Language learning week 7 day 3

Hello, Duo! To get me started today, I’ll let the green owl help me.

Diving into Arabic lessons

He is generous and he is your husband, Judy. هُوَّ كَريم وَهُوَّ زَوْجِك يا جودي. Also, it’s interesting to realize that before ever learning some Arabic, I wouldn’t even have known where these Arabic words ended, only knowing spaces between words in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and Chinese characters. In fact, Arabic is just the same, but since all letters have four forms of writing them (at the beginning, middle and end of a word and separately) I wouldn’t have known that a word like  زَوْجِك in that sentence was just one word ‘husband’.

At this moment, I can’t picture yet when I’d be using such a sentence at any point in my life, but maybe Duo knows better.

Still, I’m pretty happy with my progress in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Turkish the past two weeks!

moving on to Chinese

Ok, I already feel that this sentence is more useful:

His stomach hurts, I don’t know what he ate. 他的肚子很疼,我不知道他吃了什么。

Also, it’s interesting to look at this Chinese sentence order: He | possesive | stomache | very | painful, |I|not|know|he|eat|past tense|what.

What I like about Duo too is that you get listening practice. And you can replay the same audio a few times in order to understand the sentence. Try to challenge yourself by replaying it a few times at normal speed. Only if your target language or the new words in an exercise are too difficult, play the slower version.

Russian today

I’m using the on-screen keyboard as much as I can to better write Russian myself.

Last Duo exercise for now: Turkish

I just did one Turkish exercise today, to reach my daily goal, cause I need to do many things today.

Now it’s time to read today’s news and manage the translations to multiple languages on my self-study app!

Language Immersion Week 2

During my personal language immersion last week I learned some Swedish, Spanish and Chinese.

Learning Swedish by watching (SVT) news and TV series and (YouTube) videos

To practice some Swedish listening, I watched this video about Swedish exceptionalism and news episodes from Nyheter pa latt svenska, Nyheter Direkt and I downloaded the SVT Språkplay app to watch more serieson Swedish TV that have subtitles, which is very useful for Swedish learners.

Spanish Immersion

Being in Spain, I had many conversations with locals. How fun it must be to be called a local, like you are some touristic highlight. But the residents here who speak Spanish at a native level are one of the reasons why I’m here. Why not immerse myself with others, all on a safe distance of course? ☺ I try to have conversations to the max. So many times it’s not necessary at all to have an extra chat with the waiter at a coffee place, at the counter of a supermarket or store or engage in long-lasting conversations which might be the start of a new friendship. But they’re all good ways to freshen up my Spanish and to get to understand the lives of others here. So challenge yourself to speak your target language(s). When it doesn’t feel easy, it’s means you’re learning something. And not just to actively apply what you learned or learn some new words, but also to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, which will remove social barriers. That way you’ll feel closer to the people around you and feel more part of the culture of the language that you chose for some reason. It might feel uncomfortable, but you’ll get much out of it, if you try it. Even if it doesn’t appear to be the case at first. And eventually that skill will enable you to repeat that with other new languages later on.

Chinese

For instance, in many shops run by Chinese people in Spain, I try to listen if I hear the people behind the counter speak Mandarin, one of the languages I’m currently learning. Then I put myself at social risk asking and ask the shop employee: 你是中国人吗?Are you Chinese? In my experience, they seem to like it me asking them that question, even though they don’t always expect a guiri to speak in a language other than Spanish or English. They always ask me if I’m learning Chinese. I always reply that I want to learn it, but that I don’t really speak it yet. That’s where the convo stops, at least in Mandarin. To many, that would be a reason to not even try. But my perspective is that it not only helps me to practice that sentence, but it opens up a need to study more, cause I want to be able to say more than those two lines and to not feel embarrassed. So I feel that putting myself in the awkward position of not being able to say more actually helps me to later on actually learn such a difficult language. They often ask me why I want to learn it and I answer that I like the challenge and love the characters. So I guess I can prepare for a short typical dialogue about that. Not cause I’d feel that I can speak Chinese, but cause it’s a necessary start, for me at least. I also got to know the perfectionist learner. They take lessons for ever, until they speak the language perfectly and they’re waiting for the moment that they will feel comfortable speaking, a moment I don’t believe that will come without practicing.

