I want to learn a Celtic language

I was just going through with my vision which alphabets would be harder for me, I could probably learn the Greek alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet if I really tried. And yeah Arabic and Chinese/Japanese would be virtually impossible for me to learn.

Right now for me I have a lot of time on my hands as I don't work at the moment, so I needed a hobby and I decided to take up a language, it's just a money issue now when it comes to buying books, and finding books for absolute beginners, ones that say "for beginners" may not be for the absolute beginner. There is an app I found that reads articles to you in German, it is for a more advanced learner but if you click on the words/sentences/paragraphs it shows the English translations. It would be a good way besides music to get one to hear what words sound like especially as you're reading them. Some of the German bands I like will put videos they make on YouTube with English subtitles, but I haven't really watched them, well one band I do. From hearing the words in German when I listen to music or on Duolingo, I'm getting better at pronouncing words that I see that I don't know. I also found a photo on Google image of how the letters in the alphabet are pronounced in German so that helps a little, my confusion is the letter "S" can be pronounced 2 different ways sometimes with a "z" sound and sometimes with a more "sh" sound so that's confusing on word pronunciation especially when some "s" and "z" words sound similar and "w" and "v" are virtually the same sound, like why? So that makes hearing words even more confusing, though I'll learn how to distinguish words that start with a "w" and "v" from each other and some words that start with an "s" from words that start with a "z". It'll take time to learn.

Thanks for the YouTube video suggestion, I'll check it out.

...Okay, I tried to write up a simple explanation, and failed miserably. It depends on how comfortable you are with terms like "vowel", "consonant", "syllable", etc (not to insult your intelligence but they aren't really household words). And it's complicated by the distinction between simple and compound words. The only thing easy is that "w" is always pronounced "v" - Wagen, Wasser. And "v" in the beginning of simple words is "f" - Vogel, Verlag, - and "v" everywhere else (although I struggle to come up with examples for that; can only suggest "Adjektiven", a plural form, which in the singular would end with the "f" sound). Although, again, you have to look if it's a simple or compound (more often than not) word... or actually a recent borrowing, in which case all bets are off.

And compound words can come in an obvious form like Fernsehen, or innocuous like Beispiel.

Okay, makes more sense on the "W" versus "V" sounds now, but now "F" and "V" will sound the same to me unless it is a hard versus soft sounds thing. Now another thing I am noticing is some words sounding the same but are two different words example "sie" and "sehe" both sound the same but are two different words or "liebe" and "lebe" . The second example is because of a song I like called "Lebe deinen Traum" and I always get confused because until looking at the title I thought it was "Liebe deine Traum" , and couldn't figure out why it kept translating to "Live your Dream" and not "Love your Dream", yeah I don't think (and I could be wrong) that there are many words like that where they sound the same but are two different words with two different meanings. I know English can get confusing with words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently and have different meanings. Then we do have words like "there", "their", and "they're" all spelled differently, all sound the same, and all have different meanings. So English can do this too. But it seems more confusing in German.

Also you didn't insult my intellegence. I do know (well read) that German has 13 vowels, English has only 5 and sometimes "Y" can become a vowel (though I can't give any examples of that). I haven't learned yet which letters are vowels and which are consonants. I should probably look that up.

Well, yeah, in most cases f and v are the same sound - "f". Except if v is in the middle of a word (which happens very rarely, unless it's compound words, which have infinite variety) in which case it's a normal English "v".

The thing with "liebe" and "lebe" is that, at least in my opinion, the long i and long e sounds that they contain are pronounced somewhat similarly. But are obviously supposed to be different. Except that the mouth makes very similar shapes, at least in the most prominent High German accent (I can't vouch for all the other accents and dialects of Germany, which has the same situation as if you compacted all of the English-speaking world from New Zealand to Boston in, well, a country the size of Germany).

I guess I don't have good news in this area. They just might stay the same to you or with time you might learn to recognize the tiny bit wider that the mouth is opened when pronouncing the long e.

