|
 |
How did you get involved with languages? | ||
Tags: Beginner | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6415 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 35 04 May 2007 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
|
Greetings everyone. I am new here and I first want to thank Francois for creating such a great site and thanks to all of those who contribute to keep it a great site. I was a lurker of this site but I felt it was time to participate with all of you intelligent people (well most of you :)). As for the topic, I am curious how some of you became passionate about languages. I will share my story with loving languages:
I worked at Wal-Mart a few years back while I was in college and they contracted out companies to do their floor maintenance. The company that came in had people from the Czech Republic. They seemed uncomfortable in a new place and there was only one who spoke English very well. At break time I began conversing with the one Czech who could speak English and he taught me a few phrases. I began speaking with the other Czechs and you should have seen their face light up with excitement. I was bloodthirsty for more so I bought the David Short Teach Yourself Czech and the Pimsleur Czech programs. I was never "fluent" but I could speak and understand fairly well, plus I had that one Czech who could interpret. I began becoming interested in languages because of these guys/gals and I owe them for opening me up to more culture and sophistication. I have lost contact them over the years which is to say my Czech has suffered but I am currently studying Spanish and I am very interested in French.......someday I will pick up Czech again. I have moved since then and I do have pictures of my Czech friends and if I can find them in those stacks of boxes, Francois may I put them up here? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 35 04 May 2007 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
|
I started off as a kid being obsessed with scripts. I would make up loads of scripts to write secret stuff in and I used actual scripts as well (Arabic, Japanese etc) but modified.
Then I got into Bengali after getting letters from my sponsored child in Bangladesh. I decided it would be great to learn Bengali so I could write back to her in her own language. After that I realised I really enjoyed learning languages and just got more and more involved after that. I really like your story by the way. Talking to other people and seeing their faces light up when I talk to them in their own language is really the major reason I learn languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| awake Senior Member United States Joined 6636 days ago 406 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 3 of 35 04 May 2007 at 10:55am | IP Logged | ||
|
That's a really great story. I don't have any such story, and I'm not sure how my interest in polyglottery evolved (other than I'm generally interested in learning just about everything :).
When I was in high school, I took French. Unfortunately my teacher the first year was an alcoholic who hardly ever showed up to class. They had to replace him quickly, so they picked some French major fresh out of college who didn't really speak French. Needless to say, I didn't learn much French during that time. In college, I was advised to take German (which was supposed to be more relevant for a budding young physicist than Spanish or French. I did very well in the class, and learned a bit of German (having a German major girlfriend helped with motivation). But as that relationship ended, my German practice fell into disuse and now I barely remember a word of it. About two years ago, being envious of my bilingual friends, I decided to pick a language to learn. I started looking for a language that I could learn on my own, I came across a somewhat battered copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto in a bookstore, and was intrigued. A language designed for international communication and ease of learning. At the time I didnt really care what second language I spoke, I just wanted to become fluent in a 2nd language. My thought was, why not start with the easiest one in the world to learn? So I dove in....did great for a couple of months, then lost focus. Several months later I picked it up again and started diving into it full speed ahead. What I've found is that I really love the language. I love what I can do with it (both practically in terms of using the language with others, and personally in terms of how I can express my creativity through the language). I'm now in the process of consolidating my Esperanto fluency (working on speaking and listening comprehension, the two areas where I'm still hesitant). I really believe that my experiences with Esperanto have given me a great foundation for future language learning. My next language will be Spanish, and then I'm going ot learn Japanese. Eventually, I want to be one of the people on this board that have half a dozen or more languages on their profile :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lastlife Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6473 days ago 85 posts - 93 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 35 04 May 2007 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I grew up around Spanish speaking people. I also had friends who spoke other languages including Portuguese, Polish, Creole, etc.
I even "studied" Greek for a bit because I was infatuated with a Greek girl. :) Initially I was only interested in learning other languages so I could speak in secret to people without others knowing what I was saying :) Everything else pretty much opened up to me through watching foreign films. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6603 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 35 04 May 2007 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
|
For me, the seeds were sown when I was five. I spent an awful lot of time leafing through my older brother's world atlas, completely enthralled by the mystery of faraway locales. But in the back of the atlas was a glossary of common geographical terms in many languages. I marveled at the shapes of these exotic words -- all I distinctly remember from that list, 34 years later, is jää (Finnish for ice), and jezero (Czech for lake).
A few years later I became a Beatles fanatic, and I was mystified by those words in their song "Michelle": Michelle, ma belle sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble très bien ensemble My brother, then in high school, recognized this as French. So I incessantly begged my mom to drive me to the public library in order to check out a French dictionary. I picked one out and immediately got to work "deciphering the code". You all know what happened next: I crashed and burned after two words. "Why isn't sont in the dictionary??" By then I was irreversably hooked on languages, and I checked out a children's book entitled "You Can Learn Russian" by Marguerita Rudolph as well as the old Berlitz French book. Haven't stopped learning since! Edited by magister on 04 May 2007 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ruivabela Newbie United States kellys-langs.blogspo Joined 6546 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian | Message 6 of 35 04 May 2007 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Magister, your story sounds familiar.
I had some very basic knowledge of Spanish through watching Sesame Street as a kid, as well as classes in elementary and middle school that taught me next to zilch. However, I didn't really get into the language until after the murder of Selena, when I was 16. With coverage of her death all over the media, curiosity got the better of me, so I went out and bought her Amor Prohibido CD. I had no clue what she was saying, and was pretty convinced I'd never understand the "jibberish" blaring out of the speakers. My solution: buy a dictionary. I thought learning a language (which wasn't really my goal at the time) was as simple as looking up words...one-by-one. I would become frustrated and convinced the dictionary I had chosen was a dud when many of those words couldn't be found among its pages. 'Why isn't quiero, guardaba, dijiste, etc. in here??' ;) Unfortunately, one of my biggest faults is giving up too easily. I could've very easily thrown in the towel, but I was so determined to decipher the lyrics to her songs that there was no way I was gonna let that dang dictionary win. ;) My older sister, who was familiar with Spanish after having taken classes since the fifth grade helped me. I also began to piece together things on my own, gradually having "a-ha!" moments. Of course Spanish got me curious about Portuguese, which in turn led to my interest in other languages. I'm probably learning more than I can reasonably manage, but Spanish will always be my gateway language and the one I never decide to drop. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| HaseLiebhaberin Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 6414 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Persian, English*, Spanish, German | Message 7 of 35 04 May 2007 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Well, I first started to like Rammstein. Then, last summer I had nothing else to do except work out every day for 2 hours, catch a smoothie afterwards, I bought the three German textbooks from Amazon USED for 3 or 4 dollars each. I studied after working out and having a dee-licious smoothie (usually mango). I am now about 1/4 of the way through the third book, on account of my final exams coming up. This summer, though, I will catch up and study for AP German with my friends' notes. (Btw, I'm taking AP Spanish Language next year).
Good luck everyone! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 35 05 May 2007 at 8:08am | IP Logged | ||
Welcome to the forum! No pictures of your Czech friends thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