Language Immersion Day 7

08:00 De Moien hunn ech um Lëtzebuerger Radio nogelauschtert. = In the morning I listened to Luxembourgish radio.

09:00 Etterpå hørte jeg på radio i Norge. = After, I listened to Norwegian Radio: NRK Radio P1

10:00 Efteråt lyssnade jag på radio på svenska. = Then, I listened to the radio in Swedish.

11:00 Depois ouvi rádio em portugues.= After, I listened to (the) radio in Portuguese.

Language Immersion Day 6

08:00 Duolingo lessons Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Greek and Italian. Just those 5 today to reach my daily goal to maintain my streak.

09:00 Escoltava les notícies de la ràdio catalana.

10:00 J’ai ecouté radio Montpellier en francais sur radio.garden pendant une heur

11:00 Jeg hørte på radio i norge.

12:00 Durante el almuerzo he hablado en español.

13:00 Ho ascoltato radio in italiano.

14:00 Jag lyssnade på radio på svenska.

15:00 Später hörte ich deutschsprachiges Münchner Radio (an).

Language Immersion Day 5

Early morning Chinese restaurants and Greek cheesecake

你好!Yes, my morning -after the gym- started with Chinese. And next, I moved on to Greek. This word amazed me:

Greek cheesecake
Greek cheesecake

Following Arabic, Swedish and Russian

After, I just did a random selection of languages on Duolingo, as long as my next lesson is in a language from a different group. Meanwhile, I listened to Catalan and later Norwegian radio stations to practice listening skills from interviews, a radio play and the news.

Language Immersion Day 4

A new day of immersing myself into the languages I want to learn! After some second level owling in Catalan about my elephant eats apples and third or fourth level Swedish girls asking him for his phone number, in my third Duolingo lesson at beginner level Russian I came across meals such as завтрак, breakfast. I thought breaking up the word. I thought that I was being smart separating the Russian equivalent like the English breakfast itself, i.e. a break from fasting, hence a pause from not eating, in other words: a moment to eat. Pretty cool right? Yeah, that’s from the books of Game of Thrones. Not that I read them, but my boyfriend told me. However, breaking up the Russian breakfast got me something really different.

So there goes my theory. For this word. Cause I’m still committed to showing you other examples that compound words can help you to better understand, remember and enjoy new words in your target language(s).

Typing in other alphabets and scripts.

I prefer to write in my new target languages right from the beginning. When learning Greek in the second grade back at high school it amazed me how strange a different alphabet appeared to me at first and how fast I learned to use all but three letters by simply practicing. Cyrillic letters, though many originated from Greek or with similar roots are more difficult to me as a Dutchie, also cause of a few unknown sounds. So it takes me more time than a Hellenic afternoon when I was 14, but I think it also adds tremendously to the experience of ‘knowing’ a language. Arabic is much harder, of course, but really doable and the more fun once you recognize it. When learning Japanese you’ll not only need to learn Hiragana and Katagana but also Kanji, the characters imported from China. And although many of the language schools and program providers I worked for offer pinyin writing to their Western clients learning Mandarin at first, I prefer to at least recognize Chinese characters. For time constraints during those younger years, I’ll skip the beautiful calligraphy, realizing that I won’t reach the higher levels of Culture leaving it perhaps finding the pen and ease of mind at a more senior age.

Doing this Russian exercise, I realized it could be helpful for other language learners to know what tool I’m using to write Cyrillic letters. As I also use it for Arabic, Hebrew and Greek alphabets, I decided to write a separate blog post about how to write these languages as well as how to write in Chinese and Japanese, the latter using Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji.

Read more on how to write different alphabets and scripts on Duolingo, in Word and anywhere else using your current keyboard. Another blog post that I used as a reason to do exercises for above six languages. Throughout the day, I listened to radio Calella via radio.garden to further practice listening to news, interviews and songs in Catalan at normal speed.

Language Immersion Day 3

Polish on Duolingo

Last night, 8 minutes before the day officially ended, the little green owl praised me for my late night work, I finished an exercise without mistakes, I reached my daily goal on Duolingo and leveled up the Scholar achievement (learned 2000 new words in a single course, in that case being Chinese). So this morning, 9 am. I’m ready for more, starting the learning day with some Polish. You can tell I hadn’t been doing that for a while:

this sentence actually means: Our parents need a wide carpet (from divan).

