Read a research paper on alzheimer’s prevention, showing a relationship between known languages and first symptoms of the disease. Realized that if i studied diligently i could essentially add more (lucid) years to my life.
edit:
paper in question: Bialystok et al. 2013 Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain
I caught my grandmother doing a crossword on the toilet when I was really young. When I asked her about it, she told me it was to keep her mind working. To my understanding, she was still doing them—possibly still on the toilet—when she died when I was 25.
I'm not the only one! For as long as I can remember my grandma has kept a stack of puzzle books by the toilet. Crossword, word search, books with a variety of puzzles, sudoku, etc.
Anecdotally, between stuff like that intentionally trying to stay mentally sharp and her physically active lifestyle, she's 87 with no signs of stopping (obviously her mental capacities have declined because she's nearly 90 years old, but she's going strong).
It's nice hearing in this thread that language studying can help us later in life. I started because I felt like I should pick up something productive to do, but this is all great to hear.
My grandma has been doing math forever... and when playing cards, she's the one doing the tallying. Probably the fastest of all of us, going strong past 85. And yes, she's doing crosswords and Sudoku as well.
She was an accountant for most of her life. Growing up in a world without computers, doing sums is second nature to her. She just never stopped.
And yes, she also does keep track of her supermarket purchases to avoid surprises when paying and has both her income and expenses under control.
I teach developmental psychology and one thing I emphasize to students is that elderly people losing their cognitive skills is actually pretty rare. Obviously your grandmother has kept her sharpness. It’s all about using it.
Encourage people to do their own research on this topic, many reputable publications contest the efficacy of this protocol and there are clear conflicts of interest involved in the research.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/05/417431/pricey-protocol-not-proven-prevent-or-reverse-alzheimers-says-ucsf-neurologist
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377549/
I don't think there's any question that eating healthy and exercising can help stave off mental decline, but I also don't think it's necessary to pay $1399 for access to a particular company's advice, tests, etc.
Studied Russian in college so I could take a message if my roommate's mother called while she was out.
OK, that wasn't the _only_ reason, but it really was a factor.
I started learning Dutch on Duolingo because it was kinda cool. My dad told my grandmother (who's Dutch) that I'm learning it!Then grandmother dies and I feel pressured to continue as I can't exactly tell her that I've stopped
Mijn Nederlands is steeds niet zo goed :/ ik heb een slechte uitspraak, en ik maak veel fouten. Maar- het is beter dan wat was het.
How vind je de taal? Het is moeilijk ook, maar leer je het graag?
I have a Japanese friend who one day randomly heard a song by Seweryn Krajewski, and having never heard Polish before, decided there and then that she wants to learn this intriguing language. Over 20 years later, you could never tell she wasn't born and raised in Poland, neither by seeing her write Polish, nor by hearing her speak, which in and of itself is an extremely impressive feat. Funnily enough, she's never been to Poland.
Usually small crushes on various people. Not in the sense of "I will learn their language to impress them" but "They are cool so their language is cool by association" :D
Same haha! The guy I had a crush on motivated me to really want to learn Chinese, and he wasn't even a native speaker, just someone who was super enthusiastic about learning the language himself!
In a book I read as a child someone made a comment that their teacher was extremely well educated because he was reading a book in French and enjoying it. I wanted to make the impression of being well educated too after growing up so I convinced my mom to sign me up for French lessons, even though I was already learning English and German.
Years later I realised that the comment from the book was probably about reading a book in a foreign language in general and there's nothing special about French, but there's still a part of me that feels it's more special when I read a book in French than in English or German.
I'm too scared to learn French, honestly. Every time I come across a weird, unpronounceable word in English or German, it's always a French import word.
Those are the levels of proficiency in the japanese language, it ranges from N5 to N1, N5 being a compared to A1 and N1 being C2.
Which is strange cause the guy said that he learned japanese to an N3 level but has an A2 flair on japanese, N3 would be more like B1.5.
Actually JLPT that is the exam he is refering measures indeed from N5 to N1 where N1 is the highest, but the requirements difer from the european measurement system A1-C2, the JLPT only measures your ability to read and hear, they do not require you to write or speak and the expected N1 is equal to a high school student knowledge, unlike C2 where you would expect a native college student comprehension probably. So while a C2 would be expected to comunicate almost perfectly in every scenario without any issue, a N1 might not be able to but a simple phrase together (altought unlikely).
The hardest part of JLPT is the amount of kanji and vocabulary you know tbh.
Just for reference :
[https://cotoacademy.com/app/uploads/2019/08/How-Long-does-it-take-to-Pass-JLPT.png](https://cotoacademy.com/app/uploads/2019/08/How-Long-does-it-take-to-Pass-JLPT.png)
Thx for the response, i didn't know about it.
I have some time learning Japanese but i've never actually taken a test, so i just thought it was the exact same as the English measurements.
Yes, this is a case of deterioration - it was in \~2012-2016, and since that time, I have forgotten most of Japanese. Right now I'm relearning German, and after that, I plan to relearn Japanese.
I did german in school and was trash at it, I got F and E mostly (E is a grade where I’m from). Then I started listening to rammstein and after a month i was really good, so I decided to continue
I took an independent study class in German in high school because of Rammstein too. 1 semester wasn't enough to be fluent, but I learned enough to understand the songs and order drinks in Germany when I visited! And 15 years later I got to see them in concert. I hope you have too!
As a teenager, I read in some random newspaper that **Spanish** is the "happiest" language to speak because the combination of sounds in Spanish words somehow makes your brain experience positive emotions.
It sure made an impression, so once I was satisfied with my level of English, the choice of the next language was rather obvious.
I don't even know if it was a legit study or just a load of bull, never really cared to check it to not get disappointed lol, but learning Spanish was one of the best decisions in my life, no matter what the science says.
(and u/FuzzySilverSloth)
Lol, yeah, almost spot-on. Actually, a mixture of all three.
Once I felt confident enough speaking Spanish (as I thought back then lol), I started looking for ways to try to live in a Spanish-speaking country, and after some arduous searching, I landed a job in Colombia.
When the contract ended, I decided to backpack around South America, now that I made it that far. Ended up visiting almost every country on that continent.
Also, while I was on the move, I met my partner there (not a local, though).
So yeah, as you can see, learning Spanish sure brought me a ton of positive emotions, so in a way, the article didn't lie lol
I took a Russian lit class in college and, when I ordered my books, one bookseller accidentally sent me an original Russian copy of Onegin rather than the English translation I ordered. He was very apologetic and accommodating, and overnighted the correct edition to me. When I asked if he could send me a shipping label to return the other book, he told me to just keep it.
It bugged me so much to own a book I could not read that, after two years of getting annoyed every time I saw it on my shelf, I gave in and added Russian to my Duolingo
Went to an air show as a kid. There was an airman there who was set up at a table who was transliterating names into Arabic. This made me realize that there were so many cool ways to write stuff. That's some tinder.
Was also doing martial arts at the time, so my mother picked up a book 'Lóng is a Dragon' which showed different hanzi and how they evolved from pictures. Spark.
