Ive been feeling incredibly stuck recently. I've kinda fallen into the trap of learning vocabulary just to learn vocabulary and despite knowing what feels like a lot of words, I can't actually understand whenever anyone says anything to me.
I cant stop trying to translate the stuff in my head and by the time I'm done with one sentence the next sentence is already over and I missed it.
Started reading some level 2 (Japanese) Tadoku (paperback) books this week. I had received some level 3s last year, but finally saw the 2s on sale a couple months ago. Breath of fresh air going down to stories at my level.
Feeling more improvement understanding podcasts. My attention is kinda shot for videos though. Feels like I get bored too fast with learner videos, but don't get much out of anime or native content yet.
Work hosted a brief primer to American Sign Language this week. I didn't retain much of the little bit they shared, but fun thing to get a taste of.
Only doing 30 mins of Japanese these days and 30 mins of Spanish. Using Lingq now for Spanish instead of Migaku. Migaku felt very lobsided in how you recall words, but Lingq does a lot more testing you for each word which I find more beneficial. Also relying more on Busuu for Spanish as well. Also hoping Lingq's Irish improves so when I'm ready for that I can just pick that up.
Still not much immersion either. This last week has just been very lazy for me compared to the prior week. Feeling somewhat burnt out but still want to stay committed and do the full mandatory workloads.
My maths is fine, and in someways I'm enjoying that a lot more than my language lessons. Things are finally clicking with me in regards to committing time to maths and I don't even need to Pavlov train myself into doing the maths with fizzy drinks anymore.
Languages I get stuck for hours doing and working myself up for, but maths I just do it once and it's done and over with and it's actually less mentally strenuous than flashcards.
Yeah, things are okay.
I'd love to say it's been great, but I spent all week sick. Not much got done, including much language work.
I did manage to get through some more basic daily interactions at the checkout and in stores. I'm still getting more comfortable with speaking simple sentences/structures. Vocabulary and conjugation continue to be tough to recall on the fly.
The reading didn't happen much, but I'm a bit further through Mord Unter Den Linden (A2), a German learning book with murder mystery/crime stories.
I did also manage to read most of a letter I got back from the Berlin Senate about transit issues. I wrote them about some questions regarding local transit upgrades. They wrote back and I picked up 80% of it without any translation help.
My general speed for reading signage is getting better. I can tell many daily words are starting to become closer to full speed reading. That feels great.
hey @seespeak@on200.com welcome aboard! is this a bot account?
Fair question, and a straight answer: the post and most of the code were written by an AI agent (Claude), working for one person whose idea it is; they had built an earlier phone app that drew your voice over a native speaker's.
What isn't generated: every voice is a real person's recording from Tatoeba or Lingua Libre, credited with its licence where it plays, and the pitch lines and the overlap number are computed from the two sounds. If you try it and it breaks or misleads, I'd like to hear where.
Brand new account showing a new project. Of course you need to say up front, how much human involvement went into making this? Was this post made by a human?
Idea's not bad though.
I've begun to watch Ghosts (Germany edition) again. Just 6 episodes but German audio + German subtitles takes a lot of focus.
I'm slowly getting back into my textbook studies and trying to make progress there. But my overall German abilities have improved to the point where I can attempt to understand videos and other native material.
Attempt. Yes. I'm not fully understanding but it's not all noise anymore.
I've been doing pretty bad with language learning for a bit, tbh. Just falling out of some good habits, building up review card backlogs, etc. Drifting into other hobbies. That's ok, the interest phases come and go, but I really gotta get my discipline back in order. I think too that trying to spread focus and pick up bits of other languages has really made it hard to feel like I'm making progress in any of them.
That does sound like good reinforcement, good idea!
I still remember trying to read Japanese Pokemon cards when I was a kid. I didn't know how to pronounce it, but I eventually noticed whenever an attack started with コイン it meant you had to flip a coin, lol.
Additionally--I just discovered Magic: the Gathering rules text in Japanese. I've been playing the game on and off since 1995, so I'm very familiar with the rules, but seeing it in a different language has been incredible for reinforcing my grammar discrimination ability.
For anyone unfamiliar, Magic is extremely precise with its rules language, almost like legal documents. When you've got thousands and thousands of cards and they all have to interact together in an agreed upon way, all sorts of edge cases and specificity of basics have to be covered. Because I know almost all the details of the rules in English, it's been a little like reading a book I know well or seeing a movie dubbed in Japanese, just with more specific language.
