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How much time do you spend worrying... | ||
Tags: Wanderlust | Loss of confidence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4847 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 9 of 15 15 August 2012 at 6:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I worry about it all the time. It takes a lot of effort to focus my energies on
Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 15 15 August 2012 at 6:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Not much. Whenever I do, I come here and get advice, and then either follow it or I don't , and then I get it out
of my system. Either that, or I let myself wander for a week or two. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 15 15 August 2012 at 7:10am | IP Logged | ||
Not at all. I'll be happy to reactivate my German and become fluent in Finnish, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak. This doesn't mean that I won't dabble or even put in a decent effort to learn other languages (e.g. Mongolian, Ukrainian) but deep down acheiving fluency in those wouldn't satisfy me as much as doing so in the first five languages that I listed. I've been studying languages for much of my life in one way or another and after early years of revolving in the Romance and Germanic circles, I felt that I found a handful of keepers in Balto-Slavonic and Finno-Ugric. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 15 15 August 2012 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I only worry about the languages I have decided to learn - and it only takes seconds to run through the list of possible new candidates and reach a conclusion. With my current workload that answer will almost certainly be: "No - not now".
For instance Chinese isn't on my list because I have a hard time even distinguishing those pretty small paintings on a piece of paper, and that's long before I care about their meaning or pronunciation. Maybe some kind of handheld scanner with a speaking device can solve that problem and because of that I might some day revise my ultimate, final and irreversible decision, but I don't have time to learn thousands of pictograms right now and therefore I don't have to think about Chinese right now. For the same reason Japanese is not on my agenda. And for precisely the opposite reason I don't have to worry about Korean: the writing system is so simple that I already once have learnt it, but the rest would take so much time that I could learn the rest of the Indoeuropean languages in the same time. Arabian is off the list because they have more dialects than Norwegian and they don't write their wowels. And languages without good dictionaries, grammars and a wellstructured presence on the internet are off the list. Strangely enough my latest project, Irish, has got copious amounts of precisely those three things, in spite of having very few native speakers, and because it is weird beyond belief I decided to give it a chance. In the foreseeable future I may decide to add a few other languages to my list, but the current waiting list is short and fairly stable: Bahasa Malaysia and some Slavic languages, and only that - Wanderlust go home. Among the Slavic languages Polish and Serbian (or Croatian) are the ones that are in play, among other things because I can buy TV channels in these languages from my cable operator. And because this is the plan and it is logical and based on wellknown facts I don't have to think it over again and again. And I am not going to lie sleepless at night because there are 6000 languages or so which I don't have time to learn. Maybe something happens which makes me study one of them, like it happened with Indonesian and Irish (and Romanian during my study years, where my institute suddenly got a native Romanian teacher). But then I will take my decision on the basis of facts which I haven't got yet - no need to worry now. Edited by Iversen on 15 August 2012 at 11:00am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| freakyaye Senior Member Australia Joined 4838 days ago 107 posts - 152 votes | Message 13 of 15 15 August 2012 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Right now I'm trying to learn french, but i still get pangs of interest in German,
japanese, korean, mandarin, cantonese..... blah blah. And every time I begin studying one of these other languages I always end up enjoying it but thinking, shouldn't I be doing French? First world problems :-) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5556 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 14 of 15 15 August 2012 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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If I added up all the hours I spent on deciding which languages to learn one day and how, and invested this time in language study instead, I'd probably have learned several in my hit list already... Edited by Teango on 15 August 2012 at 5:52pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 15 15 August 2012 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I waste more time on worrying that whatever I'm doing, it's not good enough. Of course, when I'm really bored in school I make grand lists containing all the languages I shall pick up right now, and how to do so, but that's just daydreaming.
... and well, my list is long enough as it is. I want to learn those languages to a self-sustaining level before I go to university, though I probably won't manage with Korean and Mandarin. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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