In 6th Grade, my history teacher was also a language nerd, and he let me borrow some of his language materials when he found out I liked languages. Whoosh! 🔥
Edit: Additional thought afterward: I did end up going to DLIFLC, the same military language school that that airman likely went to for Arabic (I went for Russian).
I watched The Three Body Problem (Chinese) earlier this year and I found it frustrating that I couldn't understand anything they were saying. So hopefully by the time season 2 comes out I'll be able to understand some of it.
I initially learned Brazilian Portuguese to understand my then-fellow teenage girls talking about my favorite celebrity. I realized these girls are fucking hilarious, I loved how they mixed English and Portuguese together, and I kept at it.
I started learning Spanish many years ago because ... I opened google translate and the default setting the app was set on was English to Spanish. So I thought why not.
I started learning Dutch at 18, after four years of high school German, because I thought Dutch sounded cooler and I already had a head start. That’s my weirdest reason and it’s not that weird. (Incidentally, a solid 18 years of study later, I’m four days into my second visit to Amsterdam and I still can’t be bothered to speak it, even though I’m really fucking good at it!)
To finish an anime that was canceled and the light novel was never translated over to English. I at least googled the ending to see what happened but it was so long ago and unpopular that only a handful of people actually read it but they forgot the ending so the forum discussing it didn’t even have a clear answer and no one remembers what happened. I’m learning Japanese in hopes of reading the series and finally getting an ending after a decade of curiosity,
It was called Nanana’s Buried Treasure. It has 13 volumes but no matter what websites I go to I can’t even find the original digital copies in Japanese but here’s to hoping I can find them one day.
Honestly? The John Wick movies. Watching John communicate with various people all over the world in various languages is just a cool skill to have; even if not fluent but at least knowing enough to get by.
I signed up for Latin and Ancient Greek classes at my school because I found out about Hadrian and Antinous and thought: "mmm, Roman gay dramas, sounds fun".
The woman I want to marry speaks Russian, so I started learning Russian.
I study Japanese (from time to time) because I can't be bothered to read manga scanlations that are translated like ass and it comes out 3-4 days before the official release.
I started learning Serbo-Croat based purely on being fascinated with 90s Yugoslavian war songs. Bojna Čavoglave, Crni Bombarder and Panteri are annoyingly catchy.
No, officially they are four separate languages that are mutually intelligible. To refer to them collectively you can use ‘BCMS’, although in practice most people from the region use some form of ‘Naš’ (ours) to refer to them collectively.
Serbian is an official language
Croatian is an official language
Bosnian is an official language
Montenegrin is an official language
Within those languages there are multiple dialects. Yet while there are ‘dialect-like’ differences between the languages (Lj/L difference for example) - the languages are not themselves dialects of an ‘umbrella language’.
There is just an ‘umbrella term’ to refer to four mutually intelligible languages (BCMS …or colloquially Naš/Naški for native speakers).
If someone thought they were learning ‘serbo-Croatian’ but was learning in the Latin alphabet and using Lj then they’d be learning Croatian. If they thought they were learning ‘Serbo-Croatian’ and using Cyrillic and omitting Lj then they’d be learning Serbian. If they were learning in both Latinic and Cyrillic and learning the different options in each language for certain words - then they’d be learning Serbian *&* Croatian.
It doesn’t really matter. If you want to be able to understand all texts from all the countries, it would maybe help to learn the Cyrillic alphabet - but that shouldn’t take you more than a few weeks to get into your head. It’s probably best to pick language resources for just one as a beginner because it’ll help with consistency in your writing. But as you progress it can be useful to use resources from various ones, to help you learn to recognise the differences.
You are, it was literally called serbo-croatian during yugoslavia, literally anyone that learned it during that time says they learnt serbo-croatian
And if we’re being honest, other then a dozen or so words + accents its the same language
I wanted to play an ace attorney game that seemed like it was impossible for it to ever get an official localization. there was a fan one, but i could only get through 30 minutes before realizing i really wanted to experience the game in its mother tongue. Then an official localization was announced before i was ready to play 😭 but i love a lot of things that come from japanese media so my hard work isn’t a total waste ! I still would like to play it in japanese eventually!
High school classmates made fun of me because of my English pronunciation,specially the word "cool" (I'm a Brazilian Portuguese speaker and, if pronounced wrong, cool becomes a swearing). Proceeded to not only learn the language but to teach it to one of their mom's.
I picked up learning Greek because a friend of mine started learning Japanese. I don't need Greek but it just became more interesting the more I learnt
I believe it had this meaning in the past but now it has changed. You can use it with a positive meaning in informal speech with a friend for example.
Edit: Check this for an analysis, it is in greek but I believe it will be generally understandable if you translate the page with google.
https://ti-einai.gr/alani/
My parents have been forcing me to learn Arabic since I was 4 😭 still can only recognize a few letters not even exaggerating. Who knew drugs were the way
There’s a book I used for it called Arabic Script Hacking. Learned the alphabet in like 2 days, then watched a youtube video to really get the difference between ط and ظ.
I’ll admit, غ is still tricky for me to pronounce but I’m getting there
Learning georgian because I have a friend who's from Georgia and I want to talk to her mom. Also russian because her mom speaks Russian but my friend doesn't so we can feel superior
I was playing a lot of CS:GO and I was really into slavic memes at the age of 12, so I thought it will be funny to understand Russian players rage
Since then I don’t even log in my steam account for years now
Chinese for Jay Chou and JJ Lin, both wonderful singers, Russian for my aunt/Ic3peak, Thai so I can order perfectly at a Thai Restaurant I've been going to since I was like 4. Mostly music lol.
I used to listen to Korean news livestreams while studying because I wanted to listen to something but found music to be distracting, so I chose Korean news livestreams since I didnt understand it back then, plus the fact that it was easily available on Youtube.
Some of the commercials played there were just so weird to me that I wanted to understand what they were all about, and so I started to learn Korean just for that.
I also picked up Japanese about 2 years before I started Korean, and it was literally just because I felt bored during my summer vacation. I chose Japanese since I thought it would've been easy to learn given that I speak Mandarin as my native language.
Watched an episode of '24' (American tv show) in which this character was speaking Serbian. Next thing I know, I was downloading material to learn the language.
My main reason for learning Italian was my interest in organized crime and wanting to understand how the mafia truly works. Now I'm actually an antimafia activist and knowing Italian is super useful because a lot of sources, books and articles on this topic are in Italian. So far I've never met anyone who studied Italian for that reason and I'm always worried that it might come across as weird. Whenever I'm asked why I chose Italian I tell a socially more acceptable version, for example that I simply love the country which is obviously true as well but only half of the story lol.
I learned Romanian for three months because whole scrolling through Duolingo language options I thought the flag looked like the pansexual flag, and that was what I identified as back then.
Now I found two target languages I love grammatically, been learning for more than a year.
Fun story of why I DIDN'T learn French. I'm Chinese, and in Chinese, language names were translated as first sound syllables's closest sounding common Chinese word. Like English is "yin languages" Deutsch is "de language"
French is "fa language" as patterned, but the common Chinese character they chose also means law, and as rebellious kid, I didn't like the law, and decided I was never going to learn a "law" language
I stumbled upon a chart online, that showed the “average amount of hours a typical anglophone monoglot will spend on x language to reach B1 level,” or something like that.
