Started learning Mandarin Chinese because I’m dating a girl from China. Our first date was the beginning of December and I started learning on some apps within the next few days. I still have barely any oral comprehension skill unless she slows down a lot (tones are hard). But I can text simple sentences, and if I don’t know a character I can look it up on the fly. The other night while texting we had an exchange of maybe 10 messages back and forth where we were discussing our favourite pizza toppings. The longest message I sent her was “我爸爸做非常好吃的比萨。他有一个比萨烤箱” (My dad makes really good pizza. He has a pizza oven).
She tells me she’s really impressed with how quickly I’m learning.
Managed to have a few social gatherings completely in my target language, quite happy with myself.
Played the Spanish version of Cards Against Humanity yesterday, that definitely required some context based translation ha ha
I wanted to learn Dutch because I wanted to move to the Netherlands.
… Suddenly there may be an opportunity in Germany lol.
In any case, now I’ve kind of started to enjoy Dutch so I’ll keep at it anyway. I moved on from just Duolingo and have started studying actual grammar, but not as much as I should. I was bored a while ago and decided to watch the old episodes of the Pokémon anime in Dutch - I found a browser extension that allows you to watch a show in your target language with subtitles in both your target language and a language you already know, with the possibility of highlighting single words to get their meaning, which is great, and I’m having fun while learning new vocabulary.
(this extension is only available for Chrome, unfortunately, which means I keep it installed alongside Firefox just for this!)
I wanted to start dedicating time to actual language study instead of these fun, barely educational activities, but work is not letting up (writing this from work right now, left here at 21:00 yesterday…). My lab will close for maintenance next week so I’m going to have much more time (and energy) soon.
