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  #126  
Old Mar 26, 2018, 11:51 AM
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Well, "sie" is "die Sonne" which is a girl (look at the article), although I don't know how you're going to convey that in English (which doesn't have grammatical gender, may I remind you )... Except, of course, "die Sonne" is also "der Stern" which is a boy. I think you should give the translator a little slack.

And "reich" means "rich" but it's also the imperative singular conjugation of the verb "reichen", which means, well, "reach" (or for best results in this context - "give"). I won't say that I quite understand the situation with "die Hand", but it's not impossible based on my knowledge of Spanish (as just a random example of another foreign language), where there's a lot of situations with a definite article before the noun, although also a reflexive pronoun before the verb - "se cepilló los dientes"... Wait, "cepilló"? Gah, my Spanish is really getting rusty... -"self brushed the teeth", sort of... On the other hand, I don't remember this being the rule in German or really any Germanic languages. That's more an Italic habit. But it's not impossible.
Gender is going to be so confusing, like you said and I know, English doesn't have gendered words, (there was actually a funny meme about English not having gendered words like some other languages, but I don't remember exactly what it said). It's going to confuse me how and why things translate over the way they do until I actually start to get a grip on the language. The song title was just one thing that came to mind as something that stumped me as to why it was translating over as something other than what I would have translated it as.
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  #127  
Old Mar 26, 2018, 11:54 AM
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Wait, what? Vienna, of all places, has the highest quality of life in the world? ...I mean, I have nothing against Vienna, but a bit unexpected... And that is just to say that der deutsche Sprachraum is pretty well-off and has many surprises in store.
That is surprising, I thought places like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland had the highest quality of life in the world. Where did you find that out from?
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  #128  
Old Mar 26, 2018, 12:08 PM
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Well, "sie" is "die Sonne" which is a girl (look at the article), although I don't know how you're going to convey that in English (which doesn't have grammatical gender, may I remind you )... Except, of course, "die Sonne" is also "der Stern" which is a boy. I think you should give the translator a little slack.

And "reich" means "rich" but it's also the imperative singular conjugation of the verb "reichen", which means, well, "reach" (or for best results in this context - "give"). I won't say that I quite understand the situation with "die Hand", but it's not impossible based on my knowledge of Spanish (as just a random example of another foreign language), where there's a lot of situations with a definite article before the noun, although also a reflexive pronoun before the verb - "se cepilló los dientes"... Wait, "cepilló"? Gah, my Spanish is really getting rusty... -"self brushed the teeth", sort of... On the other hand, I don't remember this being the rule in German or really any Germanic languages. That's more an Italic habit. But it's not impossible.
Quoting this again because I forgot to add something and didn't want to edit my other comment.

I did look at Google translate earlier and was looking up a word and the word "it" came up amd one of the translations for that actually was "sie", but I don't know if that is actually right or not, it just came up under the word "it", though the actual word for "it" is "es", but it now makes a little more sense that "Sie ist der hellste Stern von allen" would translate to "it's the brightest star of all".
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  #129  
Old Mar 26, 2018, 12:37 PM
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That is surprising, I thought places like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland had the highest quality of life in the world. Where did you find that out from?
I was reading the German wikipedia for Vienna (Wien). But I think I kind of double-checked it later... I mean, we're talking countries and cities. I don't know if Austria averages out to the best country together with its capital (considering it borders on some unfortunately former Soviet countries, with nationalist and populist attitudes - although it also has Czechia under the back, which is also a rather famously happy country).
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  #130  
Old Mar 27, 2018, 05:38 AM
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At the beginning of this thread I was looking at different languages, and one of those was Greek. It caught my fancy, because it - among relatively few other languages, like Welsh, and English, of course - uses the sound θ, and is also everywhere (and I'd very much appreciate not to have to consult a dictionary if I want to use the plural of some scientific term or whatever). The problem is that it doesn't use the Latin alphabet, which would make looking words up on the internet a pain. I mean, I'd have to learn another keyboard layout, I guess. With German you get away with omitting diacritics and expecting Google to fill them in... But really, with these complicated, unusual languages I more and more long for a person I could just ask... I suppose that's not the most outlandish idea. It's just unusual for me. As such, I also don't know if there's many people willing to become another's walking talking dictionary...
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  #131  
Old Mar 27, 2018, 06:05 AM
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Followup: So I registered a few weeks ago at italki, where you can spend, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of money on personal language tuition (although according to everyone else, I guess, it's very cheap), but you can also write journal entries for other people to correct them, which for me is the important feature, even though I haven't used it.

