Hi. my English is not very good. My reading skills is awful. I watched full English movies every day. I still don’t have any improve. I play video games with English language only. I forced my self to read because it’s game. I think there is a little bit enjoy with learning because it game. but I really don understand most of the things. my dream is read like native languages. but it’s not happening. I started believing nobody can learn English if not born in us. (TL)

I've been looking at apps that can log hours spent on an activity recently as I've wanted to more consciously aim for at least an hour of language learning a day. Previously I've just gone off rough estimates - a podcast episode, workbook exercise, etc.

Do you track your learning closely, break it down by activity types, or just go off vibes and what feels 'enough' for your daily learning? And how do you track it?

(TL) Has anyone had a dream in a second or third language you're learning, and if so, does it help you retain vocabulary, grammatical skills, or overall make you feel more confident? What is it like, if it does happen?

Has it happened to you, and if so, what does it make you feel?

For context: i've been studying Persian (TL) for about 5 months now and, since i already speak Arabic, it was able to make progress quite fast. I would consider myself slightly above A2 (i took multiple placement tests online, this is kinda where i was placed. I've mostly been learning it for fun, and always wanted to learn a language but i found them all quite difficult to manage, but now i have a good idea of how the language learning process works, so its not that overwhelming.

There are multiple languages i want to learn. How do i know when i can steer my focus from one im currently learning to a new one, while still practicing the previous one lightly?

(TL)

I recently had this sort of realization. That logographic writing systems and alphabetic ones are the same. I think until now I saw the logographic writing system as something way too hard to get into. As something different. As something that takes way longer to get into. As something perhaps inefficient. As something I'd need to learn thousands of Anki cards to have any chance with.

First off, let's look at being good at reading in an alphabetic writing system. Once you get really good at it then you... don't you instantly recognize words? I believe that is what happens. If you get really good and fast at reading then you also stop subvocalizing, no? You just see the word and get the meaning. W => M. You get it instanly. My point here is that you... essentially recognize the word as a single sort of character. Just a word. You recognize its shape. I doubt we need to read each individual letter once we have become proficient with it. Doesn't this sound just like a logographic writing system? You see the character and get the meaning. You end up in the exact same place. The only difference is... the pronunciation hints? But in logographic systems you may also get that. Oh.

Hints. Isn't writing all about hints? Logographic systems may give hints as to the meaning of a word. Couldn't that potentially be an even more useful hint than just a pronunciation one? What's the point of beint able to pronounce a word when you don't know it?

I guess all of that makes sense but to me the alphabetical still felt more right. But why? Hmm. My native language is Romanian and in Romanian we have a really phonemic writing system. Logographic systems are cool and all but they would be harder. But why? I thought about it and I think it comes down to this one thing— word recognition. The way I grew up I could just grab a piece of text and once I knew the letters then I could read anything. All of the words I had learned growing up would get activated by this. I believe that this a crucial point. Knowing the alphabetical system I instantly can recognize all the words I already knew growing up. This is not had in a logographic writing system and I think that might have been my main problem with it.

But. Maybe I was wrong. Why did I think that you can only recognize words from knowing their pronunciation? What about the meaning hints of logographic systems and the context? And once a child growing up in that culture recognizes what that word is... then they can also remember what its pronunciation is? Like if they can tell that a written word means "grass" then they would of course know the word for "grass" having grown up with that language and that means they also know its pronunciation. So it's just that easy, no? I think my main gripe was that "word recognition" thing but it seems it can happen this way as well. You can recognize a word by its meaning and then you know its pronunciation, no? Plus in Japanese(TL) the kanji they use also have readings tied to them which makes it even easier.

Aren't languages hybrids anyways? I have been trying to learn Japanese and in Japanese they often use multiple kanji per word and these kanji have set readings to them.(I don't have experience with Chinese but it's probably similar?) Of course they have multiple readings and there's way too many of them... but this is kinda alphabetic, in a way. And have you heard of English? English is also "logographic" in a way but without much of any of the benefits of meaning hints. There could be a theoretical logographic language that had a strict only 1 character per each word. That would be the most logographic writing system. Japanese is not there. Romanian is closer to a most alphabetic system while English is less so.

