Fond memories of HTLAL

[kimchizzle]

I thought it may be nice to share any fond memories we had of the old HTLAL forum and what impact it had on our language learning. I thought sharing memories could provide extra community comradery here and would be interesting to hear others personal anecdotes and highlights.

It was around 2006 when I first found HTLAL. At the time, I was using a different username, vanityx3, in one of my many failed attempts learning an eastern asian language. The community was fairly small still then, but there was so much information already, and I remember how great it felt everyone is really wanting to help everyone else learn another language in whatever way they can.

I remember back then, there were many threads about this once prolific and extremely knowledgeable poster who had just suddenly stopped posting for months, then over a year. He went by the username of, Ardeschir, or something, I can't remember the spelling. It was like a mystery, what happened to this guy. A mythos was built up around him the longer he was away. During this time a number of community members would look through his old posts to find useful knowledge to glean and requote and add to their learning repertoire. The admin was able to get in touch with him and convince him to return after over a year of departure due to community demand for him. That guy happened to be Prof. Aguelles. He returned with a different username at that time and some strict rules set by the admin about how to contact and respond to him if I remember.

Sometime after joining HTLAL, I became more interested in French and I owe a lot of my achievement in learning French to a high level to the forum and more importantly the community members who shared their knowledge, techniques and strategies. Before I found HTLAL, I didn't know anyone who was like me, and who liked learning about languages, just because. Everyone I knew only studied a language, due to a class requirement. But in the community of the forum, I found many others who liked learning and trying to learn language simply for fun and pleasure. This was a big encouragement for me to persevere in my language studies, and I always had a community of people like me to ask for advice or gain knowledge from.

Even if the HTLAL site goes away, I sincerely hope the dedicated community of language enthusiasts remains and stays strong under a new roof.

[tastyonions]

I came to HTLAL in early 2012 by way of the "Fluent In 3 Months" site. I had started out my French learning by buying Pimsleur and a tourist phrase book. Pimsleur was ok but ended up boring me, so I dropped it. I never ended up using the tourist phrase book. HTLAL set me on the path that was right for me by recommending Assimil, and that's when my learning really took off.

Being exposed to so many people with a passion for languages does have a downside: I always feel the pull to follow in their footsteps and learn more languages, even when I barely have the time for the three I am learning now!

[Andy E]

He went by the username of, Ardeschir, or something, I can't remember the spelling.

It was Ardaschir and he was responsible for introducing me (and a number of others I don't doubt) to Assimil ...

EDIT: I just checked and it was 14th June 2005 I registered - I've just had my 10th Anniversary and I didn't realise.

[sillygoose1]

I found HTLAL around 4 years ago during my freshman year of college. I remember the feeling of how excited I was to study everyday and put everything that I learned from the forum into practice, hours spent reading many of Arguelle's posts and watching his youtube videos, and thinking to myself how many languages I wanted to learn. In fact, I still get that feeling when I see a new Assimil book come out or find an edition of Linguaphone that I didn't know existed. Learning languages helped me discover new movies and books that as an American I probably never would have heard of otherwise. It also made me love to read and study. To this day, I've read more books in the past four years from 18-22 years old than I have when I was 0-17. But the most important thing to me is that it helped me to realize that you really can do what you put your mind to and it's not really just a cliche thing to say. I don't think I could've learned a language without it and its wealth of information aswell as its community.

HTLAL really helped changed my life and how I approach new challenges and goals while also serving as an escape when things in life got too hard to handle at times. For this, I'll try to lurk around wherever the community decides to go for as long as I can.

[garyb]

I had been thinking about picking up my high school French again for a while, and done a bit of dabbling, and then I lost my job at the time and decided to use some of my new-found free time to get more serious about language study. I did some online searching about how to learn languages and that's how I found HTLAL! It was great to see some success stories and find other people who were keen on languages. Thanks to the forum I've discovered some great resources and picked up some useful learning ideas over the years. In particular I found out about Assimil, which I would have never known about otherwise. And I've been writing logs for a few years now, which has been enjoyable and useful.

These days it's hard to say whether what I get out of the forum is worth the time I spend on it, or I'd be better spending that time actually studying my languages. For that reason I rarely log in during evenings and weekends. But it does keep up my motivation, I still pick up some useful ideas to refine my methods, logging helps me organise my thoughts and stay on track and have the occasional rant about frustrations, I enjoy the social aspect of connecting with other learners, and as far as online time-wasting goes it's much more productive than many other things I could be doing like checking social media.

[rdearman]

It is my 5th anniversary at HTLAL on the 25th. How time flies.

[dedalus66]

I found HTLAL sometime in 2010. I only got interested in languages then, but if I had never found HTLAL I'm not sure if I would have been able to turn that enthusiasm into a passion. I have learnt so much, and despite not being the biggest poster, I've spent countless hours perusing thread after thread (perhaps to the detriment of my language learning!).