Learning Italian, for me, brings my late friend Diana back to life. She died too soon, but before she did, she taught me everything there was to learn about Rome and the Italian way of life.
As for you, highly recommend learning Jamaican pat-wah, followed by a trip to Jamaica! :-) The second I start saying even the simplest phrase in pat-wah, the listener inevitably breaks out into a huge smile, or bursts out laughing, and we immediately start talking. It was such a great way to get to know people. I don't think many tourists bother to learn this local language, which is a mix of English, French, west African and Spanish.
Wow, Paula, I didn't know about your friend Diana 💜
And I love the idea of learning Jamaican Patois. I think this is the reaction you often get from speakers of lesser-known languages because it's not that common for them to hear someone speaking their language so it's like a pleasant surprise.
My first foreign language was German. We had the choice between German & Spanish in high school. My connection was the many holocaust books I had read.
My 3rd: Japanese. My connection was childhood origami, but really I had discovered I liked learning languages and discovering how you think differently in & through them. After a 20 year break, I returned to Japanese because I missed doing things without a purpose.
As a teenager, I found Arabic beautiful, especially ح. I collected signatures for class to be offered, but the foreign language dept said they had no teacher. After September 11, 2001, they finally hired the teacher who kept urging them to offer Arabic, whom they had been telling that no one would take it. I loved the language then, but bad experiences with not a few Arab *men* have since tainted the language for me.
My niece has connections to Korea and wants to learn Korean and wants me to learn with her. The class I signed up for was cancelled, but on motivated days I work a bit on learning hangeul, the letters. It’s the first time in years that I’m digging into a language because of another person rather than my own desire.
All my life, I have wanted to learn a sign language.
I know, Arabic script is gorgeous! And I think you're being a cool aunt for learning Korean with your niece. By the way, a friend recently sent me a video of how to learn the Korean script in 15 minutes or so. I watched it and it nearly broke my brain, it wouldn't work for me at all, but she thinks it's amazing so I'm gonna share it with you. Here it is (it's a FB reel): https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1GFaDtN3vt/
It was the sound of Arabic that I liked. But I did enjoy learning the script. Especially as a lefthander. I could finally weite in my natural direction.
My inspiring story: Well, inspiring to me anyway! About 10 years ago I started learning Italian (I’m a second gen Italian-American) to help with my cooking (I write Italian cookbooks) and to speak with my elderly grandmother who was nearing 100 years old at the time in her native tongue. It also allowed me to have another connection with my father. I became more-or-less fluent by taking classes, youtube videos, and ultimately language learning partners on Skype. I have three wonderful Italians that I speak to every week for an hour or so, half in English, half in Italian. About 3 months ago, my brother and his family took my dream vacation to Italy and tracked down our relatives in a small village in Calabria. Unfortunately, they couldn’t communicate with each other beyond smiling. My brother called me and I acted as interpreter for them and it was like I was there. My Italian cousin was lovely to talk to and we’ve been in touch ever since.
Wow, Gio, that's a really inspiring story. I love that you started with Italian to help you with your cooking and ended up having a deeper connection with your grandmother, your father AND being an interpreter for your Italian-speaking relatives.
I started learning languages at university—sometimes for love, sometimes for survival, and sometimes for work. I love the idea that, in my brain, a single concept exists in multiple languages. I’m convinced that language shapes how we see the world, giving me the impression of living in multiple universes.
I decided that my newsletter would be multilingual, reflecting my passion for languages and the way they shape our understanding of the world.
Don't know what to tell you about choosing the next language because there are so many beautiful languages to choose from!
My journey with languages has been serendipitous. English as my mother tongue, Latin as an elective in high school, French and Spanish in junior college, Spanish major at uni, but also studied Russian (seemed exotic). Took an ASL course at night school. Later moved to Japan, so, Japanese has been useful. Then moved to Spain and studied Catalan, Polish (from a Polish friend there), and a tiny bit of Hebrew. Have a book on Arabic and was trying to learn that beautiful script. Picked up a few words from @mmerikani here on Substack (thanks, M!), and had a look at Buru and Kurmanji, thanks to your stack! All my life I have been studying cat. I can understand some things, but it's a difficult language to speak. (Hi, Beatrice🐾).
