New Year Learning Goals!?!

[Kajo76]

Though, my accent is a little atypical for Scotland, anyway, as my family is mainly from Ireland.

I’m sure I couldn’t even recognize if it were a Scottish or an Irish accent But that could be the same with you and German accents (the ones apart from Hochdeutsch) and Austrian/Swiss accents. But then: I don’t know

I can’t watch German TV without subtitles

Someday you can!
The same with me. I started in 2005 to listen to American English, as I was fascinated with the TV show LOST. First I couldn’t understand anything - they spoke way too fast. So I watched the show while using German subtitles. One day I had enough of German subtitles, because I had to concentrate too much on German sentences while listening to American English. So I used English ones. Still had many words to look up, if it wasn’t clear from the context.
This way helped me a lot to be able to follow TV shows etc. Today I still use subtitles, but I’m also able to watch something (may be a video without any subtitles) or even listening to American people talking.

The only thing to master one day: British English These days I watch Doctor Who, but can’t really follow without English subtitles. If I have to, I only understand 50%.

my English sentences now come out a bit ‘I must before I leave my keys find’ (instead of ‘I’ve got to find my keys before I go’). It’s an annoying crossover.

Ouch
In German both sentences are correct. But I would say that the latter is more common in spoken language
“Ich muss, bevor ich gehe, meine Schlüssel finden”
“Ich muss meine Schlüssel finden, bevor ich gehe”

No voice recognition thingy’s ever understood me.

Who really needs those things?

Even worse, when I tried to tell him I couldn’t remember the German for cheese, I went and forgot the word for ‘remember’! I just ended up having to explain that I couldn’t [ d’gegenteil von vergessen ] it. So embarrassing. Wasn’t until I got home I recalled the words were ‘käse’ and ‘erinnern’.

That’s quite normal
Once upon a time in school (long, long ago) my teacher gave us a tip: If you don’t know a word, try to describe it! But I guess for that to happen one has to have a rather huge amount of vocabulary
Nowadays I’m more able to describe things I don’t know the word of. I only can’t give an example now… Unless I use your cheese example.
I probably would have said:
“Oh and then I also need -what’s the word again?-, you know, the yellow high-calory thingy which you put on pizza!”

why did you decide to learn Portuguese? Doesn’t it have like fifty-bajillion cases, or something?

2 1/4 years ago I wanted to learn (and speak!) proper English, so I tried Duolingo, but for that I definitely had too much knowledge (like with any other English course out there) So I wrote in the forum and a Brazilian guy answered me. He spoke American English fluently and learned German himself. First we chatted in English/German and then he mentioned some Portuguese words. I was wondering about the accents and then I was curious about his native language and began the (Brazilian) Portuguese course (from English!)
Just out of fun - and then I fell in love with it - especially the pronunciation

Cases? Ugh, I don’t know actually. Irregular verb conjugations sometimes are tricky. But the most troublesome are the prepositions
I simply see it like: I learned my native language (easily), I learned English (first: not so easy in school, because I didn’t like it back then, but nowadays really easy!), so this will also be the case with Portuguese one day

[isharr (𝓛ı𝕥𝕥lꦌ ꞗɪᴙᶑ ... 𝓑ⅈ𝘨 𝓦ᵒʳ𝔩̲ꝺ̲)]

German accents (the ones apart from Hochdeutsch ) and Austrian/Swiss accents.

I have a friend currently in Austria. He says they don’t speak German there, lol; it’s kind of like English and the Scottish, I think, where the dialect is just so far removed that it’s intelligible but quite hard even for natives to understand sometimes.

In German both sentences are correct.

Yeah, that’s what’s so annoying, too. But it’s just that final verb, finden… and even the muss (which isn’t used much in English, to be honest — I have got to is far more common) — in English you just don’t put it at the end of the clause and my brain insists on it at the moment. I think it’s just because I’ve spent so much time with written German. What I need is to go back and start learning all the slang, lol. Written and spoken English are pretty much the same, where quite a few languages have different standards depending on whether one’s just speaking at home or writing a book (not that there isn’t a lot of colloquial English or anything, but only in academic papers do we write ‘officially’ — novels are full of terrible constructions, lol).

But the most troublesome are the prepositions

I think prepositions in any foreign language can get harey. That and conjunctions (why German, why so many?) Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaelic languages… though that’s mostly because of the eclipsis rules (but not entirely).

But having each language I learn grow slowly easier… yes, I think this is the real goal for the year. The more you work at it, the more it becomes second nature. Also, the more languages you learn, the easier it seems to become to pick up new ones.

You’ve already been through all the official Memrise courses for Brazilian Portuguese. Where do you go from there?

Sometimes, it seems a shame Memrise doesn’t go further on things. I know the French 7 course looks pretty scary (when I peeked in out of interest), but German 7 doesn’t look too bad at all. I suppose, after learning basics of the official version of a language, it’s time to go find it’s aberrations, lol. Though, just the very idea of Portuguese slang gives me the heebie jeebies. (I guess I’ll never go holiday with my nana… Portuguese is just too frightening.)

Anyway… I’ve got about thirty courses to keep up with… I haven’t had any time today, so I don’t want to lose my streaks by procrastinating now.

Best get to it, aye?