I usually prefer to decided what grammar or word categories I start with, but on Duolingo you need to complete the basic levels for all categories before being able to move on to the next lessons. So not all sentences are just as relevant for my trips to Poland.

Continuing Chinese on Duolingo

Some sentences contain three new words and make me feel helpless that I’ll never master common characters and words. Then one later I feel pretty awesome again when I understand a sentence completely.

In Chinese characters: 我 们 的 西 班 牙 语 老 师。

Romanized to pniyin shì wǒ men de xī bān yá yǔ lǎo shī.

Literal character meaning That (to be) I [plur] [poss] See-ban-ya (language) teacher.

Correct translation: That is [ our ] [ Spanish ] teacher.

This is what I love again about the Chinese (or any new) language. It’s so cool to see the structure!

With that necessary confidence I also try to approach another sentence with many new words for me:

Although Duolingo just asks me to translate it, I try to write each character using the pinyin keyboard input.

In Chinese characters: 明 年 三 月 我 们 会 去 印 度 旅 游。

Romanized to pniyin Míng nián sān yuè wǒ men huì qù yìn dù lǚ yóu.

Literal character meaning New year 3 month I [plur] [fut] (go)to [phon Yindu] [ travel ].

Correct translation: Next year [ March ] [ we ] will travel to India.

Cool, right? BTW, to learn and recognize characters better on Duolingo, it can be helpful to zoom in for some exercises and zoom back out when you need to see the whole screen. When selecting the right semantic meaning from all phonetic options from the deck that the pinyin keyboard option provides, I’d like to do the same, but unfortunately those characters sty small, which makes it difficult for me as a beginner to recognize the one I need.

I can’t enlarge the font pinyin input from Windows itself. I can only zoom in on the text displayed in the browser.

Do you want to write Chinese characters in Duolingo using your own keyboard?

Then read this post on how to write Chinese characters using a common keyboard QWERTY (US/many EUR) /AZERTY (French language) / QWERTZ (German speaking areas) to write Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Duolingo lessons – or really in any offline application or anywhere online.

Finishing that exercise got me to level 1 from that category Hobbies. That unlocked the checkpoint 3, which I passed. Although Duolingo is extremely good at giving you a satisfied feeling about it, I could have never passed it, if it wasn’t for the (deliberate?) mistake of not differentiating between a test and a normal exercise: hovering over any word in a given sentence still gave you the pronunciation and meaning. Also, given characters plus pronunciation weren’t extremely difficult to select the pinyin equivalent from the multiple (3) choice option. But hey, it’s not a state exam at Beijing Uni and it makes me feel good like I reached a next level of Chinese today and it makes me want to return to the course tomorrow. For now, I’ll move on with Swedish or something.

Swedish became Esperanto on Duolingo again

And yes, it keeps on telling you that you’re great. I start to realize the true reason why apps and users need one another. Something about time spent on the app versus having a good feeling. And great if you actually get the marketed benefit along the way.

I was going to switch to Romanian, until I realized I might confuse that with my last language from a minute ago and end up speaking Esperanto in Romania or Romanian in Esperantoland. The latter is probably not that bad, as in my case the only people I know who speak Esperanto are multilinguals from the Polyglot Gathering 2020 who often speak 3-5 Romance languages anyway. Hearing them converse pretty fluent in this constructed language in various chat rooms that weekend inspired me to start learning this language in the first place.

If not this, then what?

If not Romanian, than what? Arabic of course! But dear lord (or Allah), what to do with these numbers in this first exercise? Besides, to answer below question correctly, it should have a fourth answer none, because the audio doesn’t play (except for the first word).

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you yet what this sounds like. Oh wait, if not Duolingo, than Google Translate can read out the pasted text!

Rebut tut gut

a respected, intelligent German former colleague of mine. Or former respected, intelligent German colleague of mine? Ahh, I ♥ order and semantics.

I’ll always remember that advise from a co-worker back a technical service desk. I don’t know if rebooting Windows or just the Chrome browser enabled me to hear the audio from the Duolingo exercises, but it did the job. Now that the audio works, I only have trouble recognizing those Arabic letters that are romanized as 2 and 3. After some continued struggles in the Arab speaking deserts, which I deserted with a lovely dessert, I boarded my vessel and navigated towards the Eastern Aegean where I landed on some isles with another xenophonic tongue and came across the following writing, which actually is related to both Arabic and of course Latin letters.

