I'm French. Not even French people can speak French properly, let alone write it, you can all stop worrying.

Generally speaking though, school sucks for languages, I learnt English by reading manga and Japanese by moving here for one year on a whim (which ended up moving permanently).
Being able to have a casual conversation in Japanese came pretty fast but it took 10 years to be confident in my reading abilities.

I've been trying Spanish on Duolingo and it seems to stick better than German (which I did finish before they updated the curriculum, again).
I also kinda want to go back to latin, I was pretty good at it and it really helped me understand the way German works, strangely enough.

PS @Kirsch: Where I'm from (near the German border actually), your username doesn't just mean cherry, it's cherry alcohol and I kinda get nostalgic whenever I see your username because we had huge cherry picking "parties" to make it with family and friends when I was a child.

We had the options of French or Spanish starting in 8th grade and then at minimum first two years of high school
The teacher for French idk how she taught. So for all I know she was either amazing or really bad
The Spanish teacher? She'd help you on tests and not dock you. Terrible. She moved after my one year of Spanish (due to reasons I finished my foreign language credits at the local college with ASL) and from what i heard, the new one was a bit of a drill sargent who was most displeased when she got her second and third year of the language students and none of them knew shit because they didn't bother learning cuz why bother? You're not gonna get punished

I think I felt the same going to Saturday school for Chinese. I literally learned no Chinese bc I was lazy and hated reading and writing. I mainly copied off my HK friend lol.
It’s not like I can’t read tho, I still recognize some of the simpler characters. As for writing, I can also do simple characters. As for harder ones, it feels more like…drawing pictures? But like…drawing them in the correct stroke order. Bc YES, there is stroke order and stroke order is very important if you’re trying to search up a word. And yes, even tho I forgot just about almost everything else in chinese, somehow, weirdly enough, stroke order has been ingrained into my brain lol. So even if you gave me a complicated Chinese character, I can probably 90% “draw” it the right way.

Just don’t give me simplified Chinese. Cuz simplified and traditional Chinese are WAY different. Like they’re practically alot of the time don’t look anything like each other. And I learned traditional Chinese in school lol.

Example:
龍-龙 - dragon
愛-爱- love

Kuuki wrote: ↑Nov 27th, '24, 01:54 PS @Kirsch: Where I'm from (near the German border actually), your username doesn't just mean cherry, it's cherry alcohol and I kinda get nostalgic whenever I see your username because we had huge cherry picking "parties" to make it with family and friends when I was a child.

Now I'm curious where you are from xD because I also do live near the German/French border.
Though I'm used to 'kirschwasser' for the cherry alcohol and not just 'Kirsch' but I can imagine it being shortened that way

Fun fact: My username is actually comes from 'Kirschbonbon' (cherry candy) which was my username on other sites earlier and had become shortened to 'Kirsch' over the time.

There's a stroke order for Japanese too

One of the books I have, the main character is Chinese and has a journal. He mentions his teacher constantly nagging him for having his strokes be in the wrong order

Given that the Chinese language influenced Japanese language, I’m not surprised lol. According to what I just read, the Chinese culture is older than the known Japanese one. So I’m sure the Japanese language has many similarities to Chinese, especially on their kanji.

It’s also a fact, for me lol, that I can recognize some Japanese kanji bc it’s the exact same as the Chinese one. Lol

Japanese kanji do come from Chinese characters. Except for a few that have entirely been created in Japan.
Hiragana and katakana are derived from those Chinese characters, hiragana especially started as a women's "language"

I had strokes order because I sometimes find another order easier to write.

Also Chinese people in my Japanese language school were indeed ridiculously good at reading but couldn't write or speak at all.

Kirsch wrote:
Now I'm curious where you are from xD because I also do live near the German/French border.
Though I'm used to 'kirschwasser' for the cherry alcohol and not just 'Kirsch' but I can imagine it being shortened that way

Fun fact: My username is actually comes from 'Kirschbonbon' (cherry candy) which was my username on other sites earlier and had become shortened to 'Kirsch' over the time.

I can totally picture my grandpa calling it wasser XD
A very very small village between Metz and Strasbourg. I'm actually at the very limit of German influence so our local dialect is very close to German.
Which is another reason I'm so mad at myself for not being able to speak it.

yup. that's why i get excited when i see a character i recognize in japanese since i recognize it as a chinese character. lol

lol really? i suck in reading or writing chinese so i'm not sure how i would do in japanese school. lol

but if you try writing chinese on a cellphone or something, proper stroke order is a must bc if you don't, the character is completely different than what you actually want to write.

Well,probably better than a lot of people. At least you are used to it so it is indeed easier.
I could speak already when I went so everything but kanji was pretty easy.

i still don't like it though lol. a lot of chinese just looks like gibberish to me. xD;;