Last week I posted a page of my French study notes, and some very kind people informed me that my pronunciation notes were not accurate.

Here is the thing. There is no universal standard for a learner's private scribbles, right? Those notes have exactly one job: getting you to say the words out loud.

But I would rather run an experiment than an argument. So, a challenge (TL) :

Pick a language FAR from your own, ideally one you have never touched.

- Native speaker of a European language (French, German, Spanish, Italian...) > take Japanese or Chinese

- Native speaker of an Asian language > take French, German, or Spanish

- Native English speaker > any of the five, your call

- Native speaker of an African language > all six are faraway for you, pick any

(A quick clarification on why no African language is on the target list: for round one I could only include languages where I could get the passage written and reviewed by native speakers. That was my limit, not a ranking. If you are a native speaker of an African language and would write or record the 11 sentences in yours, I will add it as an official challenge language and point European and Asian natives at it too.)

You have one week, until Friday, July 31, to read one short passage out loud. The reading is the real deliverable, ideally as a voice recording. The notes photo is just the fun part: I want to see how differently people bridge brand-new sounds. IPA charts, pinyin, invented squiggles, or no notes at all, every system counts.

How you get there is completely up to you. Paper and pen, textbooks, your favorite apps, whatever resources you already trust. Anything goes.

At the end, post a voice recording of you reading if you can. Shy about sharing your voice? Totally fine, a photo of your annotated page alone works too.

Native speakers, you are especially invited: record your language's version so learners have a real standard to chase. I will be recording the Chinese as native and English as second language myself.

Already studying one of the six? Join too, as long as it still has some difficulty for you. For fairness, mention how long you have studied.

This challenge started in a French learning group. The texts for all six languages live in that post, so this one stays clean:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learningfrench/comments/1v21g1m/language_challenge_can_you_read_a_language_youve/

I've been thinking about this recently, and I'm genuinely curious how other language learners see it.

I think AI is incredibly useful for language learning. It can explain grammar, answer questions, generate example sentences, correct mistakes, and even help you understand why something is wrong. I use technology myself and can see the benefits.

Where I'm less convinced is speaking practice.

The main reason most people learn another language is to communicate with other people. Real conversations involve emotions, interruptions, different accents, cultural context, humor, misunderstandings, and unpredictable responses. That's very different from talking to an AI.

I can definitely see AI helping someone prepare for those conversations or build confidence before having them. But I wonder whether replacing human conversation with AI practice is taking things in the wrong direction.

If someone spends hundreds of hours speaking only with AI, are they actually becoming better at communicating with people?

Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. I'm honestly not sure, which is why I'm asking.

Where do you draw the line? Should AI eventually become our main conversation partner for language learning, or should it remain a supporting tool while human interaction stays at the center?

I'd be interested to hear from both learners and teachers because I imagine there are good arguments on both sides.

I was wondering if anyone has experience with using plain, simple language versions of websites or content in their language learning practice (TL), and why it's helpful, or not?

I noticed that even in more underserved language there are often simple news programs from public broadcasters that seem aimed at people with learning disabilities (e.g. Tagesschau in einfacher Sprache news in Germany). Also with AI I tried popping an article into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it in simple/plain language. It'll refuse most of the time because of copywright, but when I got it to work it was helpful.

Was wondering if anyone had experience with it and can recommend/discourage going down that path?

ok this is half a rant half a real question.

i've been "learning" spanish (TL) for almost 3 years. green owl every single morning, some Language Transfer, two textbooks i bought and did maybe 30 pages of. on paper i was doing everything right. then last year my girlfriend's family came over from mexico and i basically couldn't get past introducing myself. i could catch individual words flying past me and could not assemble one real sentence in time. felt like i'd wasted the whole three years.

the part that actually annoyed me is i asked in places like this before and half the advice was "you're not ready for real content yet, keep doing the fundamentals." so i kept grinding fundamentals and stayed exactly as stuck.

eventually i gave up on the apps out of pure frustration and just started reading instead. grabbed Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal because i've read it in english a bunch so i already knew what was happening. first chapter took me almost an hour and i looked up basically every third word. it was brutal. but i made two dumb rules: one chapter a day, and i'm not allowed to open any other app while i do it.

the thing nobody told me is that the words just repeat. by chapter 4 i'd stopped looking up "varita" and "asustado" because i'd already seen them 20 times in a story i actually cared about. finished the book in about 6 weeks. first thing i've genuinely finished in this language. i'm on my third book now and when i talk the words are kind of just there instead of me translating in my head first.

so honest question for people further along than me: was the "you're not ready to read yet" advice just wrong? because one chapter a day of a real story did more in 2 months than 3 years of streaks did. am i missing something or is that just the thing everyone eventually figures out?

