For me it was French, particularly how many sounds are reduced in real-life speech and how clipped it can be, sometimes I’m like, there is literally no distinguishable phonetic information here - but clearly the entire French nation disagrees haha. I really love it though, it’s been a fascinating jump too.

It made me wonder what other languages have the steepest ‘learning —> IRL’ jump in your experience?

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I am 32 y.o. and planning on going to Taiwan for a 10 week college language exchange program this winter. I am genuinely wanting to get to conversational Chinese. Anyone did this later in life around my age? Was is hard making friends? Will I be considered creepy? (ethnically Korean, male, single, also retired already)

Does anyone have experience with this practice and if so would you recommend it? In my case it's learning Turkish in order to have an easier time with Kyrgyz later down the road.

I want to learn kyrgyz in the future but as someone who relies heavily on immersion for language learning it's difficult to find reliable content to grasp the grammar. I am thinking about learning basic Turkish before diving into Kyrgyz to better grasp turkic grammar. I am mainly interested in doing this because there is so much more turkish content for immersion and learning online then for Kyrgyz. Also i do want to learn basic turkish to some degree as i visit there quite often and im interested in general in the language.

What are your opinions? Do you think it will help me later with understanding kyrgyz grammar better?

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