I've loved languages from a very early age. I was lucky enough to have been taught some French at school from the age of six or seven up to 16, and I did a couple of years of German as well. They were saved from rusting away completely partly by my general language interest, but partly also by my interest in classical music and the singers I had the pleasure of accompanying during my twenties and early thirties. Over the last year I've started listening regularly to Philippe Cassard's 'Portrait de famille' programme on French radio which I hope is improving my comprehension (although I've seen all six series of Engrenages and still have no idea what they're saying)! My German is severely atrophic and improving this situation is high on my to-do list.
Italian was the first language I learnt outside of school - though I think I was still about 15 or 16 - because of a developing interest in Italian-language opera. I'd have started off with a couple of book-and-cassette courses and moved on to short stories and a couple of novels, supported by Mozart and Puccini. Since then it's been smouldering away like French and German. It was nice to be able to test it out in Sicily a couple of years ago and to find that I could have an extended conversation with a sympathetic native speaker (in standard Italian, not Sicilian!) without too much difficulty.
Spanish I started only a few years after Italian, but I never had that much interest in it and it's always been a bolt-on to Italian. I've warmed it up two or three times in the last few years for tourist purposes, with the effect that last year in a restaurant in Granada I asked for 'burro'. Seriously.
At university I tried a bit of Czech, motivated by my opera interest having moved on to Janacek and meeting a native speaker. I never got much further than learning some of the grammar (this is a recurring theme - syntax and morphology have always been the fun bit for me, vocab largely a chore), but I can at least recognise the odd word in Slavic texts.
I spent a couple of months in southern Sweden as a student and made a serious attempt to learn Swedish, before and during (at least it seemed serious to me at the time). At the standard I managed to reach, it was basically useless in Sweden and I haven't looked at it again in any depth since, but it was fun.
A few years ago I visited the Cyclades and spent maybe three months learning Greek before going. My competence in the language was and remains essentially nil, but I fell in love with the sound and feel of it and someday I will return to it.
In a similar way, I spent a few days in Iceland three years ago and did Alaric Hall's (original) MP3 Icelandic course in the run-up to this. I was strangely charmed by the language - I cannot honestly say why although I suspect there is an element of 'people use this every day? really?', as well as the aura of antiquity and the distant echoes of English. Last summer I noticed Alaric had done a revised course, tried it and got hooked again. More below.
Other languages that have attracted my attention over the years have included: Maltese (Arabic grammar but Sicilian vocab and written in Roman script, 'the Vietnamese of Europe'), Russian (apparently I loved the BBC's Russian Language and People [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLN9WG-2Ya0] as a small child!), Japanese (I don't think I could ever afford the time to study it seriously but so beautiful), Finnish (of course... [http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Finnish]), etc.
Current activities and goals
Since discovering this forum I've been inspired to set some language-learning goals for 2018, which I posted in the New Year's Resolutions thread at Christmas just gone.
Goal 1 get Icelandic up to a solid A1, perhaps even A2, with 100 hours of study. At the moment I'm working through the 'Viltu læra íslensku' videos https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq5-Y9TskeAsWFxI3EL6ef7e8lfbJb042, which I've converted to MP3s so I can listen to them repeatedly while commuting, and studying the transcriptions [link]. As well as that I'm trying to decode Ævar [http://www.ruv.is/thaettir/visindavarp-aevars] and one or two other websites, and using Anki as much as possible to consolidate new vocab.
Goal 2 well, it was to get Italian to B1... but now the Dialang tests say I'm at B2 in writing and C1 (!) in listening. I've settled on B2 as a realistic estimate of my current ability, but this has scuppered my SMART objective so I'm now simply aiming to be able to understand a standard non-fiction broadcast with little effort and getting the point of pretty much every sentence. I'm currently using Wikiradio [http://www.raiplayradio.it/programmi/wikiradio/], which has the benefit that the narrator is different each time, and Dario Bressanini's Scienza in Cucina videos [http://bressanini-lescienze.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/] as well as reading his blog. I've also bought two copies of one of the Montalbano books (Il gioco degli specchi), one in Italian and one in English, and am doing pretty well, missing only about one crucial point every five sentences or so.
Future plans, as mentioned in my New Year post: improve German, pick up Greek again, try Russian.
Thanks for reading if you've got this far! I'm going to try to post monthly if I can, so see you then
