About

I am what you can call a serial language learner. I have developed this interest in learning a foreign language if I happen to like how it sounds or somehow given the opportunity to learn it. Take for example French. When I was a kid I stumbled upon a TV show teaching French. Because of that, I wanted to take a French course. Alas, for some inexplicable reason, the only place teaching French in my city only accepted students above a certain age. So, I waited… In the mean time, my mother found out that there’s a woman teaching Mandarin in the neighborhood. She asked if I wanted to learn Mandarin. Mandarin, huh? Sure, why not.

Gee, Mandarin… I wasn’t prepared to the way Mandarin sounded. After all, I was never exposed to it before I started taking the course. To be exact, I didn’t quite get its tonality, and I suppose my teacher wasn’t too concerned that I completely ignored the tones. I was taught the tonal difference of ‘4′ vs ‘10,’ of ‘buy’ vs ’sell,’ but that’s as far as I could remember. Add to that the fact that I had this disease called ‘laziness.’ Yeah, I was pretty lazy, interested but lazy nonetheless. My homework didn’t get done until 1-2 hours before I had to go see my teacher. The same thing with preparing for quizzes. It’s no wonder I still don’t quite get it. Really, I have no one to blame but myself.

1-2 years after I started Mandarin, I was finally eligible to take French. Awesome! I did quite well, possibly because the pronunciation and writing were more comprehensible to me compared to Mandarin. I couldn’t keep up, though. I took the course in the night, and between school, other lessons, and the lousy traffic in my city, I just had to let something go. So I quit French after about a couple years… I was probably at the upper beginner level.

Fast forward a few years. I got the chance to learn German at school during my senior year. So, I studied German as well. I didn’t really have a choice not to study it, by the way, since it’s part of the curriculum. I did quite well with German too, but again I didn’t continue since I graduated.

Then came college… I didn’t take any foreign language classes since I wanted to speed up my studies. But I did find a chance to browse around in bookshops, etc. Somehow I decided to take upon Japanese. So, I studied that on my own… It didn’t last; I had too short an attention span.

You think I’d learn to focus on one single language by now. I’m not sure if I could do it. After Japanese, I ran into Spanish and got a little acquainted with it. And now, a friend is offering to teach me Italian, and how can I resist?

If I can’t focus on a single language, I can at least try to track my progress in each language. That is exactly what I’m hoping to accomplish here. It’s my way of reminding myself of what I’ve learned. You see, throughout the years, I’d gone back and forth to pretty much all the languages mentioned here, and I always started back from the beginning since I didn’t know where else to start. If I do some sort of tracking, all I’d need to do is read through what I’ve done before, which should refresh my memory a little, and I can move on.