Thanks for clarifying that, I'll probably never get the chance to speak the language out loud (too poor to travel to any country but Canada, well passports cost money too so too poor to travel period), but I want to be able to read and write in it, but I do listen to music in the language so I want to make sure I'm hearing the right word (though that problem can be solved with looking up the lyrics). Duolingo is okay for helping me hear how words are pronounced, but the accents the robots speak with aren't German accents, so I rely on songs to help me hear how words are supposed to be pronounced, and any videos I can find that have English subtitles. The other night I was listening to a song called "Siamesische Einsamkeit", and now I can pronounce " einsamkeit" okay but "Siamesische" I pronounce like the English "Siamese", it's not the first time I've heard the song either so I should get it by now, that is just an example of how I can mispronounce words. Though I do mispronounce words in English too and that is my native language. I am getting a little better at pronouncing words even if I've never seen them before or heard them pronounced out loud so that's a plus.

The words that sound the same but are spelled.differently will get me though, I found a couple more, "das" and "dass", "ist" and "isst", and I think "mir" and "mehr" (though I am probably wrong on that and Duolingo pronounced "mehr" wrong), same with "dir" and "der" (though again Duolingo could be pronouncing "der" wrong, think I heard it prounced slightly differently in a song). So learning this is fun until I start crying over pronounciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

Yeah, Duolingo will mess with you in this respect... I've heard a few polyglots recommend the site forvo.com for the purposes of pronunciation, although I don't really use it. Well, after I've learned English I tend to stick to languages with more or less strict phonetic spelling (which isn't actually one of my rules... but I suspect it helps me keep my sanity anyway). So I learn the pronunciation rules once and mostly don't have to worry about it anymore... Although on second thought, German is a language that benefits from double-checking, due to, well, compound words among other things.

Well, I just had to bring that up, didn't I? It turns out Welsh pronunciation is a giant bloody mess... Well, the spelling is supposed to be almost completely phonetic, but those phonemes have quickly gone from funny to headache-inducing. For example, I'm reading 8 rules for deciding if a vowel is long or short, each rule pretty much an exception to the previous one, in the form of "in the ending syllable vowels are long, except if the ending consonant is ll, ff, or dd" (yeah).

Lesson 3, have to mentally substitute Spanish verbs for the given English ones, because it's easier... I mean, they are explaining the concepts by referring to some distinctions in Spanish that don't exist in English.

Thanks for the website recommendation, I'm sure it'll be helpful to me, Duolingo though good for an absolute beginner like me has things that don't make sense. Even Google translate mispronounces words, "ich" and "Deutsch" were grossly mispronounced. I also heard German has flexible sentence structures which makes the language hard to pick up as I'm finding out. I'm also finding out the words in German can have many different translations, one word in Englis can be up to eight different words in German, so it'll be fun looking for the most commonly used words for the translations. I picked a hard language to learn, someone told me it shouldn't be a hard language for English speakers to learn as there are similararities, but other than having some same or similar words, I dont see any other similarities.

Okay Welsh sounds like an even harder language than German.

That sounds a little confusing, at least it would be to me.

I think Welsh might officially be my last language... or at least the outer border of my language space. On the other hand, as far as I can tell right now, it might as well be an alien language, so in a sense any human language becomes fair game... Nope, no, thanks.

...I don't know where you got the info that German has flexible word order. It's true that the verb and the subject can change places in a sentence, but that change is very strictly regulated by the function of the sentence, and per function there's basically a single unchanging order, down to the sequence of adverbs.

And yeah, there's a lot of base cognates (words of same origin) with English (ich, geben), but the grammar can mess with you. I really consider English quite an unfortunate language to start off of with another. I briefly even became convinced that it should be classified as a creole, because of what Normans did to it. I mean, the loss of grammatical gender alone puts English-speakers at a big disadvantage with respect to most other Indoeuropean languages. As well as the reduction of the singular second person pronoun ("thou" - Shakespearean English, or German "du") and the subjunctive mood... Well, I'd better stop myself, before I get too excited.

On the other hand (before you run away scared), my native Russian has all these elements, and I still have barely any grasp of them (aside from "du" which is pretty natural) in German. It doesn't prevent me from very much enjoying entertainment in the language.

