What is a good hobby/skill that most people should give a try, and why so?
What is a good hobby/skill that most people should give a try, and why so?
What is something like a hobby or skill that you belive almost anybody should give a try, and what makes your suggestion so good compared to other things?
i feel like this is a descent question i guess.
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Learning a new language. You learn a bit about how languages work, understand other cultures a bit better, usually learn new vocabulary for your native language, understand the relationship between different languages, learn the roots of loan words and generally helps your brain stay healthy, even by only studying the basics.
what lauguage would you recommend for people who only know english?
Not OP, but I've asked myself this as well. I think it depends on where you live and what you want out of your language learning experience. If your goal is to learn something more useful in everyday life and you live in the southern US, Spanish is a great option. If you're from Canada, French is probably the most useful. German and Mandarin are useful in the business world, but the latter is significantly harder to learn. If you're not worried about maximizing the utility of what you learn, Norwegian is considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers, and let's be real, Norway is awesome.
It's more important that you stick with whatever you choose though. That's the part I've struggled with.
To be honest I'm not a native English speaker so your advice is probably more useful anyway. My husband is British and has studied plenty of languages, finding Swedish and Norwegian definitely the easiest to pick up. Romance languages have more complicated grammar but you'll find a lot more TV and movies to watch to casually pick up a bit more of the language, which I find useful because I only speak English as well as I do from watching a lot of TV (first with subs) when I was younger.
do you have any swedish tv shows or movies you could recommend? the more the merrier please, or any resources for it at all?
Some from recent memory:
- Real Humans (Äkta Människor) tv show, I liked the UK version a bit more
- Young Royals, tv show about a young gay prince
- Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves, a heartbreaking miniseries dealing with Aids epidemic
- Raspberry Boat Refugee, a movie about a Finnish man who believes he should've been born Swedish
- Glowing Stars, a movie about a girl looking after her mom who has cancer
- Stormkärs Maja, a miniseries on the hard life on a tiny island
- Roy Andersson Also has a lot of fun absurdist comedies
- Also movies/miniseries based on Astrid Lindgren books are sweet and nostalgic and despite being aimed for children
I think those might be easy enough to find online depending on where you look.
Spanish: it's the most return per effort.
Italian! Really close and easy to learn. It sounds so pleasant to hear.
Bit of an off-the-wall suggestion but I was having real trouble learning other languages mostly due to all the cases (and sometimes genders). So I started learning Esperanto, which admittedly is not the most practical language to know BUT it really helped me understand languages more in general. It's very simple to learn and easy for an English-speaker to pronounce, as well as having lots of recognisable words (the Esperanto for "yes" is "jes", which is pronounced "yes" lol)
Now that I've gone back to learning German I'm feeling much more confident about learning in general just because I got some of the grammar concepts from a much easier language. Might be worth a look if you've struggled before.
Esperanto is reckoned an easy pickup, has speakers globally, and will improve your default in most romance languages. The community is also quite nice, in my experience.
Esperanto seems to be pretty useless to invest so much time into learning it. Wouldn't be learning "normal" language more beneficial anyway?
Depends on your goals. If you're going somewhere with one language to spend time, or especially value a particular language, studying that language makes sense. If you want access to a global network of the sort of people who would pick up a conlang intended to be a universal second language, one speakers of can be found anywhere, Esperanto's your pick.
Mi lernis Esperanton ĉar mi volas havi amikojn en ĉiaj la landoj de la mondo.
I am Polish native that can easily read Ukrainian, English and also some German and I have no clue what that sentence means in Esperanto :D. I can only guess that "lernis" is probably something like "learning" and "mondo" refers to "world" (guess based purely on 'Le Monde' - French newspaper). Rest looks like some random Lithuanian stuff. I don't think knowledge of Esperanto could give me any advantage when traveling across Europe. Idea is cool but to be honest English is the new lingua franca and I think that's good because it's easy to pick up and already widespread.
If you're curious...
"Mi" - pronoun meaning I/me
"lernis" - learned (The root is "lern-". The following rules apply to all verbs: "-i" is the infinitive form, "-is" is past tense, "-as" is present tense, "-os" is future tense, "-us" is conditional tense (kind of like could/would), and "-u" is imperative/command form.)
"Esperanton" - obviously Esperanto, but the "-n" suffix denotes a direct object.
"ĉar" - because
"volas" - (verb, present tense) want
"havi" - (verb, infinitive) to have
"amikojn" - (noun, direct object, plural) - root is "amik-", the "-o" suffix denotes a noun, "-j" makes it plural, and then the "-n" for direct object again
"en" - in
"ĉiaj" - all
"la" - the (this is the only article in the language; incidentally, there is no indefinite article)
"landoj"- countries ("-o" is noun, "-j" is plural)
"de" - of (there are actually multiple words that can mean "of" but that's another topic entirely)
"mondo" - worldThe letter "ĉ" is pronounced like "ch"; Esperanto doesn't do two-letter phonemes because one of its foundational principles is one letter = one sound.