las linguas

I don't actually know for certain what "la lingua" means, but it sounds nice, and I can only guess that it means something along the lines of "the language".

I have a fascination with languages. I think this stems from my fascination with cultures - I enjoy learning about different countries and their unique traits, although I think it's also safe to say that the more you learn about a different culture, the more you realise that there's a lot of similarity across the world.

I remember being taught Mandarin at school in Year 3, just basic words and what not. I don't recall being particularly good at it though.

Year 8 was the next time I had the opportunity to learn languages - at school we were taught Japanese and French. Unfortunately we had a poor French teacher (her pronunciation and spelling changed from class to class, it was annoying), so I didn't study the language much, but Japanese was great, and it was easy to pick up because there were numerous words that were similar to their Korean counterparts, which made it more exciting for me. I was never very good at the French pronunciation either.

During high school when I used to go swimming training, there was a period of time where we had a Russian swim coach. I loved listening to him speak, he had such a great accent to his English! That got me interested in the Russian language, and I taught myself the Russian alphabet and a few words/phrases ("shto eta?" = "What is this?" N.B. that's my phonetic spelling of Russian). I still have the sheets somewhere, and now that I'm writing this, I think I'll go hunt them down and run a refresher course - being able to read Russian would be the coolest party trick.

Also during high school I became fascinated with Africa, and Hawai'i to a lesser extent. I never really ended up learning much kiSwahili, but when I graduated from high school a good friend of mine gave me his "Instant Hawaiian" book, which is a short but sweet read. Another to-do to add to the list! It's been years since I read that book.

Since the end of high school I've been teaching myself Spanish, on and off, here and there. Last year when I started work, I also started learning a bit of Turkish, as I made friends with a colleague who was originally from Turkey. As I made more friends at work, I tried to learn a few Polish words from a friend, but unfortunately we don't really seem to speak anymore. And then earlier this year I made friends with some French colleagues who have come to work in Sydney for a few years, and my interest in the French language has been re-ignited.

So let's see.. I've tried my hand at Mandarin, Japanese, French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Hawaiian, Polish, kiSwahili.. Portuguese if you count the songs I've sung in Portguese.. and oh, Filipino. I only know a few words, like kumusta, kuya, salamat.. hardly what I'd call "learning", but at least they aren't offensive words. Funny how everybody wants to learn how to swear in another language!

That above paragraph was a bit of a cop-out. In terms of active self-learning, I've attempted Japanese (studied at school for 5 years but I've forgotten a lot), French, Spanish, Russian and Turkish. With the last two languages, I haven't learnt too much, but I know there's a few good sites on the internet that I can go to if I feel the need to study some more.

I also recently discovered the beauty of podcasts. I didn't realise they were free.. now I have access to numerous educational podcasts that teach me how to speak Japanese, Spanish, and French - and heck, there's even a taste of Russian news! It's great.

Oddly enough, sometimes it's nice to just listen to a language when you don't know what they're saying. Certain languages have more of a musicality/percussive feel to them than others, and they're fun to listen to.