would memorize the lyrics and translations to dozens of songs and listen to them over and over. It definitely carried over to other aspects of the language and gave me a great core of vocabulary and an understanding of basic sentence structures. Juli and Jupiter Jones are my favorites and I would recommend listening to music as an aid to anyone trying to learn a foreign language.

Obviously, music is just a bonus and can't replace proper study of grammar but should can be great in conjunction with it.