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Cunning Linguists


darrenm

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Me mammy used to speak irish to me and i understood what she was saying (usually it was a bollocking or a "givin' out" ) but read, write or speak it myself ? Not a hope. 

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On 27/11/2020 at 15:20, darrenm said:

I honestly think Norwegian is the easiest for an English speaker to learn because it's basically English spoken like Yoda with a Norwegian accent.

Seconded, I had to go to Norway a lot for work in the 90's, took me about a year to learn with a class every week. Once I had Norwegian down the jump to learning German was also rather easy. What's great about it is that with Norwegian down it's fairly easy to understand Danish at least in its written form. Danish in its spoken form sounds like someone trying to eat a baked potato while regurgitating the italian national anthem..

Edit: I learned a lot by watching Norwegian stuff on TV in hotels. With the ease of streaming nowadays you'll easily be able to watch some great Scandi Noir and learning the language at the same time..

Edited by magnkarl
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  • 3 months later...

343 day streak on Duolingo for Norsk. I really didn't expect to enjoy learning the language this much. I still look forward to doing daily lessons.

I still can't keep up with spoken Norwegian on TV but I can construct basic sentences. Today I found myself saying "hvor går vi nå" without thinking.

 

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9 hours ago, darrenm said:

Today I found myself saying "hvor går vi nå" without thinking

That’s (I think) a massive positive moment. For me at least it was ( a long time ago), because when that almost out of the blue “I said it without thinking” happens, the conscious side of the brain kind of relaxes and stops getting in the way with its conversion process “I want say how are we doing now? what’s the (in my case) German for that” and the sub conscious side of the brain just lets the words out directly.  And when you realise that’s happened, mentally you then, without trying, favour that new mechanism and it speeds up the learning and proficiency and fluency.

it doesn’t last forever though. If you don’t use it, you lose it, or lose most of it, or at least I have.

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On 20/03/2021 at 23:53, darrenm said:

343 day streak on Duolingo for Norsk. I really didn't expect to enjoy learning the language this much. I still look forward to doing daily lessons.

I still can't keep up with spoken Norwegian on TV but I can construct basic sentences. Today I found myself saying "hvor går vi nå" without thinking.

 

I usually curse in Swedish than English now that people think its natural now. Happens a lot while watching Villa 😂

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  • 3 weeks later...

My Polish humming along nicely, very comfortable in conversations, understand most of what's said on TV/radio; I just panic on the phone and sometimes when a stranger asks me a question I don't understand.

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On 19/04/2021 at 15:57, StefanAVFC said:

My Polish humming along nicely, very comfortable in conversations, understand most of what's said on TV/radio; I just panic on the phone and sometimes when a stranger asks me a question I don't understand.

How did you do that if you mind me asking? I think it's difficult as nothing else, and I'm fairly good with languages.

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  • 1 month later...

I think I have a fairly good ear for languages, and can pick up tonality and decipher a foreign language quite easily (in written form) by quickly identifying cognate root forms and contextualising words and phrases. 

However, the step from there to becoming a functional user of a language is so freaking big, and I’m really only fluent in my own native language (or language group, given the similarity of the Scandi languages) and English. I can read French and German with a little bit of effort, and could probably get by fine in Paris or Berlin without using English very much, on a combination of a basic understanding and body language doing some heavy lifting. Spanish and Italian less so, but a little. I also have a very basic understanding of Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian through the in-laws. 

I know a lot of language but I don’t think I’ll ever be fluent in more than the two languages I use on a daily basis. I just can’t make the effort. 

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