Julie’s NL FR SV EN DE

[Julie]

Re-posting from my HTLAL log (http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/fo ... 33322&PN=1).

Having not been around for almost two years, I've thought I'd drop by :) [and it took me some time to figure out there is a new forum :)]

It's a funny feeling to see my previous post here [or rather: there :)], as my 2-month stay in Luxembourg seems to be sooo long ago (and here I am, editing my profile, changing my location from Luxembourg back to Poland ;)).

I've also edited my languages to become a proud heptaglot... [in terms of HTLAL ranks] still not believing it :), even though at the same time I feel kinda like a fraud, as my Spanish has only further deteriorated, and I peaked in Swedish a year and a half ago.

That's one thing I keep learning about learning: the more languages you know, the more difficult it becomes to keep them, active and ready for use. But I do believe it doesn't take that much to activate them when the opportunity arises.

The time in Luxembourg was great - I got to speak so many languages on a daily basis! My German and Swedish improved quite a bit, my spoken English and French - massively. It's a pity that two years later I feel like I speak each of these languages worse than back then (or maybe I'm just too critical?). On the other hand, my Dutch is clearly better than it used to be.

Plans for my language learning future?

I haven't really 'studied' any languages (but Dutch) this year. For professional reasons, I've just decided to work on improving my two strongest languages: English and German. However, I want to keep listening to other languages and, to some extent, keep reading in them.

Surprisingly enough, I've become quite a 'podcast/radio person'; I listened to tons of the Internet radio in the last 18 months, all thanks to a nice Bluetooth headset I bought. Most of the listening was done while cooking/cleaning/washing the dishes etc., so the purchase contributed both to my listening comprehension and the general cleanliness of the house ;) (when I'm done with my housework, and an interesting podcast is not over, I keep looking for things to do ;)).

I've also discovered the power of VPN - and now the geoblocked TV websites are for me a thing of the past. I just have to find more time for using that.

Oh, and I finally replaced my old e-book reader with a shiny new Kindle that doesn't crash at every attempt to use the dictionary - so reading e-books is nicer than ever.

I guess these are nice examples of how technology can really facilitate learning :). Hopefully, all of that will be enough at least to keep me from forgetting what I've learned :)

Speaking of which, is there anybody here who still remembers me? ;)

[Montmorency]

Hi Julie,

Yes, I do, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Good to hear from you.

I remember that on one of the previous occasions when HTLAL fell apart, you provided a temporary home for us. I wasn't using HTLAL at the time of the most recent problems, but when I recently discovered this site, and then read about the recent problems with HTLAL, I wondered what had happened to that temporary forum, and if anyone else had remembered it.

But anyway, things have moved on, and here we are.

Viele Grüße von einem anderen Radio-Podcast-Mensch!

[Serpent]

Hi!!! I meant to tell you that now we're mostly here, but you've found us yourself
*hugs*
[meh i realized i don't know the Polish equivalent]

Julie's temporary forum was probably crucial to the change that happened, the first seed of it. (I wrote a little about that here, this kind of reads like Tolkien's timelines to me ) For the first time, people actually felt the freedom of a more modern forum on phpBB. It was inactivated when HTLAL was back online. By the next outage, it was already gone (and as far as I remember, Julie wasn't around anyway - only she could make the same temporary forum active again).

From this we learned that people need to know in advance where to go. We set up facebook, twitter and an e-mail list, and when it turned out that the domain was going to expire, rdearman set up this forum in advance (called how-to-learn-any-language.org originally), which was good because it got occupied by spammers at once and he had the time to find a suitable antispam solution.

The fact that FX had no clue his site was dying while we had our life vests on and life boats ready, naturally, boosted the community spirit significantly

I really think the forum's present and future would be different without you, Julie. Maybe it wouldn't be worse, but different for sure. Fascinating how our actions may have consequences far beyond what we can imagine.