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How did you get involved with languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6872 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 17 of 35 07 May 2007 at 5:44pm | IP Logged |
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I was actually just thinking of asking this question a few days ago, before I saw it posted here already.
My aunt, a French teacher, is the one who got my intersted in languages. Almost as long as I can remember, I've been interested in French, thanks to her. I started with Muzzy tapes to learn French, and when high school rolled around, I took French lessons. So, I always had an interest. But the real life-changing experience was yet to come, when I was perhaps about 12 years old. My aunt had worked as an au pair in France, and brought her French family over to America on a visit. One night after dinner, I was sitting at the table listening to my aunt speak French to her host mom, and suddenly it clicked for me. The lightbulb in my head went off like a sun: I suddenly with clarity realized that my aunt and this woman weren't just speaking gibberish, they were actually speaking and understanding each other perfectly in a way that was completely alien to me. When Einstein was a young kid, so the story goes, he was shown a compass, and the needle staying in a northwards direction, no matter what, was what sparked his interest in the invisible forces of the world. For me, it was this conversation, of which I have absolutely no idea was being discussed, that finally made very clear to me that people actually think in a completely different vocabulary, grammar, everything that a language is. It also helped show me that the world is actually beyond my town in Nebraska, and the cities on the news on TV are actually real places, not just stories in a box in my kitchen. Like getting lost in the details of a painting, sort of, I started to fall in love with languages. Ever since then I've devoted most of my time, almost half my life, give or take a couple of years, to the study of them. I heard Esperanto was easy, and French classes were going to slow, so I started teaching myself that. I have never yet learned French, but I've done two study abroads (in fact, I'm currently still on my second one) and thus have learned Spanish and German, and have acquired a huge list of languages to learn. I don't really choose languages to study for practical reasons, it is really more like they choose me, in a way. I never really wanted to learn Spanish, but when I was an exchange student to Mexico (I wanted Germany, Austria, or Japan, for example) I learned it. On the other hand I've always wanted to learn French, and more recently, Japanese, and I keep getting sidetracked into something else, like Norwegian (which, by the way, has given me more pleasure than any other language I've ever studied...I don't know why...after German, I think it was simply just like a breath of fresh air). I hope that I never lose interest in languages. I don't have a set limit of how many I want to learn, because I don't know how long I'm going to live. There are more things to life than just languages, but to me they are like the open air to a pilot...very important, and a very big part of who I am. So I never have looked back on all the time I've spent with them and wished I had done something else. I really cannot even imagine doing that. Edited by Journeyer on 07 May 2007 at 5:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6476 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 18 of 35 09 May 2007 at 2:56am | IP Logged |
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I really kinda just fell into languages. I hated my three years of Spanish classes in high school -- well, actually I enjoyed the first year and hated the second and especially the third -- but if it weren't for that, I probably wouldn't be studying any languages at all right now, so I guess they did me some good in the end. I love Spanish now, by the way... I just wish I had been enlightened back then.
Between having had Spanish in high school and picking it up again last year, I flirted with the Japanese language a couple of times. My motivation was mainly to play classic video games in their original language and maybe to read manga (I'm not and probably never will be a huge anime fan, though I don't think there's anything wrong with being one ;)). Japanese was the language that I wanted to be learning in high school, but couldn't. When I finally did start studying it, I had a pretty typical experience for people who do that sort of thing: a little bit of initial success followed by total failure. It wasn't exactly the same kind of failure, though: never was so turned off by the Japanese language that I'd never return to it. Indeed, I had every intention to return to it. But I decided I needed to work out an organized study method, particularly for handling kanji, and one that will actually work for me over the long term. The main reason I started picking up Spanish again was because I realized that, a few years later, I still remembered much of what I did learn in high school, and I thought, "Hey, maybe this means something." And you know what? It did! Now I can speak Spanish a thousand times better than I could back then. My Spanish still sucks (especially my spoken Spanish!), but this time around I know what my shortcomings are and how to overcome them, and all it will take is time. Two good signs are that I rarely come across grammatical structures that seem totally alien to me now, and I can mostly distinguish Spanish that's written incorrectly from Spanish that just uses language features I've never heard of. I find Spanish to be a pretty easy language... it's just not the kind of "easy" that somebody who has never studied a language expects it to be. Earlier I mentioned that I needed an organized study method for Japanese. By now I think I've worked one out and have been trying again. This infernal language still keeps defeating me! But this time, whenever it does, I just take a couple of days off and try again from scratch with another method. I'm really determined. If the Japanese can learn Japanese, so can I! I have been making progress, though, but it's pretty slow and painful at this point. With luck, though, I may have finally found a method that's right for me. I always have had some fascination with languages, though. As a creative person (read: somebody with an overactive imagination), I tend to come up with worlds for stories, and then I naturally start to think, "What sort of language do these guys speak?" So right now I have at least two, quite possibly three "conlangs" (constructed languages) that I want to design. I did start actually designing one of them, though I haven't had much success at it so far. It's not something I've really actively pursued much, but I think it does indicate something about my personality and my love for language. - Kef 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5448 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 19 of 35 11 April 2010 at 12:18pm | IP Logged |
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This is an extremely interesting thread, so I believe it deserves a bump.
