This is the second part of my story about how I came to learn the languages I am writing in, here on Journaly.
I have in my personal library a 24-page magazine called "der esperantist - Mitteilungsblatt des Esperanto-Verbandes im Kulturbund der DDR", number 4/1987. I don't remember exactly from whom I got it and when, but it was either during a language exchange in Dresden, Eastern Germany, with my school, in 1990, or somewhen in the mid-nineties in Romania. What I remember, however, is that looking at the language, I had a quite contemptuous opinion about it. How dare you mix Germanic words like "jaro" (year) with Romanic ones like "urbo" (city) in one sentence? The person who gave it to me apparently managed to convince me to take it with me, probably holding the hope that I would reconsider.
In December 2017, "Linguisticae", a French popularizer of linguistics I had been following for quite a while, started a series of five Youtube videos on Esperanto. By the time the fifth video was released, my decision was made to take an online class to learn this language. What convinced me? Mostly the fact that there was an active community speaking it, creating content on Youtube, especially songs, and that there are some native esperanto speakers in the world, that is, parents who learned the language decided to speak Esperanto to their children. I found that fascinating. After all, they said the language was not hard to learn, so I gave it a shot. I was not a very diligent student, since I had a lot of fish to fry. I eventually finished the 35th lesson after more than one year, in May 2019. In the mean time, I've found somebody in my town who speaks Esperanto, but we haven't found many opportunities to talk together but on these occasions I've noticed that I really cannot speak the language yet, my active vocabulary being still too poor.
Since Esperanto was the first language I started learning more than ten years after the previous one, Korean, I suddenly got excited again about learning a new language. The next occasion presented itself in spring 2019, about at the same time when I finished my Esperanto class. My daughters had started to exchange with a pen-pal in the Czech Republic, when that friend expressed the wish to come and visit them with her family in summer. I felt that it would not stop there and we would return their visit sometime. From my experience with Romania, I was convinced that knowing a little bit of the language always helps a lot for connecting with the locals, even though many can speak English. All this made me start learning Czech on Duolingo.
So they visited us and we had a great time together. We became very good friends in a short time and we made a plan to visit them in autumn. This was the time to put into practice what I had learned until then. My knowledge in Czech came in very handy, for example when we had to tell the bus driver where we wanted to get off, or when we had to ask our way.
I'll finish this post by sharing some insights about how I'm learning Czech. First I started only with Duolingo, but soon I noticed that these exercises were not enough for me to truly memorize the vocabulary. So I used the SRS system provided by Memrise which works really well. I don't have much time to put into language learning, some days only a quarter of an hour, but regularity is key. One year into learning the language, I started listening to the Czech radio in order to get exposure to the language. It's not exactly what one would call "comprehensible input" because at the beginning I would only understand the titles: "the news", "the weather" and "sports". Several weeks later, I suddenly started to understand the meaning of some sentences like when there was a crash between a train and a bus with several people injured. It was mind-blowing to be able to understand something all of a sudden. There is still a big portion of what I hear that doesn't make any sense to my brain, but I'm sure that I will continue to progress, slowly but surely.
Now don't ask me when I will take up a new language and what it would be. I think that I should first get comfortable in Korean, Italian, Esperanto, Latin and Czech before going on. This is what I try to achieve by writing in all these languages here on Journaly.
Wow, you have had quite a journey with language learning! It seems like you have had some pretty wonderful experiences with speakers of other languages. Your English is quite good and you seem very proficient with your grammar and vocabulary :)
Thanks :) I'm trying to keep in mind all what @CocoPop and others told me in the previous posts.
I also always wonder when I'm listening to podcasts in a language I'm not really fluent in, wether it is actually helping me improve or not... But I'm still listening... :)
Awesome! I echo that feeling of suddenly realizing you've understood something. My "thing" is music and interviews with the artists I listen to. A few months back, one of the artists I follow posted a video about some upcoming releases and I got really excited about what they were saying--totally in the moment and without realizing, at first, that I had understood what they were saying in German. Oh man, the excitement I felt when that dawned on me.. it was such a small moment, but one of the most powerful moments in my language learning journey. Anyway, keep up the great work!
Dude, that was amazing - your best English post yet!! I'm so excited reading this and seeing you reuse some of your past errors correctly. Great work!
Thanks CocoPop. I seem to have found a good teacher ;-)
I did the exaxt same thing with my spanish! But i was careful to pick topics that i already know to start with. And i did this on youtube so there's visual too.
I started to learn Esperanto also because of Linguisticae. I found the concept of the language very interesting, but I have to say that it's more difficult to find content than in other languages. I like your posts and it's funny to see that as a French I am doing sometimes the same mistakes than you.
@Choura, that's right, I cannot hide my French influence in English. :) As for the availability of resources in Esperanto, you're right, there's less than for other languages. But one thing I find really awesome is that there is a music label just for it: Vinilkosmo.