How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

General discussion about learning languages
tacerto1018
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How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby tacerto1018 » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:02 pm

As the title suggests: how did you decide which languages to learn? Or for future languages what are the factors for you having or will be for you choosing to learn your languages? Relationships? Travel? Linguistic interest?

Sorry, I know this has definitely been posted at one time or another.
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby Iversen » Wed Apr 14, 2021 12:09 am

The question has certainly come up a few times, but since then we have been welcoming some new members, and others have become silent. Those who have been here for a long time may already have heard my story more than once, but here it is again because I like to lists things and write long rants.

I was born in Denmark so I first learnt Danish. And with time also (passive) Swedish and Norwegian through TV because they are so exceedingly easy for us Danes. Then I picked up some English from TV, and soon after I got English classes in school, and after that German - age 9-10 or something like that. And I learnt to understand Low German by watching TV (NDR: talk op platt). at home I started to study Italian because I played music with Italian words, and I added Spanish because there was a book in the same series as the one I used in Italian, and soon after I also added Latin because of the scientific animal names, but more vocabulary than grammar (and definitely not literature)

In the mid 60s I got Latin in school (as a passive language) and also French. And luckily I had a teacher in French who would throw me questions in Italian and Spanish just to keep me awake.

When I started at the university I first chose mathematics because I had liked that discipline in the Gymnasium (high school), but my interest had waned. Then I switched to literature, where we were expected to use Danish, English, German and sometimes French, but not more than that. However communism was rampant in that institute so I did my exam as quickly as possible and hurried onwards to the Romance department where I studied French, but I also followed courses in Old French, Old Occitan, Catalan, Romanian (3 years), Italian and a little bit of Icelandic, even though it was taught in another institute than mine (with less than a handful inscribed students they didn't mind having me sitting in the background). And some more Latin, of course - but not Spanish, because the benches there were full of marxist students with flaming sympathies for Fidel Castro. In contrast, the Italian teachers were just happy to have some more people coming to their courses because it provided more stability.

Then I got my exam and stopped studying languages because I saw that job opportunities were limited and tended to become even more restricted. Some languages survived because I travelled a lot, and the most surprising here is that I learnt to speak Spanish fluently just on the basis of my home studies plus some travelling. I did buy some 'irrelevant' language books near the end of my studies and just after my final exam - like books in/about Greek and Russian, but I only really started to study those languages almost thirty years later.

And since I discovered HTLAL in 2006 and restarted my language studies my modest goal has been to learn all major European languages, so far with Bahasa Indonesia as the only rulebreaker. It this point I'm more or less through the Germanic and Romance languages and underway in Greek, Albanian, at least five Slavic languages and Irish - well, Irish on an on and off basis, but progressing. Those I haven't started yet are partly members of those families (like Anglosaxon, Welsh, Czech and Ukrainian), but I have also planned to start Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque at some point in the future - and maybe a few other languages. I have visited Georgia and Armenia and might take Kartveli and Armenian up, and maybe also Turkish and a few others. But my vision is quite eurocentric, and I don't see that changing.
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby IronMike » Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:27 am

For my first two, I had no choice.

In my school in Texas, if you were in honors classes in 7th grade and passed, you could pick Spanish I as your one elective in 8th grade. I met the prerequisites, so I chose it. ("had no choice" point is, there were no other languages offered in 8th grade in early '80s in my junior high school.)

At the age of 19, I enlisted in the (US) Air Force as a linguist. You don't get to pick your language. Back then (maybe still...not sure), at a certain point in basic training, you took 3 tests: the CAT, RAT and APE test. Basically, each test taught you a bit of Chinese, Russian and Arabic (respectively) and then tested you on it. IIRC, they were about 30 min each. After you took the 3 tests and they graded them, you then gathered in a room with your other future linguists to discover what languages were available to choose from!

For my iteration, the only choices were Romanian and Russian. The month prior they had 9 choices, the month after us would have 6 choices. At that time, AF linguists went to DLI San Antonio for Russian. The thought of another year at San Antonio after a lifetime in (Houston) Texas and 6 weeks of basic...ugh. Romanian linguists went to Monterey. The issue, though, was after. Romanian linguists could be assigned to only one place in the world: Maryland. (I didn't join the AF to stay in the states.) Russian linguists in mid '80s: tons of places everywhere.