My inspiring stories all have to do with love. Falling in love really gives you the incentive to communicate! No details here, I'm afraid, but suffice it to say, I made a lot of headway with some languages for emotional reasons.
Hmm, for your last one, assuming you aren't thinking of something like reading musical scores (a very different kind of language), how about a sign language, but in a language you haven't studied before. I've recently come into possession of a handout of the alphabet in Japanese Sign Language. Some things are similar to the alphabet in English, but most of it reflects the Japanese language. How about Braille in Swahili?
Whichever you choose, have fun and keep us posted!
"All my life I have been studying cat" - it's a fascinating language, isn't it? As I've had a chance to discover this year! And I'd love to learn a sign language one day. By the way they're not necessarily similar / sign versions of spoken languages used in that area. Each sign language is a language in and all itself, with its own complicated rules! One day I'll learn one.
Thank you for sharing your language stories, Louise! Yes, I imagine falling in love would provide a great incentive for learning a language.
Oh, I was just reading them for a university course. And I was translating them (for myself, not a literary translation or anything) into Hebrew since my studies were in Hebrew.
But if you understand Samskrutam, wouldnt it be easier in Samskrutam - not all concepts would have equivalent words in Hebrew, I imagine, since its a different world-view?
I don't like it when a book's author just uses a language because he/she assumes all readers can understand a foreign language. No, i'm not familiar with this app. Thanks for your suggestion. I'll install it and see how it is.
Yes, letters of the Persian alphabet are similar to Arabic, only their pronunciations are different (Plus, Persian has more letters compared to Arabic). I don't know much about Kurmanji because i wasn't exposed to it much. Great idea, beside English, you can practice Persian with me.
My mother tongue is Persian/Farsi (It's an interesting language). Since this past November, i've been learning German (I'm beginning to love this language). My WHYs are that not only i wanna have sth to do beside making art and doing house chores, but also i wanna apply for a university in Austria (My German teacher says that Austrian German isn't much different than what i'm learning).
And I've been toying with the idea of learning Farsi for a while now. I chose to learn some Kurdish this year (Kurmanji) because it's a lesser-known Iranian language, but Farsi is definitely also on my list.
Thanks for sharing, Negar! Wanting to do something besides house chores is reason enough, but wow deciding to apply to a university in this language must be super motivating!
God, Tan'ka, it brought in so many memories! And I clearly remember this picture. And Castaneda. It is amazing how everyone in our family regardless of the age always wonders what to do be when we grow up:)
I had no idea how you ended up in Canada studying Oji-Cree. Nice story.
Have you considered Dutch? It's close enough to English that there's some stuff you'll ust know once you get attuned to it. But it's not so close as to be cheating. And it's got some interesting grammar, like the way it handles the inanimate objects of prepositions.
Can I slip in a question about Yiddish here? (I'm learning Yiddish as part of my program to get to a level of useful knowledge in all the major Germanic languages.)
The question is uvular r or apical r? Where I grew up there were many Jewish families and the old folks with Yiddish accents had uvular r. But Duolingo has apical r's. (And lot's of children speaking!) I suspect it has something to do with whether your people came from German speaking areas or Slavic speaking areas, although it can't be that simple.
I was also really surprised to find out that apical r is also used, as I've only ever heard uvular growing up. But it turns out both are used and it looks like it's not even aligned with dialects, at least not that I can see. But maybe the apical r is the influence of Slavic languages.
Dutch would be hard precisely because it's too similar to English 😁. I thought Rusyn and Portuguese would make my life easier but they were hard because they're too close to Russian and Spanish. My brain gets lazy when the language is too similar.
