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.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    1·
    6 hours ago

    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.

    Immersion is pretty universally thought to be the best way, and English immersion is easy.

    If I’m in the picture depends heavily on how much you need to know. Do I have enough to get by at a basic level if I was suddenly in a Russian-speaking country? Probably. Can I make heads or tails of the poetic-bookish stuff? Hell no. And even that took a lot of study and practice; there really weren’t shortcuts.

    So, if you do Ukrainian, first probably don’t, because they all speak Russian anyway, and expect to solo study many hundreds of hours over years to get anywhere.