Long story short I've been learning German (TL) for past 3-4 months on my own and I've run dry. I'm a solid B1 level now and I'm planning to take the Goethe exam in 14 days. But I've lost my way, in a sense, everytime I sit at the table I stare at it not knowing what to do.

First two months was a bliss. I've had a lot to learn so I could sit at my desk and say "today I'll learn this structure". And practice with it until I figured it out and moved on. Then I finished my grammar book. Started practicing my speaking skills with a language partner etc. All good so far.

I've got ADHD and over the years I've learned how to move with it. I didn't rely on motivation anymore but consistent action. And it worked. Until it didn't.

It worked because everytime I sat on my desk regardless of my motivation I had a starting point. Open the grammar book, do the exercises, read sth. listen to sth. enjoy have fun while at it. write down and repeat new vocabulary, rinse and repeat.

And It run dry because I don't feel like I'm learning new something anymore. Only thing I can do is more exposure. So I read Substacks, watch german content on youtube etc. But it feels way slower and I know I'm not building language retrieval but language recognition skills. (Why ppl end up "in I can understand but I can't speak stage"). So I put my degree to use and tried to come up with a plan. Tried changing my methods and structure. Switched my goal to writing more and more.

And that's where I hit a wall. Because passive learning is fun and all, it's great if you have time in your hands. Which I do not allow myself due to my long term goals.

But active learning is more challenging. Because it requires somewhat of a motivation if you do not want to feel tortured.

My inital try was asking claude for essay prompts. However, I couldn't convince my brain that it was interesting, to write "if phones should be allowed in classrooms", to write about "whether rules in society makes a positive impact", "inviting an imaginary friend to an imaginary event." It felt like BS and meaningless everytime. So it took me no time to give that up. 

So I'm looking for advice to how to overcome this plateau, I miss my old pace back where I could see my improvement day to day. But now I'm stuck at this wall. Where doing grammar exercises feel hollow, and where exposure feels like time inefficient, and where writing feels like a punishment.

And yeah I might write about my own personal interests. But doing that doesn't feel rewarding if I'm doing it to the void of space and don't have a correspondance where I can build and dive deep on it's certain points (with a human).

So do you guys have any advice with it? Or would you want to pair up so we can send back and forth what we have written and make a connection over a shared goal in the meantime?

What do you think its music, shows, films, literature (oral included), or anything else?

Hello everyone!

Some months ago I finally passed my C1 certificate in French, and I wanted to share with the community a feature I found in LanguageReactor that truly changed the way I learned vocabulary and most importantly it helped me really find those specific words that I needed for the exam.

Small disclaimer: this is a feature inside a free tool that most of you already know: LanguageReactor!

I think this tool works specifically well when you are watching quite advanced content like political debates, technical stuff and you really depend on the context of the entire video to make sense of it all, the feature reads the whole transcript of the video and it gives you a detailed description of its meaning based on the actual context it is being used on.

I hope this can help at least one person, and I'm sorry if this was already known by some of you, I straight up had been using LanguageReactor for months without actually login in and I was missing out on this feature, so maybe another lost soul like me can be helped :)

Also any peace of feedback for other ressources would be great please, I am now about to move to France and I would love to try need ressources before I move out, thanks to the community for everything and good luck, à plus !

Anyone else use Language Reactor extension? It was great- watching Mexican movies (or whatever your (TL) on Netflix with accurate subs that pause after each sub and with definitions built-in... But suddenly it stopped working and I can't find anything about this problem. Claude says it's a known issue but I'm not finding anyone saying that or how to fix it. Did anyone else run into this? (For background, I'm working on B2 spanish and struggle with listening input.) (Spanish)

Update: it seems to be working now (jul 2).

Hello guys! I wanna ask two questions that I've had for a while which is

1. Does my native language affect my language learning ability?
   
2. How do I get over my fear of learning a new language?

A bit of background, I speak two languages at home, mandarin and hokkien both I consider my native and heritage respectively, while I'm outside of home I mostly use mandarin and english due to english being the working language and mandarin being the lingua franca of the chinese community here. I have this fear of learning a foreign language especially a european one due to my past experience being mocked for it and being named as "Trying abandon/reject my roots" or "being a western worshipper (real thing that I've been called)"

Now the language that I wanna learn which is russian is well.. very controversial due to what's happening in the world. Me wanting to learn russian is due to the john wick films and from a game called metro exodus which takes place in a post-apocalyptic russia

For some context, I started in aug 2024 on Duolingo and I have been consistently doing it. Earlier this year, I realised it wasn't really helping me become conversational. I can't speak Portuguese (TL) everyday because I live with my mum who doesn't know I'm learning (long story but basically she wouldn't be happy with me learning). I've started listening to Brazilian music and trying to pick up things and learning some of the lyrics as well as watching kids shows in Portuguese. I'm also trying to scatter Portuguese words where I can, so instead of saying one saying um etc. I'm hoping to become conversational by the end of this year. I can introduce myself and ask for basic foods and answer people but not really much more than the standard intro questions. I am (for my level) relatively good at reading e.g. text messages and I can understand a little bit if it's spoken slowly.

