Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

How To Learn Any Language

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The most important thing you have to do when you’re setting out to learn a new language is decide why you’re learning.

You can’t be general or vague or non-committal about it either. “It’d be cool to read books in French,” “My family speaks Spanish, so like, it’s probably good to learn,” or “It just sounds cool,” usually aren’t good enough reasons. I say “usually” because I don’t know the true passion or enthusiasm you might feel when you give these reasons. But I can guarantee that you’re not going to learn anything unless you have a real reason that resonates with you.

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A “Hypothetical” Plan For Learning Latin

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This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

I got hit by a new wave of language lust the other day. Every other week or so I get an itching to study some new language, usually unprompted and without a sensible reason. This week’s sultry provocateur: Latin.

I try to trust myself and give in to these weird cravings as often as I can. And so within moments of being overwhelmed with a sudden desire to learn Latin, I was browsing Amazon to see what resources they had available.

I saw lots of textbooks, workbooks, grammar references, and parallel readers. Same old, same old. But there were so many things to choose from, and each book seemed to have its own pros and cons. And so it made me wonder (hypothetically, of course!). What exactly do I want in a Latin textbook? Or rather…

What does “learning Latin” mean to me, and how do I do it?

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Diversity: The Thing I Love Most About Language Learning

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This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

I’m a polyglot. That is, I speak a couple foreign languages. I’m not perfect, but I speak Russian, Portuguese, and a livable amount of Polish in addition to English. I’ve spent lots of hours studying other languages like Japanese, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Nigerian Pidgin too just for fun.

My goal in my personal language learning is just puzzle solving. Plain and simple. Languages are like puzzles to me. I choose a language to learn with the intent to pick it apart and see how it works. If I remember enough to order dinner when I go to a Thai restaurant or if I solidify my knowledge enough to maintain a discussion on the Ukrainian civil war with a stranger on the train, that’s cool. If not, I don’t really care.

Truth be told, the thing I love about language learning the most isn’t even the language learning itself. Most of all, I love the diversity of the language learning and polyglot community that exists because so many people happen to share my weird hobby. The diversity of the community has made language learning invaluable for me.

I’ll bet that when I say the word “diversity”, you think of race or ethnicity or nationality or maybe socio-economic class. This is usually the context in which we hear this word. But I think that it’s hard to really understand what diversity is when we always look at it in these contexts. The word loses its power (if it has any) because it’s vague and impersonal and charged.

So I’m actually not going to talk about diversity in any of these contexts at all. I’m going to talk about it in a way that’s more real and meaningful to me in my life. I’m going to share five polyglots who I think represent the diversity of the language learning community. They’re diverse in their skills, their depth of knowledge, their breadth of knowledge, their approach to learning, their field of learning, and their goals. And these areas of diversity are what has made language learning so meaningful to me.

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