I want to learn a Celtic language

That's great, I still have to refer to google translate for everything, plus the translations sites you linked me to, and dictionaries. I am able to translate some song titles right now though, they may not be exactly right, and I'm literally translating them, but hey it's something.

Also I posted a song on Facebook in German saying how I love the song but don't understand the lyrics, but used Google translate to get a rough understanding of them. And one of my German friends was like "you could have just asked", then Intold her that I'm currently learning German which she thought was impressive and said it's a hard language, just like my other friend said. I sure did pick a hard language, but I fell in love with it through music amd want to learn it, so that's what I'm doing.

For whatever reason it makes me wonder, "hard language" - compared to what? And I mean... how can you tell if you're a native speaker? I mean, to me personally Russian comes without any effort. And Polish seems quite intuitive. Whereas English pronunciation still causes me near constant head scratching, and I officially consider this language mastered.

Just... well, it's when one person says "hard language" - it's an opinion. When it's 10 random people, it sounds more like a meme to me, and I'm instinctively suspicious of memes.

Is there an easy language? And if German is hard, what is Chinese or Japanese?

...Anyway, apparently you've advanced from simple interest to being in love with German, which is certainly progress.

I've just been told it's a hard language by 3 or 4 people already, so maybe it is hard. But the more I work at it the easier it'll get for me, Hell Spanish was hard fkr me and I took two years of it amd was beginning to read and write in it before I forgot it all. And yeah I just fell in love with German quite a while ago, and just decided back in December to officially learn it, so it's some progress to see that I love a language and want to work to learn it. Now it's just doing the best I can to immerse myself in it, so far I'm doing that with music, and I can already translate some song titles without using Google translate. I just changed my signature and didn't need Google translate to know what it meant.

Fun fact, before I forgot my Spanish I was reading something online amd I thought it was in Spanish because I was understanding parts of it, it turned out it was in Portugese, and I didn't realize it at the time.

Also I heard that English can be a hard language to learn, how true that is I don't really know, amd I heard Japanese is the hardest to learn, again I don't know how true that is.

But once I get a good base in German, I do plan on trying Spanish again, In already have a facebook friend offering to help me, but it wouldn't be Mexican Spanish which is most commonly spoken here in the U.S., it'd be Venezuelan Spanish as that's where he's from. But for now I need to focus on German.

The only problem I'm having with the music thing ks some songs are so fast and the vocals are not clear so I can't always hear the words, but it's better than nothing. Also I have over 800 songs that need to be translated, that may pose as a problem. Also German goth/metal (even the bands that sing in English) is better than American goth and metal, in my opinion.

Yeah, Portuguese can be deceptively similar to Spanish... I mean, maybe not "deceptively". I guess maybe because it can mislead an uninitiated reader (and maybe even listener) into thinking that it's the more popular Spanish... On the other hand... are counting? What did I say last I'd learn if I got bored with Welsh? Anyway, add Portuguese to that pile, especially because it should be really easy because of its similarity to Spanish. And I've found it a very nice-sounding language in the past.

...On the other hand, I've been thinking, maybe it would... do something... to devote a day to each language I'm studying. So with the current number they neatly fit into a week, with a rest day. But... it won't be so neat if I keep ramping it up.

I'm surprised, honestly, that you say that you can't understand "some" songs. I mean, I still struggle with spoken German, and I've been studying it intensely for 5 years... Hell, I can't understand some English songs, even if I've seen the lyrics... I don't know if you've come across any German Pearl Jams, but I think that's the double-edged nature of learning with songs - sometimes the singer won't even try to enunciate.

I had a kind of paradoxical thought - I might already know more Welsh than most inhabitants of Wales. I discovered yesterday - via the Welsh Wikipedia, no less - that only 19% of Welsh people speak the Welsh language... Well, I'm far from being able to speak it, but considering how often native speakers of a language struggle with their own grammar, I'm feeling pretty good about my chances.

Yeah, it was just a bit interesting that I was thinking I was reading in Spanish and later realizing it was Portuguese, they have their similarities I guess.

My understanding is bits and pieces, mostly song titles that I'm reading, but no I can't understand a whole somg yet. I'm just using music to get me hearing the language, plus In can look up the lyrics online for translations.

That's interesting, makes me wonder if it isn't a dying language then if so few people speak the language?

There's a video my German friend shared with me yesterday, it's in his hometown, there is English and German spoken (no subtitles), I understood a little bit of the German though which is progress.

