You know you're a language nerd when…

[IronMike]

Please share the Coptic resources when you get them.

[sfuqua]

This isn't really funny, but it's true.

My father died in the afternoon a couple of years ago. I was holding his hand when he died.

I went and check into a hotel afterward, and started to make phone calls.

Around nine PM a couple checked into the next room and began to loudly and repeatedly enjoy themselves, and the walls in the hotel were too thin to give them any privacy. I'm all in favor of true love (or true lust) and everything, but I wasn't really in the mood to be an unwilling voyeur that evening.

Assimil over noise isolating headphones kept me distracted from dark thoughts and the activities next door, and let me get to sleep.

[Xenops]

This isn't really funny, but it's true.

My father died in the afternoon a couple of years ago. I was holding his hand when he died.

I went and check into a hotel afterward, and started to make phone calls.

Around nine PM a couple checked into the next room and began to loudly and repeatedly enjoy themselves, and the walls in the hotel were too thin to give them any privacy. I'm all in favor of true love (or true lust) and everything, but I wasn't really in the mood to be an unwilling voyeur that evening.

Assimil over noise isolating headphones kept me distracted from dark thoughts and the activities next door, and let me get to sleep.

Along that mood, you know you're a language nerd when life has become stressful, and your coping method is to start learning a language completely unrelated to the ones you know.

[peter]

... you lose track of the sport event you are watching because you are trying to keep score in your TL's irregular number system ...

(Now time for the snooker semi-final ... I mean, for some more language practice ... )

[Cavesa]

when you hear a language tutoring session not far away from you in a café and have to fight the urge to correct the tutor's mistakes.

[Ingaræð]

...you get a new MP3 player and the first thing you put on it is Assimil.

[zenmonkey]

You buy a used Garfield in a foreign language for your gf and when you discover that you bought it in Dutch rather than in German you think ....

a) I should start Dutch
b) I can always give away at the next Polyglot Conference
c) don't I know someone that would use it?
d) I can put it with the other Dutch material
e) all of the above

e - the answer is e.

[Deinonysus]

When you're trying not to waver from French, but you saw a failed "click" joke posted on Reddit and you spend your whole lunch break researching Zulu and Xhosa. Is there an AA for Wanderlust?

[Cavesa]

When you turn off the World of Warcraft, so that you can do more Kwiziq.

[Random Review]

This isn't really funny, but it's true.

My father died in the afternoon a couple of years ago. I was holding his hand when he died.

I went and check into a hotel afterward, and started to make phone calls.

Around nine PM a couple checked into the next room and began to loudly and repeatedly enjoy themselves, and the walls in the hotel were too thin to give them any privacy. I'm all in favor of true love (or true lust) and everything, but I wasn't really in the mood to be an unwilling voyeur that evening.

Assimil over noise isolating headphones kept me distracted from dark thoughts and the activities next door, and let me get to sleep.

Along that mood, you know you're a language nerd when life has become stressful, and your coping method is to start learning a language completely unrelated to the ones you know.

There's a small but vocal minority in the (general) language learning community that are complete and utter snobs. They have this idea that if you don't learn a language to a good level, you're not serious. I think everyone interested in languages can benefit from taking at least one of their languages to a good (B2 or higher) level; but it's a free choice, there's nothing actually wrong with dabbling your whole life if you wish.

I know most of you are sitting there thinking that you never said otherwise, and I know that; but I watch some of the comments online from the minority and feel guilty for dabbling in languages (Yiddish, Modern Greek, Swahili, possibly even Portuguese) that I will likely never get to B2 with.

A concrete example: I really admire Moses McCormac. It's pretty clear that he speaks 2 or 3 languages well and then has a smattering of an absolute ton. I think that is awesome. That's what I want too. Yet some of the disdainful comments I've seen are really horrible. At times (with one guy several years ago in particular) abusive. The problem is that this minority is free to put others down without being pulled up on it by the rest of the community.

Even recently I saw a link on here to a blog post by a smart guy with interesting things to say, in which he referred to a certain kind (in my view a legitimate and even admirable kind) of language lover as "performing monkeys" (I think that was the phrase) and similar disdainful comments. AFAIK he is not a member on here; but he would never have got away with that kind of abusive comment on HTLAL when he was a member.

And yet we read these things, feel guilty, suppress our real wish to study some more basic [insert wanderlust language of your choice] and instead start slogging through advanced material (BUNfun or academic) for [insert core language of your choice] in spite of wanting a break from it.

Having said that, this forum (and HTLAL before it) is pretty good in that regard. I think that's why so many of us are so keen to reveal our guilty secrets (dabbling, wanderlust, etc) on here more often than we really need to: because we would be scared to admit such things on many sites we frequent and find useful.