Irish shorthand for text messages. Try it today!
Not something I’m used to since I emigrated before texting became widespread, but there’s a couple I use when texting the family (GRMA is a usual one). List is missing “IMTF” (i mo thuairim féin) which is the equivalent of “IMHO”
Any other equivalents in your languages?
I barely text in English, but found some of these to be interesting:
Thank goodness all of my French friends are old. 
We still exchange e-mail! 
I can assure you that the brazilian phrase is very accurate and you shouldn´t pronounce it in front of your mom.
Very nice!
I like the use of numbers. I’m surprised to see the number 6 used as a “cee” sound in MR6 (merci) and 6né (ciné) but not in s’il vous plait. Maybe it’s just quicker to type SVP?
STP…what? You need motor oil? 
All the K pour Q seems a bit odd to me, PK = parce que mais QDN = Quoi de neuf… 
Still, that’s not the most confusing French reference I’ve seen in the past week:
This underscores the importance of practice. I used to participate in local conversation groups. Now we’ve moved to Zoom, which is much easier.
Thinking back, the only thing that made my French worse was struggling with Spanish in college. Settling on Mexican pronunciation helped. Haven’t had issues with German yet, but my practice partner is Swiss, so time will tell… 
Interesting. Any idea why that worked well for you? I grew up learning Mexican Spanish, and used to be able to switch pretty easily between Mexican and Cuban pronunciations. Taking on Portuguese killed all that. Now I gurgle between the two pronunciations and can’t speak Portuguese any more.
I think it was exposure and experience. I had a series of Spanish instructors from different places, and was trying to map all of those accents to what I’d learned in French. It made composing phrases and speaking very difficult. Everything was through a filter, and too slow.
Focusing on one works better, and I had more opportunities to practice. My ear for other accents I don’t use hasn’t been affected. So online options are available to revisit them in the future. Portuguese is on my list to study, because it’s frustrating to understand but not be able to reply in the same language.
Agreed with that, for sure. I’d really like to learn Xhosa, because I think it sounds beautiful. But I don’t have a use for it, and there isn’t a community in my area where people speak it. I learned some phrases at one point, but that’s all gone.
my Spanish is terrible but when I worked in kitchens I used to get to pick up new words, ask questions, and practice every day, which was great.
one problem I would frequently run up against was that my highschool French would pop up unbidden; I would be searching for my word in Not-English and sometimes the French word would come out instead. Like my brain had two lexicons: English, and Everything Else. super annoying.
OTOH, knowing some French is good because the romance languages share structure and cognates, so that definitely helps. comes out a wash, I guess, but I wish I could file the words more accurately.
I sing in Xhosa (actually hearing the click in my brain as I type that word!) because my choral director has a number of friends who are composers there, so we always sing at least a handful of their songs every year in performance.
Pronunciation while singing is always different than spoken language, but FWIW it’s a really nice way to get at least some exposure. Find online videos with the lyrics written out and practice.
There’s a point when you stop translating in your head and you just use the X-language part of your brain to respond, which makes all the difference. It’s more like a partitioned hard drive than folders, if that makes sense.
This was my major problem with Spanish. I think in French when speaking other non-English languages. When stuck for a word in Spanish, French was always in my head - sometimes to the point I couldn’t think of the word I wanted in English, my native language. 
Now, I do that on purpose with German, to create new associations based on the ones already in my head. With every new word or grammar rule, I quiz myself on the equivalents in Spanish and French. If I don’t know, I find out and commit those to memory so each new concept might lead to multiple things to practice. I’m also using colors and imagery to help with memorization.
what do you think of Duolingo?. I went back after ten years, and it’s changed quite a bit from the original concept-- crowd sourced translation.
Does it give short shrift to your favorite languages?
Spanish is massive. French is almost as big, and they get a lot of love.
Latin, somewhat less so. Like, it doesn’t even get into different tenses: it’s all the present indicative active. (Also: while macrons should be optional on entering Latin text, I see no reason why they can’t be included in the displayed text.) I’d offer to help, but I have no idea how to go about asking, or where.
Norwegian is fairly thorough and entertaining, with many pop-culture and scifi/fantasy references, but I’d really appreciate the tones being taught more… or at all.
Is there anyone either teaching or learning English as a Second Language who actually likes TOEIC?
It’s a good way to keep engaged with a language a tiny bit every day but it doesn’t replace a proper language course or immersion.
Don’t know about TOEIC, but English tests are a scam on the other end as well.
I had to do a TOEFL or Cambridge test to prove I speak English to apply for some things internationally, despite the fact that at that point I had written an entire MA thesis in English. Those things are expensive and a nice introduction to the Anglo-American model of having to pay a private company for everything, even things that you are required to do.
Of course the test, even at the “academic” level, is trivially easy, which adds insult to injury.
