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| CamineComet Newbie United States Joined 4973 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Sign Language, Russian, Persian | Message 1 of 1 13 April 2011 at 6:29am | IP Logged |
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Now Boarding: Rocket to Fluency
Entry One Greetings from the Triangulum Galaxy, I am starting this log in order to record my journey in the many languages I study. So, let's begin with what languages I have dabbled in and/or studied: Spanish: In middle school, Spanish was offered, but only for those that were willing to write a ridiculously long essay on how speaking Spanish would help them contribute to our global society. To put it simple: I had a small Spanish class. The class, however, was very engaging, entertaining, and the one part of the school day I actually looked forward to. Except, there was one minor issue: I disliked Spanish. For me, Spanish was an excuse to get away from my conspiracy-theory-obsessed advisor, so I saw no other choice but to take the class. I earned perfect scores on most of the assignments and a 99 on the final, but over time, my dislike for Spanish only grew. I could never pinpoint why I disliked it. I just knew that Spanish wasn't for me. So, when I was signing up for high school classes, I went for German. My 7th grade World Language class surrounded me with German chocolate cake, woodwork, and Oktoberfest and I loved it. German was my dream language and nothing could stop me from taking it. Then I moved. So I decided to sign up for French. The french teacher was fired, and I was put in a Spanish class. Now, I have to take the full four years (plus two in middle school) of high school Spanish. To make a long story short, I dislike Spanish a lot. Japanese: My brother speaks the language, I'm interested in the culture, and I loved watching anime. Guess which one initiated my slow disinterest in the language? I found Japanese fun to speak and fun to learn. I was ten and had no care in the world but to learn, so I did. Colors, basic phrases, numbers; they all came so naturally for me. I just knew that by the time I turned 18, I'd be pretty good at the language. Then I joined the anime club. " Your picture is so Kawaii-desu!" Huh? "You're such a baka!" Eh? Now I knew they were interested in anime, but really? When those are practically the only two phrases that everyone throws out at you, it gets repetitive and irritates those that really want to learn the language. I'd like to say that I just lost interest in Japanese, but knowing my experience in the anime club, I know it influenced my decision. Chinese: Paired with Spanish in my 8th grade World Language class, I was fairly excited about learning the language. We started off with characters like water, man, and tree. Then my teacher nonchalantly mentioned some statistics about how many characters there are and how many you'd need to read a newspaper. I really wasn't sure how to respond, so I just ignored what she said and continued loving Mandarin. Then we learned about something called tones. I'd have to say that I was happy when World Language was over. French: Paris, fashion, culture. Up until 7th grade World Language, I loved French. We watched movies about France and different things about the French culture. I thought French was the true language of love and the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard, but then I found... German: Besides the things mentioned earlier, German is such a lovely language to pronounce and my interest in Prussian history (or just history in general) made me want to learn more. After World Language was over and I knew I'd have to take Spanish, not German, I forgot about the language. Then, I found out that I could be (if the passport stuff is taken care of in time) going to Europe next year, and Germany would be one of the hotspots. This spiked my interest in the language and I began to study it. This time around, though, I became discouraged when my pronunciation was wrong. I have awful pronunciation in Russian, but I still absolutely love it, so why did it hurt so much in German? A love that was never meant to be... Xhosa: Clicks. Botswana. The !Kung. What's not to love? Russian: Ivan Braginski. But seriously, I couldn't think of a language I'd rather study. I'm madly in love with Russian and I wouldn't change that for the world. Yuri Gagarin. Sergei Krikalyov. Crime and Punishment. And most importantly, I'm on a mission to convince the people in my English class that if they read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in Russian, it wouldn't be "boring", as they say. If I wasn't a complete beginner, this whole entry would be in Cyrillic. But above all, there's one thing that solidifies my already unwavering love for Russian. The Cold War. Persian: A while ago, I really wanted to join the air force. So, I researched super critical languages and narrowed my choices down to Arabic and Persian. I wanted to learn Gulf Arabic, but learning Egyptian Arabic seemed useful too. Adding MSA, I knew I probably wouldn't take the effort to learn MSA and choose between a dialect, so I went with Persian. Since my military dream only lasted five minutes, I could have forgotten about Persian. The Iranian culture, however, drew me in. Old English: As a history "buff", I was very interested by the evolution of the English language. My parents, however, were not. I was scolded for choosing "trivial" languages and it did irritate me at first, but then I realized I probably wouldn't use it. At that point, I think my contagious hoarding habits were sneaking into my language learning. ASL/SEE: Signing was used early on in my life due to my stuttering and cluttering problem. Throughout middle school I was okay with my speech, but it's starting to become a hassle again, so sign language is not only beautiful and expressive, but it's also very therapeutic. So as of now, I am blasting off with Russian, Persian, Spanish, and ASL/SEE. Hopefully I'll be able to pick up Xhosa, Italian and Welsh on my journey. I am currently using Living Language: Spoken World for Persian, FSI and Teach Yourself for Russian, and CoffeeBreak Spanish plus iTunesU podcasts for Spanish (outside of school). My best friend is Russian, so that's a really big help in learning. I'm also searching for new resources everyday. Edited by CamineComet on 13 April 2011 at 6:34am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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