Language thread

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I'm jealous! Is there a sizable Somali community there? I had family there but they ran off and moved to Egypt. What's your German like?
Yes a sizeable community if you put all the somalis in the country together but by region some have more somalis than other because that's where the qaxootis were settled.
There's a running joke that somalis make of somali swiss
as somalis in switzerland most or you could say a lot even after living there for 30+ years they don't have sharci
Its quite depressing :vo3yidw:
and some of their kids have assmilated too much although they're stateless cos of switzerlands hellish citizenship process

so that's why in the 90s any somalis that arrived in switzerland would tahriib to the neighbouring nations
 
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BANTU

+op MVLI
I took 5 years of Spanish and 3 years of French in school.

I didnt take it seriuously but to this day I can understand Spanish very well (enough to know the subtitles in Narcos suck :ftw9nwa:) and I could get by in a Spanish speaking country. French I can only understand when read now because that language sounds like gibberish to me when spoken.
 

Indha adeeg

Ogadenist
Swahili and Hebrew. I know some Arabic already. I also know some Spanish. I would like to be fluent in Spanish, Arabic, French, Swahili and German. There 180m German speakers and yet no one wants to learn it.
 
@Slickback
I started by immersing myself in Spanish literature (journalism, poems, short stories, etc.) as well as YT videos and all sorts of nonsense. I wasn’t so concerned about learning every new thing I encountered, it was more about understanding the composition of sentences. I quickly realised that upto 30% of it was lifted from idiom/ strange phrases that just don’t mean much to the non-native speaker.

Then I decided to do A-Level Spanish when I was in the middle of year 13 and I had three months to prepare so I started to use all sorts of websites to try to improve my grasp of the language. The best thing that happened to me was meeting that rapper because when I went to meet him he was staying at a hostel filled with Spanish speakers. I made friends with a guy from Peru and he literally messages me every day, forcing me to write/speak in Spanish. He still doesn’t speak any English lol.

I think you should try to write as much as you can and put yourself out there, people really like it when you’re trying to learn about their language and culture. It feels like Spanish has opened the world up to me, I would have known about Garcia Marquez or Borges nor would I have had such a close relationship with my Colombian neighbours. For Portuguese I am going to try to write something every week, this week I'll answer these questions:

¿Qué tipo de persona eres?
¿Cuáles son tus objetivos a media y a largo plazo?
¿Crees que tus objetivos son realistas?
I wrote them in Spanish just in case you wanted to try too.

Post them somewhere so someone can correct it for you and you would have learned a thing or two pretty quickly.
 
Honestly thank you @cinina

@Slickback
I started by immersing myself in Spanish literature (journalism, poems, short stories, etc.) as well as YT videos and all sorts of nonsense. I wasn’t so concerned about learning every new thing I encountered, it was more about understanding the composition of sentences. I quickly realised that upto 30% of it was lifted from idiom/ strange phrases that just don’t mean much to the non-native speaker.

Did this genuinely help? I've tried this for maybe 20 minutes, but then there's this nagging feeling that tells me I'm wasting my time and should be going through books or trying to memorise vocab. Although, many other people have mentioned this, along with changing phone/laptop and ipad language settings as well as radio etc. to create like a pseudo-immersive environment I'd definitely prefer this type of approach over filling a note book all day everyday.

@Slickback

Then I decided to do A-Level Spanish when I was in the middle of year 13 and I had three months to prepare so I started to use all sorts of websites to try to improve my grasp of the language. The best thing that happened to me was meeting that rapper because when I went to meet him he was staying at a hostel filled with Spanish speakers. I made friends with a guy from Peru and he literally messages me every day, forcing me to write/speak in Spanish. He still doesn’t speak any English lol.

That is actually pretty fucking cool

@Slickback

¿Qué tipo de persona eres?
¿Cuáles son tus objetivos a media y a largo plazo?
¿Crees que tus objetivos son realistas?
I wrote them in Spanish just in case you wanted to try too.

Post them somewhere so someone can correct it for you and you would have learned a thing or two pretty quickly.

I am going to attempt this and see what I come up with by next weekend and send it to a friend. :salute:
 
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