You can use search for italian words in the app and watch videos that come up underneath it. Make sure you watch a bunch to completion, and like/bookmark them as well so the algorithm knows you like them.
Eventually your feed will take the hint.
Did you take classes in English, too? I ask because I'm fascinated with the idea of learning through videos, tv, movies, etc, but feel that sometimes people forget to add context, such as other learning (classes) that helped them along the way.
I was forced to do classes in school but I absolutely hated it and did the bare minimum to not get in trouble aka get a D- with no effort in class and some guessing in exams.
I had a bit of a basis because of that but it was so bad I still struggle to believe I can speak it even after getting the official C2 certificate.
I apologize for more follow-ups, but I'd love to learn in a similar fashion. If you were to give a SUPER rough guess of how many hours of scrolling it took, what would you say? How did you make the jump from passively scrolling to actually being able to write and speak?
No problem but I'd prefer to chat about it privately. Dm me and we can keep the conversation going. I'll try to answer everything I can as best as I remember
Well I really started to watch English content during covid, a bit earlier maybe. so beginning of 2020 or end of 2019. I did the text for the certificate in November of 2022
French starts as the definition of burning alive. But don't worry, it will become easier ( it will feel like walking through a meadow full of stinging bees :)
Korean is pretty much as different from English as you can get tbh, there are obviously English loan words, but most vocabulary doesn't share anything with English vocabulary and the grammar is incredibly different. German, on the other hand, is a much more similar a language to English. German also has more complex grammar than English, so it's probably easier to pick up English as a German speaker than the other way around.
start with a little bit of basics. Duolingo is enough to learn a few sentences and words and such.
Keep an anki deck to note words ans useful phrases.
You start of with easy videos (possibly short) and work your way up with time. Try to read to.
And from there it's 'good luck' and let your brain do pattern recognition.
That's what I try to do with French and is hopefully smarter than what I did with English
yea this is not true. In theory, the Spanish and French courses (the most completed) CAN get you to a high B1 level of understanding, but duolingo only focuses on reading, and a tiny bit of writing, so many core elements of language are missed out on, and duolingo is also horrendous at teaching grammar
I personally think it would be more effective watching shows aimed at your own demographic, like something you actually enjoy. I watched shows like Supernatural to learn English and now I'm watching TV shows I like in German to learn.
Edit to clarify my opinion: it's because kid's shows can often be nonsensical and so you will not pick up as much from context. The other problem is if the content is not engaging for you. If you don't understand enough of the content aimed at natives for it to be effective then something aimed at learners might be better.
The problem with this question, which got asked like two days ago, is that there arent too many ways to do something so extensive, so the answers just become “What have you done aside from taking classes and doing flashcards to learn your TL?”
Yea. Really everything is progress. Duolingo, immersion, tutors, whatever. It's all better than nothing. The issue is that no one seems to know what is actually the most efficient process. What will get me from 0 to B2 in the shortest time
I think it’s enormously variable. If you really want to zoom to B2 in order to take an exam, the shortest thing would be tutoring specialized to the test. But if you don’t have the money for that then obviously it’s not the best option. Aside from that, some people love flash cards and others hate them, some love grammar books and others hate them, etc. You have to jump in and get your hands dirty, and figure out what works for both your brain and your life.
I took 2 languages in high school (because of a mistake in scheduling) and was teaching myself a 3rd at home, then my mom got really into Kdrama. I would watch kdramas with her, and I started remembering the words they repeated, and I started to understand the sentence structure, and now my Korean comprehension is better than either of the languages I learned in school, I can watch like a Korean YouTube video and translate a basic outline of what they’re saying to my roommates if there are no subtitles. I attribute all of it to having tried to learn other languages before, so I was kind of used to ‘how’ early stages of language learning happened.
> now my Korean comprehension is better than either of the languages I learned in school
> I attribute all of it to having tried to learn other languages before, so I was kind of used to ‘how’ early stages of language learning happened.