Useful orations in Greek

From linguistic struggles in the Middle-East and North Africa, I now struggle to see the relevance of above utterance. I find it hard to picture myself in Athens using this phrase, but hey, I recognize a Greek word from other European languages and that’s worth something. After the question about that musical instrument followed who’s bear that is. Yes, 🐻 not 🍻.

Language Immersion Day 2

Esperanto on Duolingo

As it appeared that my last lesson from yesterday was gone, or actually not saved cause the dishwasher started to spit out foam, I felt bad that I had to redo it. But with didactics in mind, I now embrace the possibility to recap it [insert vomit emoji here]. So I copied some of Day 1’s posted sentences on here again. In order to add yet another writing exercise, I rewrite both the sentence in Esperanto as well as English in this post. This time, I’ll also leave director’s comments below with my impression about the languages I’m learning.

Jen la mapo de Kandao. = Here is the map of Canada.

Multaj Usoanoj loĝas en Germanio. = Many Americans live in Germany.

Kiu kontinento estas pli granda ol Eŭropo? = Which continent is larger than Europe?

Kiu kontinento estast pli granda ol Europo?

Mi vojaĝas al Aŭstralio por viziti miajn gepatrojn. = I travel to Australia to visit my grandparents.

Iberian parents

Observing the prefix ge- in last example sentence, I thought it would add something to parents, so the first thing I thought of was grand. But romantic (or Romance) as I am, I guess my reasoning that patro means father doesn’t make the pluralized patroj parents yet. That may apply to the following where alpha and high-level beta meet in the following daddy plus mommy makes parents equations:

Spanishel padrela madrelos padres
Portugueseo paia mãeos pais
Galiciano paia naios pais
Catalanel parela mareels pares
North of the Pyrenees
Occitanlo pairela mairelos parents
Frenchle pèrela mèreles parents
Italianil padrela madrei genitori
Romanianmamătatăpărinţi
PC emojis on PC etcFamily: Woman, Girl, Girl on Google Android 10.0 March 2020 Feature DropFamily: Man, Girl, Boy on WhatsApp 2.19.352Family: Woman, Woman, Boy on Samsung One UI 1.5
Englishthe fatherthe motherthe parents
father + mother = parents in Romance languages

Conclusion: Pyrenees crossing North makes you a little less patriarchal (at least when looking at those words)!

Duolingo courses

This is an overview of the target languages Duolingo offers from instruction language English. The marked ones are the ones I’m taking. I’m also following Catalan through Spanish and prefer to learn (Brazilian) Portuguese with the same Iberic neighbouring perspective to see the resemblances and differences.

Even though I believe Duolingo is pretty good at integrating gamification and makes me want to complete all wizard levels cause I added an image, become a new gemstone I never even heard of in my native Dutch and follow someone from the other side of the world who’s nearly outowling me in Klingon, I will switch to other apps to keep my comparing looks on self-study apps and platforms as fresh as a sprouting spring upon the hills.

Chinese on Mondly

8 new languages on Mondly: Bengali, Catalan, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Tagalog and Urdu
8 new languages on Mondly: Bengali, Catalan, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Tagalog and Urdu

I used Mondly before for other languages, such as Hebrew and Japanese, which I also reviewed.

Mondly now offers 8 new languages: Bengali, Catalan, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Tagalog and Urdu. Probably feeding Covid-19 conspirators, it announced the inclusion to its now 41 languages to the Mondly family in February 2020. What a welcoming news for those bored linguofiles in quarantine. More details on this Mondly page.

At first I thought I could no longer fly a new Mondly balloon lesson as I kept hearing the Mario coin level sound each time I clicked a new lesson for Chinese. But it appears that I just have to follow the intended lesson structure.

When using different apps, platforms and methods for the same language, you can’t avoid repeating known language. As mentioned earlier, that actually helps you memorize better and feel more certain. Besides, it might give you another approach of the new language as well as learn a few new words, that you thought you knew already.

As always, Mondly starts any beginner lesson with these kinship terms, in all languages that I tried at least.

It may be confusing that Duolingo and Mondly both use different terms for the same family terms. But in reality, they both have a different formality (dad(dy)/mom(my) vs. father/mother) and age (younger and older brother/sister). And kinship terms don’t always have a one-on-one equivalent in different languages, and especially in different language families.

