Language learning background

As a child, I soaked up a few words of Greek (my dad was learning it for business purposes), but I didn’t start any formal language learning until at secondary school, age 11. There, we studied French from the first year, adding Latin in the second year and German the year after that. I took to languages like a duck to water, studied all three languages up to A-level, and added Italian GCSE for good measure.

After leaving school, I continued with language learning but did a lot of it outside the classroom. When I did take classes (Advanced French while working in France, Intermediate Spanish as part of my degree), I found it frustrating to learn at someone else’s pace (whether faster or slower than mine), and for me the conversation practice was one of the most stilted and tedious parts. I suppose I care about the environment as much as the average person, but do I enjoy having a basic conversation about it with someone who’s almost a stranger? No, I do not.

Nowadays, with the wealth of online material available, it’s very easy to teach yourself, and that’s what I tend to do. If I feel like I’m struggling to progress or to retain a language by myself (such as with BSL at the moment), I go for private lessons rather than a group class. I’m lucky to have some conversation groups where I live, so if I do feel like practising live and in real time, I can go along to one of them.

Why learn languages?

If you learn a lot of languages, people sometimes ask you why. But for me, it’s more of a case of “why not?”. If I have any exposure to a language (for example, via a work trip) I’ll end up feeling like “This language is beautiful, I want to learn it”. Although that doesn’t always pan out, due to the limited number of hours in the day, I’ve been studying at least one language for fun or revision for so long now, I don’t know what I’d do with my time if I stopped.

It doesn’t particularly matter whether I’ll be able to use a language or not. A large part of the enjoyment is from the learning itself: from spotting the patterns, slotting the words where they match up with other languages, and seeing words in a new way. In fact, while writing this text, I got distracted by the thought that “caterpillar” in Japanese translates as “hairy insect”, and then I had to look it up in several other languages (in which it was not so exciting).

Why are you writing?

For me, this website is a way to share my language learning experiences, make myself accountable, and practise using all the languages I know.

I am a member of HYPIA – the International Association of Hyperpolyglots.

Read my membership interview.