Resignedly, most of us sighed and said, Guess we're spending the next year in Texas. One of the instructors heard that and told us, "No, we moved Russian linguists back to Monterey two classes ago." Holy crap, that made the choice easy.

After that, all languages I've studied (except BCS, again for the AF) were my choice. I either picked them because of the place I was at at the time (German, Kyrgyz) or interest (Esperanto, and pretty much every other one). I also studied others based on who my neighbor was, so I could speak with them.

tl;dr: Spanish and Russian were chosen for me, all others I chose.
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tacerto1018
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby tacerto1018 » Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:48 pm

Iversen wrote:The question has certainly come up a few times, but since then we have been welcoming some new members, and others have become silent. Those who have been here for a long time may already have heard my story more than once, but here it is again because I like to lists things and write long rants.

I was born in Denmark so I first learnt Danish. And with time also (passive) Swedish and Norwegian through TV because they are so exceedingly easy for us Danes. Then I picked up some English from TV, and soon after I got English classes in school, and after that German - age 9-10 or something like that. And I learnt to understand Low German by watching TV (NDR: talk op platt). at home I started to study Italian because I played music with Italian words, and I added Spanish because there was a book in the same series as the one I used in Italian, and soon after I also added Latin because of the scientific animal names, but more vocabulary than grammar (and definitely not literature)

In the mid 60s I got Latin in school (as a passive language) and also French. And luckily I had a teacher in French who would throw me questions in Italian and Spanish just to keep me awake.

When I started at the university I first chose mathematics because I had liked that discipline in the Gymnasium (high school), but my interest had waned. Then I switched to literature, where we were expected to use Danish, English, German and sometimes French, but not more than that. However communism was rampant in that institute so I did my exam as quickly as possible and hurried onwards to the Romance department where I studied French, but I also followed courses in Old French, Old Occitan, Catalan, Romanian (3 years), Italian and a little bit of Icelandic, even though it was taught in another institute than mine (with less than a handful inscribed students they didn't mind having me sitting in the background). And some more Latin, of course - but not Spanish, because the benches there were full of marxist students with flaming sympathies for Fidel Castro. In contrast, the Italian teachers were just happy to have some more people coming to their courses because it provided more stability.

Then I got my exam and stopped studying languages because I saw that job opportunities were limited and tended to become even more restricted. Some languages survived because I travelled a lot, and the most surprising here is that I learnt to speak Spanish fluently just on the basis of my home studies plus some travelling. I did buy some 'irrelevant' language books near the end of my studies and just after my final exam - like books in/about Greek and Russian, but I only really started to study those languages almost thirty years later.

And since I discovered HTLAL in 2006 and restarted my language studies my modest goal has been to learn all major European languages, so far with Bahasa Indonesia as the only rulebreaker. It this point I'm more or less through the Germanic and Romance languages and underway in Greek, Albanian, at least five Slavic languages and Irish - well, Irish on an on and off basis, but progressing. Those I haven't started yet are partly members of those families (like Anglosaxon, Welsh, Czech and Ukrainian), but I have also planned to start Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque at some point in the future - and maybe a few other languages. I have visited Georgia and Armenia and might take Kartveli and Armenian up, and maybe also Turkish and a few others. But my vision is quite eurocentric, and I don't see that changing.


Absolutely fascinating tale!!! Thank you so much for recounting it. It is very impressive. And I find myself trying to branch out to non-european languages but I, too, always get dragged back in. I have tried to do Japanese and Bahasa Indonesian as well, but always get inticed by Icelandic or Occitan or Albanian.

How do you go about choosing how "far" to go in a language for example? In other words, what factors make you say "I will learn this until this point and then move on"? Or is it more holistic, just moving through languages as you see fit and that fulfill that itch to learn this or that?
Last edited by tacerto1018 on Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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tacerto1018
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby tacerto1018 » Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:54 pm

IronMike wrote:For my first two, I had no choice.

In my school in Texas, if you were in honors classes in 7th grade and passed, you could pick Spanish I as your one elective in 8th grade. I met the prerequisites, so I chose it. ("had no choice" point is, there were no other languages offered in 8th grade in early '80s in my junior high school.)

At the age of 19, I enlisted in the (US) Air Force as a linguist. You don't get to pick your language. Back then (maybe still...not sure), at a certain point in basic training, you took 3 tests: the CAT, RAT and APE test. Basically, each test taught you a bit of Chinese, Russian and Arabic (respectively) and then tested you on it. IIRC, they were about 30 min each. After you took the 3 tests and they graded them, you then gathered in a room with your other future linguists to discover what languages were available to choose from!

