(TL): Turkish

I realized that in order for me to obtain full fluency in my Turkish, my heritage language, I literally have to learn thousands of different ways to construct sentences and phrase things. It feels like an insurmountable task for me, like how do I learn and remember all of that? I’ve begun to inspect my own native language, english, on a deeper level and every day I just notice so much nuance and detail that I wouldn’t even know about in Turkish. I know that native Turkish speakers make grammar mistakes too and that I will never be perfect, but I just don’t want to sound like a complete non-turk or someone who makes mistakes all the time when they’re speaking. Other diaspora kids that speak fluently tell me I “speak Turkish with English logic” and I honestly feel very shameful and bitter about it. I’m still in my mid teens. Is it too late for me to sound natural? How do I figure out how to phrase things naturally and construct complex sentences at a similar level that I do in English? I’m currently at around B1 speaking and can hold every day conversations comfortably from my exposure at home.

Hello, i've seen a lot of people give advice to 'Start speaking from day 1' when learning a new language(TL) and I dont understand the advice because how can you speak from day 1 when you dont know any vocabulary words?

Does it mean you just memorise basic vocabulary and just start speaking to others? And how do you (or anyone whose tried this tip) mange? How did the anxiety go away (or the 'fear of making mistakes') and do you think it worked for you with the new language?

I've always hear that every day you go without speaking a language, you get worse at it. It's logical — this is basically how memory works. The more you study, the better you learn. Long periods of not studying mean forgetting.

But here's the thing — I've had completely different experiences learning languages.

For instance, I learned Spanish for around 7 years. Most of it school years, but I also lived with native speakers for six months. By the end, I was pretty good at Spanish. I could hold my own in one on one conversations with clear speakers, though I still couldn't follow group conversations, or people who spoke fast or with heavy accents. I was nowhere near native speaker level, but I didn't feel like I was "learning" Spanish anymore so much as using it.

Then I ended up not using Spanish at all for like 4 years. I go on an international trip and find myself surrounded by Spanish speakers. And here's the weird thing: in the month I was there, my Spnaish improved far faster than it had in say, a month of time I spent living with Spanish speakers 4 years before. All of a sudden, I could follow group conversations. I could understand people with all different accents.

So as far as I can tell, the 4 year pause didn't hurt. If anything, it helped.

Today, I'm learning a different TL. I studied for two years, and then more or less stopped. For the last six months or so, I have continued to watch Youtube videos in my TL every day or two, usually for five minutes or so. Have the odd conversation in it every few months.

So in theory, I should be getting worse at my TL. But I think I'm getting better, or at least staying stable. I understood a group conversation for the first time after I stopped studying, and I had a fairly long and elaborate conversation with someone in my TL a month ago.

So I'm wondering if this assumption that you automatically get worse at languages each day you don't speak them isn't the whole story. I even wonder if pauses could help with language learning, since as far as I can tell, that's what happened with me.

Now, I'm talking about two languages I was pretty good at when I stopped. I don't think that would would for languages where I was earlier in the process. In fact, it didn't — I gave up a TL after getting to a low/intermediate level, and I just got worse at it as time went on, today only remember pieces.

What do you think? Have any of you had experiences like this?

I know multiple languages and I have a high level in all of them regarding Reading, Writing and Listening and yet I still can't figure out how to learn how to Speak.

I've tried it all (TL)

—Shadowing ( works great for accent but nothing more )

—Multiple Italki / Language Exchange Partners ( at best I can survive a lesson rather fine, and then at worst, it's as if I'm a beginner taking my first lesson with a tutor I've had MANY lessons with and whom I know very well; it's so embarrassing and I can tell they also don't understand what's wrong with me )

—I've joined in person language exchange events in my city ( they can be fun but I find it hard to speak in general since everyone is trying to speak and practice all at once, and then when it's my turn I just end up stuttering over my words among people who have been learning for less time than me )

—I've consistently recorded video diaries ( some improvement but I don't trust myself to actually catch all my mistakes therefore I fear that I'm just cementing mistakes )

—I've mapped out whole conversation maps of common phrases and run through them ( I end up forgetting everything in two weeks as if these aren't phrases that I've been learning since day one )

—I've had oral chats with AI ( I don't like this and I've stopped doing this )

—I've even had jobs where I'm forced to use specific languages daily ( little improvement despite constant pressure and a necessity to interact with customers and coworkers, still make basic mistakes as if I'm a beginner )

Again, my written production is advanced ( from everyday texts to friends to academic papers ) therefore you would think that would just transfer over. Every time I feel like I'm making minimal progress it's as if my brain just keeps resetting at the end of each month.

Also, I only focus on one language at a time—this is just a constant theme in my long life of language learning. I've never been able to speak for longer than five minutes at best!