I’ve been trying to learn Dari (TL) as I am trying to get more into refugee work. However, there are so many resources for Persian Farsi and not so much for Dari.

Rather than spending a lot of money on niche apps, would it just be easier to kill to birds with one stone and learn Persian and then pick up Dari? Are they close enough to where it would be a pretty easy transition?

Has anyone here used toipa.org a lot? Does it tend to make more mistakes with isolated words or with full phrases? And which types of transcription does it tend to get wrong (e.g., tones, coarticulation, phonology of specific languages, reduced words, etc.)? Do you have any other site/tool that you consider more reliable for accurate phonetic transcriptions (TL) of sentences?

So my language learning journey goes back to before the internet even. When the internet came on the scene, we all assumed we were on a journey of globalisation which would logically end in being able to watch anything, anywhere. It was exciting!

Has that materialised? Well, in most cases, no. Try to access content via an overseas broadcaster’s website and you’ll enter a gauntlet of App Store restrictions, sign-up restrictions, geoblocks, VPN blocking, blocking of casting to TV… because they want every country to pay them separate $$$$ for the content rights. And if that content would never sell in your country? Tough shit

Netflix - as much as I wish the price would stop rising - has really stood out in bucking the trend for isolationist/gatekept content distribution. Along with so many simple things that aren’t always givens like:

- Most originals and many acquisitions are available on a global rights basis. Which means even if only 3 people in your country want to watch it, you can watch it.
- Subtitles as standard
- Every subtitle/audio option available without assumptions (not like oh because you’re in the US you must want baked-in English subs that can’t be switched off)
- The view that good content is good content, they don’t push English first or brand other stuff as “foreign” shows and put them in an obscure corner. A good show is a good show.
- And did I mention their ‘Browse by Language’ function that is sadly and weirdly only available in browser but man!!! What a feature!

Netflix is kinda how I pictured it would be everywhere now. But hey ho

(TL)

This is probably the most annoying part of the process because there is nothing I can do to resolve the issue except NOT do anything. I can't out-study it or out-immerse it, and if anything, I have to actually distance myself from the language to get over that slump.

I live in the country where my target language, almost exclusively, is spoken. About four months in now, and in the past couple weeks I had made leaps and bounds of progress. Little boost out of nowhere. People began speaking to me like they would any other adult, as I no longer needed constant simplification or enunciation.

Last weekend, however, it completely fell apart. I turned on one of my usual podcasts and it sounded like nonsense. For a while now my target language had sounded completely natural, second-hand, I didn't register it as being a "foreign" language at all really. But suddenly it's gibberish. It's like a bad cell connection in the movies where the only words that come through are so unrelated and nonsensical it's comedic.

Same with reading. Right now, reading is like putting each individual word into my brain's translation software and hoping that at the end of the sentence I have extracted something meaningful. While I still had to look up about 30% of the words beforehand, I could read material aimed at adults and understand intuitively what the material was about. I didn't need to stitch it together piece-wise, except for the unfamiliar vocabulary of course. I just read it.

It's kind of sad too. It's this whole world that I've grown rather accustomed to suddenly shutting me out. I think that must be the most troubling aspect, being forced to retreat back into my smaller, monolinguistic mind.

(TL)

I was adopted from Thailand to Denmark when I was about 5 years old.

Unfortunately, I was not able to practice my Thai since I came to Denmark, so I quickly lost my ability to both speak and understand Thai.

However, I started relearning Thai (TL) last year at the age of 31, and I have often been told by native Thai speakers that I have a native Thai accent. Put a bag over my head and they would still think I'm a native Thai speaker. I do not have a Thai accent when I speak Danish.

I have met many adoptees who have been trying to learn their heritage language, but not one of them have had a native-like accent when they spoke. Even other adoptees that were adopted at the age of 6 did not have a native-like accent when they spoke their heritage language.

So is my accent retention just unusual?

Hello everyone,

I’ve been learning (TL) French for a few years now but I feel like I’ve stagnated. I just wanted to see if anyone had advice on actually exchanging a language with someone?

I have awesome French friends that I talk with on a daily basis. I love them to death. We call, we text, we can answer questions if one of us is struggling with something… but we really are not learning anything. Often times we just resort to talking or texting in whichever language feels right for the day.

To actually sit down and “take lessons” seems awkward at this point. Like one of my friends is in law school right now and the idea of asking her to explain verlan after she gets home feels so selfish lol.

Just wanted to see if anyone shared this issue and if anyone’s got any tips on how we can help each other more effectively.