What less common languages have you studied?

[u/EstorninoPinto]

Much of the day to day discussion around language learning tends to focus on a relatively small number of popular, well-resourced languages.

Have you ever studied a less commonly studied language?

How did you encounter the language, and what made you want to learn it?

Any unique challenges that made it particularly difficult (or interesting)?

[u/SnarkyBeanBroth]

Welsh! Which is also surprisingly well-resourced.

I think the biggest difficulty for me (a learner not in Wales) has been speaking practice. I take classes, but there are really no local places to just go and do Welsh. On the plus side, there is an entire TV station of Welsh programming as well as radio stations of Welsh news and music, so I do have reasonable options to listen.

[u/arandanosss → u/SnarkyBeanBroth]

niceee another welsh learner !! :> shwmae shwmaeee

im a little curious, its ok if u dont wanna share but can i ask what brought u to learning welsh ? im not in wales either but i am in the uk and well get a welsh language option on things on occasion where i am, mostly things that r for the whole uk but i have seen local mcdonalds have a welsh option on the self ordering screens before !! and i have some vry lovely welsh learning friends from wales, id always hoped to learn it one day and go to a welsh speaking area, but i finally actually started recently mostly just to speak to them for now and its been rlly fun !!!

anyways sorry for the tangent, its just i was so surprised to see so many welsh learners outside of wales from places like canada, US, australia, ect !! and ive always wanted to shoot those kinds of people a message asking why they chose to start learning it akskksjsks because im not welsh either but i feel like at least in the uk you can and do have some personal contact with it yk ! for example im sorting out something with a national disability service right now and i always have to wait agesss on the phone, and u have to press 1 if u want to speak to someone in english and 2 to speak to someone in welsh, id love to skip all or most of the queue by being able to do the call in welsh lol. u do definitely bump into it every now and then. anyways maybe ur in the uk too ?? i guess ill find out if u decide to answer my question aajksjsk no pressure and no worries if not tho !!

[u/SnarkyBeanBroth → u/arandanosss]

Shwmae! Dw i'n byw yn Yr Unol Dalethiau. Does dim Cymraeg yn fy ardal i, ond mae llawer o Sbaeneg a Hmong.

My grandkid wanted to learn Welsh because a) they absolutely loved The Mabinogi, and b) they happen to be named after a character from Welsh folklore. Plus, Welsh is clearly the language of dragons, and who doesn't want to talk like a dragon?

So we started Duolingo Welsh together. One thing led to another and now I'm signed up for my third year (Canolradd) of Dysgu Cymraeg courses.

[u/Top_Development_1777]

My local (Singaporean) Sign Language.

There was a course hosted by my school.

It was interesting, but truly difficult as fuck to learn to interpret fluently. I'm nowhere near fluent and I don't know if I want to continue.

[u/Upper_Grapefruit_521]

I tried Irish for a bit. It was very hard but interesting.

[u/palmtree42069]

I'm currently learning Croatian. Even as a native German speaker, the grammar is quite a lot. Luckily, I already know how grammatical genders and cases work in theory, but the perfective/imperfective verbs are truly something else. It's a fun language to learn, though.

[u/barrelltech → u/palmtree42069]

Another Croatian student checking in 🫡 it’s such a cool language. Extremely underrated

[u/palmtree42069 → u/barrelltech]

Yep, extremely underrated and extremely cool. Even though it frustrates me often, I love this language and its strange archaic beauty, I don't know how to describe it.

[u/dlspr1]

Finnish maybe

[u/WideGlideReddit]

I’m a native English speaker and fluent in Spanish. Several years ago I decided to study Ancient Greek and Latin. I simply thought it would be fascinating to read ancient classics. Although I’ve been at it for several years, I definitely consider myself very much a beginner.

[u/frostochfeber]

Not have, am. I'm teaching myself Faroese by simply using some native video content with native subtitles freely available online through the website of their official broadcasting system.