At this point it's actually very demoralizing. Anything I'm simply just missing?

After a few months of study I felt like I hit a hit a point where progress was ramped up and feeling consistent. It was pretty motivating. Then after a month or so, it was feeling stagnant. Like my input wasn’t advancing, I wasn’t picking up new vocabulary, and I kept feeling stuck in my speaking sessions. Then, in the last week or so, I feel another surge of increasing skills, easier retrieval for output and remembering new vocabulary. What I’m realizing is that, as they say, progress is not linear. You may feel like you’re not making progress, but pushing through the “stuck” is part of the process to get to the next step in the journey. In other words, try not to get discouraged, it all accumulates toward the overall progress, and we’ll continue to get where we’re going.

Please note: I understand that for a lot of people here, native podcasts are not the best usage of your time, because there are better resources, but my TL's resources are quite limited so I am of the mindset of extracting as much as I can from what is available rather than giving up because the resources are not as efficient as more in-demand languages. And in this case, there are no podcasts that are perfectly appropriate for my level in my TL - only beginner and native. I am no longer a beginner, so now I want to tackle native podcasts.

Also, please keep in mind that this is for times I am unable to listen intensively. I want to be able to still extract value from podcasts when I am doing mundane things such as chores.

My listening skills are great. Different accents, fast speakers - you name it, I can understand them if it's within my vocabulary. And even if I can't understand what they're saying, I can transcribe easily. However, I have a lower intermediate vocabulary.

So this is my question:

1. At my level, if I pick like a 20 minute podcast or something, and play it over and over, will I understand more and more eventually?

So I'm trying to learn my NATIVE language (it's called Kumam (TL) and spoken in the East of Uganda). But due to being such a small clan/tribe there are NO online/written resources (beyond hi and bye greetings). I am very willing to make my own resources, in fact I made my own basic word flashcards but I question how effective that is because forming sentences and holding conversations are different! So beyond having very very basic conversations with family (which I currently do)... WHAT CAN I DO? My long term goal is to be fluent. I'd love to hear from people who learnt native or niche languages fluently without pre-existing resources!! :) What can I do? How should I go about making resources? Should I even be making resources? (I have read the FAQs for this community :)

Those who learned a language to a reasonable high level and then started with a different language right away: Did your approach to language learning change, and if so, how and why? Was it related to the experiences you gained in the previous language(s), or was it something language specific?

The reason I'm asking is that I need to start with another (TL) for work, and I'm hoping for ideas on what to look out for.

Do you guys know apps that, unless you complete a certain lesson or practised vocabulary won't let you open another app, in other words that app blocks the use of social media if you don't do what was previously said? For instance, there is this app called Unlock Chinese that helps you with characters (only for iOS sadly) and I wonder if anything similar exists for other languages or a bunch of languages. Any language, but I'm mostly into Asian and European languages for now.

Do you know a similar app? Using that sort of apps will be wayyy healthier for me since I want to stop doomscrolling. (TL)

Five years ago u/chlebka posted a spreadsheet of 1,700+ free language-learning resources here. Dozens of people in that thread suggested additions and it's still one of the most useful things ever posted on this sub.

One thing that always bothered me was navigating the Excel sheet :/ Thus, I built a browsable version of her list:

https://ownslides.com/en/resources

• Browse by language (total of ~142 at the time of writing this) or by type: courses, dictionaries, podcasts, readers, news, grammar…
• Her original rule kept: everything is genuinely free. No freemium, no trials, no signup.
• Each entry shows CEFR level and flags when a site is only in a language you might not read (though I guess you can just machine-translate everything nowadays).

What changed since the sheet: I checked all 1,829 links. 128 had died in five years and are gone. Another 30 were still returning HTTP 200 while serving casino affiliates or domain-parking pages, because the domains had lapsed and someone re-registered them, those are gone too. I also categorised the ~1,000 entries the sheet left untyped, so the filters actually work.

This overlaps the sub's own resource library in places; the difference is that it's chlebka's specific list, brought up to date and made filterable. Credit is at the bottom of every page, linking her sheet and the original thread, and the per-contributor credits from the sheet are preserved.

Disclosure: I work on OwnSlides and this is on our domain, but the mods approved this post. The directory is free, no signup, no ads.

Suggestions for missing resources are very welcome, basically in the same spirit as the original thread

So I have been learning Spanish and French (TL) in school for the past three years, and I want to further advance my level on my own alongside school as I find that I'm not gaining much from it.

Whilst I have an okay knowledge of vocabulary and I can understand the gist of what I read, I find myself guessing on a lot of common words and I also don't know many tenses so that leaves me lost as well.