I started with Irish at school in the early 1990s. In the late 90s I began taking lessons in French and in 2003 began learning German from a Lonely Planet guide which I got in Dublin. As of April 2010 I study Irish and German at school, and I plan on majoring in Chinese if I am fortunate lucky enough to get to university in September. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5649 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 20 of 35 11 April 2010 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
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When I was younger I used to hate languages with a passion. School forced me to learn French, which was hard, not fun (at the time the only exposure I had to the language were worksheets) and something I would never need to use as of course I spoke English and everyone speaks English :P
I thought this way until I was 12 and was in France on holiday with my family. We saw this watersports school one day, nothing big or flashy just a place with a small hut with a couple of little sail boats and stuff but I was curious. I found a sign in English advertising for this week long Windsurfing course and being the amazingly cool, adventurous little citizen of the world I was, I was dead keen to give it a go. After about half an hour of whining to my Dad he finally agreed and signed me up. It was a week long course where you came at 9 and left at about 4 in the afternoon and as the sign was in English I assumed that the course would be in English... MISTAKE!! :D I turned up and was pretty happy, the instructor was really friendly, always smiling and he spoke a bit of broken English and there was a pretty French girl about my age there so the whole language barrier suddenly seemed much less of a big deal :D I really liked the way the other kids were accepting, was amazed that they knew all the same song lyrics as I did even though they didn't understand and had a really great time. Every night when I went home I started asking my Dad how to say little words like help, food and sail and looking them up in the dictionary when he didn't know, eager to communicate in my manly Tazan like way ^^ Ever since having that really nice relaxed experience and having chilled with people who didn't speak my language I've always been curious about both languages and the people and cultures behind them. After all this I ended up doing a Michel Thomas course in French, before dropping everything again. I was still really curious but never really worked on anything, though I soon discovered this website and read, and read, and read. Until I found this site I used to think that languages were something that people either can or can't do, and I believed in talent. I thought that I would never be able to learn languages because I didn't do well in school and it seemed something that only really really intelligent people could do (bear in mind I grew up in a relatively isolated enviroment made mostly of British people and other than my Grandpa none of them were fluent. I read and read and read everything I could find out about learning languages, and eventually fell upon Khatzumoto's All Japanese All The Time website. I still didn't actually do anything though, I bought lots and lots of Spanish learning materials but never did anything with them :D Through this I started to form my own ideas about learning languages and started using Assimil to work on French. I used it for an hour a day for 6 months and then moved to Zürich in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. I regrettably never made and Swiss friends but at my boarding school in the Isle of Man I was one of the few English boarders at the weekends. About a half of all the boarding students were German and the rest went home in the weekends so I decided that I would learn German. I couldn't stand the idea of going through another course again and did a little bit of listening-reading before just listening to lots and lot and lots and lots of German ^^ German tv, German podcasts, and soon I was only watching films and tv when they were dubbed in German. I spoke in my then very broken German to all the German students (at the time I couldn't even conjugate verbs and just used infinitives :P ). An amazing German teacher allowed me to go to the German lessons for Germans (they were studying German culture, literature and language) and I loved it =) After just sort of immersing myself in the language it made more and more sense and I eventually just sort of got it, and now my German is becoming ever less broken :P I can speak about pretty much anything, understand almost everything (except in literature or specialist vocabulary). I don't call myself fluent though because although I've had friendships for almost a year, virtually entirely in German (except when other English people are around as that's kinda rude) I still don't have a natural feeling for the entire grammar and my accent is still pretty bad. But soon it should be very good, after school is over I have no commitments other than enjoying myself, learning German and exploring Berlin!! Just two months left of school and then I'll be moving to Berlin, to try and be independent for a year (I'm gonna work in a hotel) before going to university in London (if I get the grades) to study German and French! Thank you François, Khatzumoto and all the members of the forum for helping me develop a more open mind, a skill that has enriched my life and a desire to learn more about people, their cultures and to see more of the world! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6458 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 21 of 35 12 April 2010 at 1:29am | IP Logged |
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My fascination with languages started even before I learned how to read (I was 5 at that time). I was a perfectly normal Finnish kid who watched cartoons and sometimes even animal documentaries on TV. All cartoons, of course, were dubbed into Finnish, but the documentaries were not! I guess I understood only then that other languages existed, yet it all seemed very natural to me. I mean, I never thought of foreign languages as gibberish, they were just other ways of communication.