Anyway, it was sorted from most difficult (for English speakers) to least difficult. I don’t remember the exact values (I’m making them up here), but it read something like this:
- Mandarin: 10,000 hours
- Russian: 8,000 hours
- German: 6,500 hours
- French: 5,000 hours
- Spanish: 4,500 hours
- …
- …
- Esperanto: 500 hours
The exact values aside, most of the numbers were large, but Esperanto, at the very bottom of the list, had a ridiculously, unbelievably small number.
So I said to myself: “Bullshit. No way.”
Then I thought about it. Then I checked to see if Duolingo had an Esperanto course. They did.
So then I said to myself: “We’ll see about that. Challenge accepted.”
It turns out, by the way, the chart was roughly correct, at least for Esperanto. I did pick it up ridiculously quickly.
That’s probably weirder than my reason for learning Latin, which is basically, “it’s cool and I want to.”
I'm currently doing Russian using pure CI to experience ALG for myself. I'm being disciplined about never translating or researching grammar.
It will be a useful language for me, but the main reason is just the experience. I'm still only up to 40 hours after more than a year but it's fun to feel my brain working things out.
I made a CI video course in Toki Pona for people to get this experience in the shortest possible time. But unfortunately I can't use it because I made it.
If you have the time and you want to do this with a "real language" Dreaming Spanish is very good.
Learning ukrainian for
1 the burst of happiness when I can recognize a language
And 2 so I can read harry potter for the millionth time but pretend it's a different book
I had a couple of languages on my bucket list that I thought looked cool so I put them all on a wheel and whichever one it landed on I'd start learning. It landed on japanese so bam I started learning Japanese
I’m interested in languages in general, and had already had a lot of classes in Spanish, (and one in German as a filler elective). For my official third language, (don’t count German because I didn’t have time to take other classes and didn’t keep up with it) decided to try one I’d heard was hard just for the challenge and went with Japanese. Being honest with myself, a petty part of me in the back of my mind probably picked that over others because a girl I dated in high school (and dumped me) was trying to learn it and as far as I know never got any good at it. To be fair though I looked at Chinese first and didn’t think I’d be able to differentiate the tones well enough to learn it.
Learned Japanese because I practice Judo and wanted to watch instructional videos from Japanese Judoka who were always winning national level tournaments.
When I lived in Ukraine I would visit a Georgian bakery a lot and they all said I sounded like a Georgian when I spoke Russian. So I decided to start learning Georgian! And it’s been awesome!!
I really wanna learn Feench just to spite my mom and my sister. They both said that i shouldnt learn it in school because they both regretted it about one to two weeks in.
I also started learning Ukrainian because my friend was learning Russian, so i was like “Well thats neat, I’m gonna learn Ukrainian now so we can be balanced!” And also because i kinda want to be able to at least sort of efficiently communicate with a refugee if i should ever come across one
I have a farm with an airbnb/tours etc and my guests are over the moon if I can speak even a handful of words in their language. I have a lot of Russian and French guests so I’ve been trying to learn some just for them lol.
Funny thing is I’ve also been learning Latin to help homeschool my sister’s kids and I’ve had two guests so far that spoke latin and were so excited to randomly run into another Latin speaker they practically jumped out of their skin. Never thought I’d bump into speakers of a dead language lol.
To be able to speak with a favorite actor at a convention in that person's native language. Granted, I was picking up another language for work, but there were two that were equally useful. I picked the one that had the metaphorical spoonful of sugar that makes the grammar go down.
i wanted to start learning because a very small part of a character's voicelines were in his language and instead of memorising those voicelines and what they meant i instead went for the "learn the transmaltions and drill them into your head" approach. then i got the addiciton of having to finish the language ^((and also a afeeling of "i'm not a fricking quitter!"))
I started learning Chinese, thinking that every other language I'd learn after that would be easy in comparison. I gave up around the same time I started to watch anime and thought it'd be efficient to learn Japanese since I was already getting lot of exposure and learning the Kanji would be like a stepping stool to learn Chinese later on
I want to leart especifically british english just becouse of a character. I have been learning english all my life (native spanish) but I realized it was american just a few years ago, and now I regret i didn't learn the british accent from a start. Now I want that accent and words just becouse they sound fancy, and my favorite character of all the world, Octavia Melody from my little pony, talks like that, lol.
I have a few reasons why I started learning my second language, and I just shared some with my tutor a few minutes ago.
Out of the several reasons, however, the weirdest one may be that I love how it sounds.
I have other reasons; reasons that may seem more reasonable than the aforementioned, but this must be the “weirdest” one out of all of them :).
I also get a bit of a high when I hit a fluent stride in my tutoring sessions; sometimes I say a sentence here or there that I had no problem conjuring and delivering; and when I say it, it still sounds good lol despite not being a native speaker
Knitting patterns. All the cool knitting designers are from Denmark and Norway. I started listening to podcasts and lessons to learn Danish first. It sounds like German, but not.
My reasons usually had something to do with music or other media. I had/have a fondness of music in foreign languages, and after a period of listening to the songs I start to want to know how to pronounce the lyrics and what they mean so I’m not just randomly singing gibberish. I also found that by understanding languages at at least a surface level I was more easily able to “take in” foreign films/series without having my eyes glued to the subtitles.
I was in college for 2 months at the end of 2020. I had moved from a rural area that had such bad internet options that I had to rely on my data plan, so the unlimited wifi in the place I was staying was mindblowing. The US election had left me feeling burnt out enough to want a distraction from doomscrolling on Twitter.
Then I happened upon a Swedish tongue twisters video from a creator I had recently started following, and I tried to match them. It was hard, and I giggled, and it felt good to giggle like it felt I hadn't in a while. Then I noticed that I'd already been following several Swedish creators, and it was their particular humor that had drawn me in.
Since I had a limited time with unlimited wifi, I binged Duolingo Swedish. I completed 80% of the tree in 50 days, even doing lessons while walking between classes.
I moved on to YouTube after that, and I have read a few novels and watched some movies, even had a few italki lessons. It's a part of my day to day social media life, now. It's not been super life changing, but any change has been for the better.
While I was learning English in grade school, my biggest motivator was the Barbie stop motion community on YouTube. The craft tutorials were amazing, and even though I never learned how to properly sew a doll dress, I ended up doing a bit of an immersion program on my own by interacting with everyone there.
I am currently studying French, and even though I'm now doing it for more decent reasons, I originally started taking lessons when I was 15 after developing a major crush on Antoine Griezmann (and, eventually, most of the French men's soccer squad).
Tried to learn Latin back in highschool so I could do witchcraft LOL.
Now I'm just trying to learn Korean to help my husband teach our kids so they can talk to their grandparents and great grandparents.
I was done with English and tired of french, tried a lot of languages here and there and i just didn't stuck to any so i said fuck this i am gonna choose a random language and just however it goes stuck with it. I asked a friend to tell me a cool language to learn.
