this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
30 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43395 readers
1272 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

What is something like a hobby or skill that you belive almost anybody should give a try, and what makes your suggestion so good compared to other things?

i feel like this is a descent question i guess.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

what lauguage would you recommend for people who only know english?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not OP, but I've asked myself this as well. I think it depends on where you live and what you want out of your language learning experience. If your goal is to learn something more useful in everyday life and you live in the southern US, Spanish is a great option. If you're from Canada, French is probably the most useful. German and Mandarin are useful in the business world, but the latter is significantly harder to learn. If you're not worried about maximizing the utility of what you learn, Norwegian is considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers, and let's be real, Norway is awesome.

It's more important that you stick with whatever you choose though. That's the part I've struggled with.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be honest I'm not a native English speaker so your advice is probably more useful anyway. My husband is British and has studied plenty of languages, finding Swedish and Norwegian definitely the easiest to pick up. Romance languages have more complicated grammar but you'll find a lot more TV and movies to watch to casually pick up a bit more of the language, which I find useful because I only speak English as well as I do from watching a lot of TV (first with subs) when I was younger.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

do you have any swedish tv shows or movies you could recommend? the more the merrier please, or any resources for it at all?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Some from recent memory:

  • Real Humans (Äkta Människor) tv show, I liked the UK version a bit more
  • Young Royals, tv show about a young gay prince
  • Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves, a heartbreaking miniseries dealing with Aids epidemic
  • Raspberry Boat Refugee, a movie about a Finnish man who believes he should've been born Swedish
  • Glowing Stars, a movie about a girl looking after her mom who has cancer
  • Stormkärs Maja, a miniseries on the hard life on a tiny island
  • Roy Andersson Also has a lot of fun absurdist comedies
  • Also movies/miniseries based on Astrid Lindgren books are sweet and nostalgic and despite being aimed for children

I think those might be easy enough to find online depending on where you look.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Bit of an off-the-wall suggestion but I was having real trouble learning other languages mostly due to all the cases (and sometimes genders). So I started learning Esperanto, which admittedly is not the most practical language to know BUT it really helped me understand languages more in general. It's very simple to learn and easy for an English-speaker to pronounce, as well as having lots of recognisable words (the Esperanto for "yes" is "jes", which is pronounced "yes" lol)

Now that I've gone back to learning German I'm feeling much more confident about learning in general just because I got some of the grammar concepts from a much easier language. Might be worth a look if you've struggled before.

[–] h_a_r_u_k_i 1 points 1 year ago

Italian! Really close and easy to learn. It sounds so pleasant to hear.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Spanish: it's the most return per effort.