So what occurred to me right now, is 1) it could be a place to meet people, but also 2) I took a shot at a game script (really, some scribbles), and I don't think I managed to come up with something that would be suitable for a language learning game (since I had to look some words up for it myself, which isn't a great sign). But I also came up with a roster of characters, and I kind of like them. I'm wondering what to do with them. Maybe I should continue my rather lame attempt, as a journal on italki. I don't know why... I just don't even know what the people there are like. Maybe almost no one participates in journals (or maybe it's just trolls).

I don't know. I probably should scrap those characters, and restart with cats, dogs, and birds, because those tend to engage in actions with simple names and don't speak (or when they speak, can be made to say very simple things while being believable).
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  #132  
Old Mar 27, 2018, 11:27 AM
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Originally Posted by ArcheM View Post
I was reading the German wikipedia for Vienna (Wien). But I think I kind of double-checked it later... I mean, we're talking countries and cities. I don't know if Austria averages out to the best country together with its capital (considering it borders on some unfortunately former Soviet countries, with nationalist and populist attitudes - although it also has Czechia under the back, which is also a rather famously happy country).

That's interesting, like I said it's usually the Scandinavian countries I hear about that are some of the happiest countries in the world.
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  #133  
Old Mar 27, 2018, 11:33 AM
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At the beginning of this thread I was looking at different languages, and one of those was Greek. It caught my fancy, because it - among relatively few other languages, like Welsh, and English, of course - uses the sound θ, and is also everywhere (and I'd very much appreciate not to have to consult a dictionary if I want to use the plural of some scientific term or whatever). The problem is that it doesn't use the Latin alphabet, which would make looking words up on the internet a pain. I mean, I'd have to learn another keyboard layout, I guess. With German you get away with omitting diacritics and expecting Google to fill them in... But really, with these complicated, unusual languages I more and more long for a person I could just ask... I suppose that's not the most outlandish idea. It's just unusual for me. As such, I also don't know if there's many people willing to become another's walking talking dictionary...
Greek would be an interesting language, I have a friend on Facebook that I talk to every so often who is from and lives in Greece, I actually thought about learning it at one point, but the having to learn a whole new alphabet thing kind of stopped me.
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  #134  
Old Mar 27, 2018, 11:38 AM
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Followup: So I registered a few weeks ago at italki, where you can spend, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of money on personal language tuition (although according to everyone else, I guess, it's very cheap), but you can also write journal entries for other people to correct them, which for me is the important feature, even though I haven't used it.

So what occurred to me right now, is 1) it could be a place to meet people, but also 2) I took a shot at a game script (really, some scribbles), and I don't think I managed to come up with something that would be suitable for a language learning game (since I had to look some words up for it myself, which isn't a great sign). But I also came up with a roster of characters, and I kind of like them. I'm wondering what to do with them. Maybe I should continue my rather lame attempt, as a journal on italki. I don't know why... I just don't even know what the people there are like. Maybe almost no one participates in journals (or maybe it's just trolls).

I don't know. I probably should scrap those characters, and restart with cats, dogs, and birds, because those tend to engage in actions with simple names and don't speak (or when they speak, can be made to say very simple things while being believable).
If I had the money I probably would use a site like that, but also if I had the money I'd take a German class at my local community college.

You have good ideas regarding the video game, I would say keep working on it as you never know where it will lead you.
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  #135  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 12:42 AM
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I think I may have given the wrong impression of italki. Registering on it is free. The only paid part is arranging Skype lessons with their tutors (which go for, I guess, competitive fees, starting with $10 / hour, which is like... I mean, if I spent money at this rate regularly, I'd only last a couple days). And I think there's also, like, volunteer tutors that don't charge anything. You might want to check it out.