So now i am learning Chinese, i have been learning it for two years. I am going to study in china in in one year. I honestly still haven't found any true motivation for the language but you know, sunken cost fallacy and all that i will just keep going because of it until I find an actual reason to justify having spent so much time on the language
I really liked Casa de Papel/Money Heist so trying to learn Spanish to watch it without subtitles.
(Not the only reason obv but I always resisted Spanish cause I speak and LOVE Italian and was always worried about my brain getting too confused about the similarities. Taking that risk now ;-))
I started learning Japanese to impress this girl I like.
SPOILER ALERT: it didn’t work, and now I just study because there’s a lot of games/manga that don’t make it to the west without fan translations/ patches.
My sister and I tried to learn german to communicate behind our parents backs because they used to use hindi to communicate behind our backs. We quit after a week because we weren’t familiar with germanic languages😂.
Im learning Chinese so that I'll have a good foundation for when I learn Japanese. I heard Japanese was hard so I wanted to make it easier for myself.
Then Chinese fried my brain too much and i needed a break so I wanted to pick up an easy side language... I chose Norwegian because it looked like it was just English with an accent and I thought that was funny.
Spanish - it was the only language my ex boyfriend spoke when we met
Korean - kpop lol I’m sick of not being able to understand what my biases are saying
Honestly? I admired the bravery of street preachers telling people about what J3sus did for everyone & wanted to do the same but in multiple languages ❤️
I love road trips, and I want to be able to say I've driven through all of North (and hopefully part of South) America. English only gets me the US and Canada. I've done most of the US and I'm planning a 2-3 month trip through the border provinces for Spring 2024.
Spring 2025? The rest of North America.
I don't know if it's a weird reason but I haven't met anyone that wants to roadtrip through Central America with me so I'm going to assume it's not a common goal.
Because everyone quits learning for whatever bullshit reason they fake and i just want to shove it in their face. Outwardly i just be like, oh it's been 7 continues years. Inside I'm thinking...you could have done it to you dumbass
I wanted to learn Hawaiian because I am able to speak anything that isn't English. I hate America, so speaking only a language that isn't English would be a dream come true for me. However, there weren't enough resources for me to learn it, so I settled with Toki Pona. Maybe when more resources are published, I'll learn it.
Surprised I haven't seen this comment yet but basically to increase my dating pool.
Two of my languages had no real practical purpose in my daily life being in the US -- Russian and Portuguese. Also I didn't travel much until my adult years, so I made the decision to start learning them without any firsthand experience of either culture.
My initial impetus began after I came across [this article](https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20091112_beatifulpeople/). It basically tried a (questionably) more objective approach to answering the question: "Which country has the most beautiful people?"
They looked at statistics from a dating site called beautifulpeople(.com). Its somewhat elitist purpose is to create a place where only good looking people meet one another. The way you were allowed to join is by getting voted on by already existing members. Not sure how the first member ever just spontaneously decided they were good looking enough to initiate the club without anyone to vote on them, but I digress.
The countries with the highest acceptance rates were generally the Nords, Russia and Brazil. It was my undertanding most people in Scandinavia already spoke fluent English, plus there was a massive differential between male and female acceptance rates in Russia in particular. Sort of a buyer's market for guys, if you will. I also tend to enjoy "less westernized" countries for their culture and humor.
I also remember finding it hilarious that the UK was voted amongst the ugliest -- the best looking people in England do often seem to be the immigrants. Opposite of the Nords, oddly enough.
Bill Burr tells a funny story where a Swedish taxi driver explained to him that this was because when the Vikings would raid other countries, they didn't just take the best goods and best farm animals, they also took the best looking women. Talk about an L. My land AND my girlfriend?
Looking back at this list so many years later, wondering if I should take a course or two in Norwegian.
Started learning Brazilian Portuguese because I befriended some Brazilians in the fandom for a weird anime and wanted to connect with people more! 2 years later, I got to visit them in Brazil, and while I wouldn't call myself fluent at ALL (I feel like a spacey toddler a lot lol) I can have basic convos with customers at my work sometimes, and I've chatted with tourists too...it makes me very happy, though I feel bad for not being able to practice as much
French I guess is funny bc I was never interested in learning it before, but I got into some medieval history and I keep getting recommended French papers on academia.edu and also I want to watch some old shows with no translation..idk how useful what I've learned is to actually say in real life tho lol
Read a research paper on alzheimer’s prevention, showing a relationship between known languages and first symptoms of the disease. Realized that if i studied diligently i could essentially add more (lucid) years to my life. edit: paper in question: Bialystok et al. 2013 Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain
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I caught my grandmother doing a crossword on the toilet when I was really young. When I asked her about it, she told me it was to keep her mind working. To my understanding, she was still doing them—possibly still on the toilet—when she died when I was 25.
I'm not the only one! For as long as I can remember my grandma has kept a stack of puzzle books by the toilet. Crossword, word search, books with a variety of puzzles, sudoku, etc. Anecdotally, between stuff like that intentionally trying to stay mentally sharp and her physically active lifestyle, she's 87 with no signs of stopping (obviously her mental capacities have declined because she's nearly 90 years old, but she's going strong). It's nice hearing in this thread that language studying can help us later in life. I started because I felt like I should pick up something productive to do, but this is all great to hear.
My grandma has been doing math forever... and when playing cards, she's the one doing the tallying. Probably the fastest of all of us, going strong past 85. And yes, she's doing crosswords and Sudoku as well.
I never thought of just straight up doing math to keep your mind sharp. I’m going to start doing that. Tell her I said thanks.
She was an accountant for most of her life. Growing up in a world without computers, doing sums is second nature to her. She just never stopped. And yes, she also does keep track of her supermarket purchases to avoid surprises when paying and has both her income and expenses under control.
I teach developmental psychology and one thing I emphasize to students is that elderly people losing their cognitive skills is actually pretty rare. Obviously your grandmother has kept her sharpness. It’s all about using it.
Encourage people to do their own research on this topic, many reputable publications contest the efficacy of this protocol and there are clear conflicts of interest involved in the research. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/05/417431/pricey-protocol-not-proven-prevent-or-reverse-alzheimers-says-ucsf-neurologist https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377549/ I don't think there's any question that eating healthy and exercising can help stave off mental decline, but I also don't think it's necessary to pay $1399 for access to a particular company's advice, tests, etc.
Mind sharing the paper?
Just go to Google scholar and look up language learning and Alzheimer’s prevention
Studied Russian in college so I could take a message if my roommate's mother called while she was out. OK, that wasn't the _only_ reason, but it really was a factor.
That’s so nice of you!
Calls from Russia to the US were a big deal back then!
I started learning Dutch on Duolingo because it was kinda cool. My dad told my grandmother (who's Dutch) that I'm learning it!Then grandmother dies and I feel pressured to continue as I can't exactly tell her that I've stopped
De eerste zin geldt bijna ook voor mij, ma godverdomme. Kan je nog wat Nederlands?
Mijn Nederlands is steeds niet zo goed :/ ik heb een slechte uitspraak, en ik maak veel fouten. Maar- het is beter dan wat was het. How vind je de taal? Het is moeilijk ook, maar leer je het graag?
