https://youtu.be/KNwuVwDcEn4

(You can skip to 5:03 for my TV appearance)

Hi everyone! Today I have an interesting story to share with you all, and a personal example of how language learning has created amazing opportunities for me.

Learning Kazakh

To give ssome backstory, I have been learning Kazakh for a few months now. I have been interested in Central Asia for a while but only recently decided to try learn one of its many languages. I was learning by myself for a bit, and about 2 months ago I started doing iTalki lessons with a tutor from Kazakhstan. If anyone is interested in the materials I have been using, I used Colloquial Kazakh, and then a site called soyle.kz (they have an English version of the site but I use the Russian version since it works a bit better). I also skimmed through a Russian language Kazakh textbook called Казахский язык- самоучитель.

Making a video

About a week ago, my tutor asked me to record a video of myself speaking Kazakh, because he was making a video of all his students answering questions about their Kazakh learning. I made the video, which was less than 2 minutes long, and sent it to him. He told me that his dad was going to post it on his Facebook account.

Anyway, it turns out that his dad is a somewhat famous political scientist, and the post got shared hundreds of times. Someone wrote a short article about my video on a news site, and other news sites wrote articles following the first. So, you could say that I kind of went viral in Kazakhstan.

A side note

One factor in people's reaction to my video is the debate in Kazakhstan regarding the Kazakh language. Many people who live in Kazakhstan either can't or don't speak Kazakh, and simply go everyday speaking Russian in most situations. Recently, it has become more and more popular to speak Kazakh as Kazakhstan tries to move away from their more 'Russified' identity. Part of this is the transition from a Cyrillic-based alphabet to a Latin-based alphabet. Anyway, proponents of the Kazakh language (which includes me of course) are really happy to see foreigners learning Kazakh, so my video got a really good response.

Appearing on TV

A few days ago, my tutor messaged me to tell me that a morning news program in Kazakhstan wanted to have a short interview with me in Kazakh. I knew it would be a challenge for me, since my Kazakh is still not great, but I accepted it as a challenge for myself. They sent me the questions beforehand and I prepared some loose answers, then did the short interview over Skype. It went really well, I was able to answer their questions without many problems, and the only issue was that the internet cut out near the end so the interview stopped somewhat abruptly. In any case, it was a great experience, and it really showed me how learning languages can open up so many opportunities that I never could have imagined.

Learning uncommon languages

Kazakh is far from a small language - there are 13 million speakers - but it is hardly the most commonly studied language out there. Even a language as big as Hindi isn't that commonly studied outside of India. I hope my story can inspire some others to learn any language that interests you, regardless of its size. When you learn a language with fewer speakers, the positive reactions of native speakers are really motivating.