Addicted to Languages! | General discussion | Forum

Kevinpost said:

A good Chinese proverb sums it up: "If you chase two rabbits both will escape."  

Can I have an amen?

It's true. I'm doing a grab bag style mission right now, but there's only one new part: Old English—and it is closely related to my native tongue. The rest is all improving what I'm already pretty good with. And I would suggest there is a difference between starting out with a language and improving intermediate to advanced skills. 

So yeah. Start with one and stick with it through the first hard part. Get good at it. Then move on. Of course, it isn't necessary to spend twenty years on getting good at it: follow Benny's lead.

I'm not so sure about that.

I mean – learning a language to fluency in as short a time as possible is a big, one-only commitment. But just playing around with a few languages at a time lets me not get bogged down in turning it from a pasttime into a chore.

I'm listening to some Hindi, my most advanced language, and I manage to read an article in it. I'm pleased with myself. But as I go along the words are getting more complicated and at this point I'm basically just Google Translating whole sentences. I've learnt new words and I'm feeling great about that but it's getting a big…stodgy. So I pop on YouTube and listen to some glorious Red Army Choir music. I learn a few lyrics and their respective declenations. I sing along a few times. I start reading Russian Grammar articles. After a while I feel a bit bored – I'm not actually learning anything – I'm just laying down some solid foundations for the stuff we cover in the lessons every Wednesday (after which I chat to a Russian vendor in Russian, feel pleased with myself and spend an afternoon in a Russian buzz reading and practicing Russian). Then, on Wednesday evenings, I go to a Spanish meet-up with some Spanish students and Spanish-learning students and we chat in Spanish. I just get by with my limited spanish and come away understanding a few new words and feeling pleased that I managed to survive in an actual, real-life conversational situation. I learn phrases in Spanish all evening. At some point one of my Chinese friends pops up on Facebook. I want to ask him something, so I do it in Chinese. I learn how to tell the time in Chinese so I can ask him when we're doing something. I don't remember the characters but I remember the pinying so I type it up and Google Translate converts it into characters. He corrects my minor mistakes and we talk in Mandarin all evening. 

It's the lingual equivelant of channel-hopping and it makes each day exciting and varied. Sure, I'm learning vocabulary at a terribly slow rate and good grief Russian would be so much easier if I committed to sitting down and ramming it into my head I'm sure – but this way everything I'm doing is fun and I'm 100% engaged. Understanding of complicated concepts such as declensions is built up bit-by-bit as I remember small segments of how to say things.

I think it's all aided by the fact that I have no pressing desire nor need to learn any of these languages to a conversational level any time soon. I'm not off to China next week and Russia's not exactly down the road. Spanish and Mandarin are the only ones I get regular contact in and in those cases I am learning conversationally, though my Hanzi are suffering for it.

I spend each day gripped by a passion that never wilts and, to be honest, I can't think of a more enjoyable way to enhance my horizons.

A friend of mine recently gave me a wonderful piece of advice (which I'm sure he took from somewhere else but he said it with such conviction it might as well have been his own)

"The only person you should compare yourself to is who you were yesterday"

It's beautiful.

It works so well with languages, too. You go to bed at night – Are you fluent in Navajo? No? But you know more than you did yesterday, even if it's one word or rule (or even a burning desire to do more tomorrow precisely because you did absolutely nothing today). To summarise it all in the cheesiest way I can think of off the top of my head – Life is a journey and every step's taking you further then you've ever been before. 

I do look forward to that day

That doesn't mean that day is going to be anywhere within the next year or so. 

It's one thing to, as you say, "dabble" in languages – but it's another to be taking on a half-dozen at a steady rate so it never becomes a chore. I want to be fluent in all of my languages but I don't want it to come quickly or efficiently if it means sacrificing one ounce of the fun I'm having.