@FolhaS:
True and funny story that may be helpful to you:
I found that knowing how to do that stereotypical french laugh, that "hon hon hon hon", actually helps a bit to get the prononciation/accent down.
Then you mix it with their song (you know, every language has a song/rythmn), which I guess you're already learning with those radio shows, and the rest is memorizing vocabulary.
My challenge right now, besides the always present getting more vocabulary and training the verbs conjugation, is hearing the subtleties when people are just talking.
If I happen to catch a bit of news or maybe a ted-talk in french I can usually follow, since those people are speaking in carefull and enunciated manner but outside of that it still gets tricky.
Kinda like understanding the Queen's English and then hearing people from south-london or Scottland speak, there's a whole new learning curve.
Yeah you don't often meet people with that clean newscaster speech. But yeah i try to pick up on how it flows, but i imagine that even if i try to immerse myself and work at it for a few years i'll still have a thick horrible that the natives can poke fun at. Like haha he said large throaty noise when it's supposed to be medium throaty noise, what an oaf.
@Nilitch:
Anyway, I've been learning German for over a year now. And it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done beside studying philosophy. The grammar is so damn complicated, and for some reason the sentences have to be written backwards… Silent letters in French are really nothing compared to German grammar though.
That's pretty much exactly what i've been sitting here thinking about French.
Like i don't mind it that much, it just feels strange to start from the back.
@Nolus:
I wonder… at what point can a person say they speak a language? I'd certainly, with confidence say that I speak English and Hungarian, but I'm a little hesitant about Swedish or Finnish. I could probably be able to navigate in an unfamiliar place using these languages, but I'm not proficent in them in any way.
My personal definition is when you can make use of the language without thinking about it.
Like if you can go thru a day and do that with minimum effort then dude you speak the langauge.
@brockhampton:
Catalan and Spanish as mother tongues, English at a Bachelor's degree in English Studies graduate level で は 今 日本語 を 勉強して いる。
Huh. So Catalan is a whole 'nother language huh.
I thought it was a dialect or something. Talk about a knowledge gap.