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i've been learning german on my own for a little over a month now, working my way through youtube lessons, comprehensive input videos and an assimil exercise book i pirated. why german? dunno. i was always vaguely interested in it, first cause i thought it sounded funny and then cause of my fascination with the berlin wall as well as the intriguing literary and philosophical works that were originally written in the language. anyhow i'm having a lot of fun with it-- i think it's a charming language, and learning's always more fun when nobody's telling you to do it. i won't subject you to my mediocre deutsch yet, not that there's even much i could even say considering my vocabulary's limited to phrases like "der Tee ist kalt" and "entschuldigung" and "ich bin nicht schwul" (i learnt that one from a depeche mode interview...)
for my future language-acquisition exploits, i'd really love to learn something with a writing system completely different to english. so far, the european languages i know all fall under romance or germanic categorization. it's why i'm interested in giving myself a real challenge and learning something like russian or arabic, where the script itself is totally different. mandarin is my mother tongue, and though i can speak it fluently, i always had trouble remembering how to write all the characters as a kid. my reading comprehension for mandarin has also greatly deteriorated too, so i'd like to begin teaching myself again someday even if i feel there's something massively humiliating about having to learn your own first language again.
on top of that, i'd also like to learn a language with ancient roots sometime-- something like latin or sanskrit. though i'd better not try to run before i can crawl. maybe i'll read this entry again in a few years when i can speak perfect latin and german and proto-indo-european and laugh at myself. or maybe i'll read this again not knowing anything and laugh at myself all the same. i hope it's the former.
for my future language-acquisition exploits, i'd really love to learn something with a writing system completely different to english. so far, the european languages i know all fall under romance or germanic categorization. it's why i'm interested in giving myself a real challenge and learning something like russian or arabic, where the script itself is totally different. mandarin is my mother tongue, and though i can speak it fluently, i always had trouble remembering how to write all the characters as a kid. my reading comprehension for mandarin has also greatly deteriorated too, so i'd like to begin teaching myself again someday even if i feel there's something massively humiliating about having to learn your own first language again.
on top of that, i'd also like to learn a language with ancient roots sometime-- something like latin or sanskrit. though i'd better not try to run before i can crawl. maybe i'll read this entry again in a few years when i can speak perfect latin and german and proto-indo-european and laugh at myself. or maybe i'll read this again not knowing anything and laugh at myself all the same. i hope it's the former.
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