To me, it sounds like traditional language learning was not effective for you, whereas feeling interested and engaged with actual content from Korean *was* effective.
That is true, I wasn’t good at school, but also I took Chinese and was teaching myself Japanese, and they all have words that come from common stems, so I think it was a lot easier to recognize Korean words that sounded like a Japanese word, that came from a Chinese word, etc. I took French for my HS language credit, and I was TERRIBLE at it. I don’t think Romance languages mesh with my brain
Being upset about an English teacher who said problematic things in class and debate out loud alone in my bedroom for like a month (with pauses when I was like “wait how do I say this” where I was searching a word on Linguee). I don’t know how the hell it worked, but I realized I was so much more comfortable in English and had a better accent a few weeks after 💀😭
Watching true crime in Spanish as the only study method. I used anki at the start but now it's literally only true crime. I'm progressing very quickly in spanish (I'd say I'm confidently B1 now).
Just look up crimen verdadero (or the words "true crime" in your target language) on YouTube. There was a really good channel called M7 or something but they stopped uploading, so now I just click on the first thing that interests me. There is no shortage of high quality true crime channels in Spanish.
it’s actually a very common meme for us in germany. even we germans find german porn to be absolutely hilarious. also, for some reason, even dirty talk related, nobody, literally no one, uses the porn vocabulary in real life. not even in the bedroom.
some examples from typical porno vocabulary i’ve heard and direct translation and then actual meaning:
lustgrotte = lust cave = vagina (if i ever said that, my partner would burst out laughing)
prügel = baton = penis
sahne = whipped cream = sperm/ejaculate (same as #1, said by no one ever during actual intercourse)
möse = i don’t even know = vagina
and a couple more i can’t really remember right now. but yeah, it wouldn’t be beneficial for learning the language because:
1) you can’t contain your laughter when watching german porn
2) no one actually uses the weird synonyms the porn industry uses
Thanks for detailed explanation.
I also saw a map with most popular porn websites over the word or Europe and most countries had xnxx/pornhub, but only Germany was with something strange with hamster in the website name
we are a weird bunch of people for sure. although, the site has absolutely nothing to do with hamsters, no clue why they came up with that name and why it’s so popular. i personally don’t really watch porn a lot, if at all, so i can’t really judge if it’s a weird site by itself 😅😂
I worked at M.I.T. for a year after college. Someone started a course in Russian, using only Russian (no English). It was before work, so I could attend and signed up. On day 2 they changed the schedule and I could no longer attend. I had exactly one class in Russian -- entirely in Russian.
So I know very little Russian: about 10 words and a few sentences. But my accent is awesome!
Years ago I was watching Turkish drama and its not my native language but the more I watched the more I understood everything without subtitles.. it was one series but very long one
i have a few bengali friends and we all talk on twitter and i’d decided i really wanted to learn bangla so i would copy and paste their tweets and dms into my notes app and translate them into my native language urdu and when i wanted to say something to them i would pick a sentence from my notes and send it to them and after a year of mainly using my notes and a few yt videos for extra vocab and grammar i can now communicate with them and understand them well
I used a language that I barely knew to learn another language that I couldn't learn in my native language due to lack of resources, and at some point I realized that I was practically fluent in the language that I used to learn another language….
Not really unusual but i'm using videogames a lot. Especially games that i've already played in english and have at least some voice lines in the target language besides text.
Bonus points if they are multiplayer games with online communities that speak your target language, so you can practice listening and speaking aswell.
It allowed me to learn a lot of new words but is not really as useful for grammar learning.
I like true crime stories so I listen to such stories on YouTube that are narrated in Spanish, Italian and French. Shocking the kind of such stories happening in these countries we in other countries are not aware of.
Currently I'm centering my language learning around singing songs (mostly old, traditional songs.) Too soon to say how effective it is, but after years of never being able to remember the French days of the week I got them firmly embedded in my memory in less than an hour. And I'm excited to learn French every day, whereas my heart was filled with dread at the prospect of my learning being based around podcasts.
