I am an aspiring polyglot. Yes, you will need to add languages to your growing mental list of my many interests. Languages fascinate me in every way. I often wonder about how language first came to be and how people communicated in the early days of international trading. There is only so much hand gesturing you can do to get your idea across. Trust me, I know.
But of course, as you are slowly finding out about me, I have many things that interest and fascinate me and trying to dedicate myself to any one of them proves difficult. Whereas I should be dedicated at least 10-15 minutes every day to each of the languages I know or am learning, I also want to dedicate time to learning the guitar, working on my novel, practicing dance moves, etc. Not to mention I’ve always been a horrible self-studier and I can’t afford classes just yet (on any of the above abilities I want to learn).
Despite my inability to focus on it as regularly as I would like to at the moment, becoming multi-lingual is truly something that is a life goal of mine and I want to soak up and absorb as much as I can. So in my own way of trying to remain motivated, I go seek inspiration, usually online, about whatever topic I want to study at the moment and continue to research it to remind myself how wonderful I think that topic is (which I’m sure you are realizing just leads to more procrastination…it’s a vicious cycle I fight with myself about often).
I want to share with you a video I found several months ago of my polyglot inspiration, Luca Lampariello (<—– see his WordPress blog there). In the video below he is demonstrating his speaking ability in 8 languages. I am awe-inspired and envious all at the same time.
I’ll admit, I have a bit of a web crush on him. ;)
Anywho…when I find a way to learn how to devote myself to learning one skill at a time, I hope to learn the following languages (any will do, but these are at the top of my list): Korean and Italian (both of which I’m working on now), Arabic, French, Polish, Russian and Portuguese.
If you could learn another language, what would you want to learn?
Aug 24, 2011 @ 05:22:20
I would like to speak Italian, French, Korean, Japanese, and Portuguese fluently. The problem with me is that I get my languages confused when learning/speaking them. When I took Italian class in university, I kept trying to speak Spanish all the time in Italian class and then I would throw in Italian words when I was speaking Spanish with my friends/ family. Now Korean is probably the language that comes to mind first when I try to speak another language so when I was in Mexico recently, I kept trying to speak Korean all the time, especially to waiters. It takes me like 2 weeks to be able to switch over to another language.
If I had 3 wishes from a genie, one would be to able to speak ANY language fluently without an accent. That would be so great!
Aug 24, 2011 @ 23:18:23
I totally understand. I tried to take French in college (while majoring in Spanish) and had that class in between 2 Spanish classes so I was always confused. I now know that you shouldn’t learn two languages at the same time if they are in the same linguistic family.