I have a Japanese friend who one day randomly heard a song by Seweryn Krajewski, and having never heard Polish before, decided there and then that she wants to learn this intriguing language. Over 20 years later, you could never tell she wasn't born and raised in Poland, neither by seeing her write Polish, nor by hearing her speak, which in and of itself is an extremely impressive feat. Funnily enough, she's never been to Poland.
Buy her a ticket maybe? XD
Usually small crushes on various people. Not in the sense of "I will learn their language to impress them" but "They are cool so their language is cool by association" :D
Lol. I did the same thing. I know people frown on it but even the tiniest crushes provide so much motivation.
Same haha! The guy I had a crush on motivated me to really want to learn Chinese, and he wasn't even a native speaker, just someone who was super enthusiastic about learning the language himself!
I don’t know if it’s considered funny but women, the reason is always women.
I learned 3 different languages because of 3 different dudes. 😂 I feel ya.
Same. People may not want to admit it, but you literally expand your dating pool by learning another language (and ideally the culture).
which language do you learn?
I'm assuming sign, german and russian
In a book I read as a child someone made a comment that their teacher was extremely well educated because he was reading a book in French and enjoying it. I wanted to make the impression of being well educated too after growing up so I convinced my mom to sign me up for French lessons, even though I was already learning English and German. Years later I realised that the comment from the book was probably about reading a book in a foreign language in general and there's nothing special about French, but there's still a part of me that feels it's more special when I read a book in French than in English or German.
I'm too scared to learn French, honestly. Every time I come across a weird, unpronounceable word in English or German, it's always a French import word.
I learnt Japanese to at least N3 to be able to read visual novels that weren't translated into other languages yet.
That’s what I did, but with obscure manga!
Unrelated but I've never seen a Norwegian-Brazilian before lol I've met a Swiss-Brazilian tho
I feel like we’re everywhere, but then again frequency bias lol
Isn't that the most common reason to learn Japanese?
I think manga/anime is a more common reason.
What's N3?
Those are the levels of proficiency in the japanese language, it ranges from N5 to N1, N5 being a compared to A1 and N1 being C2. Which is strange cause the guy said that he learned japanese to an N3 level but has an A2 flair on japanese, N3 would be more like B1.5.
Actually JLPT that is the exam he is refering measures indeed from N5 to N1 where N1 is the highest, but the requirements difer from the european measurement system A1-C2, the JLPT only measures your ability to read and hear, they do not require you to write or speak and the expected N1 is equal to a high school student knowledge, unlike C2 where you would expect a native college student comprehension probably. So while a C2 would be expected to comunicate almost perfectly in every scenario without any issue, a N1 might not be able to but a simple phrase together (altought unlikely). The hardest part of JLPT is the amount of kanji and vocabulary you know tbh. Just for reference : [https://cotoacademy.com/app/uploads/2019/08/How-Long-does-it-take-to-Pass-JLPT.png](https://cotoacademy.com/app/uploads/2019/08/How-Long-does-it-take-to-Pass-JLPT.png)
Thx for the response, i didn't know about it. I have some time learning Japanese but i've never actually taken a test, so i just thought it was the exact same as the English measurements.
Yes, this is a case of deterioration - it was in \~2012-2016, and since that time, I have forgotten most of Japanese. Right now I'm relearning German, and after that, I plan to relearn Japanese.
Could have been a case of detoriation.
Ohhh yeah, you're right.
I did german in school and was trash at it, I got F and E mostly (E is a grade where I’m from). Then I started listening to rammstein and after a month i was really good, so I decided to continue
I took an independent study class in German in high school because of Rammstein too. 1 semester wasn't enough to be fluent, but I learned enough to understand the songs and order drinks in Germany when I visited! And 15 years later I got to see them in concert. I hope you have too!
I've met many Swedes who gave that as the specific reason for chosing German in school. Not sure how well it worked out for most of them, though.
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😂
As a teenager, I read in some random newspaper that **Spanish** is the "happiest" language to speak because the combination of sounds in Spanish words somehow makes your brain experience positive emotions. It sure made an impression, so once I was satisfied with my level of English, the choice of the next language was rather obvious. I don't even know if it was a legit study or just a load of bull, never really cared to check it to not get disappointed lol, but learning Spanish was one of the best decisions in my life, no matter what the science says.
>but learning Spanish was one of the best decisions in my life Care to expand on that? I'd love to hear more!
If I had to guess: 1) Job offer 2) cool travel story 3) Colombian girl
(and u/FuzzySilverSloth) Lol, yeah, almost spot-on. Actually, a mixture of all three. Once I felt confident enough speaking Spanish (as I thought back then lol), I started looking for ways to try to live in a Spanish-speaking country, and after some arduous searching, I landed a job in Colombia. When the contract ended, I decided to backpack around South America, now that I made it that far. Ended up visiting almost every country on that continent. Also, while I was on the move, I met my partner there (not a local, though). So yeah, as you can see, learning Spanish sure brought me a ton of positive emotions, so in a way, the article didn't lie lol
It could be legit, cuz let me tell you: one of the main reasons I love the language is how it sounds, the sounds do make me feel good!!
Oh, absolutely. I love the sound of Spanish!
I took a Russian lit class in college and, when I ordered my books, one bookseller accidentally sent me an original Russian copy of Onegin rather than the English translation I ordered. He was very apologetic and accommodating, and overnighted the correct edition to me. When I asked if he could send me a shipping label to return the other book, he told me to just keep it. It bugged me so much to own a book I could not read that, after two years of getting annoyed every time I saw it on my shelf, I gave in and added Russian to my Duolingo
What is the level of your Russian now?
Still Very Bad I can’t read my Onegin yet, but I’m gonna get there!
Went to an air show as a kid. There was an airman there who was set up at a table who was transliterating names into Arabic. This made me realize that there were so many cool ways to write stuff. That's some tinder. Was also doing martial arts at the time, so my mother picked up a book 'Lóng is a Dragon' which showed different hanzi and how they evolved from pictures. Spark. In 6th Grade, my history teacher was also a language nerd, and he let me borrow some of his language materials when he found out I liked languages. Whoosh! 🔥 Edit: Additional thought afterward: I did end up going to DLIFLC, the same military language school that that airman likely went to for Arabic (I went for Russian).
My friends were consrantly saying Arabic phrases such as "mashallah" and "inshallah" so I decided to touch on a bit of Arabic to out-funny them
I should probably do that too
I started learning Turkish as I love Turkish cinema and it is nice to watch it with the original language.
I watched The Three Body Problem (Chinese) earlier this year and I found it frustrating that I couldn't understand anything they were saying. So hopefully by the time season 2 comes out I'll be able to understand some of it.
The books are great fyi
I know, i read them twice 🙂
I initially learned Brazilian Portuguese to understand my then-fellow teenage girls talking about my favorite celebrity. I realized these girls are fucking hilarious, I loved how they mixed English and Portuguese together, and I kept at it.
I started learning Spanish many years ago because ... I opened google translate and the default setting the app was set on was English to Spanish. So I thought why not.