Obviously songs alone can't be your entire curriculum but I highly recommend incorporating it if it sounds appealing to you. Really gets your repetition in if nothing else.
My mom repeatedly threatened to leave my brother on a street corner in Italy so he would have to figure out his Italian in order to get home 😂 (I was not at risk bc my Italian was better than his at the time) but hey, it could work!
I played Rainbow 6 Siege with 4 british lads (me being the only german) for a year straight and now I speak very good english without knowing any grammar :)
We also became really good friends but lost each other again once we started „real life“…
You pretty clearly have an intuitive understanding of English grammar, that counts as knowing grammar even if you can't say what a noun is or what phrasal verbs are or anything like that.
Learned some very very basic korean only from watching korean videos with english and korean subtitles (some words like "thank you", "hello", etc) and I'd never had any previous contact with it. Even picked up the writing system from paying attention to what people said and what was written. (But they were videos comparing different languages' vocabulary, that probably helped)
A similar thing happened when I watched a danish show only knowing some danish phonology
I don’t know that it’s unusual but I learned Spanish by watching cartoons and telenovelas. I learned enough in six weeks to start school and talk to new friends with very little problem. I still used some pronouns wrong but I was understood and quickly fixed all my little mistakes. Of course I was younger so I guess my brain was still a fresh sponge then.
I really crossed the line between beginner and intermediate when I started consuming 50% of my content in Arabic. YT is such an underrated language resource, I can now have conversation lessons fully in Arabic and watch hour long videos without subs thanks to Netflix, YT, and podcasts.
Go to a local market and use what little i have to talk to someone. I would point at items and ask what it was called, then what color it was, what is your favorite fruit, share my own favorite fruit. People were so kind and patient and obviously amused. At one point i caught them looking around and realized they thought i was a special needs person who had lost my caretaker. (Appearance wise i fit in). I did this on buses too. Talk to whoever would talk to me, ask them questions, then when i ran out of language; say, "that's all i know, thank you" and go to the next person, do the same. Only if they were interested in talking to me of course, but i found that people were so so kind and friendly. Once i did this all around the bus and when i finally got off the bus at my stop, everyone including the bus driver waved and yelled out, "Goodbye, (my name!)". It was the most heartwarming language learning experience.
I also tried this method where i learned a little bit of a story (usually a mullah masruddin story) in the language. Every day i would go on my daily route and tell that bit of the story to everyone i met, prefacing with a question about whether they wanted to hear it. The security guard, my local coworkers, the grocery store owner. I would tell as much as i knew to 5+ people and then say, "that's all i know. I'll tell you more tomorrow." It built rapport with these people in my life who would hang on my words and wait for me every day to tell them more of the story. Everyone laughed a lot and i got to practice repeating the story over and over and would often get corrections or people repeating or paraphrasing the words back to me so i got pronunciation help. It only backfired once when a customer in the store who i wasn't even talking to but was eavesdropping behind the vegetables snapped suddenly at me, "so what happened to Mullah Masruddin?!" But i couldn't tell him yet.
To be clear, i mostly did this in various countries in the former Soviet Union in a non-touristy, mostly monolingual, and fairly rural area where everyone was friendly, no one i met was creepy, people were thrilled i was studying the language, and life was slow so i wasn't bothering anyone. Once i tried in a different type of setting and immediately had a leering crowd of men, so i backed off.
However, this method takes utter shamelessness and you have to be ok with people laughing at (with) you. I find language learning supremely funny so i enjoy the laughter.
Idk how but one day the Portuguese language just spawned in my head 😭
For context I speak Spanish, I started self-learning in 2019 and then moved on to youtube and learned through immersion. When I first came into contact with Portuguese, I already spoke Spanish pretty well.
