Ask Lemmy

40750 readers

764 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world

7) No Hit-and-Run questions.

Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

Bluetreefrog@lemmy.world

Asudox@lemmy.world

lemmy_bot@lemmy.world

beefbaby182@lemmy.world

ModeratorCan@lemmy.world

neidu3@sh.itjust.works

asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev

candyman337@lemmy.world

candyman337@sh.itjust.works

Multilingual people of Lemmy who learned a language (or multiple) as adults, how did you do it? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 day ago by user224@lemmy.sdf.org to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I wish we as society could simply have one language to overcome language barriers, but that's more of a content for my daydreaming.

I often encounter issues due to language barriers.
Mainly with 2 languages.

Since the start of war, I've been encountering lots of Ukrainians I can't really speak with. Especially when I was on a dorm, where they were a great majority.
Not that I tend to talk with people, but I felt weird after a while.
Probably like someone who doesn't speak Spanish in the US (at least I assume that's fairly common over there).

And now searching for a job, I found many companies want you to know German.
Which I also encountered as "would've been useful now" a few times.

Seems like I should know an answer to this, as English isn't my first language, but I have no fucking idea how I picked it up. I never made any serious attempt (i.e.: studying for more than a week) to learn it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Kaligalis@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I started by reading the English WWW and then participating in English forums. All video games had synchronization in my native language. But I started to deliberately play them in English with subtitles. And then I started to watch more and more videos and movies in English (with subtitles when available). Now I only need subtitles occasionally to offset unclear speech.

Starting with text makes looking up unknown words practical. Games most often let you take your time to read text. Cutscenes can be problematic early on. But games often support setting different languages for audio and text/subtitles.
Being in an environment speaking the new language would probably be the fastest way.

What did not help at all was having English taught in School. Memorizing vocabulary and working through artificial text book did not work at all for me. Only when the internet entered my life years later, did I actually get a hang of the language.

P.S.: English is the universal language right now. Even Chinese children learn it in school. I think, it's possible to get away with only speaking English in basically any industrialized country. Not everyone will be able to understand you. But there will always be someone who can translate.