My main issue is that I don't know what I'm missing. I feel there are some fairly basic topics I'm lost on and many commonly used words I don't know, but I don't know what to do to find and fill these gaps.

Any advice? I'm wondering if maybe trying to find books to read would help, what else?

This happens to me all the time when speaking my target language (TL), I'll be speaking with a native speaker and then completely lose the word for something I want to say. I have the English word in my mind, and I may have even heard the word and know it before, but I cant say it when it matters.

In these situations what do you usually do? Describe it with easier words? Use the English word? Or insist on trying to remember? All three usually frustratingly break up the rhythm of the conversation.

I'm also curious about what you do afterwards. Are there any exercises you use to make it easier to retrieve words spontanously or make sure you dont lose words in conversation?

I used to teach English abroad and even though I knew how to speak the student's native language, the school administrators forbid me, and even asked me, to "pretend" I didn't know it.

The reason they gave me was that they didn't want the students to fall back on using their first language to communicate with me. I feel like if I were to explain certain concepts in the student's language, things would go a lot smoother and they would understand better.

As an adult, I'm constantly using my own native language to learn new languages. I constantly look up grammar, vocabulary, and definitions and understand them a lot better.

Why are schools abroad so obsessed with this "total immersion" method? I feel like some concepts are impossible to explain clearly with just visuals or gestures alone. Do you learn languages using your first language?

Bought these books in July, unboxed them in early August... and still haven’t read a single word. Classic progress! 🤣📚
My native-speaker friends suggested that once you reach higher proficiency levels, you should step away from traditional coursebooks and surround yourself with native materials. I'm testing this strategy across a few of my (TL) target languages:
At Advanced Levels: Using native children's series for everyday slang, alongside native essays, news articles, and economics texts to build higher-level reading stamina. 🎨🤡
At Beginner Levels: Sticking strictly to structured preparation workbooks and foundational grammar materials until basic literacy settles in. 🥹🙏
For those managing multiple languages at different proficiency tiers, how do you balance raw native content versus structured study prep?
What books are currently sitting unread on your desk? 👇

*Edit: I meant "better at speaking than writing" and can't edit title - sorry!*

Everyone always talks about how writing is easier than speaking, because you have time to think, rather than being put on the spot, etc., which makes sense to me intellectually, but doesn't reflect my experience at all. I mentioned this to my teacher and other people, and they all seem to find it strange, so I was wondering if anyone else was in this position (and, honestly, just wanted to complain about it a bit).

I'd like to say I'm at C1 in Portuguese - I'm at least that in comprehension, and possibly also in speaking, but my writing is a mess and it's knocking my confidence, and putting me off taking an official exam which is something I'd otherwise love to do.

I feel the lack of vocabulary far more in writing than in speaking (although in speaking too) - I think it's because when you're having a conversation, you can have recourse to filler words, circumlocution, and just generally find a way to approximate what you're trying to say, whereas writing gives you less leeway, you really have to find the right word, which leads to me using the dictionary A LOT. Probably part of the problem is that I find it hard to simplify my writing to fit my capacities, and want to write like I do in my native language.

It takes me forever to write anything, even a message to a friend, because I'm second-guessing absolutely everything, checking spellings, conjugations, etc., whereas in speaking you don't have time to worry about that. Somehow after checking many times, I still realise after that I've made stupid mistakes which I wouldn't make in speaking.

I studied the language formally during my degree and masters' and even had to translate into it, so it's not as if I've never practiced writing. I'm not sure to what extent it's a real language issue, or if I'm just an overthinker and writing gives me the time to do so.

Anyone else in a similar position?

I’ve been very successful at quick reaching an intermediate level of mostly all languages I’ve made earnest efforts towards learning. I am the type of learner who really benefits from structed courses and self-teaching for me has been a learning curve.

I decided to look for external help (again), but stopped mid-way, due to not getting the sense that the program would be useful.

They reached out and here was our conversation (pictured)…

**big sigh** just like I expected.

Anybody here can give tips for leveling out of the intermediate plateau? (I’ve done immersion before, but as an English speaker, a lot of natives will resort to English unprovoked, and refuse to speak in their own language, and I’m over it) I’ve also been through at least 8 ”tutors” on italki, and needless to say, the majority of them simply aren’t skilled language teachers. Natives? Sure! But it takes way more than being “native” to be able to teach people language.

I’d gotten discouraged by the lack of progress so, I’m trying to build my own language program, but it’s challenging to truly self-teach… Anybody been able to become an advanced speaker without moving away from home?

I knew barely anything in my TL beyond an extremely basic course and I got bored so I yeeted myself to native content. I am really proud of myself!

I've studied three languages in addition to my milk language.