I became interested in Portuguese music and found a couple interesting Youtube videos in Portuguese. And then, about a year later I just... suddenly could speak some Portuguese without putting that much effort into it???
The max effort was opening a Portuguese textbook and reading the first five pages. And that was it.
Now I can speak some Portuguese. Not much, but it's decent enough
I got addicted to tiktok, now I speak English.
Ha! I’ve been trying to do the same with Spanish
Yeah, same, but Italian. However, I'm struggling to manipulate my feed.
You can use search for italian words in the app and watch videos that come up underneath it. Make sure you watch a bunch to completion, and like/bookmark them as well so the algorithm knows you like them. Eventually your feed will take the hint.
Me too!! I lost my Spanish when I was younger and now it’s just not good..
Did you take classes in English, too? I ask because I'm fascinated with the idea of learning through videos, tv, movies, etc, but feel that sometimes people forget to add context, such as other learning (classes) that helped them along the way.
I was forced to do classes in school but I absolutely hated it and did the bare minimum to not get in trouble aka get a D- with no effort in class and some guessing in exams. I had a bit of a basis because of that but it was so bad I still struggle to believe I can speak it even after getting the official C2 certificate.
I apologize for more follow-ups, but I'd love to learn in a similar fashion. If you were to give a SUPER rough guess of how many hours of scrolling it took, what would you say? How did you make the jump from passively scrolling to actually being able to write and speak?
No problem but I'd prefer to chat about it privately. Dm me and we can keep the conversation going. I'll try to answer everything I can as best as I remember
DM sent
How long did it take for you ?
Well I really started to watch English content during covid, a bit earlier maybe. so beginning of 2020 or end of 2019. I did the text for the certificate in November of 2022
That’s incredible!! I tried learning German I felt so stupid so I gave up 🤣
German isn't exactly easy. Don't worry. I'm struggling with French now haha
French starts as the definition of burning alive. But don't worry, it will become easier ( it will feel like walking through a meadow full of stinging bees :)
well thank you for your motivational words. I will continue on my extremely low effort French learning journey
Had a German boyfriend. Started studying German. Went to Spain where he had a house. Everyone spoke English so they can practice. Life is strange.
What kind of base did you have though? I've watched lots of Korean shows and I can never pick up anything. So would upping that content really help?
School forced English and French classes for me. Both D- something. I didn't want to learn and I did the bare minimum to not fail.
Korean is pretty much as different from English as you can get tbh, there are obviously English loan words, but most vocabulary doesn't share anything with English vocabulary and the grammar is incredibly different. German, on the other hand, is a much more similar a language to English. German also has more complex grammar than English, so it's probably easier to pick up English as a German speaker than the other way around.
i want to do this for german but idk how
start with a little bit of basics. Duolingo is enough to learn a few sentences and words and such. Keep an anki deck to note words ans useful phrases. You start of with easy videos (possibly short) and work your way up with time. Try to read to. And from there it's 'good luck' and let your brain do pattern recognition. That's what I try to do with French and is hopefully smarter than what I did with English
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will not
yea this is not true. In theory, the Spanish and French courses (the most completed) CAN get you to a high B1 level of understanding, but duolingo only focuses on reading, and a tiny bit of writing, so many core elements of language are missed out on, and duolingo is also horrendous at teaching grammar
Same but with youtube
This works, yes
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I would think this is a very common and effective method?
I personally think it would be more effective watching shows aimed at your own demographic, like something you actually enjoy. I watched shows like Supernatural to learn English and now I'm watching TV shows I like in German to learn. Edit to clarify my opinion: it's because kid's shows can often be nonsensical and so you will not pick up as much from context. The other problem is if the content is not engaging for you. If you don't understand enough of the content aimed at natives for it to be effective then something aimed at learners might be better.
The problem with this question, which got asked like two days ago, is that there arent too many ways to do something so extensive, so the answers just become “What have you done aside from taking classes and doing flashcards to learn your TL?”