I can also recommend any autodidact to perceive any such language learning app, platform – or any method for that matter – as useful in some way. Though given language can sometimes confuse you at some point, just realize that not one language method can be complete, especially not at beginner level. That means that for those who detect a critical view and perfectionist behaviour within themselves when approaching a new language (course), my advise would be to use it as a useful tool to give you a better understanding of the language, not a complete overview. And since language learning nowadays is not really dependent on what a monk teaches you, just perform a quick search online. It doesn’t only give you a broader scope on things, but also a more independent and therefore self-certain feeling perhaps. Speaking of self-awareness, I’m going to change languages and learning method again, because Margret and Zwanovski here have so out-ballooned me after this Chinese on Mondly lesson here that it doesn’t really encourage me to compete with such frequent Mondliers.

Learning Portuguese (or any language) listening to radio.garden

While writing this post -except when listening to the Esperanto and Chinese audio of course- I’m listening to radio stations from Spain and Portugal on radio.garden. Interviews, songs and news bulletins are amusing to listen to while practicing my listening skills during work. I now happen to have selected Spanish and Portuguese stations, because of my little Iberian Immersion, but you can easily jump to any place on on the world map and listen to connected stations in your target language, from any country that you can’t physically be in now due to Covid-19, travel budget, flygskam or work and family matters. Speaking of flygskam, I’m going to learn some Swedish!

Learning intermediate Swedish with a Babbel lesson

conversation in a Babbel Swedish lesson at intermediary level

This first lesson from the intermediary course (you can select this level yourself) starts with an introduction of some words of time, before you are asked to fill in the blanks of a typical convo, which I think is very useful.

Just as useful are the grammar lessons after the dialogue of the lesson, the former as an essential though not boring explanation, the latter as a founding body of the lesson:

And like Duolingo, Mondly and most language learning apps, Mondly also finishes with some words of appraisal. Even though I think I made more than one mistake, especially those that were counted as typos. In reality were my errors choosing the other preposition from what that specific lesson was about, but well. I did learn from that lesson and I was made aware of my mistakes -ideally I’d be able to enter the correct version afterwards myself but well, c’est ça- ou la la, voici, polyglot. 😂 Anyway, I think that positiveness does want me to continue.

Deciphering my first Chinese message on Tandem

I just found dozens of messages in my inbox on Tandem, a worldwide community of language learners who help each other by offering their native (and other high-level) languages while practicing their own target language(s) and yes, for free. One should always realize with any language exchange (often referred to as tandem) partner that your free exercise is paid for by additional time for the other person. So in a one-on-one exchange I could speak one hour of my target language Portuguese and after I should ‘teach’ or at least dedicate another hour of my native Dutch or fluent English to my tandem partner. On Tandem.net it’s not that transactional. And though you’d be a good community member contributing with your own time, any user can hit up any other user based on the languages you can/want to speak.

the language learning app where millions of people teach each other.

Tandem described by Tandem

My inbox had some messages in Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, German and English.

I got this feeling that my lengthy nights with the little green owl being my only companion finally started to pay off. Apart from four awkward attempts in Chinese shops and restaurants in Spain, pretending that my Duolingo efforts would enable me to apply Mandarin as a lingua franca in order to greet, thank and ask the lady behind the counter if she was Chinese and that I am Dutch, I had never brought theory into practice. And here I found two lines of characters in my inbox from a real person. Probably someone who wants to help me. Who understands the difficulty of being a language learner. Who knows how vulnerable I became as I added Chinese as learning language on my Tandem profile. And here I found her initial message: 你好呀. 你会的语言好多啊 你是为什么想学习中文呢?Yes, my first thought was if Tandem has an auto-translate button somewhere, like Hello Talk has. Ah, wait, Hello Talk, so I did have a chat in Chinese before. Alright, well, forget about Google Translate and what more, I’m going to see which characters I know for sure, which I recognize and then try to guess the general context. Well, I’ll take you along in my per-character deciphering experience, to show which hopefully encourages you to dive into the same (or another) deep yourself. I was happy to be sure about the first two already!

你好 = Hello (so far, so good. and understood for a 100%!) What’s that third character? 呀 OK, maybe I just understood that first sentence for 66.66%. If that would be the case when following a debate with President Xi (if there were any at all), I’d be extremely proud if that would be my rate of understanding. OK, I guess I don’t need to understand her full greeting at this point. I do recognize the mouth radical in that third character, but that could be a phonetic indication rather than signifying something semantic. 好 (Good), let’s move on!