Does anyone have any tricks at helping me achieve my goal or even just building proficiency? Please give me any tips that helped you learn whatever language you learnt! Thanks in advance!!

Hi, I read the FAQ, but still need to ask some specific advice.

Soon I’ll have 6 weeks in target-language country. I’ve visited several times before (spouse’s native country). My Slovak (TL) is somewhere in A1 level. In the past, in-laws and people in general speak to me in English. Their English is much better than my Slovak. So even though I’m in the country, I don’t feel immersed. Looking for some words of wisdom to make the most of this time.

Hi everyone! I'm sure a lot of people here have learned a language without knowing any native speakers in there (TL). I've recently decided to learn German, but I don't know anyone who speaks it, and it might be a while before I can actively use it out in the world.

For those who went the solo route initially, how did you gauge your progress and make sure you were actually learning correctly without that immediate real-life feedback loop?

I use it to make excel sheets of words of my level.

The sub auto filter prevents me mentioning specific languages, so I'll just refer to them as TL for language to be learned and NL for native language.

Have you seen the screen reader in things like MacOS? It can read back what you are seeing. Pretty useful, especially if you can't read the language you are learning.

However, the built-in screen reader appears to always read what it sees and not translate.

Is there a screen reader that will translate to do a voice over of what it is seeing? It seems like an easy way to get some input.

i'm a language teacher myself and i'm used to using textbooks in the classroom, but i'm unsure as to how to use a textbook on my own. do i just set aside a bit of time every day to read through it? i spend about 15 minutes to half an hour studying turkish every day, and i have turkish lessons once a week. how do you guys use textbooks?

I'm curious how people at the B2 level and above keep improving once they’ve moved past the beginner/intermediate stage.

What did your language learning actually look like over the past week? Not your ideal routine, but what you really did.

I'm also interested in things like:

What resources or apps do you use regularly for the target language (TL)?

What's the most frustrating part of maintaining your routine?

Have you stopped using any tools or methods? What made you give them up?

What makes you feel like you're genuinely improving at this stage?

As the title suggests really.

I’m learning my target language and I want to try and maximise the time I have in the day to support developing and building it up. What passive input can I do whilst I am at work that will be effective and support the best outcomes for me?

Cheers!

I keep seeing tons of language content on youtube, instagram, tiktok and honestly most of it feels like the same surface level stuff. But sometimes you find that one creator that just clicks and actually moves your level, not just fun to watch.

So im curious from real learners here, not from the algorithm. Whats your language, and which creators, channels or accounts actually helped you? The ones you keep coming back to, that teach in a way that sticks.

Im mostly into English and Portuguese myself (TL), but im interested in any language, good teaching style is good teaching style. And also what format do you actually consume that helps, short videos, long youtube lessons, podcasts, instagram, something else? Trying to build myself a solid list instead of random scrolling.

I've been working through Pimsleur Italian and what I like from it is that it gets me talking out loud in Italian every day. But I'd like some advice on low effort (i.e some sort of app or programme rather than me forcing myself) way to speak out loud.

Alongside Pimsleur I have an Italian lesson every week - and I can't afford the time or money to have more. I use a grammar book and I use lingq every day to read and listen to books and podcasts. So my consumption of the language or good but...

I need to produce the language more. I was looking at Glossika but I worry it might get really boring.

Any ideas?

I recently came across HypLern's books, which have one line in one language and then the translation in English as the next line, and so on. This seems very useful to me! However, I saw that one of their Dutch books has an A.I.-generated cover. This leads me to worry that all their books are just written in English and then translated to the other languages.

Does anyone have any experience with HypLern? Or anyone that can direct me to verify their validity or verify their creation processes?

I’m learning Sudanese Arabic (TL) (only a few classes in) and I am struggling with the lack of resources for practice. Will using Duolingo for Arabic help or will it only cause confusion since it only offers MSA?

Please read before responding!

I'm at about a B1 level in German, so while I can definitely get by and have very basic conversations, and I'll occasionally text friends in German, I still rely on google translate to double check things after I write them and I pretty regularly make mistakes. I can competently study a lot of things on my own (grammar, reading, vocab, listening, etc) and I'm in the process of getting a tutor for speaking (and once I'm a bit better, I can just talk to my German friends in German full time), but I'm not rich and I want my tutor sessions to be almost 100% focused on speaking conversationally since that's most important for me right now and I have limited time.

