What is something like a hobby or skill that you belive almost anybody should give a try, and what makes your suggestion so good compared to other things?

i feel like this is a descent question i guess.

  • kani@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Learning a new language. You learn a bit about how languages work, understand other cultures a bit better, usually learn new vocabulary for your native language, understand the relationship between different languages, learn the roots of loan words and generally helps your brain stay healthy, even by only studying the basics.

      • The_Empty_Tuple@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Not OP, but I’ve asked myself this as well. I think it depends on where you live and what you want out of your language learning experience. If your goal is to learn something more useful in everyday life and you live in the southern US, Spanish is a great option. If you’re from Canada, French is probably the most useful. German and Mandarin are useful in the business world, but the latter is significantly harder to learn. If you’re not worried about maximizing the utility of what you learn, Norwegian is considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers, and let’s be real, Norway is awesome.

        It’s more important that you stick with whatever you choose though. That’s the part I’ve struggled with.

        • kani@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          To be honest I’m not a native English speaker so your advice is probably more useful anyway. My husband is British and has studied plenty of languages, finding Swedish and Norwegian definitely the easiest to pick up. Romance languages have more complicated grammar but you’ll find a lot more TV and movies to watch to casually pick up a bit more of the language, which I find useful because I only speak English as well as I do from watching a lot of TV (first with subs) when I was younger.

          • wafflez@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            do you have any swedish tv shows or movies you could recommend? the more the merrier please, or any resources for it at all?

      • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Bit of an off-the-wall suggestion but I was having real trouble learning other languages mostly due to all the cases (and sometimes genders). So I started learning Esperanto, which admittedly is not the most practical language to know BUT it really helped me understand languages more in general. It’s very simple to learn and easy for an English-speaker to pronounce, as well as having lots of recognisable words (the Esperanto for “yes” is “jes”, which is pronounced “yes” lol)

        Now that I’ve gone back to learning German I’m feeling much more confident about learning in general just because I got some of the grammar concepts from a much easier language. Might be worth a look if you’ve struggled before.

      • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Esperanto is reckoned an easy pickup, has speakers globally, and will improve your default in most romance languages. The community is also quite nice, in my experience.

        • randomperson@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Esperanto seems to be pretty useless to invest so much time into learning it. Wouldn’t be learning “normal” language more beneficial anyway?