As long as I'm on the topic of sites, there's another site with journal functionality, called lang-8. Unfortunately, I've read that the people behind it stopped working on it (and there's still a lot of issues with it). They switched to their other site, called HiNative, which is also a smartphone app (making it more profitable, I suppose). I don't know if you've checked it out yet (I think it should pop up in suggestions quite often). Well, you just ask questions and native speakers answer them. And the questions can be of any level of banality. I've seen things like "How do you say "Hello" in Spanish?"... I think they even got responses... Well, sure they did, because your number and quality of responses influence your rank, and who doesn't like a good rank.

I have ignored them so far because I was studying (I should say "am", but that's kind of confusing, with Welsh) Polish, with which I quite frankly didn't need help... Maybe it's time to return now.
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  #136  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 09:37 AM
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It suddenly jumped out at me that you, as you say, keep some pretty eclectic company (it's "eclectic", right, not "egalitarian"?). I don't know if you go out of your way to meet colorful people or maybe it's just chance... I've got to confess, in the Russian knock-off Facebook that I'm on, I've only got 6 friends, and 5 of those only out of politeness - and all of them Russian, often quite stubbornly.

Also, that Wolfgang Hohlbein is hammer, as a German would say. I really haven't been so drawn in by any book for a long time... The only problem is I can't decide which store to buy the book in: Kindle or Google. They, or rather, their apps are both terrible, in different ways. Kindle relies on Bing for translation, which apparently is both slower than Google and sometimes doesn't make any sense. Whereas the way Google's text selection is implemented makes me not want to use it. And both of them, even though they have the information on the store, are constantly confused about which language the book is written in. I'm especially annoyed at Google which owns both the book app and the translator, so should have all the necessary tools... I mean, I know the language well enough so it doesn't hurt my understanding if I miss a word here or there. Still, I'd prefer the process to be both fun and educational...
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  #137  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 10:02 AM
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Or maybe I could, like they sometimes recommend, read the whole book without knowing all the words... and then re-read with a dictionary... I've wondered if I shouldn't start re-reading stuff - books that I tackled before I, in all honesty, was ready - that I barely understood at all. But for some reason that frightens me.
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  #138  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 11:01 AM
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I think I may have given the wrong impression of italki. Registering on it is free. The only paid part is arranging Skype lessons with their tutors (which go for, I guess, competitive fees, starting with $10 / hour, which is like... I mean, if I spent money at this rate regularly, I'd only last a couple days). And I think there's also, like, volunteer tutors that don't charge anything. You might want to check it out.

As long as I'm on the topic of sites, there's another site with journal functionality, called lang-8. Unfortunately, I've read that the people behind it stopped working on it (and there's still a lot of issues with it). They switched to their other site, called HiNative, which is also a smartphone app (making it more profitable, I suppose). I don't know if you've checked it out yet (I think it should pop up in suggestions quite often). Well, you just ask questions and native speakers answer them. And the questions can be of any level of banality. I've seen things like "How do you say "Hello" in Spanish?"... I think they even got responses... Well, sure they did, because your number and quality of responses influence your rank, and who doesn't like a good rank.

I have ignored them so far because I was studying (I should say "am", but that's kind of confusing, with Welsh) Polish, with which I quite frankly didn't need help... Maybe it's time to return now.
Okay, thanks for clarifying, I haven't seen that app you mentioned yet, but I'll look for it to see what it's all about.
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  #139  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 11:13 AM
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It suddenly jumped out at me that you, as you say, keep some pretty eclectic company (it's "eclectic", right, not "egalitarian"?). I don't know if you go out of your way to meet colorful people or maybe it's just chance... I've got to confess, in the Russian knock-off Facebook that I'm on, I've only got 6 friends, and 5 of those only out of politeness - and all of them Russian, often quite stubbornly.

Also, that Wolfgang Hohlbein is hammer, as a German would say. I really haven't been so drawn in by any book for a long time... The only problem is I can't decide which store to buy the book in: Kindle or Google. They, or rather, their apps are both terrible, in different ways. Kindle relies on Bing for translation, which apparently is both slower than Google and sometimes doesn't make any sense. Whereas the way Google's text selection is implemented makes me not want to use it. And both of them, even though they have the information on the store, are constantly confused about which language the book is written in. I'm especially annoyed at Google which owns both the book app and the translator, so should have all the necessary tools... I mean, I know the language well enough so it doesn't hurt my understanding if I miss a word here or there. Still, I'd prefer the process to be both fun and educational...

