Foreign language

Duolingo is good and Memrise is good for vocabulary.  Different languages have their quirks.  I wouldn't say one was necessarily the easiest.

je ne sais pas

Easiest language to learn is English.
So easy, that you’ve already done it

As these things go, Spanish is easy, especially if you have even schoolboy French

I'd suggest starting with schoolboy French in that case.

Go for a "different" language.  The world and his wife learn German, French and Spanish.

No point in learning another language unless you need one. I can still speak schoolboy French enough to be understood but I have done so about 5 times in 50 years. I have since spent a lot of time in Portugal and Brazil but speak very little of their language which I regret. They don't speak French. Much harder to learn a new language as you get older. One tip though. If you try one latin conversion of an English word and it is not understood, try another that means the same thing in English. We have anglo saxon, germanic, latin and norman words in our language so try to work out which one comes from latin.

Learning another language is great for the brain.  It's also good fun, if that's what fires your happy neurons.  There's no point to anything really - crosswords, Tv, football.  If you enjoy it, do it.  Once you've advanced with your second, the third will be easier.  I learn to read, mostly.  There's also some fantastic music out there that remains hidden from us due to it being in a language other than English.  Normal bands; Italian isn't all opera, German isn't all shouty and Norwegian isn't all death metal.

Languages, for some, are fun to learn and explore. I have always been fascinated by them, but sadly have never properly learnt a language that is completely foreign to me. The motivation just died down for me everytime I tried to learn a language. I took persian classes at my university but left after a few weeks. Every alphabet needs to be connected to the previous and the next alphabet, except some. And I could never figure all that out.

What motivated me to learn Persian was this: A guy from Iran told me there are five different words to represent the intensity of love in Persian. Mohabbat, Ishq, Janoon, Diwangi and I don't remember the fifth one. If I remember it correctly, Janoon is where you forget or don't care about anything in the world, except yourself and your love. Diwangi is where you forget to even consider your own well being, basically crazy. These worlds are 'only' used in the context of love. Are there any equivalent of these in English?

The same guy also told me that Russian and Persian are two of the richest languages in terms of expressing emotions with a wide spectrum of possibilities.

Of course I don't know if all this is true but this is what I know and what attracted me to languages back when I was in school.

The secret to learning a second language is to learn it like a child.

We all fail with second languages because we try to learn them like an adult, trying to make sense of something that has little or no sense to it.

You didn’t do that to learn your first language.
You accepted everything without question.

Think like a child, expose yourself to the new language and it will all fall in to place.

Bahasa Indonesia.  Bought a book at Singapore airport and by the time I got to Jakarta I was fluid.

P1ss your pants

best way is to live in a country of course   ....  otherwise it's luck of the draw  ,you either can or can't .

i've tried languages,about 5 of them ...also tried  painting,sketching ,different musical instruments  etc etc and i'm absolutely sh1t at the lot ....complete sh1t   ... i'm also pretty sh1t at most sport too actually ,thinking about it .

genetic lottery imo  ...if you're no good after a couple of weeks just accept you're sh1t

only 1 in 1000 people (apprx) can speak English properly

We all fail with second languages

Speak for yourself.

because we try to learn them like an adult

Worked for me. Do the hard yards, learn the grammar, memorize the vocabulary, then put it into practice. Same way an adult learns any subject.

Think like a child, expose yourself to the new language and it will all fall in to place.

That's the way my Ukrainian father learnt English. Lived the last 60 years of his life here, and could still barely communicate by the end of it. He just sounded like a three-year-old.

On the other hand, the languages which he'd been forced to learn via formal teaching and books (Polish and German) were ones in which he was totally fluent.

I personally enjoy grammar.  It's the engine of a language and each language does it in a slightly different way.  The big thing that holds adults up is the fear of making mistakes.  Kids don't mind.  Young children make loads of mistakes in their mother tongue but they soon learn.

I learnt French by living and working in France. At the time I neither knew nor met any other native English speakers although one or two of the French people could manage to speak a little English and I had schoolboy knowledge of a few words of French.
I suspect your father may have been immersed in a Ukrainian or Polish community, Screaming. If you are in at the deep end as it were, you learn very quickly.

He learnt Polish because the area around L'vov, in Western Ukraine, where he grew up before the War, was occupied by Poland. He was forced to learn Polish at school.

When Communist Russia invaded in September 1939 alongside their Nazi German allies, he was forced to flee, since he and one of his brothers had been politically active against the communists, who had already been occupying the rest of Ukraine. (And had deliberately murdered 4 million Ukrainians through starvation in the process.) He was 18 at the time, and never saw his home again.

