People who went to an American public school and speak English as their first language.

[geofftc@mas.to]

@Fragglemuppet

Listening. Especially to French, where they abhor consonants.

[bryanredeagle@beige.party]

@Fragglemuppet I'm usually pretty good at grammar. So we just smack our heads together, and we got a fully communicating person.

[ymasumac@mstdn.social]

@Fragglemuppet Listening/comprehension should be an option.

[alkaid@social.lol]

@Fragglemuppet In middle school, we had one semester of Spanish class (my local university had the same requirement; taking more was optional), and in both cases...writing was the hardest for me. Though that was mostly an issue of "How do I form a coherent sentence?"

We never got that far with speaking, beyond some stock phrases.

I'm pretty sure my high school had Spanish and French as options, but those were courses for the college prep kids. Us tech prep kids could've benefitted from learning a second language, but alas.

[trainguyrom@techhub.social]

@Fragglemuppet I very much struggled with learning another language as a teenager in school, but I was also struggling with a lot of things right then.

As an adult however I've been learning Italian ahead of a trip with family to Florence, and I've picked up about a hundred words just since the beginning of the year!

[cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca]

@colo_lee @Fragglemuppet It’s manageable but the necessary information to me was having dictionaries that bothered explaining what the radicals (root images) were which make up the characters, because then things start to take on phonetic and semantic valence (even though the meanings or sounds are often fuzzy and always unreliable) - just memorizing them all with absolutely no clues is masochistic. Wenlin is the best paid software I ever used, Pleco is the best free.

[cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca]

@colo_lee @Fragglemuppet Also, I got very very lucky I was learning it not even five years earlier than I did. Doing so without software, trying to use the four corners method to look characters up in a dictionary, would have been awful. Having smartphones now with OCR is even better.

[colo_lee@mstdn.social]

@cwicseolfor @Fragglemuppet Pleco is what I've been using. And I did try a little back in the day of paper dictionaries -- that was hopeless.
So I can't actually "read" but can decode some texts ...

[cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca]

@colo_lee @Fragglemuppet Enough fluency with just picking up characters as you go and you’re reading, you’re just not able to transfer that reading to one of the dialects yet. I think that’s probably easier if you don’t think in spoken words anyway. My fluency is crap now but I was pretty good twenty years ago.

Also, especially nowadays that you can get anything online, almost all Chinese TV comes with subtitles burned in, because it’s being shown across a country bigger than some continents and needs to be intelligible across languages because a lot of people just don’t use mandarin much. So if you can already read for meaning you will have a MUCH easier time picking up the spoken language than vice versa, imo!

[stormdancer@mstdn.social]

@Fragglemuppet None of those things were the hard part. The hard part was wrapping my head around the idea of gendered language.

[lexyeen@plush.city]

@Fragglemuppet the curriculum and teachers at the time I was in school were both awful, so, it was all too hard.