#& that's probably why in two years of sporadic basque 'studying' the best i can do is say hey that word means this!

[narratorstragedy]

12, 13, 29, 33 and 34 for the language asks!

i'm putting these under a read more because wow did this get out of hand. thank you for the questions wren :-)

12. already answered!

13. What do you think about language learning/teaching at school in your country?

i think it sucks! lmao. (in terms of pre-university teaching, bc i think in college it really just depends on the professor.) i can only speak to the public school system in my state but the problem is that unless you are personally motivated you can get an A with mindless memorization & filling out worksheets & never really being able to speak a language. i know people who took 3 years of spanish in high school but because they simply did not care about it their speaking skills are, like, the level of my basque speaking skills (which are essentially nonexistent). also we start way too late in the us (language learning is mandatory only in high school and i never had the opportunity to take a language in school before then), a lot of schools only offer one or two languages so kids can't learn the ones they're actually interested in, & it's just... whatever. ugh! i've been mad about this for years i just feel so dead inside when i think about it.. usamerican public school system moments. i had a great teacher for 2 years of high school & i'm sure there are a lot of great teachers out there in the public school system but it's just sad.

i think it's really different in private schools bc a lot of people at my university were like oh yeah i took mandarin for four years in high school, or korean, or italian, or french and i was like Oh... so we come from two different worlds huh (my school only had spanish and so everyone was forced to study it for 2 years at minimum.)

29. What do you like learning the most? (vocabulary, grammar, writing skills, oral skills… Whatever you can think of!)

i guess vocabulary bc i like fun little words :) and then when i see them or hear them again it's like oh! my friend! but i also kind of like learning about grammatical structures, or at least i have been lately? the other day i watched like 5 youtube videos trying to understand morphosyntactic alignment. So

33. What achievement(s) are you the most proud of?

uhhhh hm i recently read a book in italian which was exciting! also this is kind of lame but the fact that i can basically read anything (literary) in spanish if i want to. of course it's harder than reading in english and if you put a medical text in front of me i'd be like what the fuck but. yeah. one of my favorite parts of learning languages is getting to learn about the literature & history of that language so :)

34. What do you think is the best for learning? Websites and apps or books and notebooks and stuff?

my favorite thing to do is literally just listen to music or watch or read things in a language (once i'm at an intermediate level) to the point where i barely ever watch or listen to anything in english anymore. this is not really a studying strategy because to be honest i've never been one of those #langblr language learners... i just do whatever i want and then take some classes and have fun with it and make a lot of decisions based on vibes. this is because i have not had to learn a language from scratch (ie i don't understand a word of it) since i was a child and i remember nothing of what i did except that i did rosetta stone for months and then when i got to spain i could not communicate at all and came home from my first day of school crying because i had no clue what was happening. so like... i guess what i'm saying is at a certain point just i consume media and try to communicate with people in whatever language i'm learning bc why not. but that doesn't help for beginning language learning bc. you have to actually know some words and grammar lmfaoooo.

i am really a terrible language learner, i just happen to love it. in terms of spanish websites i am in a love-hate relationship with la RAE. my favorite way to distract myself in class is to go dle.rae.es and select the random word function and see if i know any of them, or to put in words and see the expressions that are linked to them. i also have insane, only vaguely organized bookmark folders like this.

#what i've learned from answering these questions is that i am so unserious about languages KHJFDSHJFSHJKDHJFDS #me voice uhmmm i like learning languages based off of vibes <- my actual strategy in italian half the time /hj #& that's probably why in two years of sporadic basque 'studying' the best i can do is say hey that word means this! #thanks for asking! #also this got sooo long my bad