Soon I started watching other TV programmes as well: films and TV series such as the Bold and the Beautiful.. :D Every time I would lean forward to hear what the actors were saying and picked up a couple of words in English. My mum would then tell me what they meant. A few years later I got interested in Mandarin Chinese, went to the library and borrowed a book on Chinese culture and language. I remember that I used to write down lists of the words used in each chapter and I tried to learn them by heart. Well, I still haven't learnt Mandarin, but I'm sure that one day I'll continue from where I left. My English got better and better without much effort, but I wasn't fluent until I turned 13. That year everything just 'clicked' for me, but I didn't began to study languages seriously until the following year. I had studied German at school since 4th grade, but I found it very difficult at the beginning. At the time I would've preferred studying French, but German was the only foreign language (apart from English) that my school could offer. At 13 I, like most other Finns, had compulsory Swedish classes at school. I hated the way Swedish sounds, so I had zero motivation, but somehow always managed to get good grades even though I hardly ever did my homework. One of my classmates was Russian, and he taught me some words in his language - a moment that changed my life for ever! I began studying Russian independently, but made little progress. Nevertheless, I was very motivated and decided to give my school German a chance, as well. I started studying it outside of classes as well and realized that in just 1-2 months of independent studying I could learn more German than in 5 years at school! I kept on studying more or less continuously for the next 4-5 years and achieved basic fluency at around 19. I went to an international high school where all classes were taught in English, and continued to study Swedish and German. My plan was to take Russian as an extracurricular class, but since it didn't fit in the only 1-hour slot available I had in my weekly calendar, I opted for Italian, a language I had recently become interested in. I sat only two basic Italian courses in class, but was so motivated that I continued to study it independently. In addition to Finnish, I spoke fluent English, Swedish, Italian and German by the time I was done with high school. No gap year, I just continued straight to university to study Italian. I was very excited about it, and in the end did in fact learn a lot in 3 years. I also continued to study Russian (I was quite lazy, though) and took Spanish for a semester. It was nice to notice that a degree in comparative linguistics was not needed to be able to figure out the grammatical similarities and differences between Spanish and Italian. I just absorbed them in a couple of months, studied basic vocabulary and immersed myself in Spanish through salsa classes and music. It took less than a year to reach basic fluency, and I've been actively trying to use the language ever since. Holidays in Spain, speaking with natives, etc. That was 3-4 years ago. Now I live in Italy and speak the language very well. :) I continued my Russian studies last year, and have reached intermediate level by now. I'm planning to go to Russia (my 6th time!) later this year to practise. After that..? Probably Bahasa Indonesia, a language I've been interested in for a long time... Or maybe Latin, one of my favourites? Keep posting stories, people! It's nice to read them. :) Edited by bela_lugosi on 12 April 2010 at 1:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5407 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 22 of 35 12 April 2010 at 1:48am | IP Logged |
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When I was 15 I decide to do something that no one has ever taught me in school or explained much to me: the Glagolitic script. I learned it and became obsessed with it, writing everything I could with it. In Slovak not Old Church Slavonic. I made people around me go crazy since no one could read what I wrote and plus that Glagolitic looks funny to most teenagers. I eventually got bored with it.