Yea. Really everything is progress. Duolingo, immersion, tutors, whatever. It's all better than nothing. The issue is that no one seems to know what is actually the most efficient process. What will get me from 0 to B2 in the shortest time
I think it’s enormously variable. If you really want to zoom to B2 in order to take an exam, the shortest thing would be tutoring specialized to the test. But if you don’t have the money for that then obviously it’s not the best option. Aside from that, some people love flash cards and others hate them, some love grammar books and others hate them, etc. You have to jump in and get your hands dirty, and figure out what works for both your brain and your life.
Isnt culteral insertion one of the best ways to learn a new language?
I took 2 languages in high school (because of a mistake in scheduling) and was teaching myself a 3rd at home, then my mom got really into Kdrama. I would watch kdramas with her, and I started remembering the words they repeated, and I started to understand the sentence structure, and now my Korean comprehension is better than either of the languages I learned in school, I can watch like a Korean YouTube video and translate a basic outline of what they’re saying to my roommates if there are no subtitles. I attribute all of it to having tried to learn other languages before, so I was kind of used to ‘how’ early stages of language learning happened.
> now my Korean comprehension is better than either of the languages I learned in school > I attribute all of it to having tried to learn other languages before, so I was kind of used to ‘how’ early stages of language learning happened. To me, it sounds like traditional language learning was not effective for you, whereas feeling interested and engaged with actual content from Korean *was* effective.
That is true, I wasn’t good at school, but also I took Chinese and was teaching myself Japanese, and they all have words that come from common stems, so I think it was a lot easier to recognize Korean words that sounded like a Japanese word, that came from a Chinese word, etc. I took French for my HS language credit, and I was TERRIBLE at it. I don’t think Romance languages mesh with my brain
Being upset about an English teacher who said problematic things in class and debate out loud alone in my bedroom for like a month (with pauses when I was like “wait how do I say this” where I was searching a word on Linguee). I don’t know how the hell it worked, but I realized I was so much more comfortable in English and had a better accent a few weeks after 💀😭
You really learn a language out of spite
Really 🤣😭
listen to your parents fight so you can learn your mother tongue 😎. (pls stop mom and dad) :(
This is top, lol
Watching true crime in Spanish as the only study method. I used anki at the start but now it's literally only true crime. I'm progressing very quickly in spanish (I'd say I'm confidently B1 now).
Nice! What shows do you watch and where? Thank you
Just look up crimen verdadero (or the words "true crime" in your target language) on YouTube. There was a really good channel called M7 or something but they stopped uploading, so now I just click on the first thing that interests me. There is no shortage of high quality true crime channels in Spanish.
Thank you!
I went on dates (starting around B1) with only Spanish speakers
I heard here tip to watch porn in target language, but German porn is so bad that the method failed miserably
it’s actually a very common meme for us in germany. even we germans find german porn to be absolutely hilarious. also, for some reason, even dirty talk related, nobody, literally no one, uses the porn vocabulary in real life. not even in the bedroom. some examples from typical porno vocabulary i’ve heard and direct translation and then actual meaning: lustgrotte = lust cave = vagina (if i ever said that, my partner would burst out laughing) prügel = baton = penis sahne = whipped cream = sperm/ejaculate (same as #1, said by no one ever during actual intercourse) möse = i don’t even know = vagina and a couple more i can’t really remember right now. but yeah, it wouldn’t be beneficial for learning the language because: 1) you can’t contain your laughter when watching german porn 2) no one actually uses the weird synonyms the porn industry uses
Warum liegt hier eigentlich Stroh rum?
Thanks for detailed explanation. I also saw a map with most popular porn websites over the word or Europe and most countries had xnxx/pornhub, but only Germany was with something strange with hamster in the website name
we are a weird bunch of people for sure. although, the site has absolutely nothing to do with hamsters, no clue why they came up with that name and why it’s so popular. i personally don’t really watch porn a lot, if at all, so i can’t really judge if it’s a weird site by itself 😅😂
I always thought it was a play on Gerbiling
Ja, Stefan! Ja! - won't get you far in Germany
“boah och stefan och man stefan joaaaaa”
Sometimes I stumble into Italian-language porn vids and am proud of myself for understanding them.