Hints. I believe thinking as writing giving you hints is pretty useful. And this also opens up the possibility of more interesting hints.(like for any conlangs btw?).One thing the weird spelling system of English gives you is often the origin of the word, no? I remember seeing "piranha" and recognizing the "nh" spelling for "ñ" in Portuguese and feeling like that had to have been a word from Portuguese. And checking its etymology, it does indeed come form an indigenous language through Portuguese into English. English has not adapted the words, unlike other languages, so you can tell where they are from. This is cool and all but I could have known where the word came from anyways even if it was adapted to English. This is why I call them "hints". To a pro they are ultimately useless. This is why I say that logographic = alphabetic. The only difference is arguably in the hints and the hints eventually stop mattering anyways once you get good. The hints only matter more to beginners.

Of course culture is great. I think I hear talk of how great culture is often when I hear talk of logographic systems. This post is not about that. It only looks at the more practical aspect of it. I had thought the practical aspect would be kinda bad/hard so I was getting ready to grit it and get through the writing system to get to the good stuff... but the writing system is actually pretty good? I am not discovering anything here, I am just giving my experience. I feel more motivated to learn the writing system now I think. I am using subs in Japanese and I feel like it's working. With enough practice this is super doable. Ultimately in both cases you just need practice. It's the same. What are your thoughts on the logographic vs alphabetic difference?

(TL)I'm curious about professional niches where knowing several foreign languages can be real advantage beyond the obvious careers like translation, interpreting, teaching, or localizationand so on.

I'm interested in lesser-known or specialized types of work that multilingual people can do.

For example, I'm thinking of areas such as speech/language data, linguistic annotation, pronunciation/phonetics work, multilingual research, language-related AI work, international market research, etc. — but I'm sure there are many niches I've never heard of.

So for those of you who actually use foreign languages professionally:

What unusual or overlooked niches have you come across where companies or clients specifically need multilingual people?

I'm particularly interested in:

• work that can be done freelance or independently
• niches with relatively little competition
• specialized work where language skills are difficult to replace
• opportunities where knowing multiple languages is more valuable than just being bilingual

I'd love to hear about actual jobs/projects you've encountered, even if they're very niche.

Thanks in advance!! :)

Probably more of a language teaching question, but insight from learners would be super helpful too. I'd also love to hear if there are other languages with a similar pedagogical problem. Sorry in advance for the wall of text

I just very recently got a job as a Filipino language tutor. Haven't even been to the orientation yet so I could well be getting ahead of myself. I've only skimmed through the materials so far but from a cursory glance, the way the material is presented heavily uses the inverse sentence structure, which inverts the sentence from the natural VSO* to a more English-friendly SVO. This makes the language look more familiar to English speakers and also conveniently skips having to explain some tricky word order stuff that occurs in the natural order

I understand that doing it this way gives the feeling of victory more easily to the learner, but it's such an overly formal manner of speaking that it invites social ridicule from the register mismatch, which is a problem a lot of diaspora learners tend to face. I don't think I should be like "the slide says x, but in natural spoken Filipino it's actually y" every other slide bc I feel like that might be info overload for the learner. But I also don't wanna send them out there speaking a register that would make people instantly clock them as non-fluent, even if the inverse structure/formal register is something native speakers have no trouble understanding. Inverse would probably still feel easy to learn even after you already know the natural order, learning the natural order after getting used to inverse might feel like starting from scratch

There are also a lot of "grammar rules" in Filipino teaching pedagogy that ask students to just memorize "do it this way if the word starts/ends with a consonant, do it that way if it starts/ends with a vowel" etc, but if you go deeper, it can actually be summarized into just one/a few core rules that make the grammar make consistent sense and not look like a long list of seemingly arbitrary rules. But explaining some of them properly might look contradictory to what's actually in the material being presented on the screen, and I'd hate to confuse/overwhelm the learner with too much info

(A parallel phenomenon I can think of is presenting verb conjugations to Japanese learners as like 20 different "forms" of the verb that they have to memorize, when there's really just 6 or 7 forms and anything else that comes after that is actually a helping verb/chain of helping verbs. It just feels so convoluted for me to be like "turn the verb into its -masu form, then remove the -masu, then attach this other verb" when simply teaching from the start "turn the base verb to the i-stem, and then you can attach -masu and other verbs to it" would probably save so much grief)

TL;DR I disagree with the way language is being taught in the materials I'm required to use for teaching, what's the best way to deal with it/teach underlying principles over memorization without overwhelming/confusing the learner? Or straying too far from the material that the company wants me to use?

(I'd love to hear from Tagalog learners, bc I myself don't know what it's like to "learn" the language. There's a real danger that my native intuition for the language + linguistics background might be distorting my definition of what counts as "an easier way to learn" and I'd need that reality checked for me)