Agatha Christie's mysteries were books I read as a preteen. Back then they had many phrases in French, never translated. (Maybe they still do? I don't know about later editions.) It seemed every English person also spoke French. Besides, French was the universal language then (yes, I'm very old). So I wanted to learn French. I took my first French class when I was 14 and in high school. I took another French course in college, but never completed it. I bought and listened to the Pimsleur tapes, but lost interest. Finally, after a 24 hour trip to Paris in which I used every French word I knew, and was treated wonderfully, I started studying French on Duolingo. I do some lessons every day. Now I also do Spanish, Italian, and German. You probably already know all of these.
Oh, I love it when books have phrases in French and assume that everybody should know it. Books in Russian written around that time also do that, for the same reason - because everybody was assumed to know French.
Do you know about the app Language Transfer? It has free audio courses in French, Spanish, Italian, and German and it's fantastic.
Great to hear that. Some months ago, i was talking to one of my newly-found friends and he was interested in learning Persian. I started writing the Persian alphabet letters, but by the time i was finished writing them on paper, he wasn't interested anymore. If you're interested, we can set up a session in Google Meet. Just one question: Does Glossika have Persian in its list of languages?
Yes! Glossika does have Persian. Persian uses a variation of the same script as Arabic, right? I learned it when I was learning Arabic so that's done. I'm curious how close Persian is to Kurdish. I learned the Kurmanji dialect and the Kurmanji textbook that I used made some references to the similarities between Kurmanji and Persian. I would love to chat with you on Google Meet at some point when I start learning Persian 😊
Learning Italian, for me, brings my late friend Diana back to life. She died too soon, but before she did, she taught me everything there was to learn about Rome and the Italian way of life.
As for you, highly recommend learning Jamaican pat-wah, followed by a trip to Jamaica! :-) The second I start saying even the simplest phrase in pat-wah, the listener inevitably breaks out into a huge smile, or bursts out laughing, and we immediately start talking. It was such a great way to get to know people. I don't think many tourists bother to learn this local language, which is a mix of English, French, west African and Spanish.
Wow, Paula, I didn't know about your friend Diana 💜
And I love the idea of learning Jamaican Patois. I think this is the reaction you often get from speakers of lesser-known languages because it's not that common for them to hear someone speaking their language so it's like a pleasant surprise.
And of course now I REALLY want to go to Jamaica.
Brava Paula!
My first foreign language was German. We had the choice between German & Spanish in high school. My connection was the many holocaust books I had read.
My 3rd: Japanese. My connection was childhood origami, but really I had discovered I liked learning languages and discovering how you think differently in & through them. After a 20 year break, I returned to Japanese because I missed doing things without a purpose.
As a teenager, I found Arabic beautiful, especially ح. I collected signatures for class to be offered, but the foreign language dept said they had no teacher. After September 11, 2001, they finally hired the teacher who kept urging them to offer Arabic, whom they had been telling that no one would take it. I loved the language then, but bad experiences with not a few Arab *men* have since tainted the language for me.
My niece has connections to Korea and wants to learn Korean and wants me to learn with her. The class I signed up for was cancelled, but on motivated days I work a bit on learning hangeul, the letters. It’s the first time in years that I’m digging into a language because of another person rather than my own desire.
All my life, I have wanted to learn a sign language.
I know, Arabic script is gorgeous! And I think you're being a cool aunt for learning Korean with your niece. By the way, a friend recently sent me a video of how to learn the Korean script in 15 minutes or so. I watched it and it nearly broke my brain, it wouldn't work for me at all, but she thinks it's amazing so I'm gonna share it with you. Here it is (it's a FB reel): https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1GFaDtN3vt/
I can’t open the link; I guess you have to have a FB account to do so.
It was the sound of Arabic that I liked. But I did enjoy learning the script. Especially as a lefthander. I could finally weite in my natural direction.
