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Anyone else learning any languages at the moment? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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If yes, how's it going? What do you like about it? What don't you like? What challenges are you encountering? How are you approaching it?

I ask because my partner and i both decided last year we would start doing a little language learning in our spare time, and it's been quite nice to have that "back to school" feeling again after so many years.

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[–] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

Spanish. However, I'm bad at focusing at one language at the time so sometimes I flip-flop between Spanish and French. They are both Romance languages, so I can understand a lot (Spanish even more so since it's very similar to Portuguese (my native language)).

I have a little strategy for reading theory books. I keep two translations of a text in different tabs. Whenever I start to get bored of reading, I switch to the Spanish translation. When I start to get bored again, I then switch to English. Perks of being bilingual lol.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

    Nice. I don't know much Spanish beyond what you pick up just by speaking other Romance languages, but i did take a few years of French. I forgot a lot of it, but if someone speaks slowly i can understand enough to get by. Once in a while i will put on a movie in French (with French subtitles) just to not get completely rusty.

    If you speak a Romance language natively it does make it fairly easy to learn others, though i have to say out of all of them Portuguese is the one i understand the least, especially when spoken. Like, i can half understand Italian even though i never learned it, and i can understand bits of Spanish, but Portuguese just really confuses my brain.

    Compared to Spanish, it reminds me of how i feel when i hear Dutch while knowing German: I feel like it should be somewhat intelligible – and it is pretty intelligible when written, i can usually get a lot of it – but when it's spoken for some reason it stops making sense and i check out completely.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago* (3 children)

    Maybe it's the vowels. Portuguese has a lot of vowels and we mumble a lot. Spanish is painfully clear for me lol.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Maybe. I find the Brazilian dialect is slightly easier to make out. Portuguese Portuguese has a confusing sound to it that at first makes me think i'm hearing a Slavic language. I wonder if that's how other Romance language speakers feel about Romanian.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    I saw a video of some Romanians speaking. I think it sounds a bit like a mix of Italian and a Slavic language. Not to the same extent as European Portuguese imo. If I'm not paying attention, a Russian speaker sounds like a Portuguese speaker. I don't know why.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

    I saw a video of some Romanians speaking. I think it sounds a bit like a mix of Italian and a Slavic language.

    That's a pretty accurate description. Italian is definitely the closest relative and this shows itself in some mutual intelligibility (though this is often one-way as Italians have a harder time understanding Romanian than vice versa – i've heard it compared to Spanish vs Portuguese speakers), but there are borrowed elements both in vocabulary and grammar from Slavic languages.

    If i'm being objective i have to admit Romanian is probably the hardest of the Romance languages. I'm seeing now just how many difficulties a learner can encounter as my partner has been trying to learn it for the past year.

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