felix

I wanted to share a very cool app I found for learning German and other languages. It's called Memrise, and the cool thing about it is that you can see lots of short videos with actual people playing a silly scene in the targeted language + subtitles, and this has helped me a lot with comprehensive input.

(You can also easily skip stuff you already know, and there's an AI chat function, in which you have to solve specific tasks, like "convince the waiter to give you a table even if the restaurant is full" or "confess your love without using the word Liebe")

In my Language Acquisition course, we got to the topic of plurals. Why are they difficult? Because there's SO MANY!

My prof criticized the tip "just always learn the plural when you learn the word" because yes, that is helpful but wouldn't it be more helpful to know that there's some regularity?! Just like the gender of nouns is not completely random (post about that here) Here are some of my prof's slides about the rules/probabilities:

the rules above cover around 40% of german words. there's more, of course, but they only cover around 4%:

I'm glad to be confronted with this question because... eh

Last semester was really full for me and I barely did any language learning (at least that's what it felt like) so for 2024 one of my goals is simply to "get back into language learning"

I'm doing amazingly with that since I started Spanish just a couple weeks ago and am motivated as FUCK since I have a venezuelan best friend who's helping me

but I've let Dutch slip... a lot. I bought two Dutch books in Maastricht last year and I'm planning to read them both this year. I'm confident that will go well but I also know that, especially with Dutch, passive vocabulary and language skills are not the issues, active vocab is. I feel like I could barely produce a straight sentence right now, nevermind speak confidently with a native.

But being confronted with that through your ask, I've decided (while writing this), that I'll be taking notes in Dutch about the books while reading them (they're both non-fiction, one about OCD, the other about multilingualism – both central topics for me I'm super interested in). I know the issue with reading Dutch isn't understanding, it's that it just takes me longer than German or English and is more of a mental effort.

I should really try to get more immersion though and produce more on a regular basis, even if it's small stuff.

If you have YouTube or Spotify recs (music, videos, podcasts, audiobooks) do let me know!

I'd also generally be interested in language exchanges (this goes out to Dutch-, French-, Spanish-speakers and Latin-enthusiasts) (obv. I can mainly offer English and German) but be warned that I tend to have a turbulent life 😅

So overall: I've been slacking, I want to do more but it'll be hard to work that into my life right now...