Half a year later...
So - it was my birthday, and again I started thinking about goals and what to do with my life and all that, and I would really be able to understand 50 languages when I'm 50. (Not going to happen, it's less than 1 year from now). So - here I am.
I have accepted that I will never be a very good language learner. Three weeks every January, April, and August isn't going to make anyone learn much.
I don't like it, but I am a hare, not a tortoise. (Which is a really funny word.)
I have also accepted that I'm actually an awful language learner
I don't think my Finnish-isms is a problem, on the contrary, I like twisting languages into Finnish form. And it's an awful thing to do. Absolutely ghastly. Disrespectful and not at all appreciative of the other languages.
Also, I am not using my resources. There are at least 10 languages around me, people I could be interacting with and practicing my languages, but I don't do anything. Waste of resources. *sigh* Bad me.
So - This last week I have been studying some more Maltese. I finally decided to actually learn the verb conjugation. It just is too hard to try to figure out what a word might mean and what is indicative of the verb. And, sure, I feel stupid for not having done that earlier.
I have been studying a little Russian. A little. Very little. Like just reading.
I learned about Láadan. Sounds fascinating.
I also learned about Toki Pona.
And then I read someone's comment where he mentioned Tigerian. Wow! I love tigers! I got really excited when I first heard there's a language called Tigrinya
They also have some courses in Vulcan at Memrise
Conlangs are fun, but... it feels bad to know there are some hundred languages dying at the moment, because no-one speaks them, and then we create new languages with no real world view and thinking attached, and people learn them just because it's a fad. Like at Duolingo one can learn High Valyrian at the moment. There is no course for Arabic or Finnish, but there is one for High Valyrian. *facepalm*
I wish authors would find an obscure, dying language and make it the language of their fictional world.
And go to the last speakers and let them invent new words for things like computers and so on. If there aren't any, that is. One could take the Icelandic words and just translate them.
Oh, and then I'm brushing up a lot of languages I have studied, but aren't as interesting and "fancy" as for example Welsh and Korean. Spanish, Italian, German... It would be wonderful if I got them as good as my English (which I know is not that good, but it's good enough.
)
And I finally dared to take the step to study Chinese. Now, there my Finnish-ness comes as a problem. I am just not used to form sounds needed to create the Chinese words. One comfort here is that that's obviously a problem for many people, probably Europeans. We don't have languages that are that soft - at least to my knowledge.
Anyway, giving up the stress and enormously high expectations on myself, as I don't care if I learn anything or not anymore, feels really great.