Why do I love learning languages?

Part 1: My learning languages journey or How I became a polyglot without even noticing

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

This article was supposed to be about the reason why I love languages. But I started rather extensively by describing what languages have I learned and when and how it went, and I ran out of time. So that’s what you get today and you can look forward to the actual reasons in the next part.

I’m currently learning Greek and I watched a video recently by the Channel Easy Greek with the title “Why Even Bother Learning Greek”. It was quite a personal confession of the channel host about why he’s learning the languages he’s learning, especially German, but he was also asking the audience about their reasons and Greek-learning journey. And I realized I didn’t have a particularly strong motivation to learn Greek and I’m also, accordingly, not making much progress, but he inspired me to think about why I do love learning languages in general. And also to think about why I’m not making much progress in any of them and whether I want to change it and how. So I started remembering:

I was born in Slovakia (I don’t exactly remember that), so Slovak was my mother language. When I was 4, we moved to Czechia where I learned my 1 foreign language which switched to my mother language – Czech.

When I was 6, I started learning German at school. I don’t exactly know, why I started at 6 since a foreign language wasn’t obligatory until the fourth grade (around 9 years old) and you could choose German or English. My parents felt the English teachers in our school were not very good, so they chose German for us. I don’t know why I started at 6, but I was an active and smart kid and loved learning so maybe that’s why. I liked learning German, it came easy to me, so I was good at it without having to put much effort into it.

Then I started to learn English, again as an extracurricular activity. It went pretty well, but then we had to choose a second obligatory language at school.

And I chose French. French is a beautiful language but it felt like a thousand of rules and every rule had even more exceptions. I had also other extracurricular activities, at that time especially music, I played saxophone in a band and was also attending singing and piano classes because I wanted to apply to university to become a German and Music Teacher. Attending English classes after school was a bit too much, so I decided to cut it. But English felt more important to learn than French and also French was really difficult, and one of our French Teachers was a little bit crazy and demanding that we put as much time into learning French as if it was our only subject. All and all, learning it was too time-consuming. So I decided to switch the second obligatory language from French to English.

I regret a little bit not sticking to French and it is still on my wish list, but I still think it was the best decision at that time. I also didn’t focus on English very much, because it is a Germanic language just like German, hence in many ways similar, and I felt like I confused the languages and the more I learned English, the worse I was in German. So at the end of high school, my German was excellent, my English rather poor and my French almost entirely forgotten.

I sent three applications to universities for three different combinations. Still, in the end, I chickened out and chose the only option I didn’t have to do entrance exams – German and Latin Philology. And so I started learning Latin. Ha, I thought French was difficult! Latin is a great language and not easy, but I saw more of an issue in our desperate teachers trying to teach us everything in just 5 years. It used to be common to learn Latin at lyceums and come to the university well-prepared but as years went by, more and more students started to study Latin at the university who never learned it before. So they had to teach us everything from scratch in the same amount of time. And so it happened we started reading originals (Ceasar was the first I think) being only halfway through the main Grammar. I remember it well – we were supposed to come prepared for the lesson. Translate at home in advance. But our vocabulary was small and searching every word in the dictionary was immensely time-consuming and on a level even impossible. Imagine a sentence with 10 words. You don’t know any of them. And for each of them, you will find 5 meanings in the dictionary. How are you supposed to create a reasonable sentence? I was not even sure what the part of the speech was for half of them. And verbs were impossible because if they weren’t in the basic form I wouldn’t even find them in the dictionary. And the teacher was so strict I just ditched the lessons altogether, as they weren’t obligatory to attend, you just needed to pass the exam. Now thinking about it, I should probably refresh my Latin before I lose all of it, that would be a bummer.

Later I figured out you could attend various language courses at the university for free (yes please), the only problem was the beginner courses were full, so it was hard to get in. In my fourth semester, I went abroad and used the opportunity there. I attended an Italian course. It was difficult to switch between the two foreign languages and to make it even worse I always had French words instead of Italian in my mind during the lessons. Funny enough, if you would ask me to tell you something French outside the class I wouldn’t remember a word. Anyway, I loved the lessons and I could much more easily get a place in an advanced course back home at my university. I learned three or four semesters but I always forgot quite a lot during semester breaks when I was not using it or refreshing it. Right now I’d say I would understand basic stuff when written or when somebody was speaking really slowly. I could say a couple of sentences but I probably couldn’t say what’s on my mind.

Studying Latin we also had to learn Ancient Greek. Did I think Latin was difficult? At least I was able to read it, not so much with Ancient Greek. It’s a pity I didn’t learn it well because I would love to know it and be able to read some classics in the original.

At the German department, we had the opportunity to learn other related languages, so I learned 2 semesters of Yiddish and 1 or two semesters of Norwegian. Yiddish is basically German written in Hebraic letters with some Hebraic words. I would still probably understand at least partially somebody speaking, but I completely forgot the alphabet. Norwegian is quite similar to German so I could understand a little bit but I completely forgot all I learned.

Meanwhile, my English got better. I dated an Indian guy, who although living in Germany for some time, couldn’t even say Guten Tag. So we had to speak English with each other. I remember vividly how I wanted to speak about ironing and due to the lack of vocabulary, I threw some pantomime in there: “So you have clothes and you want to make it straight. So you have this thing (holding an invisible iron in my hand) and you do like this (waving the invisible iron left and right) and the clothes is straight (“straightening” the air in front of me with a happy smile on my face).”

I think I have come a long way since then, but it was the habit of using English daily and being more confident in my abilities that got me there. I always used to watch everything with Czech subtitles and how big was my surprise when my dorm roommate borrowed me a DVD with the miniseries North & South that had no Czech version and I could happily watch it and understand most of it.

Since then I had some more lessons, individual and in courses, and used English more actively also teaching in it. And I also started this blog. Of course, I make mistakes and sometimes (or often?) can’t articulate my ideas clearly, but that happens to most of us even in our mother language. That’s also why having a blog is a great practice and I hope in another couple of years I will be proud of my progress.

Recently I started to learn (modern) Greek. Two inspirations were behind it. First of all, we would like to take a vacation there and I would love to make it a habit of learning (at least the basics of) the language of every country I’m about to visit. The second thing is, that it’s a dream of mine to understand Ancient Greek ( I didn’t write “to learn” on purpose there) and I felt like the route through the modern Greek would be easier. I haven’t come very far yet since I wasn’t very goal-driven and only do lessons on Duolingo and sometimes watch Easy Greek videos.

If I don’t count some short-lived tries of Hungarian, Chinese (definitely one for the future, as my cousin has a Chinese wife and I would love to be able to speak to her a little bit when I see her), Marathi, Russian, Portuguese and Croatian, that would be 11 languages in total, 4 of which I can use pretty confidently (Slovak, Czech, German and English) and rest I can at least somewhat understand (except for modern and Ancient Greek, sadly). It’s safe to say my success rate is not very high. I keep trying and learning new languages but I don’t invest enough effort to actually learn them and/or when I do, I fail to maintain and deepen the knowledge. Why am I doing this? That’s a question for part two. Kudos to those who read the whole thing!