I started learning Dutch at 18, after four years of high school German, because I thought Dutch sounded cooler and I already had a head start. That’s my weirdest reason and it’s not that weird. (Incidentally, a solid 18 years of study later, I’m four days into my second visit to Amsterdam and I still can’t be bothered to speak it, even though I’m really fucking good at it!)
Moet je wel doen want je klinkt me meer voorbereid dan ik toen ik in België en Nederland was. Werd bijna nooit aangesproken int Engels.
To finish an anime that was canceled and the light novel was never translated over to English. I at least googled the ending to see what happened but it was so long ago and unpopular that only a handful of people actually read it but they forgot the ending so the forum discussing it didn’t even have a clear answer and no one remembers what happened. I’m learning Japanese in hopes of reading the series and finally getting an ending after a decade of curiosity,
That's a really cool reason! What was the series called?
It was called Nanana’s Buried Treasure. It has 13 volumes but no matter what websites I go to I can’t even find the original digital copies in Japanese but here’s to hoping I can find them one day.
Me too. Specifically with the goal of finishing a light novel. Lol
Hæhæ men studerte du fransk i Norge eller Brasil da??
borge 👍
Brasil + Norge = Borge?
Yes the spelling was definitely intentional on my part,,
Honestly? The John Wick movies. Watching John communicate with various people all over the world in various languages is just a cool skill to have; even if not fluent but at least knowing enough to get by.
Keep in mind that the russian spoken in those movies is usually horrible. NFKRZ did a video on it on youtube.
I know of someone who learnt English so they could read sexually explicit romance novels. They didn't really have them in their language.
I started learning Finnish because someone gave me a Wikipedia article to read out loud for the laughs and I somehow nailed the pronunciation.
Honestly, I kinda want to learn Dzongkha (the official language of Bhutan) just because there are so few resources to learn it.
I signed up for Latin and Ancient Greek classes at my school because I found out about Hadrian and Antinous and thought: "mmm, Roman gay dramas, sounds fun".
ADHD random hyperfixation that turned into an Autism special interest.
I had bad grades for French in school and my spite about that is the #1 reason I'm learning it.
Finnish: I enjoy Finnish rock/metal music. Hebrew: I love its alphabet. Hebrew calligraphy is simply beautiful.
The woman I want to marry speaks Russian, so I started learning Russian. I study Japanese (from time to time) because I can't be bothered to read manga scanlations that are translated like ass and it comes out 3-4 days before the official release.
I started learning Serbo-Croat based purely on being fascinated with 90s Yugoslavian war songs. Bojna Čavoglave, Crni Bombarder and Panteri are annoyingly catchy.
Izaberi jedan, srpsko-hrvatski nije jezik.
it's a language with multiple dialects (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin)
No, officially they are four separate languages that are mutually intelligible. To refer to them collectively you can use ‘BCMS’, although in practice most people from the region use some form of ‘Naš’ (ours) to refer to them collectively. Serbian is an official language Croatian is an official language Bosnian is an official language Montenegrin is an official language Within those languages there are multiple dialects. Yet while there are ‘dialect-like’ differences between the languages (Lj/L difference for example) - the languages are not themselves dialects of an ‘umbrella language’. There is just an ‘umbrella term’ to refer to four mutually intelligible languages (BCMS …or colloquially Naš/Naški for native speakers). If someone thought they were learning ‘serbo-Croatian’ but was learning in the Latin alphabet and using Lj then they’d be learning Croatian. If they thought they were learning ‘Serbo-Croatian’ and using Cyrillic and omitting Lj then they’d be learning Serbian. If they were learning in both Latinic and Cyrillic and learning the different options in each language for certain words - then they’d be learning Serbian *&* Croatian.
Follow up question: So which should one learn to be understood by the most people? Or does it not matter?
It doesn’t really matter. If you want to be able to understand all texts from all the countries, it would maybe help to learn the Cyrillic alphabet - but that shouldn’t take you more than a few weeks to get into your head. It’s probably best to pick language resources for just one as a beginner because it’ll help with consistency in your writing. But as you progress it can be useful to use resources from various ones, to help you learn to recognise the differences.
Hey jackass tell me more about my own language. Ur just wrong
You are, it was literally called serbo-croatian during yugoslavia, literally anyone that learned it during that time says they learnt serbo-croatian And if we’re being honest, other then a dozen or so words + accents its the same language
It is the same language. But its either Serbian or Croatian depending on who you talk to. Serbo-croatian doesnt exist anymore
I wanted to play an ace attorney game that seemed like it was impossible for it to ever get an official localization. there was a fan one, but i could only get through 30 minutes before realizing i really wanted to experience the game in its mother tongue. Then an official localization was announced before i was ready to play 😭 but i love a lot of things that come from japanese media so my hard work isn’t a total waste ! I still would like to play it in japanese eventually!
High school classmates made fun of me because of my English pronunciation,specially the word "cool" (I'm a Brazilian Portuguese speaker and, if pronounced wrong, cool becomes a swearing). Proceeded to not only learn the language but to teach it to one of their mom's.
They all sound beautiful. Even the rough, aggressive languages.
I picked up learning Greek because a friend of mine started learning Japanese. I don't need Greek but it just became more interesting the more I learnt
Είσαι αλάνι
Sadly, I don't know what that means. I began learning Greek a few weeks ago
It roughly means you are cool, although αλάνι doesn't have a direct translation to English as far as I know.
I searched αλάνι and i got "street urchin" from Wiktionary. I'm not sure about this tho
I believe it had this meaning in the past but now it has changed. You can use it with a positive meaning in informal speech with a friend for example. Edit: Check this for an analysis, it is in greek but I believe it will be generally understandable if you translate the page with google. https://ti-einai.gr/alani/
Google translate says that it means “you are a fool” lol.
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My parents have been forcing me to learn Arabic since I was 4 😭 still can only recognize a few letters not even exaggerating. Who knew drugs were the way
There’s a book I used for it called Arabic Script Hacking. Learned the alphabet in like 2 days, then watched a youtube video to really get the difference between ط and ظ. I’ll admit, غ is still tricky for me to pronounce but I’m getting there
Not the only reason, but one of the reasons I like learning Korean is that it's the first time I've had to work hard to learn something.
Learning georgian because I have a friend who's from Georgia and I want to talk to her mom. Also russian because her mom speaks Russian but my friend doesn't so we can feel superior
I was playing a lot of CS:GO and I was really into slavic memes at the age of 12, so I thought it will be funny to understand Russian players rage Since then I don’t even log in my steam account for years now
Chinese for Jay Chou and JJ Lin, both wonderful singers, Russian for my aunt/Ic3peak, Thai so I can order perfectly at a Thai Restaurant I've been going to since I was like 4. Mostly music lol.
i've since stopped but i learned a bit of norwegian coz SKAM
Studying Polish because I want to know what my partner is saying about me to his mother on the phone.
I used to listen to Korean news livestreams while studying because I wanted to listen to something but found music to be distracting, so I chose Korean news livestreams since I didnt understand it back then, plus the fact that it was easily available on Youtube. Some of the commercials played there were just so weird to me that I wanted to understand what they were all about, and so I started to learn Korean just for that. I also picked up Japanese about 2 years before I started Korean, and it was literally just because I felt bored during my summer vacation. I chose Japanese since I thought it would've been easy to learn given that I speak Mandarin as my native language.