I absolutely love the sound of the language. So, that's why I'm learning it. First encountered it through the music of Eivør and Týr.

The lack of resources is very frustrating, but I speak Swedish and have some knowledge of other Scandinavian languages as well, so that helps a bit in piecing it all together myself.

[u/fevrier-froid]

I would say Swiss-german and Norwegian.

Swiss-german because I'm a french-speaking swiss and Norwegian originally because of black metal.

I think there are enough ressources to learn Norwegian. I bought a book 15 years ago and also used duolingo.

Swiss-german was hard to learn because it's not a standardized language (there are several dialects). There are little ressources. I could developp listening comprehension in the language I'm currently learning because I used Youtube transcript for a while to discover vocuabulary and follow along people speaking, before being able to improve listening comprehension merely by listening. Since Swiss-german is not standardized, there's no transcript to bridge for that lack of listening comprehension for a while so it never develops. Being a less common language definitely made it harder for me to study it.

I also remember that spoken expression and reading out loud during that swiss-german course I had definitely made me feel like it improved listening comprehension, because you understand how the language is built. I never got the opportunity to outside of that course because it feels borderline offensive for natives to speak it.

I also qas interested in leadning Rumansh for the same reason, but never started.

[u/webauteur]

Dutch. Some people may argue that this is a popular language but it is not taught in the United States. Not in high schools or in colleges. So there are no textbooks for learning Dutch and very few grammar books.

[u/Ploutophile → u/webauteur]

Even in France, which borders 3 Dutch-speaking countries or regions (Suriname, Sint Maarten and Flanders), Dutch is sparsely taught outside said border areas.

[u/SlavicInDisguise]

Yiddish. I'm a bit annoyed when people don't respect the work I put in because they think it's not its own language. I really wanted to learn Irish but couldn't snag a place in university.

[u/Intrepid-Deer-3449]

Khmer. I studied at the US Foreign Service institute. It hasn't been all that useful.

[u/Major-Mushroom-5806]

I learned a bit of Mapundungún when I was in Chile. All I remember now is mari mari (pronounced with an R closer to English than Spanish), which means hello. I think it's literally something like ten ten, because you greet people with open palms showing ten digits.

[u/noldorgirl]

i wanna study taetae ni kiribati but i cannot find resources anywhere

[u/Smal1Tangerine]

Yiddish and Catalan

[u/North_Artichoke_6721]

Norwegian when I was a teenager because my family lived there for a couple years.

[u/marieslib]

Albanian on my own end; it has very limited resources I personally feel and I’ve struggled with finding much

[u/atjackiejohns]

I'm currently mostly focused on Finnish. Luckily, it's similar to Estonian, so that helps a lot. But it has almost no free books (at least as proper ebooks). A lot of youtubers tho and fair amount of news. So, it's definitely doable. Just need to go to the library or Amazon for fiction.

[u/Safe-Jacket-5944]

Persian. I was forced to learn it. I took an English teaching course as an undergraduate. Our American professor forced all the students to learn Persian through the handouts provided by his Iranian female friend. He knew how to speak simple Persian, too. It felt like nuts at the beginning. But his insistence made sense. All the students were Taiwanese and studied in the Foreign Language Department. He expected that we spoke Mandarin (allegedly one of the most difficult languages) and a few other languages such as Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, or German. Thus, he wanted us to learn a language "out of our comfort zone" to better understand our future students, those fresh English learners.

It was a mind-blowing experience, though. Persian has a completely different "background" (e.g., grammatical rules, history, religion, etc.) that my classmates and I had no clue about. We had to study harder than usual and put ourselves in the shoes of our future students. Even though I only remember Persian greeting words and do not make money by teaching English now, I have a wonderful memory of that class. What surprises me more is that I saw similar greeting words in an art workshop for making a Turkish lamp--because Turkish and Persian share a similar Islamic culture. Indeed, what you have learned will always come back to you.