On Learning New Languages

It’s an unexplainable desire, learning new languages. Why? I know this might not sound like a reason enough but I find that the ability to be able to speak a greater number of languages awesome. It’s not only because you sound smarter, yeah, that’s a huge point of consideration but also because it increases your knowledge in an important way.

And I don’t know why but learning a new language has always sounded like brain games to me because it tests your memory and your observational skills.

How observational skills? Well, there are a lot of words in different languages that are similar to the language we know, mostly English. So, it primarily depends on how good you’re at recognising the variation-ed word in the other language and also accept the fact that that’s how it’s said.

But it’s also scary because at present there exist 6500 languages in the world. Whoopsie! Mastering a few is a huge task and then there’s thousands of them around this lonely planet of ours. And if I were to say ‘Yes,’ in three different languages they’ll sound very different. ‘Ja,’ in German, ‘Si,’ in Spanish and ‘Oui,’ in French.

So, since sixth grade I’ve ventured my way into three languages namely ‘French,’ using Duolingo but I don’t remember why I just gave up. I probably lost interest or something, ‘Spanish’ using Duolingo but also, I’d had a teacher who’d come to India for her three months of teaching experience at our school to whom I’m incredibly grateful for her Spanish notes because I still have them and hope to use in near future, and thirdly, the language I’ve recently ventured into, German.

After losing interest in learning from Duolingo twice, I have to admit that a language is definitely more fun to learn when there’s someone teaching you. Because the internet can tell you the right answer but maybe fail at explaining how or maybe not be able to correct your errors.

Also, the grammar. Grammar is a thing which, in most cases as I’ve observed, people fail at. I say in context of English. People make hideous blunders in tenses and you don’t want to sound rude correcting them, right?

After having paid attention, certain compound words in German have me like ‘Whoa!’ So, recently I got to know that a ‘mall’ is called ‘einkaufzentrum’ in german. When you break it down, ‘einkaufen’ means shopping and ‘zentrum’ means centre, summing up to the word meaning ‘shopping centre’. If you break the word another way, ‘ein’ means one, ‘kauf’ means purchase and ‘zentrum’ means centre. So, one shopping centre = einkaufzentrum.

Another one, I heard of this place in Switzerland called Weissenberg. I broke it down into two, ‘Weiss’ which means white and ‘berg’ meaning mountain. So, white mountain = Weissenberg.

Smart isn’t it?