Here are some of the languages I am learning or shall learn.
I’d like to read German literature and visit Germany someday. Besides, I associate it with fond memories of my old school. My German class’ teacher grew up in Germany, and she’d tell this young American audience all about the country — how they had a shopping street called Der Zeil, were blunt but loyal friends, earned money for recycling, ate white asparagus, made politically satirical parade floats for Karneval, and so on.
I’d like to read Roman literature — Virgil, Juvenal, the works. I also find the sound and grammar beautiful.
Latin is such a beautiful language, but among the most useless I know; the only real reason to learn it is to read poems and plays by a handful of people who have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years. Some people also say they learn Latin to help them study law, medicine, or English etymology, which I personally don’t consider a strong reason for torturing yourself with the passive periphrastic or the dozens of verb endings. Finding people offline who know the language is almost impossible outside of academic settings; I have never had a real-life conversation in it. There are also very few websites, YouTube channels, music, or modern books in Latin.
Almost all of my interests align with the strong suits of Russian culture – literature, classical music, art, ice-skating, ballet, and physics. I also happen to think Russian is the most beautiful language. I like the Slavic languages generally, but unlike the other ones, Russian’s spoken by many people.
Russian cursive isn’t as hard as people say it is, and you can get used to the grammar and the prefixes of verbs of motion with good textbooks (I recommend this) and practice. The most difficult part in the long term seems to be memorizing different verbs’ conjugations.
It is an abundant language in terms of resources. There are tons of YouTube channels and Quizlet/Anki decks you can use and large social media platforms exclusively using the language. Its yields are very rich, too — at this point, I don’t even engage with its music and poetry to learn, just to enjoy them because they’re good. Also, because of the Russian-speaking diaspora created by the current war, I’ve used it the most of all my languages. Even if you never meet Russian speakers, it may help you understand Serbian, Ukrainian, Polish, and so on. (Although learning Interslavic is better for that purpose.)
I have heard stories online of people recieving comments about “supporting imperialism/the war” when they say they’re learning Russian. In my experience, though, pretty much everyone offline is normal about it. If anything, though, learning Russian may help in antiwar efforts — I know Ukrainian refugees that don’t speak a speck of English and need stuff translated into Russian, and if anything, I regret not learning the language earlier to help them. But depending on where you live, all this might be different.
Just as with the other languages, I am learning this one to read, like a nerd. Besides, I find Greek philosophy and religion (that of Zeus, etc.) interesting to study, especially the concept of divine madness — surrending your soul to the hands of the gods and nature — experienced by people like the maenads. Finally, I just want another language with an alphabet my compatriots cannot put in Google Translate, so I can use it to write whatever I’d like.
This is one of the most agonizing languages I have ever tried to learn. There are six principal parts of each verb (six words you need to memorize for each, and that’s excluding cases, person, etc.), and a lot of stress marks you have to memorize, which morph depending on their cases or surrounding words. There are several dialects and periods of Greek that are quite different, meaning you’ll have to study several kinds to read all Greek literature. And there are very, very few Ancient Greek resources, fewer than Latin, which is a shame considering how much help one needs to learn it.
As a Vietnamese-American, I dine, shop, celebrate holidays, and generally hang out in places where people expect me to speak the language. It’s almost shameful when I cannot, and even more so that I can speak a bunch of Western languages better.
Its reputation as a brutal language with crazy orthography only makes me more excited, the same way the danger of Mount Everest only excites some people.
Page created April 13, 2024.