Language Love

I've started this blog to share my love of language learning. Perhaps some of you will join me on this journey, or share your experiences, or simply enjoy mine.

I have always loved languages, and for the past several years, I have felt a growing desire to learn more and more languages. My ideal situation would be to take proper classes at a college or similar place, but unfortunately, due to life, money, job that isn't possible. But to give up because of that would be defeating attitude, so I have decided to teach myself languages. If I get an opportunity to take classes, great. But until then, no reason to sit around.

My Language History:

I am fluent in three languages:

English, Gujarati (my native language), Hindi

My Life Time Goal:

Learn another 7 languages, to make a nice round number of 10. It's not easy certainly, because with language it's not just learning, they require maintenance too. Also, I don't want to learn to just speak and have a holiday conversation.I want to learn these languages properly, and be able to speak, read and write in them. But high standards required harder work, and assuming I live to an old age, I believe it's doable.

First key thing for me is to learn some European languages, since I live in UK, go to holidays in Europe, and also because I just want to. I first started with dabbling in German, because I had met some nice German people online. And I really like the language, and when I went to Berlin, I fell in love with the city. However, that is one language which I have decide is better suited to a proper class, because the pronunciation is very hard for me. I might try learning it again myself at a later date, but for now, it's on the back burner.

Other languages I've dabbled in are Italian, Spanish, Latin, Esperanto and Urdu. I say DABBLE because that's what I did. I did some serious study, but usually the effort was too fragmented and too irregular to produce long-term results. However, that's all right because that was when I had rediscovered my love of language learning and so I was experimenting and trying out everything, and it was fun. But now, I want results. Following the lessons learned from other aspects of my life, I have decided to focus on one language at this time. One to learn, and three to maintain. That would keep anyone busy. Unfortunately, I am already too busy, so again using the lessons learned from the past, instead of getting over-eager, I am planning to make slow but steady progress.

And the new language I'm focusing on is Spanish. So this blog will be about the methods I use, plus any interesting tid-bids about all my languages, or even the ones that I am not learning. It is a way to record my progress, hopefully get some feedback, and a way for me to stay motivated by seeing tangible progress record.