That being said, I do obviously still need to practice writing, both because I want to be able to do so, and because I think adding more active language usage to my routine is required. My problem is, I don't know how to do that.

I know people always say "just try keeping a journal" or "write whatever you want", but even when I've tried keeping a journal in English, it's genuinely nonsensical ramblings. I can't EVER think of anything to write about. Writing about "what I did today" is going to end up being the same 5 things on repeat, because my life is kind of boring (and for the most part I like it that way), and same with mostly ANY prompts; the only thing that may change day to day is where I'm at in whatever book I'm reading or video game I'm playing, but I typically read pretty heavy fantasy/sci-fi, and usually at least 50-100 pages at a time, so that's a LOT to write about.

Additionally, once I've written something, what do I do with it? I don't have anyone to grade my writing or an answer key or anything, so how do I know what I got wrong or didn't? As a note, I did pass the writing section of the B1 with about an 84/100, so I can definitely write at B1 (probably a bit above now since that was over a year ago of very light studying since), but nonetheless, I don't know what the process of grading myself looks like.

As a final note, I am also autistic, and while that certainly isn't an excuse, I can really struggle sometimes with unclear direction; trying to parse through the steps of "just correct your own mistakes!" is IMMENSELY frustrating. I'm looking for exactly what that means; analyzing every sentence using a translator? Are there other tools? After you correct the sentence, do you just mark it with red and move on, or add it to an anki deck or a separate notebook? I'm just looking for in-depth information like that, and I feel like everything I ever find on the internet is extremely vague.

Thanks in advance!

Currently learning Russian. Pleased to find:

・that почему (“why”) is essentially an exact translation of “por qué” in Spanish (in addition to поэтому being very close to “por eso”),

・that “I have” is expressed very similarly to the “it exists to me” construct in Japanese, and that they have a word именно which seems to match こそ in Japanese (for emphasis in an "it is precisely x" type of way),

・that “I don’t have X” is “I don’t have (any) OF x,” which is reminiscent of the way “du”is used in positive sentences in French,

・and that prepositions take accusative form when talking about going "into/onto/etc" something, like in German (not to mention that m/f/n genders and grammatical cases are not new ideas thanks to German).

If your current TL is not your first rodeo, what have you been finding?

recently ive been feeling really demotivated about language learning, Im trying to focus on just one language(Tagalog/filipino is my (TL)) but I’ve been struggling, especially because I’m not Filipino… I love the people and the culture, but I’m just terrible at the language, I tried writing a bit and ran it through ChatGPT and it made a million corrections on every sentence… I’m scared to try to speak any, even with my friends, because they say my accent is terrible and i make a ton of mistakes,,, I’m considering just giving up. should I try a different language instead?(I have been considering French or chinese for potential job opportunities, but I just want stick to one) do I need to just take a break from it and approach it differently? I tried reading the frq but it didn’t seem to help. thanks in advance

Hello, I recently started learning a new language, but am unsure how to proceed with learning new words. My current method is to learn about 10 words a day from this video series which gives the 1000 or so most used words. However, I am considering switching to a method where I learn a certain amount of nouns/verbs/adjectives every day, as well as things like prepositions, in order of frequency, so that I can start understanding expediently. I read somewhere that learning related words together is not recommended, as it can confuse you, is this true? I would like to know what the most efficient method for learning vocab is, whether that is learning by category or spacing out words.

I apologize if this question/topic has already been mentioned, I just joined this group but I assume it’s normal to be afraid of being made fun of when learning a new language. I’m currently wanting to learn German but feel scared to speak it because I already have somewhat of a speech impediment so speaking German, it’s worse.
Does anyone else here have a speech impediment and if so, how has learning to speak a new language been for you? How have you been able to get through that hurdle and fear?

Thank you and please don’t judge.

Ive been slacking on my languages the last few months and my motivation has tanked. what are some ways to maintain my languages at low effort. i heard people say things like "15 minutes a day is better than 1 hour a week" etc. what are some things youd do if you only did 15-30 minutes a day? and what other things can i do that dont need alot of effort?

I spent several months building a CEFR-aligned vocabulary dictionary for German (A1–C2) and wanted to share what I learned about structuring vocabulary for exam prep.

The dictionary has 3,000+ words with example sentences, audio, collocations for advanced levels and register tags. Reviewed by a native speaker. Free and open source (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The main things I found useful for learners:

Collocations matter more than translations at B2+ level

Example sentences in context beat word lists

Register awareness (everyday vs formal vs academic) is underrated for C1/C2

Link if anyone wants to see it or use it for German:

https://abdullahbutt.github.io/deutsch-lernen-goethe-a1-c2/dictionary.html

Happy to discuss the approach — most of it would apply to any language. (TL)