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Missing a Language You Stopped Studying | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4711 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 18 12 August 2012 at 7:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone ever have regrets? Russian was the first language I had ever studied in school
that really clicked for me and I enjoyed (after Spanish, French, and Cantonese throughout high school and university). Part of why I stuck with it after my lone semester of it was enjoying it, but a bigger part (or so I thought) was that it was maybe going to help me with a job I was considering. Well, long story short, but things changed and that became no longer the case. It was quite discouraging to my studies! I then got interested in the idea of polyglottery and such, and reading this forum made me want to dabble in something new. I thought Norwegian would be fun because it was not a Romance or Slavic or whatever Cantonese is classified as, language. It was something new! So I started doing all the research and found all these great resources for it, and ordered them. Some haven't even arrived yet. Well, all of a sudden, I've begun to be struck by these pangs of longing to return to Russian! I never expected this to happen! I stopped studying it around 2 months ago. I just think about how much I am forgetting and all this. It is....unexpected, haha. Anyone ever experience something similar? Shall I shelve Norwegian for now and just hold onto the study materials for a rainy day in the future? Go on with it, knowing that Russian is always there waiting in case I don't love Norwegian right off? I just don't know! haha 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4527 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 2 of 18 12 August 2012 at 9:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes... I miss Korean everyday... It makes listening to kpop (my favourite type of music) and watching Korean dramas quite bittersweet. I also feel like I'm missing something... But Korean was just too hard for me... So I had to cut my losses :S
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 3 of 18 12 August 2012 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I miss Tamil a bit (or not).
I liked it, but it was just too diglossic (and thus frustrating) for my taste. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| linkman226 Bilingual Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5329 days ago 26 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Kannada*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 4 of 18 12 August 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, judging by your language profile, Malayalam's not a terrible alternative.
Knowing I'll have these kinds of regrets is the one thing that kept me plowing on in moments of weakness in my Spanish studies in the past, when I was tempted by wanderlust to go learn Xhosa or Tibetan or some other exotic language rather than the "vanilla" Indo-European language that Spanish is. Glad I stuck with it too, Spanish has great literature, music, people, history, etc. Edited by linkman226 on 12 August 2012 at 4:50pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4638 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 5 of 18 12 August 2012 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I abandoned Kurdish, and I miss it once in a while. At the time, my main target language was Persian, but I felt like exploring another language a little bit to the side. To my dismay, however, I discovered that there were very few resources for learning Kurdish, and even those I found weren't that great. I had one Kurdish-speaking friend but he didn't feel that he had a strong command of his language (he was born and raised in the U.S., so he faced the challenge that many heritage speakers face). Furthermore, Kurdish reportedly works as a dialect continuum, much like Arabic, but over a much smaller geographic area, and one that I wouldn't have easy access to at that. As a result, I stopped studying the language after about a year.
I don't miss Kurdish terribly, however. I'd like to get back to it, but now Hebrew, Turkish, and Pashto are all higher on my hitlist than Kurdish.
I had extensive experience with Arabic - another classic example of a diglossic language - and honestly found that the diglossia and dialect variation was a bit of an overhyped reason to fear the language. MSA and the dialects overlap more significantly than the differ, and the dialects have even more in common with one another - even ones at "opposite ends" of the Arab world, such as Moroccan and Gulf. Back then, resources for dialects were scarce, but I still found it less intimidating. Sure, at first, the transition from MSA to Egyptian was a bit daunting, but soon I started seeing the two merge together into one. Still, it seems like Tamil has very few resources (correct me if I'm wrong) compared to Arabic, and that always makes things worse. Do you find Malayalam more accessible? I'm curious since I'm interested in studying a language of India sometime in the future, and I have trouble choosing. :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 6 of 18 12 August 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I've felt this way about Polish. I stopped studying it the end of last year for a variety of reasons. I plan on returning to it at some point. I just don't know when. But what I've been doing to ensure that it doesn't slip away is to devote just a couple hours a month to review what I've already learned, so I don't forget. I don't review every single thing I learned, just the major points, and I also listen to music or whatever I stumble across on the internet. I figure a couple hours here and there won't interfere with anything else I'm doing, and I still get the benefit of not losing anything I've gained thus far. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Biujee Newbie United States Joined 5848 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 18 12 August 2012 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I logged back onto this forum about a month ago as I started up Mandarin again.. I could have kicked myself all day
and night when I came across posts that I wrote on this forum in 2008 saying I was studying Mandarin and was at the same level then as I am now...... Had I of continued Mandarin for these past four years I'd surely be fluent by now, at least a C1. I am a moron plain and simple. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Swift Senior Member Ireland Joined 4608 days ago 137 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Russian | Message 8 of 18 12 August 2012 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have the opposite of what you have. I would really love to study some more languages
aside from French right now, as much as I love it. However, I keep on telling myself to hold on until I'm decently fluent in French as I am still learning to learn languages (it's my first foreign language). I feel like I need a good foundation in language- learning itself until I can go off into learning several languages at once. Otherwise, I think I would end up having A2s-B2s in several languages but never reaching fluency in any of them. It is really quite tempting for me to run before I can walk when I see all the polyglots that frequent the site. I would just be careful to make sure you don't jump around between languages whenever you start encountering lots of difficulty in one of them. If the reasons for dropping Russian were more complex, I wouldn't worry about having left it behind. It's natural to feel bad that you didn't "finish the job" and fondly remember the things you liked about the language. Norwegian might be a better fit for you, and if so you can always come back to Russian later. If you're really missing the language, you could always do some stress-free, relaxed revision every once and while, as others have mentioned. That way you'll feel like you aren't at least forgetting everything you learned in Russian as you progress in your other studies. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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