A language learners’ forum

When Youtube shows you ads in different languages (Spanish, English, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, etc.).

AndyMeg wrote:When Youtube shows you ads in different languages (Spanish, English, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, etc.).

When facebook gives you a mix of random advertisements like:
-basic Lithuanian immersion classes
-an advanced Persian reading online class
-Rosetta Stone, through various blogs etc, to make it harder to block them all
-a dating site for Armenians living in France (and Armenian is one of the few languages I'm pretty sure I've never googled!)
-an expat jobs agency
-a Korean tutoring platform
-an online HSK preparatory class

I am just a FIGS learner. For now.

... you are working with a subcontractor who speaks no English, but weren't told this, so after explaining everything in English, realizing you were not at all understood, you switch to somewhat exasperated Spanish, explain everything again, and have around 4 other people exclaim "I didn't know you speak Spanish."

... you are helping a client when he gets a phone call from his wife in (very loud and angry) Greek, so after he hangs up you start talking to him in Greek.

... you speak to a coworker in French for a solid minute and they are too polite to interrupt you, despite not speaking it. (Perhaps this might be better placed under "You know you're absolutely exhausted when..."

...your wife tells you that you've been talking in your sleep, and you have to ask which language.

And then she answers, "Both."

When someone gets interested in your language learning posts on reddit, does a search of your comments, sends you a long flattering message with a sort of learning guide based on your posts (I must be a graphomaniac, it's otherwise impossible, and asks for guidance.

It's flattering, and also a little bit creepy (but not from this person, they are doing what I've done as well, they are not creepy. but more in general, and more about me clearly writing too much. the tiny personal dots can be connected, that's creepy. But hey, it looks like at least my procrastinating desire to suddenly start Japanese or Arabic every now and then wasn't in that overview ). But while it looks a tiny bit scary, I tell myself that 1.few people are interested in doing a research on me as a language learner and 2.all the time posting on reddit hasn't been wasted. there are people, who find the posts useful! I feel great that I can be of assistance, and proud to be the next link of the chain of langauge learning methods knowledge for a few people, just like many of you have been it for me.

When you want to teach your old dog a new language trick.

... You see someone reference Dog Whelks in their log and this causes you to realize that you do not know how to say "dog whelk" in your target language, so you look it up on Wikipedia only to realize that they do not have a page about it in most of those languages. Well, it is not that I really needed to know how to talk about dog whelks in Ukrainian anyways, I suppose.

After you give a short answer to somebody's enquiry ("What did you have for lunch" or "How do you find the new movie"), you secretly answer the same question in all other languages you know. Just to check if you also know the expression in those languages.

... when you have a trilingual conversation between three people, one of whom speaks only Russian, one English and Ukrainian (me) and one who speaks all three, in which the Russian speaker speaks Russian, the trilingual person translates the Russian to English and you reply in Ukrainian to then be translated to Russian as needed.

When your dad asks you what variety of Arabic you've been learning and you say, "I got distracted and switched to Norwegian."