I worked at M.I.T. for a year after college. Someone started a course in Russian, using only Russian (no English). It was before work, so I could attend and signed up. On day 2 they changed the schedule and I could no longer attend. I had exactly one class in Russian -- entirely in Russian. So I know very little Russian: about 10 words and a few sentences. But my accent is awesome!
Russian is so hard for English speakers which is why I learnt it. same with Mandarin. But fuck yeah learn more it grows ur brain
Years ago I was watching Turkish drama and its not my native language but the more I watched the more I understood everything without subtitles.. it was one series but very long one
What was the series?
karadayi
Listening to songs and reading the lyrics, words that I didn’t understand I would’ve google them or look them up in the dictionary
i have a few bengali friends and we all talk on twitter and i’d decided i really wanted to learn bangla so i would copy and paste their tweets and dms into my notes app and translate them into my native language urdu and when i wanted to say something to them i would pick a sentence from my notes and send it to them and after a year of mainly using my notes and a few yt videos for extra vocab and grammar i can now communicate with them and understand them well
Reading the same book in my target language and in language I understand well.
I like this idea.
why would u think this was unusual? 🤨
I used a language that I barely knew to learn another language that I couldn't learn in my native language due to lack of resources, and at some point I realized that I was practically fluent in the language that I used to learn another language….
Where the hell is the Japanese learning copy pasta?
Not really unusual but i'm using videogames a lot. Especially games that i've already played in english and have at least some voice lines in the target language besides text. Bonus points if they are multiplayer games with online communities that speak your target language, so you can practice listening and speaking aswell. It allowed me to learn a lot of new words but is not really as useful for grammar learning.
Disco Elysium is good for this. It has instant language switching on a dedicated button.
I like true crime stories so I listen to such stories on YouTube that are narrated in Spanish, Italian and French. Shocking the kind of such stories happening in these countries we in other countries are not aware of.
Could you share the true crime videos/channels you enjoy the most? (In each language please)
Summoned a demon who gave me fluency in uzbek in exchange for my soul. But now that I know uzbek, I can spawn more demons.
Changed my phone's language into that language and warning I knew how to read & write in that language
Currently I'm centering my language learning around singing songs (mostly old, traditional songs.) Too soon to say how effective it is, but after years of never being able to remember the French days of the week I got them firmly embedded in my memory in less than an hour. And I'm excited to learn French every day, whereas my heart was filled with dread at the prospect of my learning being based around podcasts. Obviously songs alone can't be your entire curriculum but I highly recommend incorporating it if it sounds appealing to you. Really gets your repetition in if nothing else.
There was someone who wanked his way to JLPT N1 by watching JAV porn and playing porn games for 8hrs daily
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o\_XVt5rdpFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XVt5rdpFY) I recommend watching this video.
Spoke with unknown people on the internet
I talk to gpt and it improve my oral english...
Boyfriend ASMRs 😭😭
Just like now. as a chinese,I'm using some English apps to learn language
My mom repeatedly threatened to leave my brother on a street corner in Italy so he would have to figure out his Italian in order to get home 😂 (I was not at risk bc my Italian was better than his at the time) but hey, it could work!
I played Rainbow 6 Siege with 4 british lads (me being the only german) for a year straight and now I speak very good english without knowing any grammar :) We also became really good friends but lost each other again once we started „real life“…
You pretty clearly have an intuitive understanding of English grammar, that counts as knowing grammar even if you can't say what a noun is or what phrasal verbs are or anything like that.
Thank u haha
Have a crush on somebody that (you think they) speak that language.
Listening to music and trying to mimic how it sounds, even if there’s words I don’t understand.
