Chinese is the one I’ve kept after most consistently and am most dedicated to as a goal, but it is hard for me without the structure of a formal, in-person classroom setting. So I’ve mostly depended on different apps, which has had mixed success and I’m at a point now where the apps generally don’t do much since I’m pretty clear on baseline level of Chinese. But the jump from that to “everything else” is where I easily get lost. There is still an enormous amount of vocabulary I don’t know, or don’t know well, and a lot of grammar rules I only have a passing familiarity with. I also just don’t have very good listening comprehension and speaking confidence.

The latest is trying to keep after it with speaking practice via an AI conversation-based app, but I’ve been falling off lately due to distraction of helping with family-related caregiving.

I’ve also dabbled in a lot of languages via apps, but not stuck with any like with Chinese, and a lot of it I haven’t retained. The ones I probably got the furthest in apart from Chinese are Japanese and French, but again, without structure, it’s easy to miss on a holistic progression of learning and instead end up with a smattering of different levels of proficiency.