My Interests (part #4.1): Language Learning
English

My Interests (part #4.1): Language Learning

by

language learning

Like many of my current interests, language learning started very early. I was lucky enough to grow up in a German-speaking family in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Even though our family language was a German dialect, I was soon exposed to High German through my readings; school was in French, of course. I consider both of these languages my mother tongue, even though High German is considered a foreign language by many Swiss Germans. Also, being bilingual has the disadvantage of not being one hundred percent native in either language, since one invariably influences the other.

The first foreign language I learned was English. Before I even started it in school, I took my parent's English books and started learning on my own. At the beginning of the first English class, the teacher asked in English "does anyone speak English at home?". I understood the question, but didn't answer because, of course, we didn't. On the other hand, all my classmates were terribly uneasy since they didn't understand anything and wondered if it was going to be tough... My English took a big leap forward when I started listening to the VOA program that was broadcast in our region. I remember so well the American Country Countdown hosted back then by Bob Kingsley and the American Top 40 with host, by Casey Kasem.

On second thought, no, English was not the first. Latin came first, but not until very recently did I consider it one of my "foreign" languages, since it is not a language one speaks. Now there are plenty of podcasts and Youtube channels where Latin is spoken, so now I'm trying to raise it to the spoken level too.

The next language is a language which I never actively learned. I was exposed to it since I was a child, having all product packaging in the supermarket labelled in three languages: German, French and Italian. Thus, I had an Italian dictionary right in front of my eyes. When one of my sisters started learning it in school, I had the opportunity to pick up even more of the language, like the first lesson of her book: "Ciao, sono Marco. Sono Italiano".

Next came Romanian. In early 1990, shortly after the fall of the dictator Ceaușescu, our community organized a humanitarian convoy to a Romanian village it had unilaterally partnered with. In that context, I found myself writing words like "încălțăminte - bărbați" (men's shoes) and other stuff on boxes. This first contact with the language, and seing the special characters (I always had an attraction to those), led me to start learning it, even though there was very little material available at first. Without a doubt, due to the fact that it was very close to Latin and had a lot of loan words from French and some from German, I became fluent very quickly.

Because of that, I needed a tougher challenge. About ten years later, I decided to jump into Chinese. I found a course on the internet and carried a printout of the first lesson around with me for half a year, but I never got past "wo shi laoshi". So I gave up. But only because I was casually chatting with some Korean tourists on a train, as one does on trains, and they mentioned that their language has an alphabet. That was it! An asian language with an alphabet: at least reading and writing would not be too hard. As I found out, there were more challenges in such a different language than all the others I had learned until then. As a matter of fact, after twenty years, I still haven't passed the lower intermediate level... Just now, my Korean wife came to me with a video call with her sister, I said 안녕하세요 (hi), understood what she was saying, but was not able to engage in even a small conversation.

My latest additions are Esperanto and Czech. Since this post is already long enough, I will spare you the story behind these two for another post.

0