I wish we as society could simply have one language to overcome language barriers, but that’s more of a content for my daydreaming.
I often encounter issues due to language barriers.
Mainly with 2 languages.
Since the start of war, I’ve been encountering lots of Ukrainians I can’t really speak with. Especially when I was on a dorm, where they were a great majority.
Not that I tend to talk with people, but I felt weird after a while.
Probably like someone who doesn’t speak Spanish in the US (at least I assume that’s fairly common over there).
And now searching for a job, I found many companies want you to know German.
Which I also encountered as “would’ve been useful now” a few times.
Seems like I should know an answer to this, as English isn’t my first language, but I have no fucking idea how I picked it up. I never made any serious attempt (i.e.: studying for more than a week) to learn it.
There are plenty of things you can do, mostly comes down to time and determination and what you enjoy. Overall, use the language a whole lot for decoding/encoding real communication. At first that can be too hard, so you might bridge the gap with deliberate study, grammar/translation formulas, and vocab memorization.
We have a community at !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz where you can look for support. This would be a good question to crosspost there. (Full disclosure, I’m a mod there.)