So this is the site I've been using to study Welsh (for all of one day), so I thought it would be right to share: https://unilang.org/resources.php?mo...ang=de&links=0 Well, specifically I'm using it as an absolute beginner, it might not be the right thing for you. Although I see that there's different kinds of lessons on that page.

Yeah, I don't know where I heard German having flexible sentence structure either, it's been a few days since I thought I heard it. English is a weird language, we just don't have the genders or any of that that other languages have. I know when I was taking Spanish classes gender really messed with me as did all the forms of "you" and "the" (think there was more than one form of "the"). I've noticed with German is a sentence will be translated and mean something else entirely from what each individual word means. Or having to rearrange words when translating to English, it's weird, and really hard to figure out the actual meaning of the translation.

Thanks for the website, I'm still an absolute beginner so it'll be helpful to me.

I would say it's naive to think that words in English could be literally substituted with ones in German; however in a way that's something I struggle with, myself. English comes to me naturally - when I think of a concept I can generally just say it. But in German I have a concept, and more often than not - a completely empty space for how it should be expressed... I guess it's a bit different from your difficulty: I think from many years of study my brain understands the futility of - and has given up on - literally translating words from one language into another. But then I get left simply without a way to express myself... The frustrating thing is, often those useful, but unguessable expressions (like phrasal verbs), consist of the few basic words that make up the, maybe, top 100 most common words of the language, that I 100% know... like in English the combination "make up" or the German "aufgeben" (which looks like a different situation because it's written as one word, but is kind of similar, because of how it's often used, and because its cognate in English is "to give up").

A kind of random thought I just had: do you play any musical instument? Increased linguistic ability often is thought to be associated with musicality (I think it has to do with nearby or overlapping areas of the brain). I suppose if you don't you don't. I don't remember if you've mentioned if you sing along with those German songs...

You're right in respect to thinking English words can be substituted for German words, I don't know what I was getting at with that, mainly that everything doesn't translate over exactly the I thought it would and it's confusing. I do understand that things won't translate over as well as I thought they would, some words may not translate over at all.

I do play two instruments (well haven't actually touched mine in a couple years), so it is interesting you mentioned that, musical ability and language learning/ability use similar parts of the brain. I can't sing so I don't actually sing to the songs (well I do lip sync if that counts).

I don't imagine I myself am a great singer, but it doesn't prevent me from bawling at the top of my voice along with my favorite songs... (Er, obviously not in public.)

A kind of tip I've wanted to mention - do you have any kind of translator extension in your browser (like simply Google Translate in Chrome, there's a similar thing in Edge)? I find it just increases my level of comfort (and consequently willingness) when exposed to another language where I get a translation with a simple double click in the browser.

I've been wondering more and more if there isn't a job out there for which the main duty is learning languages. I'm just bored senseless at my current one, which makes me wistful for a simple textbook, and for new and interesting languages, like Gothic, which is extinct, but apparently there are textbooks even for it... But, o je, as a German would say, das ist sinnlos. Or rather, of course there is a job like that, something like "university linguistics professor". Except I'm nowhere near that and barely scraping by in terms of money.

Well, I've got inspired to muse about how a language-learning video game would work, according to... how I'd like to make one... And at the same time I'm quite confident that it's an impossible challenge...

Anyway, the game presents you with the line "Wie heißt du?" You can click on each individual word and find out their literal translation "Wie" - "How", "heißt" - "are called", "du" - "you", and you can look at the translation of the whole sentense: "What is your name?"... Unbeknownst to you, based on what (if anything) you've clicked before giving your answer, the game estimates your proficiency. So if you had to click every word, it provisionally assigns you the level "absolute beginner". What it does with this information is adjust the text that it presents you with next. If you're an absolute beginner, you probably need those words repeated to you a few times, to remember them. So a character will present itself "Ich heiße Wilhelm." Then it'll repeat the word "heißen" several sentences later. It'll also continue checking whether you've clicked the word's translation again, and update your level and mastery of the word based on this information...

I don't know what sharing this idea does... I'm frustrated with my job, and frustrated with the impossibility of realizing this game, although in a different way, so maybe it's the fact that there is a dream there...