ع*
My inspiring story: Well, inspiring to me anyway! About 10 years ago I started learning Italian (I’m a second gen Italian-American) to help with my cooking (I write Italian cookbooks) and to speak with my elderly grandmother who was nearing 100 years old at the time in her native tongue. It also allowed me to have another connection with my father. I became more-or-less fluent by taking classes, youtube videos, and ultimately language learning partners on Skype. I have three wonderful Italians that I speak to every week for an hour or so, half in English, half in Italian. About 3 months ago, my brother and his family took my dream vacation to Italy and tracked down our relatives in a small village in Calabria. Unfortunately, they couldn’t communicate with each other beyond smiling. My brother called me and I acted as interpreter for them and it was like I was there. My Italian cousin was lovely to talk to and we’ve been in touch ever since.
Wow, Gio, that's a really inspiring story. I love that you started with Italian to help you with your cooking and ended up having a deeper connection with your grandmother, your father AND being an interpreter for your Italian-speaking relatives.
I started learning languages at university—sometimes for love, sometimes for survival, and sometimes for work. I love the idea that, in my brain, a single concept exists in multiple languages. I’m convinced that language shapes how we see the world, giving me the impression of living in multiple universes.
I decided that my newsletter would be multilingual, reflecting my passion for languages and the way they shape our understanding of the world.
This post might interest you.
https://open.substack.com/pub/emanuelab/p/how-to-leverage-multilingual-skills?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3vhlfh
Thank you for sharing, Emanuela. I love it that you decided that your substack is going to be multilingual.
Don't know what to tell you about choosing the next language because there are so many beautiful languages to choose from!
My journey with languages has been serendipitous. English as my mother tongue, Latin as an elective in high school, French and Spanish in junior college, Spanish major at uni, but also studied Russian (seemed exotic). Took an ASL course at night school. Later moved to Japan, so, Japanese has been useful. Then moved to Spain and studied Catalan, Polish (from a Polish friend there), and a tiny bit of Hebrew. Have a book on Arabic and was trying to learn that beautiful script. Picked up a few words from @mmerikani here on Substack (thanks, M!), and had a look at Buru and Kurmanji, thanks to your stack! All my life I have been studying cat. I can understand some things, but it's a difficult language to speak. (Hi, Beatrice🐾).
My inspiring stories all have to do with love. Falling in love really gives you the incentive to communicate! No details here, I'm afraid, but suffice it to say, I made a lot of headway with some languages for emotional reasons.
Hmm, for your last one, assuming you aren't thinking of something like reading musical scores (a very different kind of language), how about a sign language, but in a language you haven't studied before. I've recently come into possession of a handout of the alphabet in Japanese Sign Language. Some things are similar to the alphabet in English, but most of it reflects the Japanese language. How about Braille in Swahili?
Whichever you choose, have fun and keep us posted!
"All my life I have been studying cat" - it's a fascinating language, isn't it? As I've had a chance to discover this year! And I'd love to learn a sign language one day. By the way they're not necessarily similar / sign versions of spoken languages used in that area. Each sign language is a language in and all itself, with its own complicated rules! One day I'll learn one.
Thank you for sharing your language stories, Louise! Yes, I imagine falling in love would provide a great incentive for learning a language.
Navajo? That was added to DuoLingo in the last few years, so, accessible. Have fun choosing from the myriad cultures!
Oh my god, this is gonna be a hard choice!
(your Substack was on the suggested list!)
Learning Samskrutam to translate Upanishads... sounds very interesting - what language were you translating it into
(and what's the story there?)
Oh, I was just reading them for a university course. And I was translating them (for myself, not a literary translation or anything) into Hebrew since my studies were in Hebrew.
But if you understand Samskrutam, wouldnt it be easier in Samskrutam - not all concepts would have equivalent words in Hebrew, I imagine, since its a different world-view?
I don't like it when a book's author just uses a language because he/she assumes all readers can understand a foreign language. No, i'm not familiar with this app. Thanks for your suggestion. I'll install it and see how it is.