For my iteration, the only choices were Romanian and Russian. The month prior they had 9 choices, the month after us would have 6 choices. At that time, AF linguists went to DLI San Antonio for Russian. The thought of another year at San Antonio after a lifetime in (Houston) Texas and 6 weeks of basic...ugh. Romanian linguists went to Monterey. The issue, though, was after. Romanian linguists could be assigned to only one place in the world: Maryland. (I didn't join the AF to stay in the states.) Russian linguists in mid '80s: tons of places everywhere.

Resignedly, most of us sighed and said, Guess we're spending the next year in Texas. One of the instructors heard that and told us, "No, we moved Russian linguists back to Monterey two classes ago." Holy crap, that made the choice easy.

After that, all languages I've studied (except BCS, again for the AF) were my choice. I either picked them because of the place I was at at the time (German, Kyrgyz) or interest (Esperanto, and pretty much every other one). I also studied others based on who my neighbor was, so I could speak with them.

tl;dr: Spanish and Russian were chosen for me, all others I chose.


Another interesting chain of events! To have experience like that in Kyrgyzstan to be able to first-hand experience a language so isolated to that place, especially during the Russian dominated 80s, is such an unique opportunity.

Thanks so much for recounting it. Have you kept with any of these studies?

And Spanish was chosen for me too being an American, though I rejected it as early as I could by learning French in 9th grade. I'm finishing my Master's in French now and teach it. Though I still have such a tepid relationship with Spanish. I love Latin American culture but have not much stake in it at the moment. And planning on moving to Canada in the next few years, I'm enticed to keep improving my French to native levels.

Have you had the chance to visit Central Asia again?
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby IronMike » Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:40 pm

tacerto1018 wrote:Another interesting chain of events! To have experience like that in Kyrgyzstan to be able to first-hand experience a language so isolated to that place, especially during the Russian dominated 80s, is such an unique opportunity.

Thanks so much for recounting it. Have you kept with any of these studies?

Have you had the chance to visit Central Asia again?

Actually I lived in Kyrgyzstan in the last few years ('14-'16). I lived in Russia in the late 2000s and just recently ('16-'18, till the Russian government kicked most of us out). I spent the late '80s and early '90s living in West Berlin, which is an entirely different thing. :O

Would love to go back to Kyrgyzstan, I love that place, especially lake Issyk Kul. I would love to go conquer it again.
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby rdearman » Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:27 pm

My choices are very boring compared to everyone else. :? I also assume you mean human languages as opposed to computer ones. :ugeek:

I went to Italy for my anniversary. I learned hello, thank you, and that was about it before I left. My wife and I went to the train station and I asked for tickets to Pompeii (we were staying just outside of Naples) and the guy rattled off a bunch of gibberish and ended with the word "Lira". So I gave him a note, and he said "no" (which I understood). So I gave him 2 notes, and he said "no". He kept rattling off numbers and getting more and more frustrated. Eventually I just fanned out all my money and tried to get him to take what he wanted. He snatched a bill out of my hand. Slammed down the lid on his money box, took his keys and opened his booth. He marched across the station to his colleague and came back with a bunch of change. It was only then I worked out that I had been trying to give him too much money!

That is when I decided I was going to learn Italian before I returned.

French I learned just because I wanted to understand what the dodgy French tossers I worked for were saying about me.

I haven't learned anything else, although I have had a stab at: Esperanto, Czech, Setswana, Mandarin, Korean.
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby cjareck » Wed Apr 14, 2021 9:30 pm

IronMike wrote:For my first two, I had no choice.

The same applies to me. The first one was English that my Mom chose when I was in kindergartener, and then she chose German when I was in 7th grade. But, honestly, I started learning German during my studies because I wanted to read sources about the first world war. That was the reason why I decided to learn the two most important languages of the Entente (besides English, of course, that I had already more or less knew) - French and Russian. I think it was during the later course of my m.a. studies and begin the Ph.D. studies.

I had a short adventure with the Japanese also. I've chosen it since it was available for history students and seemed to be exotic! But after one year, the course was canceled by the faculty authorities, and I didn't manage to self-learn it.

