@skinnylatte Its not hard.

@skinnylatte just a heads up, don't use Duolingo, it's vibe-coded and sucks now and the owl emotionally blackmails you

@tsvga it’s never been useful for any language, I find

@skinnylatte if that is of any consolation , I worked with someone who spoke perfect accent-free English and has never been outside of #Kazakhstan

@skinnylatte It was a requirement for me to take Spanish classes during college. But they taught Castilian Spanish which is different than Latin American Spanish (which also has its variations)

@skinnylatte I haven't used it much but Esperanto speakers have told me it's really gone downhill since they started vibe-coding

@tsvga the way it’s set up (even before they got worse) doesn’t really make for useful language acquisition. Mango languages and Pimsleur are way better

@skinnylatte I would love to learn more Spanish with you! You will be much better at me with it, but if you will suffer my poor language skills I would love to practice with you.

I get to speak 3 of my other non-English languages regularly where I live, which is pretty much the only thing that keeps me in a good place. I get to access so much more of this country and the people in it.

@skinnylatte unfortunately neither of those apps have Esperanto

@skinnylatte @tsvga my oldest son has started to learn Spanish with Anki, which he uses for university notes as well.

He finds its new learning algorithm uncannily good at predicting when you’re about to forget something.

He wants to learn Spanish enough to read online, so picking up vocab is his focus. But there’re lots of grammar decks available. He says you need to search about for good ones though.

@saper unlike that situation, Spanish is spoken by millions of people where I live, so I think it’ll be immersive

@skinnylatte I am sorry, I misread your post. Apologies.

My wife is doing her Masters thesis on immigrant grief.

For me, language is part of it. I am a native speaker of English, but my modes for love, warmth, food, hearth and home are also in the other languages that I speak. I am a different person in each language. I experience the same places differently in each language.

A few days ago, planted face down on an acupuncture bed in Oakland, learning that I can speak about my body and its aches in Mandarin just like I used to in Bukit Timah.

Today, my neighbor told me in Teochew that she was going on vacation for the first time in decades. Everyone else in the building just sees her as a ‘poor English speaker’. I see her as the kind grandma who reminds me to celebrate festivals I don’t actually celebrate. (She’s Vietnamese: and she thinks we have the same holidays. There are overlaps)

Then we went to our favorite restaurant in San Francisco, where nearly everyone spoke Tamil. I don’t really speak Tamil at all, but my grandparents did, with our neighbors, and I understand it better than I speak. I know all of the food words. The Tamil lady came over and told me to buy a nicer ring for my wife because ‘we Indian women like nice rings’.

I order Indonesian coffee down the street from Indonesian coffee roasters. I get a lemper to go, it tastes exactly like in Indonesia (just at a shocking price in rupiah). My Thai is getting rusty, but still good enough to get Thai spicy food I need. No chilli, no life.

Whenever I can, I spend time in the Mission and in Fruitvale because I love being surrounded by Spanish and all the indigenous languages of Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere.

Hearing all the languages spoken including the ones I don’t speak, remind me that I am not alone.