Being able to read English, French and some Spanish :
* Upside : I understand about 75% of the Federated TL.
* Downside : It hurts my brain switching languages so often and fast.
Conclusion : I'm not a CPU, I don't switch context well.
@_sharpLimefox In my case, I can read in english and spanish, but I have a hard time understanding french. Unfortunately I forgot most of what I learned in college
@srtaveneno I can't blame you. Even as a native French speaker, reading so much English makes me slowly lose French, and day after day I discover again some peculiarities I had been using for years without thinking about it.
@_sharpLimefox my problem is: I didn't have the opportunity of reading more books in french, or listening to French music, watching French movies... Those things could help me to keep the language in my mind. About Spanish, was easier: I often listen to songs in spanish, watch plenty of Mexican telenovelas, and already traveled to another country where people are native Spanish speakers. Of course being surrounded of Spanish-speaking countries is a boost to learn more.
@srtaveneno I assume you must be in the US, so, you're more likely to be surrounded by Spanish speaking populations than French speaking ones, it makes sense. The same issue happens to me with Spanish : not consuming enough media in Spanish means I can barely keep the small bits of knowledge I have. Mastodon will probably help with that, since so many people toot in Spanish. It could probably help you too with French.
@_sharpLimefox nope, I'm in Brazil hahaha I thought being a native Portuguese speaker could help me with Spanish but... there are so many false cognates that learning Spanish is more difficult than I thought... (and conjugating verbs... It was a challenge in Portuguese, imagine in another language with so much details haha)
but I guess I need to follow French accounts to help me with my speaking, writing and all that stuff
@_sharpLimefox thanks for the suggestion! :)
@srtaveneno Spanish is a bit too close to Portuguese for them not to be confused occasionally (I even know a native PT speaker who gets confused in Spanish class), so it's great that you're okay with both (actually, speaking either of those natively should help). Also, if you chose to follow French speaking accounts, I recommend news bots at first (so that you can read the articles which are proper French, not spoken/familiar/text French).