If I know German, I won't have to tolerate English in my entertainment very often.
Breton to read a Wikipedia article.
Watched an episode of '24' (American tv show) in which this character was speaking Serbian. Next thing I know, I was downloading material to learn the language.
I started learning Ukrainian as an act of bearing witness.
My main reason for learning Italian was my interest in organized crime and wanting to understand how the mafia truly works. Now I'm actually an antimafia activist and knowing Italian is super useful because a lot of sources, books and articles on this topic are in Italian. So far I've never met anyone who studied Italian for that reason and I'm always worried that it might come across as weird. Whenever I'm asked why I chose Italian I tell a socially more acceptable version, for example that I simply love the country which is obviously true as well but only half of the story lol.
Started learning Italian to sound like Mario
I learned Romanian for three months because whole scrolling through Duolingo language options I thought the flag looked like the pansexual flag, and that was what I identified as back then. Now I found two target languages I love grammatically, been learning for more than a year. Fun story of why I DIDN'T learn French. I'm Chinese, and in Chinese, language names were translated as first sound syllables's closest sounding common Chinese word. Like English is "yin languages" Deutsch is "de language" French is "fa language" as patterned, but the common Chinese character they chose also means law, and as rebellious kid, I didn't like the law, and decided I was never going to learn a "law" language
I stumbled upon a chart online, that showed the “average amount of hours a typical anglophone monoglot will spend on x language to reach B1 level,” or something like that. Anyway, it was sorted from most difficult (for English speakers) to least difficult. I don’t remember the exact values (I’m making them up here), but it read something like this: - Mandarin: 10,000 hours - Russian: 8,000 hours - German: 6,500 hours - French: 5,000 hours - Spanish: 4,500 hours - … - … - Esperanto: 500 hours The exact values aside, most of the numbers were large, but Esperanto, at the very bottom of the list, had a ridiculously, unbelievably small number. So I said to myself: “Bullshit. No way.” Then I thought about it. Then I checked to see if Duolingo had an Esperanto course. They did. So then I said to myself: “We’ll see about that. Challenge accepted.” It turns out, by the way, the chart was roughly correct, at least for Esperanto. I did pick it up ridiculously quickly. That’s probably weirder than my reason for learning Latin, which is basically, “it’s cool and I want to.”
I'm currently doing Russian using pure CI to experience ALG for myself. I'm being disciplined about never translating or researching grammar. It will be a useful language for me, but the main reason is just the experience. I'm still only up to 40 hours after more than a year but it's fun to feel my brain working things out. I made a CI video course in Toki Pona for people to get this experience in the shortest possible time. But unfortunately I can't use it because I made it. If you have the time and you want to do this with a "real language" Dreaming Spanish is very good.
Got fed up of British and US content on Netflix during lockdown
Learning ukrainian for 1 the burst of happiness when I can recognize a language And 2 so I can read harry potter for the millionth time but pretend it's a different book
Learning Arabic because God told me to. Not that weird if you’re religious. Extremely weird if you aren’t.
I had a couple of languages on my bucket list that I thought looked cool so I put them all on a wheel and whichever one it landed on I'd start learning. It landed on japanese so bam I started learning Japanese
I’m interested in languages in general, and had already had a lot of classes in Spanish, (and one in German as a filler elective). For my official third language, (don’t count German because I didn’t have time to take other classes and didn’t keep up with it) decided to try one I’d heard was hard just for the challenge and went with Japanese. Being honest with myself, a petty part of me in the back of my mind probably picked that over others because a girl I dated in high school (and dumped me) was trying to learn it and as far as I know never got any good at it. To be fair though I looked at Chinese first and didn’t think I’d be able to differentiate the tones well enough to learn it.
I read something about 80% of military kids knowing a second language and I didn't want to be in the minority who don't 😭
Learned Japanese because I practice Judo and wanted to watch instructional videos from Japanese Judoka who were always winning national level tournaments.
When I lived in Ukraine I would visit a Georgian bakery a lot and they all said I sounded like a Georgian when I spoke Russian. So I decided to start learning Georgian! And it’s been awesome!!
I really wanna learn Feench just to spite my mom and my sister. They both said that i shouldnt learn it in school because they both regretted it about one to two weeks in. I also started learning Ukrainian because my friend was learning Russian, so i was like “Well thats neat, I’m gonna learn Ukrainian now so we can be balanced!” And also because i kinda want to be able to at least sort of efficiently communicate with a refugee if i should ever come across one
Mine are pretty basic... Japanese because anime ofc Norwegian because of my bf (On to-do list) Russian because I LOVE the way the language sounds
I have a farm with an airbnb/tours etc and my guests are over the moon if I can speak even a handful of words in their language. I have a lot of Russian and French guests so I’ve been trying to learn some just for them lol. Funny thing is I’ve also been learning Latin to help homeschool my sister’s kids and I’ve had two guests so far that spoke latin and were so excited to randomly run into another Latin speaker they practically jumped out of their skin. Never thought I’d bump into speakers of a dead language lol.
I began studying finnish just because of Moomins. I liked the pronunciation so much I didn't care about the rumored difficulty.
i havent started yet, but id like to learn Italian because of Vento Aureo (Jojo) oh yeah and im part Italian
A dare.
I'm learning Arabic because I'm weirdly obsessed with Arabic dubbing
Ancient greek because I loved *The secret history.*
To be able to speak with a favorite actor at a convention in that person's native language. Granted, I was picking up another language for work, but there were two that were equally useful. I picked the one that had the metaphorical spoonful of sugar that makes the grammar go down.
i wanted to start learning because a very small part of a character's voicelines were in his language and instead of memorising those voicelines and what they meant i instead went for the "learn the transmaltions and drill them into your head" approach. then i got the addiciton of having to finish the language ^((and also a afeeling of "i'm not a fricking quitter!"))
I started learning Chinese, thinking that every other language I'd learn after that would be easy in comparison. I gave up around the same time I started to watch anime and thought it'd be efficient to learn Japanese since I was already getting lot of exposure and learning the Kanji would be like a stepping stool to learn Chinese later on
I want to leart especifically british english just becouse of a character. I have been learning english all my life (native spanish) but I realized it was american just a few years ago, and now I regret i didn't learn the british accent from a start. Now I want that accent and words just becouse they sound fancy, and my favorite character of all the world, Octavia Melody from my little pony, talks like that, lol.
learned german because minecraft
More like mein Kraft, amirite?
ja lol
I have a few reasons why I started learning my second language, and I just shared some with my tutor a few minutes ago. Out of the several reasons, however, the weirdest one may be that I love how it sounds. I have other reasons; reasons that may seem more reasonable than the aforementioned, but this must be the “weirdest” one out of all of them :). I also get a bit of a high when I hit a fluent stride in my tutoring sessions; sometimes I say a sentence here or there that I had no problem conjuring and delivering; and when I say it, it still sounds good lol despite not being a native speaker
A friend of mine learnt Russian to talk shit over VoIP in Dota2
Knitting patterns. All the cool knitting designers are from Denmark and Norway. I started listening to podcasts and lessons to learn Danish first. It sounds like German, but not.
