General Discussion

Honestly I've always picked up languages best when I have people to talk to/talk at me. My Italian professor shot almost constant chatter our way and we learned it somehow without even really trying? It's crazy but babies do it so you can to!

Japanese is hard due to its multiple alphabets but I think the grammar is fairly reasonable, shouldn't be too hard. There are a thousand apps available for learning it, just google like "best japanese learning app" or something and I'm sure you'll find more helpful reviews.

Beyond that, watch shows in Japanese (especially kid shows since they feature more basic vocab n' grammar).

Good luck, hun!

I'm attempting to learn Esperanto (again). I just think it's neat. Mostly using Duolingo and Lernu for it so far. I find languages a bit hard because I have trouble picking up and remembering vocabulary. x.x

I wish you luck in learning Japanese (and potentially Koren)! Koren looks really neat imho. :D

I tried learning a little Japanese on Duolingo because I had a lot of free time. I wanted to learn a language that doesn't have latin writing and settled for japanese because hey maybe it's useful to me some day? (And also because I highly underestimated it)

But then came the finals and I didn't have any time anymore. Thus I neglected Duolingo a little bit. He has my family now though, so I guess I'll have to take it back up again.

My native language is German, but as I've noticed, there are much more differences between German as spoken in northern Germany (which is what people tend to learn) and how I (and people in my area) speak. I knew there were differences pronunciation-wise but there are also grammatical differences and much more differences in vocabulary that I expected, which is often confusing. No matter how hard I try, when I speak standard German I sound more like a Turk trying to speak German than someone whose native language is German XD
At school I'm learning English (but I made the big mistake of not using it actively outside of school until a year ago so I'm not nearly as good as I could be), French, which I've never really talked outside of school, I'll never speak without a horrible accent although my writing is decent. At least I can communicate. Same with Spanish, I had a few Spanish lessons at school, but the teacher was never what I like in a teacher, so in the beginning I sounded like a Russian and didn't even know it was wrong and I'm not actually good at it. We also learn to understand Latin, but not to speak it (which is kind of logical since it's not really spoken in daily life). I started learning Dutch and Polish last year, what can I say? XD I'm trying not to make the same mistake I did when learning the other languages but especially Polish is more difficult since it's the first slavic language I'm learning and I'm learning it on my own, unlike English, French, Latin and Spanish (which also has advantages because I'm more motivated). I love languages but I know I'm not very talented, which is especially visible in some roleplays I left because my rather simple way of writing ruined the flow and when I see how much better many people much younger than me are. Also, why exactly do I often understand Ukrainian better than Polish? I'm not learning it (and it's too beautiful for my mouth), my sister is, and... I don't get it, I'm a hopeless case. Argh, I've even learned the Ukrainian letters without really trying XD (but when it comes to Russian I'm just overchallenged)
I am kind of salty because I couldn't join my classmates going to London or take part in an exchange with French students, but there are reasons... always the money. I've never been abroad except for the cheaper travels we did for school, which was Rome, Venice and Vatican City and! which I enjoyed although I can't speak Italian - I understand something, of course, but I can't really communicate.

What helped me most is, as many have said before, is just using the language, listening to music, watching videos, changing the phone's languages,...
I started both Dutch and Polish using Duolingo which is good for being more exact, but sometimes there are problems with the pronunciation. I'd pronounce apple in Polish the wrong way if I hadn't been told it was wrong, and I've also noticed many mistakes in German. For me, normal books that teach you a language work well, too. At least many, there are also some that have mistakes (hello, French book) and everyone has different standards (hello, Maths book). CDs are also helpful in my opinion, especially when you're usually not in touch with the language you're learning.
Basically, try to surround yourself with the language.

Oh no, I'm being so negative right now, I swear I can also say positive things XD I guess I'll stop now, it's not easy to write in English while listening to Italian songs, I'm not exactly a multitasking talent :P

@AbyssSlayer
Thank you!

And alright, just wanted to be sure I wasn't stealing your thread. :)

@RUHX
Ahh, yeah. I think she does have some videos of phrases that are useful to use for surviving, lol. I know she also has an app, and you can pay for lessons or something like that, or to use more features, but the free videos on YT alone are extremely useful.

[quote name="AbyssSlayer" date="2019-05-17 14:43:00" ] I was going to say English is supposedly the hardest language to learn, but guess it helps if you’re already fluent in an even more difficult language, lol. [/quote] i mean, english is ......in quite a lot of places (was going to say everywhere but for the sake of the plenty of ppl out in the world who may not know english well i didnt haha) so practice is rather easy to come by lol, saying as someone speaking estonian as mother tongue, and estonian might be Quite Tricky as well (but i mean, no grammatical gender or future tense so at least there's that hah) meanwhile primarily learning russian rn, was compulsory for me from 6th to 11th grade p much (my middle school was so small it still doesnt have any german teachers i think, so we had to go w russian as second foreign lang after english), and only after the compulsory russianing ended, i got v much into a russian music artist (moa pillar) & have taken a couple of courses in russian in uni primarily bc of that, so that's fun lol [s]i still havent entirely mastered the 6 cases despite estonian having 14 pffbbfbft but at least starting to get the perfect/imperfect aspects now[/s] but ive even been to russia a couple of times, once to st petersburg and once to nizhny novgorod thru moscow, both times primarily bc of the dang extinct bird structural element (...moa pillar), but also hey, travel experience and language experience hahah (plus a friend of mine living in nn! ..and another one in msk) [size=2](the nn trip, for an audiovisual festival (intervals), was overall amazing despite the fact i hopelessly lost one of the nibs of a pair of earbuds + was late to the initial nn-msk train lol (but managed to resolve the latter! in russian! only had to translate one word for myself before that!). but i went to a cat cafe for the first time!! and rode a train for the first time!! and the metro (both in msk and in nn)!!! and felt some damn unity with the rest of the crowd during moa pillar's set for once*!!!! and got to chill with a friend and meet w another! etc! so it was overall very worth it) (& despite me having punted myself back into learning russian primarily bc of moa pillar, ive spoken to him in english whenever ive met him haha)[/size] [size=1]*i've experienced his music live on 5 separate occasions now. twice in estonia, once in poland, twice in russia. the first time i saw him live would also have been more gucci if it wasnt for my rs w my now-ex who i was with there having been deteriorating around the time. but i mean if it wasn't for her i prolly wouldntve discovered moa <3 aaaaaaa anyway enough rambling[/size]