i dont have the money or the ability really to do classes, and spanish and japanese are really the only languages i could justify learning right now because yhe rest of my family is interested in spanish so we're seeing bout a family tutor, and japanese because of my boyfriend

anki is so so so good, i can’t believe i only started using it a couple weeks ago. it’s genuinely fun to play around with and i love making my cards a little dumb or funny, because it makes me remember even better lol.

I do fun little mini games or continuously try to translate poems, I make guesses on how words fit together until I have an unexplainable understanding of basic grammar, and only then do I check a textbook to explain what I understand.

I have for a long time had troubles with learning languages by myself. I was doing Duolingo courses for German and the way I was doing them probably contributed to how I was able to maximize my time learning and also maximize my recall afterwards. Back in 2019, I was doing a tech internship and when I would go on my lovely state-mandated breaks (oh how I miss them now that I've moved to a state that doesn't have them), I would take the time to do some German Duolingo lessons (this was before the re-tool to make it more like the CEFR scale, obviously, if that makes a difference; I don't believe it would but this is an aside just for your information; I have digressed, anyway...). Of course, my life has much less structure now than it did then (plus those breaks at work are now non-existence because different state laws so), so I don't think I'd be able to do something similar.

I have since tried to just be a sponge for the languages that I'm learning. Listening to music in the language, attempting to read things in the language, and continuing to say to myself that I'll make a goalpost of trying to take a certification exam for the language that I would then have to study for and eventually hope to pass. I've been looking at said exam for German for a while now, so you can guess how that has gone.

My ADHD and other relevant neurodivergencies make it difficult for me to learn things the normal way, and I don't think there's a way to replicate the way I learned ASL (where I would often watch interpreters and listen to what was being interpreted and attempt to pick up on signs; I have actually attempted to look into this, although the answers that I got were basically "you could try to do it, but I doubt you'll get good results out of it"). Another reason that would be difficult is that I took a class for ASL where we were only allowed to use ASL during lecture hours. That added on the pressure of being graded and since I graduated university two years ago, that definitely won't work.

Tbh I don't know why I decided to write this post. I'd love to be able to study languages daily and make some kind of routine where I could sit down (or probably more accurately, carve time out of my busy work schedule) and practice/learn the languages I'm learning at the time. I feel like I haven't found the right method for me. It's waiting out there somewhere, and I just have to find it. All of the conventional methods haven't worked for me as of yet, so I guess I keep searching.