My reasons usually had something to do with music or other media. I had/have a fondness of music in foreign languages, and after a period of listening to the songs I start to want to know how to pronounce the lyrics and what they mean so I’m not just randomly singing gibberish. I also found that by understanding languages at at least a surface level I was more easily able to “take in” foreign films/series without having my eyes glued to the subtitles.
I was in college for 2 months at the end of 2020. I had moved from a rural area that had such bad internet options that I had to rely on my data plan, so the unlimited wifi in the place I was staying was mindblowing. The US election had left me feeling burnt out enough to want a distraction from doomscrolling on Twitter. Then I happened upon a Swedish tongue twisters video from a creator I had recently started following, and I tried to match them. It was hard, and I giggled, and it felt good to giggle like it felt I hadn't in a while. Then I noticed that I'd already been following several Swedish creators, and it was their particular humor that had drawn me in. Since I had a limited time with unlimited wifi, I binged Duolingo Swedish. I completed 80% of the tree in 50 days, even doing lessons while walking between classes. I moved on to YouTube after that, and I have read a few novels and watched some movies, even had a few italki lessons. It's a part of my day to day social media life, now. It's not been super life changing, but any change has been for the better.
While I was learning English in grade school, my biggest motivator was the Barbie stop motion community on YouTube. The craft tutorials were amazing, and even though I never learned how to properly sew a doll dress, I ended up doing a bit of an immersion program on my own by interacting with everyone there. I am currently studying French, and even though I'm now doing it for more decent reasons, I originally started taking lessons when I was 15 after developing a major crush on Antoine Griezmann (and, eventually, most of the French men's soccer squad).
Tried to learn Latin back in highschool so I could do witchcraft LOL. Now I'm just trying to learn Korean to help my husband teach our kids so they can talk to their grandparents and great grandparents.
I was done with English and tired of french, tried a lot of languages here and there and i just didn't stuck to any so i said fuck this i am gonna choose a random language and just however it goes stuck with it. I asked a friend to tell me a cool language to learn. So now i am learning Chinese, i have been learning it for two years. I am going to study in china in in one year. I honestly still haven't found any true motivation for the language but you know, sunken cost fallacy and all that i will just keep going because of it until I find an actual reason to justify having spent so much time on the language
I really liked Casa de Papel/Money Heist so trying to learn Spanish to watch it without subtitles. (Not the only reason obv but I always resisted Spanish cause I speak and LOVE Italian and was always worried about my brain getting too confused about the similarities. Taking that risk now ;-))
I started learning Japanese to impress this girl I like. SPOILER ALERT: it didn’t work, and now I just study because there’s a lot of games/manga that don’t make it to the west without fan translations/ patches.
My sister and I tried to learn german to communicate behind our parents backs because they used to use hindi to communicate behind our backs. We quit after a week because we weren’t familiar with germanic languages😂.
I like learning and traveling, also it helps with your memory so it really helped me with my learning disability
Started learning high valyrian after watching GoT😂
Im learning Chinese so that I'll have a good foundation for when I learn Japanese. I heard Japanese was hard so I wanted to make it easier for myself. Then Chinese fried my brain too much and i needed a break so I wanted to pick up an easy side language... I chose Norwegian because it looked like it was just English with an accent and I thought that was funny.
I just want to learn Japanese to watch anime/read manga/listen to j-rock I have made my life complicated
Spanish - it was the only language my ex boyfriend spoke when we met Korean - kpop lol I’m sick of not being able to understand what my biases are saying
Russian i just want to understand the russian-speaking part of the gd community
Honestly? I admired the bravery of street preachers telling people about what J3sus did for everyone & wanted to do the same but in multiple languages ❤️
Tbh, you don’t have to have any reasons or big or non shallow reasons. Self enlightenment is self enlightenment
I think it's just meant to be a fun discussion. Plus not everyone considers language learning to be about self enlightenment...
I love road trips, and I want to be able to say I've driven through all of North (and hopefully part of South) America. English only gets me the US and Canada. I've done most of the US and I'm planning a 2-3 month trip through the border provinces for Spring 2024. Spring 2025? The rest of North America. I don't know if it's a weird reason but I haven't met anyone that wants to roadtrip through Central America with me so I'm going to assume it's not a common goal.
r/languagelearningjerk
Germany /Speak like hit$ler
Because everyone quits learning for whatever bullshit reason they fake and i just want to shove it in their face. Outwardly i just be like, oh it's been 7 continues years. Inside I'm thinking...you could have done it to you dumbass
I wanted to learn Hawaiian because I am able to speak anything that isn't English. I hate America, so speaking only a language that isn't English would be a dream come true for me. However, there weren't enough resources for me to learn it, so I settled with Toki Pona. Maybe when more resources are published, I'll learn it.
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Surprised I haven't seen this comment yet but basically to increase my dating pool. Two of my languages had no real practical purpose in my daily life being in the US -- Russian and Portuguese. Also I didn't travel much until my adult years, so I made the decision to start learning them without any firsthand experience of either culture. My initial impetus began after I came across [this article](https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20091112_beatifulpeople/). It basically tried a (questionably) more objective approach to answering the question: "Which country has the most beautiful people?" They looked at statistics from a dating site called beautifulpeople(.com). Its somewhat elitist purpose is to create a place where only good looking people meet one another. The way you were allowed to join is by getting voted on by already existing members. Not sure how the first member ever just spontaneously decided they were good looking enough to initiate the club without anyone to vote on them, but I digress. The countries with the highest acceptance rates were generally the Nords, Russia and Brazil. It was my undertanding most people in Scandinavia already spoke fluent English, plus there was a massive differential between male and female acceptance rates in Russia in particular. Sort of a buyer's market for guys, if you will. I also tend to enjoy "less westernized" countries for their culture and humor. I also remember finding it hilarious that the UK was voted amongst the ugliest -- the best looking people in England do often seem to be the immigrants. Opposite of the Nords, oddly enough. Bill Burr tells a funny story where a Swedish taxi driver explained to him that this was because when the Vikings would raid other countries, they didn't just take the best goods and best farm animals, they also took the best looking women. Talk about an L. My land AND my girlfriend? Looking back at this list so many years later, wondering if I should take a course or two in Norwegian.
As a half Norwegian half Brazilian girl, lmaooooo. Did not know this, but that’s funny lol.
Started learning Brazilian Portuguese because I befriended some Brazilians in the fandom for a weird anime and wanted to connect with people more! 2 years later, I got to visit them in Brazil, and while I wouldn't call myself fluent at ALL (I feel like a spacey toddler a lot lol) I can have basic convos with customers at my work sometimes, and I've chatted with tourists too...it makes me very happy, though I feel bad for not being able to practice as much French I guess is funny bc I was never interested in learning it before, but I got into some medieval history and I keep getting recommended French papers on academia.edu and also I want to watch some old shows with no translation..idk how useful what I've learned is to actually say in real life tho lol