I quit learning german, and i don’t regret it honestly lol. Now i’m focused on Chinese, and this one time i won’t give up even if it’s relatively expensive.

Si tu tengas las ganas, todo es posible. Cuando era más joven, no sabía porque aprendiendo español era importante. Ahora que soy un adulto y con esta ola de represión, ahora entiendo la importancia.

I guess what I’ll say is that if you’re having trouble trying to learn a language, maybe look into why you’re interested in learning in the first place. For me, learning Spanish is important because the threat of deportation is very real and I don’t want these guys to deport me without knowing the language.

Unfortunately thats what animates me to practice Spanish. Being able to connect with my culture is also a big plus.

Edit: I live in the Southwestern United States.

I took French in school and i was decent at it. My father speaks it semi-fluently which motivated me to try and get good at it too. Occasionally i would watch movies in French and try to speak it when on vacation, but i haven’t really put much effort into keeping up the learning for the past decade or so. I would say I have the grammar down, but my vocabulary has remained fairly stunted as a result of not using it (then again, it’s a Romance language so most of the vocabulary is pretty intuitive for me).

Bottom line, it’s really not that important a language to learn anymore. There are others that i would rather invest my time in. I’m learning a bit of Chinese and Russian on the side at the moment and they’re much harder but also much more interesting. And i already speak three languages fluently, so i don’t feel guilty about dropping French.

French…kind of. My father speaks French as well as English, so I had exposure to it growing up. I took it in high school as I wanted to improve on that, but eventually dropped it. I can sorta get by conversationally, but I wouldn’t be able to work in a French speaking country. I would honestly like to get back to learning it more again someday. I usually speak to my father in French still.

I studied Korean for a couple years, but it has gotten really rusty too. In grad school I spent a while in ROK and DPRK and was pretty good at Korean then. It’s actually one of the easiest languages I have studied, but through sheer neglect I have gotten way worse at it. I should probably brush this up too.

Most of my language learning time has been focused on Chinese these days.

I took French in school, it was sort of compulsory, and I did learn a competent amount of it by the time I’d graduated. With just a bit of extra effort I could have probably gotten fluent after that, however I haven’t bothered with it ever since leaving school, so I guess that counts?

Although since I learned a lot of the fundamentals at such a young age, I doubt it will ever be that difficult to go back and finish learning it if I could ever be bothered, since a part of it is just engrained permanently in my head. I noticed that even without years of practice, if I attempted to read stuff in French I could comprehend nearly half of it first try. Shame it seems like the more time passes, the less useful it’ll probably become.

I started learning a bit of french when I worked with a bunch of quebecois. When I started to understand what people were talking about I realized my life was so much better not knowing. I dabbled in spanish when I was in mexico as well but didn’t get very far.

Kinda yeah, with French. I’ve had various times I tried to learn it with the help of apps and then stopped because of the app going in a direction I didn’t like.

I am determined to learn Mandarin in spite of any BS like that in the way, but French feels a bit sunk cost fallacy sometimes, like I have a decent amount of familiarity so why not go all the way. Even though the language itself doesn’t appeal to me much these days and it’s hard to find the right context to learn it in.

An important lesson for diaspora by Franz Fanon:

Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.

Language has here, therefore, a dual meaning for me as both a synechdoche for culture and the discipline itself.