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.
Really interesting how you found your way to these languages. I enjoyed reading your post!
Erich, I love your posts because you seem to write not to impress, but to learn. Your errors are always smart errors and opportunities to learn something new about the language. Good work! Let me know if you have any questions about my corrections.
Wow Erich, you have really made the most of the exposure you have had to so many languages. You are a very dedicated learner. Great corrections @cocoPop
I just wanted to say that some of the things marked may be a difference between British and American English. For example the beginning of the sentence "When one of my sisters started to learn it at school," is perfectly correct in British English and is exactly how I would say it myself. We usually learn things at school, not in school.
Hi Erich, it is so true that the languages one knows influence each other, that is not just true for native languages but also for later additions. Are you practicing all languages almost daily or are you prioritizing one over another (especially the ones where you are at a beginner level like Italian, Czech, and Esperanto)?
Thanks to everybody for all those corrections and the awesome feedback. @Silly7, I'm practicing German, French and English on a daily basis, at work too. For all other languages, I try to use them as much as possible, but the opportunities are quite rare these days. Latin and Esperanto are the poor relation of my languages, when it comes to speaking them.
@Margaret: Thank you, Margaret. Of course "started to learn" is possible, but this construction is a bit nuanced since it can also mean that something you're studying finally started to sink in, or even that you thought about doing something, thought better of it and then decided against it: "The phone rang at 3am. I started to answer it, but then realized it might be my stalker and just let it ring." However, an Ngram for British English specifically shows the prevalence of START LEARNING in reference to beginning to study a language: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=started+to+learn+English%2Cstarted+learning+English&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3
If the Ngram doesn't work, put your cursor at the end of the search field and hit ENTER.
@Erich: Margaret is correct - learn something AT SCHOOL is more prevalent in BrEng. On that note, do you have a preference for your future corrections? Your writing seemed more American than British to me because of the spelling and syntax, so I made mostly "American" edits, although I like to think my corrections are Pan-English for the most part.)))
@Margaret: I have a personal aversion to AS in the meaning of SINCE/BECAUSE because in the publishing world, we tend to only admit AS in this meaning at the very beginning of a sentence in a certain elevated style of writing. Elsewhere, it's just too formal. I personally think it's too formal for the casual tone of this post. But I'm not the last coke in the desert 😉 If Erich continues to use it in his posts after this, I simply won't correct it.
@CocoPop, thanks for all the energy you are putting in showing me the small nuances of English. You're right, my English is more oriented to the US, even though at school we learned British English. To be honest, I'm fine with your corrections, so go ahead. @Margaret, also your part is very much appreciated, this helps me better identify differences between the two Englishes(?) ;-)
@Erich The reason I posted a couple of comments was that I didn't want you to think that things you had been taught were "wrong" when it was just that they were more British than American. There are, in fact, many types of English. Even British English is not the same all over the UK and we have different dialects and levels of formality. @CocoPop has spotted that I most likely speak and write more formally that a typical young person, so I'll bear that in mind when adding comments in future. :-)
@Margaret: Your comments were also very interesting to me. I love seeing the way speakers of other dialects see and use English, even though we essentially speak the same language. I watched a British movie last week and actually had to put on the subtitles because I could only make out half of what I was hearing. And here I am - someone who makes a living off my English! I thought that was pretty fascinating - to be outside looking in, so to speak :)
@Erich It's my pleasure. I look forward to your future posts.