After my Ph.D., since I was teaching the military conflicts after 1945, I decided it would be nice to publish something about it. The Middle East seemed the best study area for me since there - most probably - wouldn't be peace in the foreseeable future. So I've decided to learn Hebrew and focus on Sues Crisis (what would make the usage of English and French necessary). Well, I remembered that you have to learn both sides of each military conflict's languages, so Arabic followed quickly.

Some time ago, I decided to add Mandarin. China is a Superpower and had some military conflicts already, so that it may be useful for my academic work. And the language is exotic also.

In the past, I've considered Hungarian and Italian but didn't do much with them and put those languages aside. I thought I would use them for my research about the Austrian Bundesheer in the Interwar Period, but this research field is more or less abandoned now.
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby Ug_Caveman » Wed Apr 14, 2021 10:54 pm

Well...

Dutch - because I failed miserably at every other language I'd tried at school (French, Spanish, German and Latin) and got distracted in my attempts to learn Russian and Mandarin. Then I studied Dutch and realise I wasn't terrible at it, I like the culture of both the Netherlands and Belgium, and made friends from both countries.

I have every intent of revisiting French, Spanish and Russian in the near future now I've developed better language study skills (and have active language partners I can turn to for practise.) My love for Belgium and half of my best friends family being French, my brother's deep love for Spain and a close friend of mine being a Russian national are my motivations for focusing on those particular languages. If I can hack two Slavic languages, Polish might also creep in there due to the large number of speakers in the UK (and Poland is a major nation when it comes to athletics.)

In the future? I'd like to tackle the Scandinavian languages purely because of how beautiful the countries are (and I have many Swedish friends and friends who live in Sweden that I'd like to visit.) Plus I love those dark Nordic crime dramas (even if The Bridge did give me horrible nightmares for about four weeks.)

I have a soft spot for Welsh, having strong Welsh heritage on both sides of my family, and may well tackle it at some point in the future (plus it means I can watch Pobol Y Cwm on S4C.)
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Re: How do you/did you choose which languages you learn/ed?

Postby El Forastero » Thu Apr 15, 2021 1:24 am

Here is my erratic story:

I'm a native spanish speaker and I had been monolingual until I was 23, when I started to learn french consistently through the old text-based chat versions, back in 1999. I had been exposed to english and french in high school, but I can't say a learnt something relevant. That defined my preferences to learn languages at the very beginning: mainly by reading-writing, dismissed speaking (and ignoring listening basically due to the scarcity of resources).

In 2002, my worst year of my live, I dropped out the university and totally submerged in a deep depression, I discovered and then-old currently-out-of-fashion instalment-and-cassetes-based Planeta Agostini english course and started to study it with no speaking interaction with anyone, so when finally I had the oportunity to come across a native speaker, I realise how big thw speaking-listening gap was, and full of sorrow because of my wasted time, I drop out english too. Around the same years, I met a friend who also had dropped the school and started to practice french because we had nothing better to do.

Eventually, my life came back to the right pack and one day I listened to a brazilian song "Dança da solidão" and was mindblowing. I thought "I need to know what this extremely sweet song is saying. I neet to understand it. Ineed to sing it". A month later I had already downlowaded hundreds of Beth Carvalho songs and listened them trying to sing. That's my only portuguese training I had had when I met three brazilian classmates in my master, 8 years later (2014).

In 2007, I wanted to apply to a scholarship so I needed a B2 level in english. I decided to selfstudy but I wasn't very smart organizing an efficient method, so my training was chaotic but I finally reach the level required. With this level so-called B2 level in french and english, I went to France to study a master title in education. There I met the three aforementioned brazilian classmates, so for two years I speak Spanish, French, Portugues and English on a daily basis, so I took advantages and at the end I presented the DAPLE and the DALF C1, approving both of them

Back in my country, I started a job as a french teacher, but due to the disbalanced demand between english and french, the institute sometimes ask me to teach the very beginner level of english. So step by step I was reinforcing and refirbushing the rusty building called "my english", then I decided to study the final level and present the IELTS, reaching also a C1 level.

But before this shy closeness to the english, I used to have free hours because of the lack of french studies, so I decided to start learning Italian because at that time Colombian cyclist were among the best of the world and I watched the Giro d'Italia broadcasting in Italian, with wich I had unwittingly learned the basics. So I started an spartan self-study program and three months later I reached my C1 in italian.

At some point I tried german for four months, and then I stopped. I live in a city with a big Wayuu community, so I learned the basics to interact with them

Last year I started Russian because "I should learn another language", and I decide one with no latin alphabet. And that's it
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