I’ve studied it off and on since high school, but really struggle with speak. I get anxious about the times and accidentally saying something nonsensical. But we had a family show up that didn’t speak English, and I was able to do more than crank out 谢谢。
¡Yo estudie Espanol para una pequeno momento en DuoLingo! (Muy pequeno, lmao) I stopped when the whole AI thing started. I swapped to Language Transfer, but never actually picked it back up :-/. How’d you go about learning Spanish?
I’ll definitely look into mandarin tutor.
I’ve been learning Spanish with Language Transfer too! I’ve only just recently completed all 90 lessons of it. I’ve also been watching Dreaming Spanish to get more of that juicy comprehensible input.
I’ve been very bad with my lessons. I did really well with Duolingo because it made it kinda competitive (which is odd in itself because I don’t really like to compete), but when Language Transfer told me to take it at my own pace, I really took that to heart. I think I’ve done 3 lessons in as many months… :-/
I could make excuses, but the reality of it is that I just find other things to do. Been burning it up on Fusion 360 for the past several weeks now - designing all sorts of stuff to bolt onto my fourwheeler fenders and handlebars. I was actually about to go make an account and upload everything to Thingiverse so that they might do someone else some good when I decided to check my Lemmy notifications, lol
https://www.thingiverse.com/oldmanbombin/designs 👍
I’ll upload more tomorrow, but here’s what I got uploaded before the sleep took me.
I did the LT lessons at 1 lesson a day, sometimes 2. Once I even did 4 while walking back home at midnight lol.
Cool thingiverse you got there! Maybe it’s time for me to buy a 3D printing machine though I’ll probably just borrow it from my friend haha.
I had planned to watch a lot of (easy) videos in Spanish, but this week Stardew Valley got the better of me and I have been hooked onto it the past week. What I’m doing is setting the game language as Spanish. I have to put in a lot of effort to understand the in-game dialog (written, not spoken) and look up a lot of words, but it has actually been quite a good experience and I’ve learned quite a bit of new words. The cognates with English words really do help a lot.
Did you start learning before you met your wife, or after? That lesson schedule sounds like a man on a mission 😂
Thanks :-) I’ve got several more moderately useless things to put up there, my eyes just started burning last night and I had to hit the hay. 3d printing is fun, but it can be very frustrating. If you’re trying to decide, I’d say make sure you can put it in a place that doesn’t experience much fluctuation in temperature, preferably with no humidity (or at least on the bottom half of the percentage range). Also, tighten your belts and level your bed. And don’t let cats near it. And keep your filament in a drybox of some kind - I keep mine in a lunchbox with a bunch of salt and silica packets.
When it comes to reading romance languages, I’ve been blessed with some innate ability to mostly decipher the overall meaning. I don’t know if it’s a lifetime of picking things up subconsciously or what, but I can usually look at a sentence and have a feeling for what it means. Speaking and writing is a completely different story. Maybe we should combine ourselves like Station from Bill and Ted in order to make one massive, hairy, language interpreter.
Lol I don’t have a wife or a husband (nor am I in a relationship, for that matter)! I simply sort of found the lessons fun so I felt the urge to do them. It’s not even a habit thing where there’s a fixed schedule and that I don’t feel comfortable not doing it (in fact I have missed multiple days) but rather this… thing that calls on me to do it. Though after finishing the lessons I have sort of lost a sense of where to head next on my Spanish journey. Probably gonna make some flashcards for words.
I just realized that there’s a 3D printer that I can use at my club (extracurricular group activity thing at my university where we do game dev, web dev, server management, and almost everything computer-related). I haven’t really gotten around to using it though. I’ll check that one out too.
My ability to grasp the gist of a sentence at first glance has also been improving. Hopefully it gets even better as I read more. It has also been the same for me with Japanese - reading is just fine but actually producing output in the language is another thing.
Edit: Oh I just realized you thought I was the other commenter because you were talking about their wife. Sorry for having bamboozled you haha.
Oh yeah, lmao. Totally my fault - I get confused sometimes.
I understand the urge thing - I get that with things sometimes, but almost never for long enough to become “accomplished” at anything. I’m a dabbler - I dabble with game creation, CAD, languages, music, writing… pretty much anything that randomly catches my fancy.
Here’s the game I was working on if you wanna check it out: https://old-man-bombin.itch.io/ragegame
It’s probably as finished as it will be.
The university club sounds awesome. Tell everyone there that I said hello.
Yeah now when it comes to languages outside the romance category, I might as well be looking at Martian runes. Especially if not written with English characters or whatever. Even if it is, though, it’s still basically gibberish to me. French, Spanish, Italian, German - stuff like that I’m pretty good on. For your average redneck anyway.
I also dabble with a lot of things! In fact I think I have also used the words “whatever catches my fancy” to describe what my hobby is before. I used to do quite a lot of ricing on my Linux desktop - obsessing over the details of my desktop and trying to change everything. I also like trying… uhh… different software such as different browsers or just some cool thing I found recently. I (used to?) often waste the whole evening just fiddling with stuff and making no real progress. I also host my own tiny homelab server though not much is going on there. Only a expense manager (Firefly III), Pi-Hole (DNS server to block ads and other unwanted domains), and that’s basically all.
Cool game you got there! I like the ball buster. A twist on the classic ball busting game!
We are also gonna make a game in the university club! We haven’t even really decided on what to make yet though. Will let you try it once it’s done! It will probably be done by around November, so if you haven’t heard from me by November please send me a message to remind me haha.
I have long been interested in linguistics and learning languages in general, but here’s why I started learning Spanish: Once (back in April I think) I went to a Mexican restaurant and decided it was prime time that I learned Spanish. That’s it. I had never ever considered learning Spanish before that. Pretty random, huh? I even remember watching a video about someone cramming Spanish before going to Latin America and me thinking “I’m probably never going to learn Spanish but maybe German or Korean.” But here I am learning Spanish.
I’ve been wanting to set up Pi-Hole for a while now, but I never seen to get around to it. I’m still a Windows junkie, too which is another thing I’ve been meaning to change - I did get around to de-bloating eventually, though, so that’s something I guess. Got a little “media server” set up, which is just a few shared folders on my main PC that I actually never use at all unless I’m trying to find one of the thousands of random memes I’ve got saved. Also archived a few YouTube channels.
Glad you enjoyed the game. I had aspirations of expanding each minigame with multiple levels and adding more games. Trying to make it a one-stop shop for the classic rage game experience; was working on a Flappy Bird-like game where you controlled the pipes instead of the bird. Ended up getting burnt-out. That’s typically how my hobbies go. Super into them and can’t bring myself to do anything else, and then one day I just stop and never go back. Same thing happened when I got into Minecraft command blocks, and when I moved on to making Minecraft add-ons, and streaming, and writing, and Python, Java, Japanese, German, woodworking… Honestly, the Duolingo AI debacle was just a convenient excuse to give up on Spanish now that I think about it; I was falling off before everybody started getting upset.
Anyways, yeah I’d love to try y’all’s game. I will almost definitely forget come November, but maybe I’ll get lucky and writing this comment will force it into my brain somehow. Feel free to steal any of mine and take em to the next level (pun intended).
I started learning Spanish because I worked with an old Mexican man and he told me that Spanish and Italian are very similar, so I thought to myself “If I learn Spanish, it’s like a 2-for-1 deal. I’m basically losing money if I don’t do it,” lol. Plus I was watching a lot of XiaomaNYC and I thought it would be neat to be a polyglot - even a fake one. My plan was to learn Spanish and then use it to help me learn Italian and Portuguese, and then just kinda worm my way through all the languages I could.