Speak

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“Those who know many languages live as many lives as the languages they know.”

-Czech Proverb

I've always had a love for learning languages growing up. Although never having actually successfully learned more than 30% of the languages I tried learning, it was fun nonetheless. I mean, I did pick up on bits and pieces overtime but the ability to form useful sentences out of the limited words I knew was pretty hard. Unless I ever cross upon the opportunity of saying, "I have pants and a cat.", I'm pretty useless in daily conversations. Jag har byxor och en katt, is what it is translated in Swedish. At least according to my memory of Duolingo lessons, this is how it would translate. I think. 

The first foreign language (not counting English), I've learnt was French. Wait, maybe it was Spanish. I'm not entirely sure, but it was between those two since I remember having picture dictionary books that had English-French and English-Spanish when I was little. Guess that was the start of my love for languages. I lost the interest though, when I started schooling and the other childhood joys started filling my 7 year old mind and time. 

I'm not sure when I started gaining the interest again nor why I did but I think it was somewhere during early secondary school years. The first language I tried picking up once more was Korean. I was going through a I-Love-Korea phase and was into their dramas and tv shows, and of course undoubtedly, their music. Hey, theres no shame in that. You like whatever you want to like. People make such a big deal out of it but I don't see any harm. I've gotten over this phase though, just like I've gotten over my I-Love-Japan phase which stuck around for over a year or so. I wasn't very interested in learning Japanese though after seeing how hard it looked in the books my aunt used. She was learning Japanese at that time and still is, I think. 

Okay, back to learning Korean. I started off on Google, the mother base of all things searchable. Typed in "Learning Korean language" and bam about 18,800,000 results. So, I started learning the basics of course, which were the alphabets which surprisingly didn't take too long. Korean alphabets are pretty easy to memorise but often I still get double consonants and vowel symbols mixed up. It's been a long time since I actually started Korean but I still am able to read it now. It's just that I can't really understand whatever it is I'm reading so yeah....

After getting over learning Korean, I decided to pick up French because I've always actually had a dream of being able to fluenty roll every R and shoot words at lightning speed and still sound elegant. The whole French language is elegant in its way. You could probably curse and still sound like you complimenting someone. Someone who doesn't understand the language of course is your best bet in trying that sort of thing though. On my quest to learn (lol), I discovered Duolingo on the app store and thought it was the greatest thing ever for someone who is looking for an easy way to learn languages. I spent so much time on the app up until the lessons started getting hard and my memory of grammar and proper sentence conjugation was slowly messed up, and in the end I lost the interest and dropped the learning. A definite no-no when wanting to learn a new language is giving up easily when it gets hard because damn, it is going to get even harder and you've just got to suck it up. It's all going to be worth it when you can insult the people you hate and they can't understand you. (no, I'm joking.) (kinda) (somewhat) (it's good overall nonetheless) (that's a decent perk) (just be a good person!!) 

Following that, I suddenly wanted to learn German. I think it was after rediscovering that my aunt (not the Japanese learning aunt) could speak fluent German. Well, at least I think she's fluent. Whenever I was at my grandparents house, I'd find random story books in German. Once, my grandmother had tried to give me a Harry Potter book she had lying around the house since she knew I loved HP. Good thing I opened and checked it because it was fully written in German. Mm, I'm not up to that level yet but to be able to would be so amazing. God, now I really wish I could read in German. 

Yet again, partially into the course and I lost interest once more. This time, I decided to pick up Swedish which I currently am still learning and am putting the most effort in. I've got a notebook made for writing the words I learn so that I don't always have to rely on memory and then get absolutely frustrated when I don't know whether to use the words hast, hastar or hastarna which translates to horse, horses or the horses. The notes make it 50% easier. I love learning Swedish though and so far, I'm on level 8 on Duolingo. One level lower than my French and two levels higher than German. I did and still do switch up between those 3 languages whenever I get bored of one and hey ho hey, I'd advice people not to and just stick to getting real good at one first because I get the words mixed up often which is a pain. Like, I know food items better in German, but animals better in Swedish and colours better in French. In turn, which leads to sentences being created with all three mixed together. 

Honestly, I can't wait to actually master a language and although not be as fluent as a native speaker which is definitely very hard to achieve, I'd like to be able converse with other people in different languages. I mean, how fun would that be right? Plus the surprise that show on their faces when realising we as foreigners can speak their mother language is just a sight to behold. As I've quoted on my What About Me page, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, it goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, it goes to his heart." That's really the perk/ability I look forward to having one day, after actually mastering a (or more) language(s). The goal is to be a polyglot or even better, a hyperpolyglot. 

Somebody I look up to in this language-learning-thingy is Tim Doner. He is turning 20 this year but had been referred to by the media in the past years as "The World's Youngest Hyperpolyglot". He, amazingly enough is able to speak 20 languages, including English. However, he says that fluency is a whole different thing on its own. In this article (here!) he wrote,

When I was beginning to discover languages, I had a romanticized view of words like “speak” and “fluency”. But then I realized that you can be nominally fluent in a language and still struggle to understand parts of it. English is my first language, but what I really spoke was a hybrid of teenage slang and Manhattan-ese. When I listen to my father, a lawyer, talk to other lawyers, his words sound as foreign to me as Finnish. I certainly couldn’t read Shakespeare without a dictionary, and I’d be equally helpless in a room with Jamaicans or Cajuns. Yet all of us “speak English.”

Truth. 

So really, can we ever be truly fluent? I can speak 'fluent' Malay and English, yet it's a challenge for me to read materials that for example, are classical, where they use words I know not much of even though I did speak the language. 

If the standard of speaking a language is to know every word — to feel equally at home debating nuclear fission and classical music — then hardly anyone is fluent in their own native tongues.