Those who learned another language, how did you do it?

Question

My end goal is to be trilingual. I’ve already fallen in love with Spanish and I’m not sure about the third. Maybe Japanese? 
I’ve always been the person to love learning about other cultures, religions, and languages even if they don’t fit my own beliefs (knowing how other people think is so interesting to me). Language classes have always been fun to me and I usually easily excel in them, but the information never sticks outside of the class. Especially in conversation. How did you become fluent?￼￼

Answer

Dulingo. I can speak my native language which is American English and minor Spanish and French . I’m taking my time but it does pay off. My girls are learning French currently

Answer

Watching shows/movies, private teachers, listening to music, watching YouTube videos, reading books in the language, and travelling!!! The possibilities are pretty much endless. I think the last one helped me the most w grasping all my languages except for Latin. Ofc with quarantine it’s not an option right now, but I learn the best through cultural immersion. So ever since I was a kid my parents would send me to a relevant country to practice my language skills for the summer, plus I would make friends there who I still talk to to this day, who helped a lot with learning to speak more like a native speaker. My brother learns best through movies and shows. There’s a ton of great international films out there. I like watching documentaries when learning about culture, YouTube has a ton of them. YouTube also has a lot of cooking videos from various cultures which is also great for immersion!

Answer

I moved to an English Speaking country to learn English, but I’d say try to make friends that fluently speak the language you’re learning or watch series with subtitles in English and then subtitles in the language you’re learning once you have a bit more knowledge, that’s what helped me before I moved anyway 🤷🏼‍♀️ the most important thing is to have fun while learning

Answer

Japanese is hard.... I had a go at it. It's hard to make certain sounds as English speakers generally have their tongue hit the back of their teeth to make sounds and Japanese sounds you have to keep the tongue positioned in the middle of your mouth.

Answer

I started dating my boyfriend who is from Sweden, I got Duolingo and felt like I learned a lot of Swedish. But turns out that duolingo and other language learning apps just don’t align 100% with the spoken language and according to him just had a really funny way of sentence structure. Plus duolingo doesn’t teach grammar, which is important when a language does not have the same sentence structure as English. I really started learning after I gave up duolingo and just let him teach me. Now we have full conversations in Swedish and I learn more everyday!! I would definitely recommend finding someone who speaks the language if you can. 
Duolingo is great for vocabulary but becoming conversational is really difficult with the app.

Answer

I did classes and duolingo but also did “immersion” by:
talking to pen pals—you can try a forum or following social media in that language and go from there 
watching movies or tv shows—first with subtitles in your language then moving up to subtitles in your target language
and reading books—starting with kids books of course or books you’ve read before in your native language!

Answer

A friend of mine moved to France with his husband and has been taken language lessons on top of doing duolingo to help him learn. Ive used memrise and duolingo for German and enjoy both. The information sticks, but haven't done them in a while cause my husband refuses to learn with me and insists I learn Japanese with him instead. So since I don't get a chance to actively use it I kind of just stop. Need to get some books in German or something to encourage me to keep learning. A lot of when I took German in college was us reading in German and I really enjoyed that

Answer

I've been learning Japanese since I was 14, I've only had 3 private lessons. I can have average conversations but nothing too advanced and I can read and write Kana and a lot of Kanji. Just remember that there is also a second alphabet to learn with Japanese not just speaking :) I loveeeee Japanese though, I'm learning it at university next year and I'm so excited.

Those who learned another language, how did you do it?

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