It's probably 3 years since I started learning Latin, but it's usually days of intense activity followed by weeks or months of literally nothing. I don't intend on giving up though, it takes a long time to forget what one learns.
In my previous two sessions, the start of which was in summer, I began to do structured composition exercises other than passively reading the LLPSI and the other related books. Hence I was able to get a feel for how a sentence could be structured, at least in Indicative.
In my current session I learned
Back when I learned English in elementary, we had an activity where we would underline phrases of connected words. I applied it to my Latin composition exercises, and it seems to have helped because back then Latin sentences seemed amorphous to me.
I saw a comment that said grammar lessons should happen after exposure, not before. It should give a lightbulb moment. I agree. Analysing with our limited short term memory what conjugation family a given verb is in, is less efficient than having already known it through a sort of muscle memory.
My next steps would probably be reading my compositions out loud into an audio journal and reviewing it. I think my Latin pronounciation is decent aside from some r-rolling difficulties. Then I will learn Subjunctive and the other moods.
Well, in the case of Gilgamesh, it was translated, just into Latin instead of English.
I started getting into alchemy a bit. Seems a bit esoteric. I find it intersesting that the social collapse of the 2nd century is finding so much spiritual resonance with the collapse of Enlightenment society in the 21st.
Just keep writing in Latin. It'll get better and you'll learn more. It's also not a language you have any grammatical connection to (?), so it'll take time to gain fluency.
Oh yeah, back then anything considered controversial wouldn't be translated. I believe there was one letter(?) so indecent it hadn't been for a long time.
I haven't tried reading a full occult work in Latin yet (it seems daunting). The works on Hermeticism and I guess Neoplatonism is what I find interesting.
I would try journalling in Latin based on what I learned from the drills I would impose upon myself. But it's mostly in Indicative......
(Edit 2026-10-30 So that letter I had called indecent and had not been translated for a long time was actually a poem, Catullus 16)
A friend of mine (who is fluent in 5 languages) told me that he knew he became fluent when he could understand humor in a new language. He did not meant just a few jokes, but rather e.g. understand a whole stand up comedy performance. Of course this idea has a lot of problems, but I’d say it’s a decent rule of thumb :)
Ah, yes, my apologies. I think I kind of was more interested in the Tagalog and the other one.
If you read old copies of translations, sometimes the sex parts are written in Latin to frustrate (or motivate?) children. Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic example.
I think Mark Twain rebeled against latin in all its forms as much as he could--kept advocating for AngloSaxon-based vocabulary like saddle-wheel instead of bicycle.
What works of Western Mysticism do you like to read in Latin?
Are you journaling in Latin at all these days?
I hope to be able to write about my life and thoughts in Latin on my journal as well as I could in English.
The idea of writing in Latin is the primary appeal to me. I like the case and tense system over using particles. Though I first got into Latin because of its prominence in Catholicism and Western Occultism, then the fact that it was a language the educated people learned back in the day. In fact, learning Latin made me understand Why Old Books Were Written That Way™, the style is so similar to how one may construct something in Latin.
I considered myself a Spanish speaker after having conversations with people that don't speak English (in my case, while travelling). Am I good or fluent? No, but I could get by ok. Before that, people would ask me if I spoke it and I'd just answer, "Idk, I know a little".
Another milestone was making it through a paperback novel, without doing constant lookups. Sure I didn't understand fully, but I got the gist. Then again, I can still watch tv in the language and barely understand what's going on, so I have a long way yet to go.
I heard a language teacher on Youtube once explain that he moved to Japan, interviewed for a job in Japanese (and got it), but still couldn't understand it when overhearing other people have a conversation. Maybe that's a standard, when you can effortlessly eavesdrop on native speakers who aren't trying to dumb it down for you, lol.
You're asking us for our goals, yet you never mention yours... maybe that would be helpful to think about.
I was in Spain, talking to a bartender, and he ended up buying me a beer. I know i was still making mistakes, i had to ask him to repeat himself a time or two, but it was the first time I’d had a full on conversation in Spanish with person that didn’t speak even a little English, and neither of us came out frustrated or impatient or confused. I know I’m not fluent, but it gave me the confidence to say I’m conversational.
When I'm consistently secure and happy. Everything else is just general merchandise.
Oh, I heard that situation is common for those learning japanese that they call it being "jouzu'd".
For me it was when people stopped praising me for how well I speak the language. As long as people do that, they see you as a non-native speaker. Once they stop, you're just another guy.
Nobody can know 100% of any language, but I would say that you've made it when you no longer have to learn from books (or whatever), but can infer what most things mean from context, written or spoken.