Languages!

[Rose Dove]

Hello!
I love learning languages and have been doing so most of my life. What are some languages that you speak/want to learn? Have you ever used any language apps in your pursuits? How helpful did you find them?

I know English, Arabic, and a little French. I want to improve my French and learn Italian. I have been using the Duolingo application on my phone for a few years now. I think this app is a good way to learn a language in small increments.

[Anne-Marie Gagne]

Hello! I, too, love learning languages. English is my first language but I took both Spanish and Chinese in high school but have not kept up with either language (and I found Chinese much easier to learn than Spanish when for others, it was the other way around haha). I also used Duolingo to try and learn Irish and French but that was some years ago.

I don't know why I stopped keeping up with any of the languages I started with but now I just might start up on them again haha.

[Adeline Morior]

I also love languages. I only speak two at the moment. Afrikaans as my first and English as my second. I would love to learn languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, French, Mandarin, German, Japanese and Swedish language.

I have uses apps such as Duolingo and Beelinguapp. I have not gotten far in learning a new language due to being so busy but I hope to pick it up again soon. (Does computer languages count as well? Then I have been busy learning C#, HTML, Java, JavaScript and a bit of Python.)

[Silvana Mandeville]

I love languages very much! Leaning new languages is something that I really enjoy. Indonesian is my first language, and English is the second. Though, Indonesia has many local languages as well, and I speak 2 of them. I learned German in High School aside from English, and Korean in college. I would love to continue learning Korean and Chinese, but Chinese is soooo hard. I used Duolingo before for both languages.

[Hiya Debnath]

I am Indian and only know four languages that I learnt in my own country. They are English, Nepali, Hindi, and Bengali. However, I think learning new languages is fun, and who knows, might come in handy one day. I think my next pursuit will be learning a new language. I truly enjoy the French language because of the sweet way it sounds. I may try to learn it from the Duolingo app. I may also try to learn a bit of Japanese, and then my next pursuit will be German.

[Dibyarup James Potter]

I am a language enthusiast as well. Firstly, since I am from India, we learn 2-3 languages anyway while growing up. Personally, I am fluent (reading/writing/speaking) in English, Bengali and Hindi, since I grew up learning all three. After that, when I was 16 years old, I found out about Duolingo, and started learning Spanish. I used Duolingo for 1 year and then got busy with school. Then at the age of 18, I decided to enroll in a proper offline class for Spanish and I took 2 semesters worth of classes at the institute, where I learnt Spanish in a structured manner and earned my B2 CEFR in Spanish.

This experience taught me how to study European languages (ones that use the Latin script) and learn it by myself. After leaving the institute at the age of 19, I continued studying Spanish on my own and started learning German. The same year, my university offered French as an option under the Soft Skills category, and knowing Spanish, I chose it. I studied French for 2 semesters at my university, and it was quite easy for me since the concepts were almost the same as Spanish and there were also some similarities in the vocabularies, which allowed me to guess the meaning of a lot of French words and easily remember the rest. By the time I was 20, I was better at Spanish, however not as good as I had to be to earn a C1 in it, and I was pretty much an A2 in French and German which was great motivation. I hadn't taken the exams yet, but I was quite confident about them at this point in time.

At this point, I was so confident about my ability to learn new European languages fast, I started learning the Slavic script, which is used for languages like Russian. It is almost the same as the Latin Script but has a couple of unique alphabets. Also, an interesting thing about this script is that the same letter looks strikingly different when you write it using the "Print" font or the "Cursive" font. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Bulgarians, Kazakhs, Russians and others who use this script use both fonts together while writing with a pen on paper, so it is important to learn both. While learning the script I learnt enough of the basic salutations, vocabulary and grammar of the Russian language, to classify myself as an A2. I haven't taken the exam yet, but if I do, I am confident that I can pass the A2 exam.

By this time I had taken my French and German A2 exams and passed.

Anyone who speaks or has studied any of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian) would agree that once you learn one of them, it is much easier to learn the rest because the grammatical concepts are almost identical and you don't have to "understand" new concepts. All you need to do is learn the new vocabulary, which comes with practice, and learn the regional aspects of a language which are based on the local culture and must be learnt separately.

So one day I was re-watching Mario Puzo's Godfather movies, and I was able to understand almost 70% of the Italian being spoken in the movies without any prior experience in Italian, simply based off of my knowledge of Spanish and French. This blew my mind because even though I knew that it was possible in theory, for it to actually happen to me was simply mind-boggling. So I did what a language enthusiast like me would do, I started learning Italian the next day. When I turned 21 last year, I decided I must pass Italian A2 by the end of 2023 and I successfully passed it in November 2023.

Now coming back to Duolingo. I do have it on my phone and I log in once in a while, but I have found that it is only good for practising a language, and it is much more efficient to learn the language from books and YouTube videos. So that's exactly what I do. I will be turning 22 this year in June and today while writing this post I have passed the following exams:

1. Spanish - B2.
2. French - A2 (B1 exam scheduled in May).
3. German - A2 (B1 exam scheduled in April).
4. Italian - A2 (B1 exam scheduled in June).
5. Russian - I haven't taken any exam yet, but I am pretty much A2 in it.
6. English - Fluent.
7. Bengali - Fluent (mother tongue).
8. Hindi - Fluent.


Additionally, I have been programming since I was 12 years old. I have an Engineering Diploma in Computer Science and Engineering and am currently a 4th year Bachelor's degree student in Computer Science and Engineering. So currently it is my 10th year working with programming and markup languages. Over the years I have learnt the following languages:

1. Programming Languages: QBASIC, Java, C, C++, C#, Python, JavaScript, Kotlin, Dart, Go, Solidity, MATLAB, R, ABAP, FORTRAN.
2. Scripting Languages: Bash, PowerShell (arguably some would say Python and JavaScript also fall into this category.)
3. Markup Languages and Stylesheet Languages: HTML, CSS, Markdown, BBCode.
4. Database: SQL (Microsoft T-SQL and Oracle), GraphQL.

[Aquaria Sandalwood]

I love languages, too! My first language is English, with Hebrew as my second. I also know quite a bit of Spanish and am getting better at it every day!