jayeless@dreamwidth

So it's been almost a decade now since I started learning Spanish. Before that, I'd taken the compulsory language classes offered at primary and high school – seven years of Italian and three years of French – but because this is Australia and most schools do a really bad job actually teaching foreign languages to their students, I didn't really know that much of either one. I'd also dabbled in Esperanto, but I wanted to learn a language that was a bit more widely spoken than Esperanto, haha. So when I started university, I decided to shed my embarrassing monolingualness and enrol in introductory Spanish.

In real life, people regularly ask me why Spanish – or assume I must have grandparents from Spain or something, because why else would an Australian learn Spanish. Honestly I started because I was really interested in Latin American politics and history (and quickly realised that Spain was just as interesting)… and it helped that Spanish was one of the easier languages I could have learned (compared to, say, Chinese, which I thought would also be interesting, but I didn't have faith in myself to actually persist with it). But hey, a decade on (and my uni degree long over) and I'm still really interested in these countries' politics, histories, cultures, literature… it's been really worthwhile for me.

I think one thing I underestimated when I started on this journey is just how much learning a language becomes a lifelong task. The more you learn and can accomplish, the more you realise you have yet to learn and still can't accomplish, even though you're leagues ahead of where you used to be. I still feel too awkward to say I speak Spanish; I usually end up saying I speak some Spanish (even though this makes some people think you like, merely memorised the first page of a phrasebook), or add caveats, like “…but not perfectly though,” or “…but I find some accents easier to understand than others,” or whatever. Maybe it's better that way anyway, because people then end up pleasantly surprised that I'm better at Spanish than they thought I'd be. Not sure.

( And now the promised discussion of what I do to study! )

Whew, long entry! If you've made it this far, dear reader, I'd be curious to know: have you learnt any languages aside from your native one(s)? Is it widely spoken where you live, or do you – like me – really have to put effort into using your language? What do you do, if anything, to practise your skills?

I'm always happy to talk languages so if you have any other related thoughts this post has prompted, feel free to share ☺️