Languages and the Adventures in learning them
 

AKA: One time I said, in Spanish, on Duolingo: I eat milk.

What are your stories in learning a language?

I took three years of Japanese in college, but I started listening to Japanese music before I got good at the language.

I also played a lot of Dance Dance Revolution in college. One of my favorite songs was "true..." by Riyu Kosaka. Its lyrics are, of course, in Japanese. It has enjoyable steps, not too hard but not boring either, and the music is good.

ã*れのために笑é¡� ��でいるの？ (dare no tame ni egao de iru no?)
ã*れのために生ã� �てゆくの？ (dare no tame ni ikiteyuku no?)
教えてほしい、 あなたの他にい゠‹ã‚“ã*と (oshiete hoshii, anata no hoka ni iru nda to)
私にできること〠 それはあなた忘ã‚� �ること (watashi ni dekiru koto, sore wa anata wasureru koto)
きっとしなきゃ� �けない？ 本当にできる？ (kitto shinakya ikenai? hontou ni dekiru?)

Pretty lyrics. I picked them out well enough by ear to sing along with the song.

But then I was playing it one day and out of nowhere the lyrics suddenly made sense:


And I just about failed the song because I couldn't see through the tears.

(I did manage to clear it still, because it IS one of my favorite songs, so muscle memory was able to drag me through it with enough accuracy to not fail. Barely.)

EDIT: If you look up the lyrics for the song, this translation isn't going to match exactly, because this is my translation. The transcription is also different because I'm transcribing it the way I write Japanese instead of copy-pasting from the CD liner notes. And RemyWiki mistakenly included the lyrics for the wrong verse of the song.

It's been years since I learned a language D:
I feel like my brain died and the languages I learned are like, rotting

<x} I tried learning Italian on Duolingo back when it was just an app on Google Chrome.

I just remember it being very similar to Spanish, but nouns were slightly different or differently pronounced. <x} Same with verbs. So I took Spanish in jr. high and high school, but only a little has stuck. So, speaking in Italian was like speaking Spanish but instead of sounding like you run a Carniceria, you sound like Luigi speaking in his native tongue and being excited about absolutely anything. <X'D

I tried Duolingo once, but after learning only the same 5 words in the first 10-ish lessons, I got bored and quit.

Some of my fave things to say in Spanish (and a few of the only things I remember) are hambre por mi hombre (probably not grammatically correct and...cannibalism?), luchador de lechuga, casa de queso, and tu casa es mi baño.
Teehee.

Learning languages is one of my natural talent, I'm actually a polyglot. I learn languages from listening to people. I am also able to pick up words in many languages and they just stay in my head. Everyone in my family speaks more than 3 languages, so I guess it's also a genetic ability? I personally know 7 languages, and a little bit of about 13 other languages.

Edit* Ohhh, talking about remembering stuff...to save my life, I cannot remember names!! I can't remember people names, movie names, music names, none of that. I always have trouble with that my entire life.

I made mom fail her final project because we focused on mine
For ASL, I was not an official student, mom just took me to her classes
I think the professor gave her my grade LOL

And then many years later I annoyed the superintendent of the school I went to by going "I don't want French or Spanish I want to retake ASL" and mom and dad got their ducks in order with a you didn't hear it from me but here's how you do it" from the principal so I got to take ASL as my foreign language in high school despite the school itself not offering it

I do want to learn Japanese and Italian but I need to brush up on my ASL first: I live between two of the largest Deaf communities in the country and they like to visit the theme park I work at

god, i really should learn BSL. it'd come in handy in a situation where i can't talk, but it also requires other people to know it and my family might not be able to get to it tbh.

i've moved onto the travel course in duolingo, and the leaderboard is sort of my motivation for doing it, for whatever reason. thing is, i don't think binge-learning is going to be the best idea because, knowing my memory, i'm probably going to end up forgetting things.

edit: i've also been meaning to learn japanese because a lot of ukagaka developers speak / write it, so it'd be nice to translate things.

My wife was working on Japanese in Duolingo, but the problem with the streak system is that once you've built up a 200 streak or so it's just not worth continuing if you break it because you got sick.

Not like the streak DOES anything, but it's just soul-crushing anyway.

admittedly, yeah. there's also the leaderboards.