Ok, I might as well go first: I wish I could draw. Not at the level where I could make photorealistic portraits, but I’ve always been envious of those who are able to scetch something together in a few minutes that perfectly captures what they want to convey. Sometimes words aren’t enough to express what I want to say, and for those situations I would love to have a simple drawing do the talking for me.
I wish I could speak a lot of languages fluently.
This is my answer also. I wish I was multi-lingual.
I’m regularly on calls with people for whom English is not their primary language. Almost without fail they apologize for their poor English. I regularly tell those people, “please don’t apologize, you do me that courtesy of communicating with me in my native tongue. I am completely unable to reciprocate that courtesy.”
I’d love to be fluent in Spanish, French, German.
Look into Comprehensible Input. Dreaming Spanish is a great channel/site.
It’s really not difficult to do per se, it just takes a LOT of time. 1500+ hours. But if you can replace the time you spend watching YouTube videos and doomscrolling, you’ll get there eventually. Especially once you reach the point of understanding media in the language you’re learning. You can then go mindlessly watch YouTube again… but in that language lmao.
Check out this playlist for an explanation of the method (turn on subtitles) https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GrtxQ9yde-J2tfxJDvReNf , TL;DW don’t study the language. Don’t do grammar/vocab by rote. Literally just listen to a crap ton of the language. You will learn grammar/vocab naturally with repetition in context. But you must listen/watch at a level you can understand. That starts with content with a lot of hand gestures and simple stories, where maybe you don’t understand the words but you understand the meaning by the rest of the context. After a hundred hours or so you can move on to content with less context clues, and after maybe 400-600 hours start with media meant for native speakers.
Gosh, thank you so much!
That’s the problem with native lingua franca speakers. They don’t have a foreign language that they really have to learn.
If you don’t speak English people are mostly limited to their own country. German is worthless in France. So we all need to learn English, while you don’t have a lot of benefit of actually learning other languages.
To show my point: My team at work is spread over most of Europe. We don’t have an English native speaker in the team and there are maybe a small handful of them in the whole company. Still, we all speak English at work, because it’s the only language everyone knows.
That is a really interesting anecdote I find it both surprising and completely understandable.
I’ve been using italki.com to learn Russian. It’s pretty cool.
That’s a good one, I’d love to be able to enjoy things in their native languages rather than butchered (at best) translations.
Any particular languages?
Not op, but French, Russian, and Japanese. They’re all hard for Americans to learn (vs, say, Spanish or German).
am learn french
Russian actually isn’t that bad. It takes time, but I’ve been learning it because my gf is fluent. She calls it an unga-bunga language because literal word-by-word translation sounds like caveman-speak lol
China is rumbling in the distance
French is very similar to Spanish
French is considered just about as hard as Spanish, maybe a little harder on the phonetics. German is harder than French or Spanish. Russian is harder than German/French/Spanish, but Japanese would be significantly harder than Russian.
Other than ALL, Spanish would be very useful. Japanese so I can watch Anime and not miss half of it because I’m reading subtitles. French so I can cuss at you and sound like I’m quoting a love song. German so I can quote you a love song and sound like I’m cussing at you. And Chinese (mandarin?) because that has a lot of business opportunity.