How I get so many people on my Facebook from other countries is that they just seemed to get on my friends list, I didn't know some of them were from outer countries until they accepted my request or I accepted theirs. It's not so much that I go out of my way to meet these people, it just seems to happen. And yes the word would be "eclectic" rather than "egalitarian".

As for the book app, I only have a Kindle, well I think on my phone I have Google play books, but I haven't used it. I didn't know Kindle used Bing as it's translator as I've never read anything in a foreign language, I won't even use Bing as a search engine. I did add two books from that author to my wishlist on Amazon for when I do get good enough at the German language that I can actually read them.
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  #140  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 11:18 AM
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Or maybe I could, like they sometimes recommend, read the whole book without knowing all the words... and then re-read with a dictionary... I've wondered if I shouldn't start re-reading stuff - books that I tackled before I, in all honesty, was ready - that I barely understood at all. But for some reason that frightens me.
I don't think I could handle reading a whole book without understanding most of it, my frustration level would get too high and I would just quit. Although I might end up downloading that German Listening app and start reading/listening to the articles eventhough I won't understand most of it, because you can still click on the words and it will translate them, it would atleast get me familiar with hearing the language and seeing it written too.
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  #141  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 11:24 AM
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So I have a book called German for Dummies, and it's for beginners, I finally opened it yesterday, and now I know why there are so many random capitalization of words in the middle of sentences, it's because all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English it's only proper nouns being capitalized. Now I'm confused a little about why they sometimes put "der" "die" or "dad" infront of nouns sometimes while other times they don't (or is it all the time, I'm not actually sure).
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  #142  
Old Mar 28, 2018, 12:18 PM
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What do you mean? :-) We also sometimes put "the" in front of nouns, and sometimes don't.

I visited a bookstore specializing in foreign languages today, and I don't think the person there had heard of Welsh language. I suppose, it's to be expected.
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  #143  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 01:45 AM
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So what is your awareness of the German-speaking world? I've got to confess, I was only aware of a couple cities in Germany a few months ago, and of course, the names of the countries (Austria, Switzerland), although I wouldn't have been able to point them out on the map. Today I just found out that there was recently an election in Austria, with a dashing young gentleman by the name of Sebastian Kurz elected as Kanzler, and there is its own share of drama associated with that (not to mention that he's just a year older than me ). Does any of that get to you via your German friends, or were you pretty much like me? I mean, a year ago I was pretty much pin-point focused on the US politics, so an entire country could have disappeared off the map in Europe and I wouldn't have noticed...
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  #144  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 10:26 AM
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What do you mean? :-) We also sometimes put "the" in front of nouns, and sometimes don't.

I visited a bookstore specializing in foreign languages today, and I don't think the person there had heard of Welsh language. I suppose, it's to be expected.
Okay I completely forgot that we do, oops.

That sucks that even a bookstore specializing in foreign language didn't have any books on the Welsh language.
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  #145  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 10:31 AM
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So what is your awareness of the German-speaking world? I've got to confess, I was only aware of a couple cities in Germany a few months ago, and of course, the names of the countries (Austria, Switzerland), although I wouldn't have been able to point them out on the map. Today I just found out that there was recently an election in Austria, with a dashing young gentleman by the name of Sebastian Kurz elected as Kanzler, and there is its own share of drama associated with that (not to mention that he's just a year older than me ). Does any of that get to you via your German friends, or were you pretty much like me? I mean, a year ago I was pretty much pin-point focused on the US politics, so an entire country could have disappeared off the map in Europe and I wouldn't have noticed...
I don't really look at any politics or what is going on in German speaking countries, I could talk to my friend about what goes on in Germany but I feel like it's not my place because I can't yet read articles that focus on anything Germany related (although Google translate would help). But my friend and I do compare/contrast things in our countries, but we mostly talk U.S. politics. I think that German Listening app may have some articles about what goes on in Germany, I'm not sure because I haven't looked and I don't know how updated they keep it with new articles.
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  #146  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 10:40 AM
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Going through my book, and there's a section on words that are the same or similar as in English but with different meanings, So now I have to worry about words that look the same or similar but have different meanings, like "Gift" which means poison, but Google translate didn't say that, it just said "Gift" (context for this specif word, I was trying to find the translation to a song title/song that had this word in it, and Google translate I guess doesn't translate all words over).