你会的语言好多啊 你是为什么想学习中文呢?I’ve learned most characters and I think that line can be split up in two parts. I think the second part 你是为什么想学习中文呢 is her asking me why I would like to learn Chinese.

The first part你会的语言好多啊 I’d guess -but again, this is based on static Duolingo sentences mostly- either means that I speak the language very well or is part of her longer question asking me if I can speak the language. At this stage, only you and I know that I hardly speak Chinese. And whether I’d tell her that in correct Chinese phrasing or not, either way she’ll understand that I don’t. 好! Now that that’s solved, I allow myself to check the actual meaning on Google Translate. While philosophizing about this, I hope my sender has found a recipient who doesn’t need to blog about it and replies within a shorter period than five months, poor girl.

Ah yeah, stupid me. Of course she referred to languages, in general: Hello. You can speak many languages. But I was right about the second part! Woohoo! Now I’m going to have to be honest with her that I don’t really speak Chinese (yet), without losing this great opportunity to actually try writing a sentence to a real person! And I guess that’s how I’d like to encourage any language learner: see and present yourself as someone who speaks the language a little bit, even if it’s just one sentence. That will help you cross one of the biggest hurdles: the fear of speaking! So I’m going to change my keyboard settings to Mandarin input and try to reply to her.

me trying to write Mandarin using a pinyin keyboard input which outputs Chinese characters☺

Exciting! So of course I checked my sentence in Google Translate; we wouldn’t want to insult anyone. I said I like to learn Chinese on Duolingo whereas I intended to say I learn Chinese on Duolingo. But I decided to leave my mistake as it was and send it, cause otherwise she’d get a better impression about my Chinese than it actually is and then you’ll see that the next thing that she’ll expect me to do is discuss political differences between the Ming dynasty and the following. Besides, Tandem does have a built-in functionality to correct your partner’s sentences! If she takes a little less time to reply than me, I’ll keep you posted while I’m going to answer some other messages on Tandem! This next and last screenshot for today shows the drama I have caused by telling a new sender that I didn’t have time due to many messages and I wasn’t able to answer his at that moment. So bear in mind that you can’t please everyone. 🐻

Language Immersion Day 1 – one hour of language study and living like a local

Croatian

The first language on my list of high-quality translations, a tricky one for me in itself to kick-off with. I could assess from most words what they meant, since I know the source text pretty well, it being my own introduction. ☺

Scandinavian languages

Then, I just listened to the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish pronunciation while reading the text in those three languages on my personal language learning app.

My Chinese lesson on Duolingo today.

I came across phrases like:

你的朋友去哪儿 – Where are your friends going?

为什么他不高兴?- Why is he not happy?

你为什么学习中文?- Why do you study Chinese?

我想去中国。- I want to go to China.

你们想不想去纽约?- Do you want to go to New York?

我喜欢听中文歌。- I like listening to Chinese songs.

她喜欢学习英语。- She enjoys learning English.

为什么?- Why?

我用电脑学习中文。- I use a computer to learn Chinese.

After, an Esperanto lesson on Duolingo

Germano vizitas usonanon en Usono. – A German visists an American in the US.

Homoj tra la lando parolas Esperanton – People across the country speak Esperanto.

Hodiaŭ mi vizitas Nordamerikon. – Today a North-American visits me. Today I’m visiting North-America.

Ĉu vi estas en Nordameriko? – Are you in North-America?

Eŭropanoj ŝatas Italion. – Europeans like Italians. Italy.

Then I spoke Spanish like a local

Being a guiri in Málaga, I was looking for a gym. That brought along quite some talking to find, compare and arrange a contract. I also had various convos with people working and visiting the gym that allowed me to practice Spanish at a higher (or at least more speedy) level. So staying here for a longer period now definitely contributed to my experience being immersed in Spanish language and culture.

Literally is used way too often by everybody. Literally!

Je kan hier over de hoofden lopen, letterlijk!

Dan moet iedereen over de kam geschóren worden.

Dan schiet Putin zich in zijn eigen voet. Letterlijk.

Literally, this turned our world upside down.

here’s more from Steven Pinker about A.W.F.U.L. people (Americans Who Figuratively Use Literally)