I have yes, with French/English but I would probably need another few years of serious study to reach that level and I’m not really prepared to do that career wise at the moment.

For anyone wanting to learn, I recommend an app called HelloChinese.

It’s similar to Duolingo in many ways, but goes above and beyond. Phrases are individually recorded instead of stitched together by a synthesizer. They go out and get volunteers on the street to record some lines. Every unit has a 15-minute podcast attached to it.

It gives loads of additional material to practice on in addition to the core teaching units. I used to use a combination of Duolingo and a reader app called ‘The Chairman’s Bao’ which offered graded texts, but HelloChinese does both and it’s so much better when the two are coordinated.

I can’t recommend it enough.

It’s more than plausible but you need to put the time in. If you search Lemmygrad for FSI you should see some of my other comments on how long it takes to learn languages.

With the right program you can get conversational quite quickly, but mastering the language will take a long time. The joy is that once you’re conversational, you can engage with native content and it’s no longer a chore from that point. The trick is to make it as fun as possible—whatever you need to do to get enough exposure.

If @Munrock@lemmygrad.ml is right about HelloChinese it could be a good start. I’d mix it with Listening-Reading, with which method you can ‘natural listen’ to native audiobooks within a month of 12-hour days (250 hours total, extreme but effective, although it does require you to read a grammar and make notes before starting). Once you can understand the spoken language it becomes a lot easier. You can then listen to a familiar book and follow a parallel text to absorb the meaning of the characters in a (relative) flash.

Chinese is often said to be hard for native English speakers. But most of the difficulty is the writing system. I’ve heard from people who focused on listening and speaking that it’s just as quick as any other language (maybe not quite so easy as Spanish, French, or Dutch). Then the characters do take time, but not as much time as if you try to learn the characters at the same time. How to achieve this? Search Lemmygrad for ‘Listening-Reading’.

One hurdle with Chinese is access to native content from within the West. I don’t have any tips for this, I’m afraid.

One hurdle with any foreign language is grammar. If you’re like me, you won’t understand English grammar enough. So the first task is to read or skim a book on English grammar. Then when you come across terms like preterite, conditional, imperfect, infinitive, conjugation, etc, in relation to the target language, it’ll actually make sense. Once you work this out with one foreign language it gets easier and easier with the second and third, etc.

One warning. If you search the internet for advice you’ll come across the idea that you only need to do one thing. Usually, it’s ‘just get input’. While you do need comprensible input, nothing is comprehensible until you’ve mastered at least a bit of grammar and quite a bit of vocab. Don’t do what I did and waste a year watching foreign TV without subtitles hoping you’ll magically acquire the language.

Use every aid you can think of to help make the language comprehensible – but make sure you are taking the time to understand the target language rather than relying on the aid! (This is the basis of the listening-reading method.)

Yup, Mexican dialect is just unique imo.

Hey thank you for the response, I really appreciate it. It is always fascinating to hear how people manage things like this, or just how other’s brains work in general. I was diagnosed last year as well at the age of 25. I’m the same way with loving routine and consistency but struggling to add new habits. The tip you mentioned about “hanging” new habits off of old ones is a good one, and something I’ve been gradually trying to implement in various areas of life in the past while.

All of the questions you’ve posited are good ones. I have definitely been trying to recognize patterns in my life and trying to understand how they influence the way I act and feel, ect. I also must remember to take to heart your advice about going slow, not fretting mistakes and what not.

At the moment I’m balancing working two jobs and taking courses at a local trades college as well, in addition to just being a single guy who is still kinda coming to grips with being a “functional” adult and all of the responsibilities that come with that. As such things like language learning haven’t been a primary concern, but I would like to gradually start implementing it into my routine. I see no reason why I can’t replace 15 minutes of scrolling facebook or whatever with 15 minutes of vocabulary studying. Just about building up to it I guess.

Once again thank you truly for the response, it has given me plenty to consider.

Thanks! Though right now I’m extremely basic at Russian. As in, I can only read Cyrillic Letters (most of it anyway), and only know how to greet and say goodbye in it; so I don’t really know how helpful I’ll be haha.