Native Language: Slovene – self-explanatory
The Slovene language is, in my opinion, a difficult language. It has many intricacies, details, and duality that hardly any language has. People that speak a Slavic language should have fewer problems learning than people who are only speaking Romance, Germanic and Asian languages.
There’s more confusion when you realize we have around 50 dialects and it’s sometimes hard to understand them all. Fortunately, those people know how to speak without dialect.
Foreign Languages: English –
American English (90% self-taught even if the school system likes to credit themselves) I have been mostly exposed to
American movies and later
American YouTubers.
Spanish – completely self-taught (I have been watching
Mexican telenovelas since I was a kid, so I grew up with
Spanish almost the same as with
English). I’m not usually exposed to
Spanish and have to search for
Spanish movies or telenovelas so I ultimately don’t forget it. I’m very slow at writing because of the accents (need to look them up to copy them, lol).
German – I had
German in high school for four years and one semester in college. As with the languages above, I haven’t learned this one in school either. Unfortunately, I quit watching
German cartoons too quickly so I didn’t learn much there and school is useless (at least for me). We also hardly have had any shows in
German so it wasn’t so easy to pick it up. I’ve been trying to learn
German via Duolingo app for the past 4 years and by spending time in
Austria. Not to mention that
Austrian German is different from the
German I studied. I can understand much better than I can speak, and I find it the hardest language to learn (probably because I learned all the others when I was a child).
Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian – I can understand these languages relatively well. I don’t feel confident speaking them. I also can’t tell the difference between them, oops. A part that plays a role here is that some of my schoolmates came from these countries and used some of the words (that confused me as a child).
Italian – I had it for one semester in college. It was easy and hard to learn at the same time. It seemed familiar because I know
Spanish, but I also confused some things with
Spanish so there’s that. I guess I know some basics and I maybe still remember something.
French – I had it in school when I was 12 years old (I know this because we learned how to count until 12 lol). It wasn’t a part of the school plan, the teacher said she knew it and we voluntarily spent extra hours in school to learn it. My knowledge is even more basic here than in
Italian, and this was ages ago. A novelty thing rather than knowing anything anymore
I find it interesting that I speak so many languages from different language families. It has also confused me why I’m so bad at
German if
English never caused me any problems, but allegedly
English isn’t really a Germanic language (it’s a hybrid).