I want to learn a Celtic language

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.

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.

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).

Yeah, there are a lot of words that are pretty much the same or similar is both languages but have different meanings, So I have to make sure I use those words in the right context or else I could really embarrass myself. I used "gift" as an example because that one I remembered off the top of my head (and I was surprised because Google doesn't actually translate it to it's actual meaning, if I didn't have the book I'm working out of I wouldn't have known that "gift" translates to something different). And the other word I remembered would have gotten blocked by the censors on this site.

Well, that's unfortunate... Can't you link to a dictionary entry for it, so I don't have to wonder forever. I honestly can't come up with any... I mean, when I try to think of something obscene in German, I think of something that doesn't mean anything in English... That's a pretty tough puzzle.

In other news, I guess I'm getting the Kindle version of that book... I mean, yes, Google uses its own superior translator, except half the time I read underground on a train, where there's no internet connection, so it's useless to me. And it has no offline dictionary. And highlighting on Kindle is so much smoother, which helps if I can't figure something out on the go and want to bookmark it until I'm home... Plus there's a flashcards function, although I don't think I'm going to use it. My method with Mnemosyne is much more effective.

Have you become at all interested in flashcards, by the way? I mean, they aren't necessary, but I'm pretty much 100% convinced that my learning is going faster with them. And the fact that I couldn't use them while reading the book in google's app was kind of driving me nuts... Well, a bunch of words I just couldn't look up because I didn't have connection, but those I did, they're pretty much... gone... like tears... in the rain.
Sorry, I don't know what that has to do with anything. Well, those words, they might be really useful, except I'm not going to encounter them again within the next day or so, and so yeah, I doubt I'll remember them.

So here's a puzzle: I've mentioned that I haven't practiced Spanish in quite a while. And yet, I sometimes look at news in Spanish and can understand basically everything without any difficulty. I'm wondering, why. I mean, of course language knowledge doesn't disappear immediately once you stop using it, and I guess I started studying Spanish a little bit before French (whose turns of phrase more often than not end up being a complete mystery and a topic of an hour's reseach for me)... Although I guess my listening skills in Spanish are on par with French, especially in more obscure dialects... So I started learning Spanish before I was 25, which is often invoked as a magic number. But also with Spanish is when I was the most focused in my use of flash cards...

I guess it's not so much a mystery after all. Still, what I'd really like to know is what the deciding factor was. Because if it's age... That would really suck. And would mean that I could never master any other language at the same level as English... Which is kind of, well, I'm turning 30 in a couple of months, might as well retire (which isn't an option, but) since my brain is useless.

The word is "After" here's the link to what it translates to, or if the link doesn't work the type in the word.

https://glosbe.com/de/en/after

I haven't tried flashcards yet, I don't have enough storage on my phone to do an app (like tinycards on Duolingo), I have to literally delete apps just to update other apps, so I may have to make flashcards by hand.

Oh. I'm afraid you're confused or I don't understand something. I thought it was supposed to be offensive to the users of this forum (or more specifically to its obscenity filter). But I can write "After" as much as I like and I bet already have, many many times...

And with that, I've suddenly remembered a mostly inoffensive word in German which is unmentionable on this site (and has in fact given me a lot of comical trouble in another thread). Hint: it rhymes with and means "thick".

Actually, I think it doesn't matter at this point. If you keep a dictionary at hand and just stay in contact with the German language, you're going to see the most frequent and useful words... well, frequently, so you're not going to need any additional tools... It's just me, with my obsessive nature, and I just have to know it all... I mean, I think there comes a point when it's necessary to know pretty rare words, to stay up to speed. The active vocabulary is supposed to be, what, around 5000 words. But like 80% of every text is composed of 200 most used words (never mind that I'm just pulling these numbers out of my... er, I don't know if it's appropriate to use the suddenly fitting After at this point). So all the other 4800 words are supposed to fit into fewer and fewer percent... I don't know what I wanted to say. I guess, at some point tools like flashcards become very useful because those words become too rare for your memory to handle them naturally very well. But I don't suppose you're at that point yet.

Yeah, I haven't quite managed to master that myself. Although I try to do a beautiful cursive, and also let me tell you about Polish. There's "l" but also "ł" (an "l" with a diagonal dash in the middle, although that's only in print). And then there's "t" which you begin writing the same way. The problem is that normally you come to the end only after you have written out the whole word, and it can end up an almost uninterrupted line of "l"s to which you have then to correctly add (or not) dashes, either in the middle (for "t") or above (for "ł"), and that can turn into a real mess.

Hey, don't forget to check ahead of time that there actually is anything good to watch in German! I don't remember if I've told the story (probably yes), but I was really confused when I couldn't understand a German show at all, because it was actually in Swiss German, which is pretty much its own language. I sometimes watch Looper videos on Youtube about upcoming Netflix entries and I quite honestly catch Spanish (especially telenovellas, of course) and French way more often than German... titles... Although, I swear there was something last time... Nope. Again in Spanish. Sorry. (An intriguing sci-fi movie called Orbiter 9, if you're wondering.)

Oh, and check that you can actually switch subtitles to German. My current language learning spree started when I decided to watch a show in Dutch, which I didn't know at all but had read that it was pretty similar to German. And I hoped I might pick something up along the way. Pretty much a complete failure, because it had Dutch dubbing, but only English subtitles (I distinctly remember recognizing "mama", though... well, it was pretty emotional scene)... So jumped on books and Duolingo in the middle of the season, to avoid wasting the opportunity completely (and because I was depressed and needed to see at least some change and progress in my life).

And, of course, don't forget to share your research with me! Although I kind of don't need any more spoken German exposure - most days I get at least an hour of it on Youtube, so... But I would be at least curious, considering my past lack of success in this enterprise (of finding interesting stuff in German on Netflix).