I'm currently trying to learn to speak and read Russian. My dad lived in Hong Kong for a few years when I was a kid, so I know grade school level Mandarin. I grew up with PA Dutch (corrupted German, essentially) as a second household language. Im fluent in Spanish, but it sucks because I'm surrounded by Puerto Ricans, so I mostly sling insults rather than engage in conversation.
There's a Slavic Orthodox church near me, and I've considered going there to find some native speakers. I test out my mandarin at the chinafood restaurant and it's interesting, I try to do the "Xaioma" thing but I'm not confident in my cadence and pronunciation, so I think I come off as a weeb.
I work on cars for a living and don't have much external interaction with people, so I get heavy into memorization and end up talking to myself a lot. Nobody else in the shop speaks anything other than English. The times I've tried online learning, I didn't feel like I got much out of it. I don't like condescension, or being treated like a child, and learn best from someone with a witty sense of humor. I haven't found those people on mainstream learning sites, but that's my anecdotal experience.
Your story is interesting as fuck. Thanks for sharing it
Xiaoma is a goddamn charlatan and an attention whore - don't use him as your basis of whether or not you're good at a language. Ditto with any of the other fuckwits on jewtube or social media, or those SJW fucks who say "I am fluent" despite barely being able to string a sentence together. The way I weeded out these fucks was by insisting on speaking the language I was learning, even if they responded in English. There was one time in particular that I remember where one of these fucks sperged out because I refused to swap to English for their benefit, despite the fact they said they were "much better" than me at the language. Needless to say I never interacted with them again.
Good luck with your journey of learning Russian. There's other languages on there too if you're interested too.
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