Started on Spanish a few weeks ago. I had a short attempt to learn it years ago but got too distracted. Let's see how it goes this time!
Wouldn’t say I’m learning it as such, but I’m certainly picking up Welsh, elements of it at least.
I keep my streak going with Esperanto. It's criminally easy, and kind of interesting for being so relentlessly logicalDid Latin at school because it's easiest and I'm not good at languages.
About 9 years ago I fell in love with Estonia and have been struggling to learn Estonian ever since. I'm finally getting there, but when I started I didn't appreciate that there are easy and difficult languages to learn. The point at which things started to happen was when I started using the Memrise Decks courses alongside the books I'm learning from.
I tried Duolingo because everyone I knew seemed to be playing with it. It's terrifically addictive and I couldn't cope with losing my 1500 day streak. It's also very good for certain things, like pronunciation and reading. I started trying it with Dutch as I wanted to see if I could learn a language with just it and nothing else. The results were a) you can't and b) I got to like Dutch and am now doing an online course from Groningen University. I keep my streak up by doing French, and undoubtedly it's helping my French in a certain small but perhaps insignificant way.
About 9 years ago I fell in love with Estonia and have been struggling to learn Estonian ever since. I'm finally getting there, but when I started I didn't appreciate that there are easy and difficult languages to learn.
Just finished German; never again...
Nah, I liked German (nice to the ears), and actually got good with the grammer and vocab (to the point where I could translate any sentence chucked at me).German’s a lovely language once you’ve got to grips with the grammar.
I gather that Estonian is one of those languages -- like German, Russian, and Latin -- whose nouns and adjectives have "cases": a word is modified according to its function in the sentence; whether "doing to", "being done to", "being in ownership of", etc. The abovementioned languages have only a round half-dozen of such cases, or fewer; Estonian has about fifteen of them. As soon as I discovered this fact, I decided that -- admirable though Estonia and its people appear to be in many ways -- I want nothing to do with their language !
At one time I wanted to learn German and move to Germany but since Brexit put an end to that dream I haven't really tried rather than a few attempts at Duolingo.
The pronunciation is a dream.
The number of cases is intimidating, but some of them are actually your friends and make life easier by replacing prepositions or moods with something nice and regular. The first three are a minor problem as you have to learn each word three times, but you eventually sort of see a pattern (there's maybe kinda 17 patterns, plus exceptions, so it's not worth trying to learn them) that sees you good for almost all the others. Things relating to number are a problem as there are an unnecessary number of cases involved and it's not always obvious where you need a plural (!). One particular plural form effectively prevents you from ever speaking fluent correct Estonian as it is too irregular, but nobody cares and if you make it up you'll either be close enough or people will get what you meant.
Having two infinitives is what really screws the language up
Slavic languages are very far from English, and involve more new sounds which is difficult. The Czech course in particular isn't really good enough to learn from though. I'm struggling to follow it and I've spent most of the last year learning Polish, which is fairly similarI was forced to do French in school although I didn't particularly care about languages at the time and we weren't really taught anything practical. I can still remember odd bits of it but I don't enjoy speaking it, I'm in agreement with J-2739 above as far as French goes!
After leaving school I took German evening classes which I really enjoyed, and having made many trips to German-speaking countries I've been able to practice and improve considerably. I've also taught myself some basic Dutch given that it's somewhere between German and English, the key to that is definitely the pronunciation!
I did try Duolingo to learn a bit of Czech before going there last month, but I find Slavic languages incredibly difficult, despite having some Slavic blood! I now use it to practice and continue to improve my German skills.