Spanish. I am a USian so it is a very common language here, plus if/when the US and China and/or Russia go to war I want to be able to flee south and hope someone can take me. Conventional wars between nuclear powers won’t stay conventional.

Russian is the only language I started learning as a personal choice. I speak 3 other languages.

Русский and 조선말

Putonghua, and Russian when I’m not exhausted by Putonghua

Spanish! I have a friend in Peru who’s helping me, but I’ve done at least one Duolingo lesson everyday since I started.

I’m leaning Spanish.

I’ve tried before and given up. I just could not stay committed to studying language the way I was taught in school. (I didn’t study Spanish in school; I’m just referring to the way we worked through a grammar book with exercises.) (Also, I’m not necessarily criticising the way schools teach languages, here. Make the most of it if you’re in school!! If you supplement whatever your school teaches with some other (fun) activities, you’ll be on fire and close to fluent by the time you finish school if you put enough hours into the more fun stuff.)

This time I’ve been consistently looking at Spanish for 21 months. I had one day off, by accident. This means spending between 10 minutes (bad / busy days) and 10 hours (great, empty days – not many) each day with the language. Average is somewhere between 30 mins and 3 hours.

For three months I watched Dreaming Spanish and similar Comprehensible Input videos. (Not sure I would recommend that others start like this.) Then I used the listening-reading technique for 200+ hours before adding in some children’s audiobooks, just audio (I would recommend this method, after reading a brief grammar – the kind you might find in the middle of a dictionary).

Then I started to read native content and decided to switch all my entertainment into Spanish. So everything dubbed or originally in Spanish. With English subtitles at first, then Spanish subtitles, then none. Lots of music. Plus some Skyrim, Fallout 4, FFXV (text only), Civ VI.

For most of this time I failed to finish any novels unless they were adapted or very short. And my comprehension was low. I’d struggle through about a third of each book before realising I’d missed too many details to enjoy the story. My understanding increased slowly.

The first full adult novel I read was a translation of Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom. That took about six weeks. The second one took me about four weeks. I’m on the third in the series now. I’ve read 45% since the weekend.

Something very strange happened halfway through that second novel. I was reading and understanding without translating each sentence. But I was kind of aware of this happening in a way that doesn’t happen while reading in English. A part of my brain was watching the other half think in Spanish, and acknowledging this process in English. Very strange. Kind of euphoric, actually.

Anyway, that lasted for about ten pages and now I just read in Spanish without translating for the most part (although I still pause and reflect over some sentences – where all the words make sense, but not the sentence as a whole). This only works with the Bernard Cornwell series, btw. I tried picking up another book and it only half makes sense.

This is mainly receptive. I’ve had almost no writing or speaking practice, but I have recently picked up some grammars (well, I’ve picked them up before but soon thought that watching another series or film would be more fun and put the book down again). These are much easier and much more fun when the language as a whole makes some kind of sense, though, so I think I’ll stick with the grammar this time.

So I’ve still got a few years of learning left to do. But this is much easier after figuring out a method that lets me enjoy the language early on (listening-reading followed by scaffolded native content).

There you go. The language I’m learning and my life story. Sorry.

Japanese because I had a lot of Japanese friends in high school and college. Can watch SOL anime but am branching out to more specific/complex media and topics. I think I would have liked to learn Chinese more in retrospect as an ML but right now my goal is to be fluent in Japanese because I’d love to do translation, and I’ve found a lot of satisfaction in learning about how to learn a language. Also, it’s better to be great in one language than not proficient in multiple ones.

I’ve been saving up money working full time and studying every day, and just might go ahead and give language school in Japan a go. The process of language learning and how rewarding it feels has become a big part of my life, and I think I have goals beyond just having a hobby. So becoming fluent as fast as possible is a very attractive option right now.

As a side note: language learning can be very solitary and I recommend looking at your local community options if they have like weekly classes. The bulk of learning is done on your own but having people to engage with around your language is very important. I missed out on hopping in a language class (even though I was a bit more advanced than the courses they offered) this semester and absolutely regret it!

Russian.

I’m really bad at languages but it’d be really cool to speak Arabic

english because im not a native english speaker. So my english isnt thaaaaatt perfect.

But once ive fix my broken english. Ive like to try maybe german or russian language.

Im learning Chinese and Spanish. The hardest part of Chinese for me just seems to be remembering all the characters well enough to read anything. HelloChinese helped the tones be less intimidating to me

Wasting my time with French because I had an “advanced beginner” level after high school. Hon hon hon.

I wanted to learn Russian but I shit myself when I was gathering learning resources. I don’t have the confidence to start self-learning a language completely from scratch… yet

I am very, very slowly learning Spanish, mostly to be able to potentially move to one of the socialist countries in Latin America (if I’d even be accepted) if shit hits every single fan in my country

I have partial learning of Korean, Norwegian, and Spanish. I formally studied Spanish and Korean, Norwegian just for fun, and it’s my weakest. Norwegian being so similar to English though, I can read it with mid accuracy. I’ve worked in Spanish heavy parts of the US and can roughly converse with Spanish speakers, me speaking English and them speaking Spanish. My Korean is kindergarten level at best lol, I spent more time practicing pronunciation than I did vocab and syntax, so I can sound Korean if I’m reading but most often I don’t know what the hell I’m saying lol.

Korean is my main focus at this time. I tend to be curious about languages so I have studied a few out of curiosity, and also studied some just for practical reasons.