Anyway, he and his brother made it to safety in the German-occupied half of Poland, where they were assigned to work in a Czechoslovakian coalmine. Knowing they would never survive that, they volunteered for the German armed forces, with my father adding two years to his age to reach the minimum-age requirement. They were accepted, and that's where they began their formal German lessons.

Now, you can argue that my father learnt these two languages, Polish and German, in which he became thoroughly fluent according to native speakers, through immersion, but in both cases there was much formal learning as well, which is where he differed from his later approach to English.

After many adventures (deserted before Stalingrad, where his brother disappeared; joined UPA - the Ukrainian resistance in the Carpathians fighting first the Germans, then the Russians; re-joined the German army when the latter formed a division of western Ukrainians in 1944; fought Tito's communists in Yugoslavia; surrendered to the British 8th Army in Italy; spent 1945-7 living in a tented PoW camp in Rimini), he eventually rocked up in a PoW camp in Lockerbie in 1947. After a spell in munitions disposal for the British army, he was released in 1948, worked on a farm in Scotland, and eventually found factory work in southern England. All through this time he assumed one day he would return home, so never formally learnt English. He just 'got by', because English is a wonderful language for doing that. He married a Londoner, lived here until he died in 2006, and spoke English dreadfully. It was comical, there's no other word for it. And that's because, despite total immersion for six decades, he had never had formal lessons, and never saw the need for them.

In other words, immersion is not enough to learn a language. It requires the boring hard work first.

With Rosetta Stone you learn like a child, there are no translations whatsoever. I learnt a decent amount of verbal Mandarin & Spanish with it

The only way you truly learn is through immersion, that's how I became fluent in Thai

Do you mean "inversion"?

Dec 5, 2019 -- 12:44AM, jucel69 wrote:

The only way you truly learn is through immersion, that's how I became fluent in Thai

You're right. That's how I learnt to suba dive.

There's an Italian band called Le Vibrazioni and the latest Stereophonics song is so much in their style I find it hard to believe the 'phonics haven't heard them.

DT,  Khodāhāfez

French is very easy to learn quickly but seriously, what is the point of knowing how to speak French?

Slippy I went to night school to learn modern Greek in 1970, had a bit of fun with the waiters especially if some idiots wearing football shirts were in, The waiters would take the piss and swear constantly at/about them, I never greeted them in greek on arrival butwhen I was ready to go i would call the waiter by name and say (Anros for example) one moment! can I have the bill when you finished with those ****s, usually brought the house down esp with Greek diners.

W anchors*.

i've seen a few X anchors on the side of houses

Do you mean tie rods Coach?

or tie bars if you prefer.

Latin was more useful than knowing how to speak French!

Just for you Slippy, pete cook and dud.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofUZNynYXzM

Dec 5, 2019 -- 2:29PM, boxingthefox wrote:

Do you mean tie rods Coach?

yep

tie bars  ...wall anchors  etc  ..i knew what you meant 

yeseree  , the wall anchor is an actual  W anchor 

Slippy, it depends on your circumstances and being able to speak French was very useful to me during my working life not only in France but in Italy and Spain where people of my generation learnt French as a second language. I accept that now young people in those countries learn English first instead. I also derive more pleasure from reading French literature in its original form than someone else's translation.
I believe that learning to speak another language, whatever it might be, Latin if you prefer, is good for you. There is a Czech proverb, “Learn a new language, gain a new soul,”. I like that way of expressing it.

it's interesting to note a lot of foreigners over here  ...working in fields.emptying bins,working on cars  etc etc all seem to have a decent grasp of English ...not an easy one to learn by all accounts  ...

yet the few English i know who can speak a foreign language are super ,duper clever ...like real boffin material .

I know  they learn English in school etc etc  ...but we learnt French  ...and most of us failed miserably 

  maybe we are just a really thick nation 

French, never tried it, Greek was easy for me  (after years of fcking Gaelic at school) it is a phonetic language, If you can read it you can say it. Not much use though, I found out later, they all (Greeks) ,except in non tourist regions speaka the Engrigsh better than a lot here, they still have the consonant t in their words.

English is prevalent in music, film and television.  Look up a foreign country's tv-listings and you'll see lots of our programmes.  Quite often they're subtitled, not dubbed, so the viewer is hearing English being spoken.

Can never understand how some foreign people appear to have absolutely no English.

People, who by advertising and global brands and TV etc, have usually American English rammed down their throats.

"American English rammed down their throats".........are they 'friends of Dorothy'.

You can tell those who are exposed to a lot of American TV and films as they speak English with an American accent.