When I was 18 I somehow got around a book that spoke of relation between Slavic languages and Sanskrit. So I tried to learn Sanskrit but without proper resources at the time I gave up quite quickly. Then I decided to go to college and study Chinese as major, but I wasn't accepted, so I decided to study Russian. I got in but I left after first semester because the college I applied to had very low standards and it was just horrible there. Also, it clicked to me that to learn a language I don't need to go to college. However, just so I finish a college I decided to go to study Latin and Greek, at least I could study something I like, not that I couldn't learn either language on my own. I also tried to finally learn Old Church Slavonic (since I already knew Glagolitic and Old Cyrillic) but I got bored with it due to the fact that it was used only for religious texts and I'm not a religious person. I never decided I would get into languages. It all kinda happened because at first I was far more interested in history and then philosophy. Today languages are my number one interest, the followed by philosophy and only then history, politics and economy. Edited by Delodephius on 12 April 2010 at 1:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| laynepowell Newbie Canada Joined 5346 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Studies: Czech | Message 23 of 35 12 April 2010 at 3:01am | IP Logged |
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Hi Irish,
I was interested in your early experiences with Czech. I have just started learning it (for similar reasons) and am finding it quite difficult! What was the name of the book by Short that you used? Did you find it very useful? I prefer a book to something online. Layne 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5468 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 24 of 35 12 April 2010 at 7:26am | IP Logged |
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I started French at 11, as everyone did at that time in England, and found I was quite
good at it, although I can't say I particularly loved it. I then started German at 12 and found I was quite good at that too. I also liked the fact that most people hated German and found it very difficult - I suppose I wanted to stand out from the crowd. As I came to enjoy both languages more and more, I decided to continue them at A-Level, a decision that worried my parents very much since they thought that languages were simply "too difficult". I went to a normal, state-run Sixth Form College but one that, unusually, offered GCSE Russian with a lovely old Polish lady who had been transplanted to the Soviet Union for reasons unknown and then managed to emigrate to the UK. In my second year at Sixth Form I decided to take the Russian course, and it was this decision that firmly cemented my love of languages. Almost all my lessons were one-on-one, the teacher, Mrs. Starza, was utterly wonderful, and I enjoyed learning so much that I advanced rapidly, achieving Grade A after just 9 months (not that GCSE is a particularly high standard, but I think this was quite unusual). At university I decided to major in Russian and German with a minor in Polish (I went to a Scottish university where the system is quite different to England). I struggled with Russian at first since I insisted on being put in the post-A-Level class, but I adored Polish, and my German just kind of chugged along at an OK level. Here I discovered a love of all things Slavonic and my interest in German deteriorated correspondingly. In the end, though, I dropped Polish after two years and continued on with German and Russian. I went to Vienna for nine months as part of my course, which was great fun but consisted more of getting drunk with my British flatmates than immersing myself in Austrian culture. I then spent three months in Yaroslavl in Russia, during which I became great friends with some Russian guys and my Russian improved drastically. I had such a good time that after the three months I went straight back for another three with a student loan and nowhere to live! Definitely the craziest thing I've ever done in my life and probably the greatest. I graduated with First Class Honours and a distinction in spoken Russian, and then a combination of laziness and shyness on my part brought me to Japan, a country I had no interest in whatsoever at the time. I thought it was completely logical to study Japanese since I was living here and could not understand the attitude of those who didn't bother. I also had a lot of free time in my job. So I got a textbook and spent hours and hours studying. I found I learned Japanese in a completely different way to my other languages. Forced immersion meant I spoke much more natural, colloquial Japanese and focussed far less on grammar. After a couple of years here my spoken fluency was of a higher level than I had ever reached in any other language. And then I stagnated, rested on my laurels, and apart from a quickly aborted attempt at Thai, stopped studying languages. Of course I was using Japanese every day, but it never entered my head to start a new language. Until I discovered this site... The creator of this site should be very proud as he is literally changing lives here. I have started to study Georgian, I am enjoying it immensely, and I have met new people and gained an interest in a whole new country and culture. Edited by TixhiiDon on 12 April 2010 at 7:27am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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