Yes, letters of the Persian alphabet are similar to Arabic, only their pronunciations are different (Plus, Persian has more letters compared to Arabic). I don't know much about Kurmanji because i wasn't exposed to it much. Great idea, beside English, you can practice Persian with me.
My mother tongue is Persian/Farsi (It's an interesting language). Since this past November, i've been learning German (I'm beginning to love this language). My WHYs are that not only i wanna have sth to do beside making art and doing house chores, but also i wanna apply for a university in Austria (My German teacher says that Austrian German isn't much different than what i'm learning).
And I've been toying with the idea of learning Farsi for a while now. I chose to learn some Kurdish this year (Kurmanji) because it's a lesser-known Iranian language, but Farsi is definitely also on my list.
Thanks for sharing, Negar! Wanting to do something besides house chores is reason enough, but wow deciding to apply to a university in this language must be super motivating!
Yep, you're right. It's super motivating.
And I suggest Hungarian... because of that iron story in the camp:))
Hah! I love this. Because I already know the word for 'iron' anyway, right? So might as well learn the rest 😁
God, Tan'ka, it brought in so many memories! And I clearly remember this picture. And Castaneda. It is amazing how everyone in our family regardless of the age always wonders what to do be when we grow up:)
Yep, it's a genetic bug I guess. Or a feature, I dunno.
I had no idea how you ended up in Canada studying Oji-Cree. Nice story.
Have you considered Dutch? It's close enough to English that there's some stuff you'll ust know once you get attuned to it. But it's not so close as to be cheating. And it's got some interesting grammar, like the way it handles the inanimate objects of prepositions.
Can I slip in a question about Yiddish here? (I'm learning Yiddish as part of my program to get to a level of useful knowledge in all the major Germanic languages.)
The question is uvular r or apical r? Where I grew up there were many Jewish families and the old folks with Yiddish accents had uvular r. But Duolingo has apical r's. (And lot's of children speaking!) I suspect it has something to do with whether your people came from German speaking areas or Slavic speaking areas, although it can't be that simple.
I was also really surprised to find out that apical r is also used, as I've only ever heard uvular growing up. But it turns out both are used and it looks like it's not even aligned with dialects, at least not that I can see. But maybe the apical r is the influence of Slavic languages.
Dutch would be hard precisely because it's too similar to English 😁. I thought Rusyn and Portuguese would make my life easier but they were hard because they're too close to Russian and Spanish. My brain gets lazy when the language is too similar.
Agatha Christie's mysteries were books I read as a preteen. Back then they had many phrases in French, never translated. (Maybe they still do? I don't know about later editions.) It seemed every English person also spoke French. Besides, French was the universal language then (yes, I'm very old). So I wanted to learn French. I took my first French class when I was 14 and in high school. I took another French course in college, but never completed it. I bought and listened to the Pimsleur tapes, but lost interest. Finally, after a 24 hour trip to Paris in which I used every French word I knew, and was treated wonderfully, I started studying French on Duolingo. I do some lessons every day. Now I also do Spanish, Italian, and German. You probably already know all of these.
Oh, I love it when books have phrases in French and assume that everybody should know it. Books in Russian written around that time also do that, for the same reason - because everybody was assumed to know French.
Do you know about the app Language Transfer? It has free audio courses in French, Spanish, Italian, and German and it's fantastic.
Great to hear that. Some months ago, i was talking to one of my newly-found friends and he was interested in learning Persian. I started writing the Persian alphabet letters, but by the time i was finished writing them on paper, he wasn't interested anymore. If you're interested, we can set up a session in Google Meet. Just one question: Does Glossika have Persian in its list of languages?
Yes! Glossika does have Persian. Persian uses a variation of the same script as Arabic, right? I learned it when I was learning Arabic so that's done. I'm curious how close Persian is to Kurdish. I learned the Kurmanji dialect and the Kurmanji textbook that I used made some references to the similarities between Kurmanji and Persian. I would love to chat with you on Google Meet at some point when I start learning Persian 😊