Here's the video link if you want to watch it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ydt8PTKcRgo

They have about the same relationship as German and Dutch. And then if you expand the analogy, French is related to them in about the same way as Norwegian to German and Dutch.

Riiiight... I hope your pronunciation is a little bit better by now.

I don't think it is. At least officially. There's criteria for languages, and Welsh isn't doing so bad. There's plenty of American indigenous languages with 100-1000 speakers in total (most of them elderly), and Welsh's 19% actually translates into the absolute number of around 600,000 speakers...

Or there's a much more informative and informed article: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Welsh-language-endangered

I suppose there's something to it.... Well, it's not a complete loss. There's books written in Esperanto and that one is a completely invented language, which, I suspect, the majority of speakers learn as adults, or at least not with mother's milk... And then there's Hebrew, which was extinct for at least 1000 years, and now is getting spoken at home.

...So, it's far from thriving, but I would say, relatively speaking it's nothing to worry about.

Also, I think all of its close relatives - the titular Celtic languages - have less than 100,000 speakers (and that's even being generous). I've read recommendations to learn Irish or Scottish Gaelic instead of Welsh... Well, on the one hand, a noble goal, but on the other - I'd really have no way of practicing those outside of moving to Britain.

Meanwhile, I've actually managed to find some sort of prolific Welsh writers.

...I don't know why this... endangered thing makes me... sort of upset. I mean, it kind of has to do with pronunciation. I kind of feel like a thriving, living language has a charm, an accent that is very hard to transmit by teaching it, and impossible by writing about it... And I'm not sure if Welsh hasn't lost that already. It's pronunciation is at times so close to British English that it makes me suspect that there's very little native character left to it.

Okay, when I said "it's not a complete loss" I meant actually "not a complete loss of time spent studying a dying language by me"... Because I frankly haven't set off with the grand ambition of saving a language. For me language learning is a kind of entertainment. And I see language change and language death as a natural process, so even if Welsh were dying I'd watch from the sidelines and perhaps record the progress...

Well, I started this reply to try to redeem myself as a non-callous human being, and ended by revealing my complete lack of compassion, I guess. I mean, the majority of the Welsh people don't seem to particularly care for the language's continued existence, and who am I to tell them what to do?

Yeah, maybe that is why I was having am okay time with the couple of Dutch lessons I was doing on Duolingo, because of the base in German.

I spoke a little German yesterday, the words in my signature and I had some hard time pronouncing them outloud but I made it through, the problem with pronunciation is I don't have anyone to speak with so it will be hard to actually speak German. But in my head I can pronounce words (well some not all).

Makes more sense now, it was just that the 19% seemed like a small number, so that's why I wondered whether it was a dying language or not.

You're okay, people still learn Latin and that is a dead language, a guy in my therapy group taight himself Latin when he was in highschool, so even if Welsh was/is a dying language it could still be worth it to learn.

Hm... I think, paradoxically, speaking a language doesn't mean pronouncing it well. It might, if you simultaneousy set to imitate native speakers you communicate with, like children do. But you've probably met or in some other way heard immigrants who had spent a decade or more in America and still spoke English with a terrible accent... Well, take Arnold Schwarzenegger, although he's a bit of a special case.

Anyway, I think I've already mentioned that I practice pronunciation by recording myself reading - mostly news articles... I suppose I'm able to get away with that because I've listened to enough of those languages to be able to tell when my pronunciation is wrong. Although I sometimes consult forvo to make sure.

I can't actually be certain of the efficacy of this method, because I haven't had a native speaker check my efforts, but I know that I do make progress, discovering new ways to approach the native sound every time... in other words, finding new mistakes in my pronunciation, which might not sound so encouraging, but I consider that a sign of becoming more nuanced in listening to the language.

Oh, dear. On an impulse I went to Audible, where I picked up a couple history courses around New Year's for free and very cheap... Anyway, I normally don't care for it, because the one time I was subscribed for any considerable amount of time, books either went on too long, too short, or... well, I couldn't find anything I liked.

Well, I've discovered that they suddenly decided to seriously stock up on my favorite subjects - namely, dinosaurs, and the... well, there a book called 'the Celtic World'. And apparently they have a whole bunch of Wolfgang Hohlbein books, in German - which I'm going to wishlist for a very long term, because I'd like to be at least somewhat fluent before I tackle them in audio form.

Anyway, I've got something to look forward to. And I guess Netflix is off the table for quite a while.