UniLang

Lur wrote:I wonder wether Finnish stuff I like is really Karelian and wether I should study Karelian instead

What Finnish stuff do you like?

Btw, I'd love to learn Karelian too.

Naava wrote:

Lur wrote:I wonder wether Finnish stuff I like is really Karelian and wether I should study Karelian instead

What Finnish stuff do you like?

Btw, I'd love to learn Karelian too.

I might have to do both I guess.

I like the climate and the local ecosystems and I like the old oral poetry but it's entirely inaccesible without studying Karelian I guess.

I'm basically wanderlusting all the languages I used to learn and have become terrible at, since I'm now far too lazy to study anything.

I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'll never be as multi-lingual as I want to be; I'll always just have bits and pieces of like 20 languages in my mind all the time, decreasing in proficiency with every passing few months.

I don't think I'll ever be able to gain any real proficiency in Assyrian because the lack of opportunities to learn and use it are just so prohibitive, even with many Assyrian friends. I also don't think I'll ever get much better at Hindi, Persian, any Slavic language except maybe Russian, Greek, Armenian, or anything else.

I constantly watch videos on Slavic and Turkic languages and feel like I wish I could learn them all, but I know in reality it just won't happen. I've lost the ability I had when I was younger to just sit and study languages day to day. I only seem to be able to study when it's easy and when I can just complete all the exercises in my workbooks and get correct answers. As soon as it stops being easy or I have to try harder to learn vocab, my motivation completely drops.

I also suck at practicing the languages I know. I haven't used Hindi or Farsi in lord knows how long, and the same goes for Greek. I actually do use Russian because my best friend kind of understands basic Russian through his mother, though his grammar is absolutely appalling (he says things like "тебя хочешь пашол на работа?" and "он знаю я") and his vocabulary is super poor, so we only really use Russian when we want to talk about people secretly in public as a matter of necessity. I use Arabic a bit more. I use Hebrew almost never, even though I have people speaking Hebrew to me at least a couple of times a week either by text or face to face. I exclusively respond in English, which is the absolute best way to go about forgetting how to speak

I'm tempted to set myself a challenge of improving some of my languages, but I always struggle to pick which. I think if I ever did make a real go of it, I'd like to improve my Hebrew speaking, my Arabic and my Russian OR Hindi OR Turkish. The problem is that improving Arabic dialects is ridiculously difficult with the diglossic situation, Russian drives me crazy and Turkish seems kind of...Idk...lacking purpose for me. Hindi too.

The other thing is that my decent level of fitness has dropped off since multiple injuries, and I'm feeling like I really need to devote myself to getting back into my old shape. It wouldn't even take that long, but...it competes with my attention span for languages.

And my social life.

And my plans for the future.

This is what adulting is, isn't it? I feel like languages were such a huge part of my teens and early 20s, and now I just don't know if I have what it takes anymore. It's like getting older has just robbed me of it.

Oh well. Hopefully I'll never stop wanderlusting languages at least

n8an wrote:I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'll never be as multi-lingual as I want to be; I'll always just have bits and pieces of like 20 languages in my mind all the time, decreasing in proficiency with every passing few months.

Same.

I still try reading fiction in various languages to keep that loss from getting out of hand, but some days it feels like sandbagging a scoured-out levee.

n8an wrote:I'm basically wanderlusting all the languages I used to learn and have become terrible at, since I'm now far too lazy to study anything.
:

linguoboy wrote:Same.

Don’t you have a favourite language, like one you always go back to learn, or to practice in your free time, even if you’re not much aware of doing so? (and obviously not your mother tongue).

Antea wrote:Don’t you have a favourite language, like one you always go back to learn, or to practice in your free time, even if you’re not much aware of doing so? (and obviously not your mother tongue).

Not really, no. I have a few (German, Catalan, Spanish, French, Irish) that I go back to most often because they're the ones I'm best at so using them is more fun, but every now and then I'll an urge to pick up one I used to be good at but haven't used in a while (e.g. Chinese, Dutch, Korean, Welsh) or one that I've played with but never really learned (e.g. Persian, Osage, Arabic, Turkish).

n8an wrote:I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'll never be as multi-lingual as I want to be

n8an wrote:This is what adulting is, isn't it? I feel like languages were such a huge part of my teens and early 20s, and now I just don't know if I have what it takes anymore

Yep. I feel pretty much the same.

I decided to focus on just a few languages I actually use on a daily basis, but even that is hard sometimes. It's still possible to enjoy languages even if you're not actively learning them, though.

linguoboy wrote:Same.

I still try reading fiction in various languages to keep that loss from getting out of hand, but some days it feels like sandbagging a scoured-out levee.

Good idea. I try to listen to music in all my languages, but that's definitely not as good as reading would be.

Antea wrote:Don’t you have a favourite language, like one you always go back to learn, or to practice in your free time, even if you’re not much aware of doing so? (and obviously not your mother tongue).