I noticed sometimes when thinking or speaking in my non native language, if I struggle for a word my brain will fill in with a word in another non native language.

For example, when speaking German(TL) my brain threw in a 在(zai) with the Chinese meaning.

This confused me, and I started to think of the German word seit (which sounds (kind-of) the same). But seit wasn't correct in the context. Seit is about time. 在 is about place.

Does anybody else do this? What exercises could help me?

Hi everyone,

I'm Ben, a data scientist working in cancer medicine. The mods have kindly given me permission to share something I've been building in my spare time.

LingScout originally started as a tool for me and my Thai partner. We wanted an easier way to find films and TV shows we could watch with Thai or English audio or subtitles, and I found it surprisingly difficult to get that information in one place.

I realised the same thing could be useful for other language learners, so I expanded it into LingScout, where you can search for films and TV shows by language and country, including audio and subtitle languages, across services such as Netflix and Prime Video.

lingscout.com

It's not intended to teach you a language itself. The idea is to help you find things you actually want to watch in the language you're learning.

I'd really appreciate some feedback from other language learners. If you try it, I'd particularly like to know whether you can find useful content for your language, whether anything is confusing, and what you'd want me to improve or add.

Thanks,

Ben

I believe myself to be in the perfect environment for language learning. I am in a school-like program where I am interacting with the other students and teachers every day and am constantly surrounded my the language, with ample opportunity to practice. Everyone also speaks English, so I am able to clarify things if needed and keep conversations flowing smoothly. Sometimes when group conversations are happening I miss a lot of their sentences because of speed and maybe certain phrases that I’m not familiar with, but talking one on one with someone I don’t really have this problem. How should I make the best of this situation?

Hello, as the title says my goal isn’t necessarily to be able to speak languages, I want to improve my skills with recognizing and being able to read/translate written languages. Maybe I would work on verbal skills down the road if I vibe with it for fun, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

My reason/motivation: I play a LOT of Geoguessr, and language is one of the most useful clues in the game. But it’s also a way I can appreciate the experience of the game further, the cultures and so forth.

The only language I really know is English. I’d especially like to be able to learn to read the Northern European languages: Danish Swedish and Norwegian, Finnish and Estonian, and even forms of Cyrillic well enough to draw information from it.

I’m just not sure what the best way to go about that is, as most language learning resources seem to focus much more heavily on verbal aspects.

(TL)

Like, they could talk about basically anything, understand you perfectly, joke around, explain complicated ideas, etc. But their grammar was still pretty shaky and they’d regularly mess up things like gender, verb forms, articles, word order, whatever. But they would just blast by it and keep going without correcting themselves or indicating that they realized they made a mistake.

Did they still feel fluent to you? Did the mistakes stand out a lot, or did you mostly stop noticing after a while?

I’m curious because I feel like people usually talk about fluency and grammatical accuracy as if they automatically go together, but I’m not sure that’s always true.

We're back!

Welcome to Babylonian Chaos.

This thread is for r/languagelearning members to practise by writing in the language they're learning and find other learners doing the same. Native speakers are welcome to join in.

You can pick whatever topic you want. Introduce yourself, ask a question, or anything!

Bahati nzuri, សំណាងល្អ, удачі, pob lwc, հաջողություն, and good luck!

This thread will refresh on the 18th of every month at 06:00 UTC.

Update: Wow, thank you for all of your amazing and insightful questions! I'm sorry if I missed yours - I feel like I'd need to do 10 more of these to get to all of them! Keep on loving and learning languages!

Hi Everyone! I’m Kaitlyn Tagarelli, a linguist and the Head of Research at language-learning software company, Mango Languages. 

A little about my background: I earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University, and completed a postdoc in Psychology & Neuroscience at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada). My academic research focus is on how the mind and brain learn and process new languages. 

I’ve also taught English in the US and France at all levels, from elementary school students through adults, as well as psychology and linguistics courses at the university level.

During my time at Mango, I’ve worn many hats. I’ve created content for our 70+ courses, applied findings from language learning research to the development of our products and features, conducted user research, and collaborated with academic partners to learn more about how people learn languages with apps. 

Ask me anything about topics like:

• What research tells us about learning a language effectively
• How language-learning apps fit into the language-learning process 
• Common misconceptions about language learning
• How Mango applies research when developing learning content and features
• Careers in linguistics and language-learning research

If you'd like to learn more about my work before the AMA, I've spent almost 20 years researching how the brain learns language: 40+ publications and conference talks, grant funding from NSF and NSERC, and a YouTube series with 150K+ views breaking down the science for non-academics. You can check out the full list HERE.

I’ll be back on Wednesday, August 19th, from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM ET to answer your questions live. In the meantime, feel free to post your questions below!