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 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| Kat0 Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 4701 days ago 89 posts - 97 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin, Bengali, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 7 21 January 2012 at 5:26pm | IP Logged |
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Hi,
I've only registered a few days ago but I've been reading on this forum for a very long time now and I think it's just great! It's a source of inspiration and motivation whenever I feel like I can't achieve what I want to in language learning. I'm 30 years old, living in Austria and working full time so I can't devote as much time as I would like to to my language learning. My native language is German, my target languages are English, French, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Bengali, Turkish, Modern Standard Arabic. I would like to add some more sometime. Whenever I can I'll be very happy to share my (limited compared to others on this forum) experience with anyone interested. Besides that I'm also interested in finding tandem partners for practicing our languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 7 21 January 2012 at 5:55pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome to the forum. That's certainly a long list of languages you have under "studies". How many are you actually studying at present and which one or ones are you concentrating on?
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| Kat0 Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 4701 days ago 89 posts - 97 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin, Bengali, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 7 21 January 2012 at 6:36pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you for welcoming me!
Besides my native language German English is the only one I think I'm pretty much fluent in so I don't actively work on my English anymore but I use it every day anyway. French, Spanish and Swedish are my intermediate languages, I try to use them at least 3 days a week, mostly reading books or newspaper articles, watching the news, etc. For those I'm most interested in finding tandem partners to practice my skills and improve my vocab and use of grammar. In Russian I'm just not advanced enough to use native material, right now I have a textbook that was recommended to me by a native speaker. It's supposed to take you to level B1. I plan to work through it (I've about finished half of it so far) and then switch to native material, too, if possible. I work on Russian more or less 3 times a week. For Arabic I follow an evening course (once a week 90 minutes) with a native speaker and besides that I work on it once or twice a week. On Portuguese I don't work as much and I'd have a very hard time saying or writing anything in it myself but due to my knowledge of Spanish and French (and Latin) I can understand a lot (especially when reading). So I read newspaper articles and listen to the news two or three times a week but don't focus on studying grammar so much. Turkish, Mandarin and Bengali are my weakest languages, not much more than beginner level so far but I hope to make some progress in the next months and years. Also for those I try to do at least a little bit several times a week. I know my languages seem a lot and one might ask why I don't just focus on a few of them and achieve more in those. The thing is that for each of these languages I had a specific reason to get started with it and I don't want to give up on any of them. I'm aware that I most probably won't reach fluency in all of them or not even most of them but it's fun learning and each of these languages is very special to me in a way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rajsinhasan Diglot Newbie Joined 4689 days ago 24 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English*, Creole (English) Studies: Portuguese | Message 4 of 7 21 January 2012 at 7:27pm | IP Logged |
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Hi, welcome. I'm new as well. I always admire someone who has the motivation and energy to take on so much. While I never learned Arabic or Chinese, I'd imagine such languages alone would be heavily demanding much less the others you are studying along with them.
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| Kat0 Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 4701 days ago 89 posts - 97 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin, Bengali, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 7 21 January 2012 at 7:46pm | IP Logged |
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Hi,
Rajsinhasan, I see you are studying Hindi and Persian. I don't have any experience with these myself but I imagine they are not less demanding than Arabic and Chinese... The advantage of working on less languages is clearly that you can progress faster in them - it's just as I said before that I always started my languages for a reason and now I just don't want to give up on any of them. As for the motivation, sometimes mine seems to fade away a little bit too, then I try to at least keep up my passive learning, such as listening to music in my target languages, watch TV, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rajsinhasan Diglot Newbie Joined 4689 days ago 24 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English*, Creole (English) Studies: Portuguese | Message 6 of 7 22 January 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
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Well I was basing my reasoning from reading previous articles of what Arabic and Chinese
entails for the English speaker (most speakers of other languages), and considered their particular linguistic situation such as Arabic having a different written and spoken form, Chinese requiring a few thousand characters and being tonal, and so forth. If you don't mind me asking, what got you interested in Bengali? I was interested to learn this language myself but I have a peculiar trait about me where I get bored learning languages that are too closely related- I'm learning Hindi and I guess I crave something substantially different whenever I learn a new language. I must say that Bengali is amazing for its authors like Rabindranath and Nazrul and their accompanying music genres among other things; however, I guess I'll personally stick to the Hindi translations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kat0 Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 4701 days ago 89 posts - 97 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin, Bengali, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 7 22 January 2012 at 8:38pm | IP Logged |
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Some years ago I went to Kolkata as a volunteer in a medical project, so I learned some basic expressions (and the script) in order to be able to communicate at least a little bit with the patients (mostly children) who did not speak any English at all. It would be great if some day my Bengali was good enough to read Rabindranath's stories in the original version! For now I can only go with the English translations.
Hindi and Bengali being so closely related is one of the reasons why I'll probably never start learning Hindi - I can understand your point very well, for me it's also more interesting to learn languages from different language families. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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