Hello! Welcome to my log!
About Me: I'm 27 and live in Brooklyn, New York. I work in the arts/entertainment and have always been interested in languages as a side hobby. Years ago, I was somewhat active on the old HTLAL forum, and credit that original community of learners for helping me learn Dutch from scratch. I enjoy drawing, hiking, camping, traveling (who doesn’t, I guess?) and have visited all 7 continents, including Antarctica.
My language learning history:
2003-2009: French was my first language interest. I studied it throughout middle school and high school. My mildly decent career in French culminated with sitting for the International Baccalaureate Higher Level exam, where I scored a 6 out of 7. Not bad! I was probably about a B2 then. Since high school, I haven't had much to do with French and it's gotten quite rusty. I still have delusional notions of dusting it off and bringing it back up to scratch.
2010-2014: I become obsessed with learning Dutch, a language that my father and his side of the family speak (but one that I did not grow up with). The obsession is initially sparked by a 6-month stint as an exchange student in Utrecht, but really builds into an inferno after I leave. My experience with Dutch is very different from my experience with French. I never study it in a formal classroom setting. Instead, I cobble together an insane DIY library of resources comprised mainly of homemade Anki notecards, illegal TV streaming, books, and random websites on the internet. Somehow, this becomes shitty but functional conversational Dutch. In the years since, I've maintained my Dutch through chatting with family and frequent trips back to the Netherlands.
2015: I contemplate moving to Indonesia for a bit and then actually do it. While in Indonesia, I take private language courses for about five months with a very patient tutor. My Indonesian is shit and I'm a terribly lazy language learner. To this day, my Indonesian is still extremely shitty. I know basically nothing. Total failure.
2019: Over the last four years, I've maintained Dutch and settled into adult life in New York. Spanish is everywhere here and, again, delusionally, I contemplate trying to "pick it up". I win free airline tickets to anywhere in the world (long story) and decide to go to Costa Rica in February 2020 for the interesting hiking and volcanic activity. This seems like a great opportunity-slash-excuse to learn some Spanish... Here we go again...
Goals for this log: Use shitty beginner Spanish in Costa Rica to earn mild goodwill and avoid dire emergencies.
As you can see above, I'm more of a lazy enthusiast than a hardcore language collector. If you want to watch me muddle around with Spanish and possibly a few other languages in the slowest way possible, you're in the right place!
I am Jar-ptitsa and my Hawaiian name is ʻā ʻaia. Please correct my mistakes in all the languages. Thank you very much.