My goal right now is to spend about 30 minutes to an hour everyday studying German, so maybe if I do that everyday then I might retain something.
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  #147  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 11:09 AM
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I did find an article that I saved last night on a Facebook page I follow about how to find things in different languages on Netflix, my sister has an account that I use (my Mom won't let me get my own account even though she's using MY money for Amazon Prime and Hulu), anyway the article talked about what to search and how to search for movies/shows in different languages, how to put on subtitles, how to do audio things like voice dubbing in the language you want to watch the movie/show in etc. So now I know what to do to find things in German and how to changes subtitles to English or German on Netflix, hopefully it doesn't actually affect everything and is completely isolated to the show or movie I'm watching, if not I'll just have to beg my Mom to let me use MY money to get my own account.
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  #148  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 01:25 PM
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Well, I'm not sure, it might depend on your particular situation. Does your mom often watch originally German movies? If I remember correctly (I'm not subscribed right now), it remembers the language settings for each series or movie's origin. That is, when I watched a series in French, it would set the subtitles and sound to French for every other French-based... thing I'd watch after that. But I prefer to watch English stuff without subtitles, and it would keep that. I find that very convenient. But it might not suit your situation. Can't you add your own profile for no additional charge? I thought Netflix were pretty liberal about that. Although I'm not exactly sure.

Funny thing I discovered at the end of my last period of subscription. When I set my user interface to Polish, suddenly subtitles in Polish (and maybe even dubbing, I'm not sure) became available, whereas previously (when my interface was in English) I only had English, Russian, and for whatever reason Finnish (I guess because I'm geographically close to Finland, but... )

Well, anyway, I don't think I've found anything I like in German on Netflix, although it might be particular to my region, or, indeed, tastes. Only the recent series "Dark" which seems to have generally been praised by Germans, but even then, eventually I gave up because it was simply too depressing. On the other hand, I really enjoyed their French selection, but that's neither here nor there... "Dark" is usually compared to "Stranger Things" if you liked that. A vastly more depressing "Stranger Things", I would say.
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  #149  
Old Mar 29, 2018, 01:36 PM
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Originally Posted by OctobersBlackRose View Post
Going through my book, and there's a section on words that are the same or similar as in English but with different meanings, So now I have to worry about words that look the same or similar but have different meanings, like "Gift" which means poison, but Google translate didn't say that, it just said "Gift" (context for this specif word, I was trying to find the translation to a song title/song that had this word in it, and Google translate I guess doesn't translate all words over).

My goal right now is to spend about 30 minutes to an hour everyday studying German, so maybe if I do that everyday then I might retain something.
It seems to me that with those "false friends" (as they are often called) my brain relatively quickly adapts to actually recall the foreign meaning instead of my native. Just today, I was completely shocked when a friend mentioned the word "Losung" in Russian, which I immediately recognized as derived from German... And, well, what drove me especially crazy is that in Russian it's masculine but in German - feminine...

Also there seems to be a sort of successful compartmentalization (right, okay, I seem to have got all the syllables). When I think about the German "Gift" something about those particular sounds, especially the "g" and the "i" evokes unpleasantness. Then I "switch" my brain to the English mode, and "Gift" takes on the connotations of, well, a bright red package with white stripes.

Interestingly, I've just looked in the dictionary and apparently the root meaning for "Gift" is much closer to how it ended up in English, than in German.
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Old Mar 29, 2018, 01:47 PM
ArcheM ArcheM is offline
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An hour a day sounds like a really good idea. I did pretty much that with Polish for 6 months, and all things considered, achieved pretty fenomenal progress - I mean, at the start spoken Polish was completely unintelligible, and now I understand most of what is said in videos on Youtube. Of course, the situation with intelligibility between Polish and Russian is much better than between English and German. Still, it makes me really optimistic about language learning in general... I mean, if I actually decided to follow the same process with Welsh. But... Well, I've got many other hobbies, and I can't quite decide that languages are my priority number one. And it's physically impossible to devote an hour per day to each one of them (while living off more than air).
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