Well, Hebrew, but I only actually speak it rarely (I just respond in English unless I have to speak Hebrew). Same goes for Arabic and Russian I guess.

Luís wrote:Yep. I feel pretty much the same.

I decided to focus on just a few languages I actually use on a daily basis, but even that is hard sometimes. It's still possible to enjoy languages even if you're not actively learning them, though.

That's actually a very good point. I still love reading ABOUT languages; I've become really interested in the decline of Belarusian, and I'm always super interested in reading about Slavic and Semitic languages.

Learning them, though...another story

Actually, I have a new group of Assyrian friends that I see usually once a week. All of them are fluent in English, and many of them are also fluent in Arabic (Iraqi or Syrian) or Farsi. Most of them speak the Iraqi Koine or Nineveh dialects of Assyrian, and some speak Urmi.

I frequently speak to them in Arabic and occasionally we try to communicate in Hebrew or Assyrian.

Last night I had been out with them, and on the way home I stopped at the supermarket. It was 3am, but there were two loud guys running around. I realised they were speaking Assyrian and I had to stop them and ask them about it. One was born here, but one was a new arrival from Iraq. He could speak Arabic; the other only English and Assyrian. I ended up speaking to the other guy in Arabic, and he was surprised that I spoke Lebanese. I tried to speak Assyrian, but absolutely none came into my head when I needed it it was embarrassing, but I guess that's what happens when you literally never practice.

Wanderlust rekindled?

I've been kind of toying with the idea of posting in the Modern Hebrew study group again.

What are you waiting for?

K-pop and Overwatch (one of my mains is D. Va) are making me lust for Korean again. (My girlfriend is a gamer and a bit of a Koreaboo.) Also, I've been eating a lot of Korean food lately. Does anyone else find themself lusting over a language because of the cuisine?

mōdgethanc wrote:Does anyone else find themself lusting over a language because of the cuisine?

Yep.

vijayjohn wrote:Yep.

Could you elaborate?

I always wanderlust because of cuisine. Every time I go to literally any restaurant, I want to learn the language of the cuisine.

Big problem

It's one of my main triggers, right up there with an interesting novel/movie/song featuring the language and just behind meeting an interesting speaker of it in real life.

mōdgethanc wrote:

vijayjohn wrote:Yep.

Could you elaborate?

I think I feel like that pretty much every time I eat? If I don't already know the relevant language pretty darn well, that is. Or maybe it's not really wanderlust, but still, pretty close! Like today, I had bulgogi and kimchi...and I don't think I can think about that without also thinking something like "why do I not speak Korean yet?" (Although to be honest, I was more preoccupied by the fact that I was sitting with two co-workers speaking Mandarin and my listening comprehension really seems to have gone down the drain, or maybe I just don't know enough work-related jargon for some odd reason. I also realized towards the end of the meal that I hadn't been holding the bowl I was eating out of and became slightly self-conscious about that. One of my co-workers is from the Netherlands but ethnically Vietnamese and doesn't get why I don't do that since that's what the Vietnamese do). I also feel kind of odd when I eat Chinese food because I speak Beijing Mandarin but seem to eat, like, Sichuanese food.

Why is it than whenever I study a Romance language I get wanderlust for pretty much all the other ones?

Recently I watched a couple of videos on this YouTube channel (in Italian), and now YouTube constantly recommends me her videos.

Then I go onto language-learners.org, and there's a log where one of the users there talks about learning Galician for several pages along with translated poems and songs and such. And then I keep randomly being reminded of how cool Occitan is, and how maybe I could find some Occitan books when I visit France this summer.

Just learn French. Just learn French. Just learn French.

vijayjohn wrote:(Although to be honest, I was more preoccupied by the fact that I was sitting with two co-workers speaking Mandarin and my listening comprehension really seems to have gone down the drain

How often have you listened in on natives speaking spontaneously amongst themselves in the real world? Because in my experience that can be quite challenging to understand even at C1 level. You often have too little context to grapple onto anything.

Or did you have trouble when they were speaking to you directly?

Everyone's eating all kinds of cool authentic foods from various faraway countries at restaurants and shit, meanwhile I just sit at home eating pork and potatoes, ready-made kebab rolls, chicken and rice.

Not-so-subtly complaining about three first world problems in a single sentence? This might be a new record. Please don't be too hard on me...

Anyway, I haven't really had any proper wanderlusts in a while except Old Chinese as a byproduct of working on a conlang influenced by it. I'm also starting to truly accept that in practice I'll always be a monolingual on the same level as rednecks from West Texania whose only exposure to foreign languages is anime that they watch ironically, learning only individual words and grammatical things but not piecing them together in my brain. And I don't even watch anime...

Saim wrote:How often have you listened in on natives speaking spontaneously amongst themselves in the real world? Because in my experience that can be quite challenging to understand even at C1 level. You often have too little context to grapple onto anything.

So true. When you're missing out on context and having to predict and analyse the flow of the conversation that you have no part in, it's really tricky. Sometimes it's even hard in English