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Sunday 18 June 2017

Languages are not hard!

A little bit of my language background

I grew up bilingual, so I've already got two languages under my belt (English and Welsh), and when I got to secondary school, we started learning French - language numero trois! Then a weird choice was given to us in our third year of secondary school, where we got to do an extra class, but we had to choose between Drama and German. I was not made for the stage and I'd been enjoying French, so naturally I chose to study German - language Nummer vier! However, German for me wasn't as enjoyable as French was. Maybe it was the teacher, maybe it was the learning methods, maybe it was me. Who knows? It was a long time ago now!

Anyway, let's skip forward in time a bit. I moved to a city from rural Wales in 2007 and I made new connections and friendships. I was introduced to a Polish girl back then and we're still good friends now. Whenever I hear her speak Polish I'm just amazed that those sounds mean anything! However, I wasn't inspired to learn her language or even revisit the ones I'd studied at school.

Fast forward a bit more, and I start a knitting group (hey, don't judge!) made of friends and friends of friends! A few of them spoke other languages. One speaks some Polish as her family on her dad's side is Polish, and she spent time in Russia and France, so she speaks some French and Russian. Another studied French, and two others are Swedish. Talking about languages crops up almost every meeting! It really got me thinking about picking up the French and German that I'd forgotten but I didn't actively pursue it.

One day, while watching some TED talks (not actually about language learning), I came across a video by Benny Lewis which inspired me:



Polyglot. What? I'd never heard of this word before. I couldn't imagine that there are people out there that can speak up to 20 languages (at various levels). I immediately went to Benny Lewis' blog - Fluent in 3 Months and read some of the posts. I started to see that there was quite a large language learning community online with so many people learning and teaching with lots of free resources. I quickly downloaded some apps, watched videos online and read blogs. It turns out that I had to get to my thirties before I wanted to rekindle my love for languages. It's never too late!

French was the language I wanted to pick up. France is only a stone's throw away from the UK and it's spoken in many parts of the world. So it began. I started using an app called Duolingo to casually ease me into it, a little app I came across through reading language blogs that takes a mere couple of minutes to complete short vocabulary building lessons. I was hooked! Two years later and I'm nowhere near fluent as I fit language learning around my hectic work life but I can have basic conversations with natives! The more I delve into the language learning community, the more I want to learn and succeed.

Over the last couple of years, I started with French, and I've recently added Japanese, Polish and Swedish to the list of languages I'm learning. Because I have a limited amount of time in my life to study, I know I'm not going to reach a good level as quickly as others and I'm ok with that.
There are no quick fixes to learning a language - you have to work at it. The only thing you can do is make it fun and fit it around your current work life.

My aim here on this blog isn't to tell you how to learn a language. This blog is here to share my journey with you and share the resources I find useful. I hope it will help you!