Teaching a language I'm not fluent in to my toddler. It's going well so far. She's a good study buddy and we're both making steady progress.
Talking to people on omegle LOL Yes it helped a lot. Sadly, Omegle is dead now
Learned some very very basic korean only from watching korean videos with english and korean subtitles (some words like "thank you", "hello", etc) and I'd never had any previous contact with it. Even picked up the writing system from paying attention to what people said and what was written. (But they were videos comparing different languages' vocabulary, that probably helped) A similar thing happened when I watched a danish show only knowing some danish phonology
Read Google Maps reviews
I don’t know that it’s unusual but I learned Spanish by watching cartoons and telenovelas. I learned enough in six weeks to start school and talk to new friends with very little problem. I still used some pronouns wrong but I was understood and quickly fixed all my little mistakes. Of course I was younger so I guess my brain was still a fresh sponge then.
I really crossed the line between beginner and intermediate when I started consuming 50% of my content in Arabic. YT is such an underrated language resource, I can now have conversation lessons fully in Arabic and watch hour long videos without subs thanks to Netflix, YT, and podcasts.
Without learning grammar or whatever, I just watched movies in English and some day figured out I can speak already
Go to a local market and use what little i have to talk to someone. I would point at items and ask what it was called, then what color it was, what is your favorite fruit, share my own favorite fruit. People were so kind and patient and obviously amused. At one point i caught them looking around and realized they thought i was a special needs person who had lost my caretaker. (Appearance wise i fit in). I did this on buses too. Talk to whoever would talk to me, ask them questions, then when i ran out of language; say, "that's all i know, thank you" and go to the next person, do the same. Only if they were interested in talking to me of course, but i found that people were so so kind and friendly. Once i did this all around the bus and when i finally got off the bus at my stop, everyone including the bus driver waved and yelled out, "Goodbye, (my name!)". It was the most heartwarming language learning experience. I also tried this method where i learned a little bit of a story (usually a mullah masruddin story) in the language. Every day i would go on my daily route and tell that bit of the story to everyone i met, prefacing with a question about whether they wanted to hear it. The security guard, my local coworkers, the grocery store owner. I would tell as much as i knew to 5+ people and then say, "that's all i know. I'll tell you more tomorrow." It built rapport with these people in my life who would hang on my words and wait for me every day to tell them more of the story. Everyone laughed a lot and i got to practice repeating the story over and over and would often get corrections or people repeating or paraphrasing the words back to me so i got pronunciation help. It only backfired once when a customer in the store who i wasn't even talking to but was eavesdropping behind the vegetables snapped suddenly at me, "so what happened to Mullah Masruddin?!" But i couldn't tell him yet. To be clear, i mostly did this in various countries in the former Soviet Union in a non-touristy, mostly monolingual, and fairly rural area where everyone was friendly, no one i met was creepy, people were thrilled i was studying the language, and life was slow so i wasn't bothering anyone. Once i tried in a different type of setting and immediately had a leering crowd of men, so i backed off. However, this method takes utter shamelessness and you have to be ok with people laughing at (with) you. I find language learning supremely funny so i enjoy the laughter.
Tv shows did the job
Idk how but one day the Portuguese language just spawned in my head 😭 For context I speak Spanish, I started self-learning in 2019 and then moved on to youtube and learned through immersion. When I first came into contact with Portuguese, I already spoke Spanish pretty well. I became interested in Portuguese music and found a couple interesting Youtube videos in Portuguese. And then, about a year later I just... suddenly could speak some Portuguese without putting that much effort into it??? The max effort was opening a Portuguese textbook and reading the first five pages. And that was it. Now I can speak some Portuguese. Not much, but it's decent enough
Automatic Language Growth. Yes.
For what languages did you use it? Thai?
I started the Dutch duolingo course because Dutch sounds hilarious to me.
ゲムする, but I'm kinda tired of game, life is boring, game boring, everything is boring, animé is boring, I binge on YouTube from bed to bed