The first thing in my life I can remember involving a second language was when I was about 7 or so, in the faraway, but beautiful land of San Diego. My brother and I were trying to conceive a language of our own, not having any real knowledge of languages other than English. It was a short lived attempt, but some of the conventions of the language we came up with opened my eyes as to how different languages could also “taste” different.

Going to middle school, before I took any foreign language classes, I found myself interested in the language of Klingon. I learned what I could through the Klingon Language Institute’s website, but I simply didn’t know anything about learning languages at the time, so I didn’t really get far. Later, I eventually realized that the design of the language and the impracticality of it (there are very few actual speakers in the world) would have killed my motivation to learn it anyway.

Between the choice of Spanish and French, I chose to learn French in high school for two reasons. First, I thought of French as the more romantic language (not that I was really the romantic type,) and second, the large majority of students took Spanish. The French teacher I had for my first year was terrible, but when I had Mrs. Smith as a teacher, I suddenly found myself speaking French with the best in my class. Of course I was terrible at getting my projects done, so I only made Bs in that class.

After high school, my retention for French faded away, as did any desire to continue learning it. I was too busy focusing on other areas of study. It wasn’t until my brother got on this language kick a few years ago that I really started looking at learning another language again. Since I was into anime at the time, Japanese seemed like a logical choice, but as my interest for anime faded, so did my interest for Japanese. I’ve also looked into Lojban, which was probably the  easiest language to get into thus far, but my motivation was not strong enough. As it turns out, the mere appreciation of a language’s features is not enough to get me to learn the language. Instead I discovered that I really need a reason to learn the language, that the language is merely a means to an end.

I’ve begun learning French again with the primary intent of being able to travel to and, perhaps someday, live in a foreign country, perhaps one as strange as Canada. While I do enjoy the country I live in and the freedoms it provides, I feel I may be better suited elsewhere.

Motivation plays a large part in how well you do anything in life. What is your motivation for learning your new language? What are you trying to achieve with it? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Author Introduction – Peter
2. Author Introduction – Thomas
3. Babelhut.com launched!

Thomas can be followed at http://twitter.com/tummai and I can be followed at http://twitter.com/peterjcarroll. I’m not entirely certain what you’ll see from us there yet, but at a minimum we will tweet when there is a new post on Babelhut. I’ll see you there!

Edit: Btw, if you are a language learner or blogger, leave a comment with your twitter username or url.

No related posts.

To celebrate our inclusion in their Top 21, eduFire will give away 1 hour of free tutoring on their site to the first ten people who send an email to freetutoring@edufire.com and mention the giveaway here on Babelhut. So send that email and check out what eduFire has to offer!

Related posts:

1. The Winner of a Free Copy of ’601 Spanish Verbs’

Related to the above paragraph, I received a bid for the ad space today from a webcomic called Buttersafe. They didn’t win the bid, but today’s comic just happened to include a little bit of Japanese so I’m going to link to them. Here’s an excerpt:

The Japanese reads 「私について話してる」 (watashi ni tsuite hanashiteru?) which translates to “Are you guys talking about me?”

The rest of the comic is in English. Check it out. Read the archives too. They’re hilarious.

Related posts:

1. Learning Language With Comics

My name is Peter and I like to study new languages, though I didn’t know that I enjoyed new languages until after I left high school. I took 3 years of German in school, which I enjoyed at first. I picked German over the Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Hebrew, and Latin classes offered by my school at the time because everyone picked Spanish or French, I was told Latin was hard, and I did not want to learn a new alphabet or writing system.

Our class was small with only 7 or 8 people and our teacher, Ms. Krueger was young, in her mid-twenties, and related to us well. This class quickly become my favorite class, even more so than my computer science class. I was picking up vocabulary and conjugating verbs left and right. I loved how regular the verbs conjugated, the syntax was an easy to follow pattern, and the willingness of Ms. Krueger to occasionally teach us how to cuss or be rude in German. It wasn’t that hard and it was fun.

Sometime during my second or third year learning German, Ms. Krueger disappeared. She wasn’t a missing person or anything like that, but for some reason, she stopped teaching at the school. The mother of one of the students in our class was a native German speaker, and she took over the class. She was a nice lady, and she certainly taught well enough, but she wasn’t Ms. Krueger. Around this time we were also learning about the dative and genitive cases in German. For some reason, I just could not understand what these were, when they were used, or even what they were for. I still don’t know.

I practiced German less and less, growing quite apathetic while my vocabulary shrunk. Soon after high school I could only remember the basic stuff I learned in the first year. I didn’t care about learning languages at this point, because I didn’t really know that I liked it yet.

One day I was hanging out at a friend’s house when I first saw the movie Braveheart. This was the coolest movie I had ever seen. My friends and I very much got into all things Irish and Scottish, most of us had some unknown ancestors who had been of Celtic origin. At this time I bought book called “Teach Yourself Gaelic,” which I mistakenly believed to teach the language spoken in Ireland that wasn’t English. It turned out the book taught Scottish Gaelic rather than Irish, but that was cool too. William Wallace was Scottish, after all. I got about two chapters into this book before becoming distracted and never looking at it again. I was certainly interested, but I found the pronunciations difficult as it seemed Gaelic used a lot of unnecessary letters and didn’t match the pronunciations I knew from English and German. Even with this difficulty, it was about this point I started to realize that I wanted to learn another language, no matter which one it was.

Over the next few years I had brief flirtations with Spanish. Many people around me spoke Spanish, including my wife, but I did little more than pick up a couple of words. My wife would torment me by saying “ya te dije,” and I would ask what that meant. She would say, “I already told you.” I kept telling her I didn’t remember, and please tell me. She laughed and kept repeating herself until I realized that “ya te dije” literally meant “I already told you.” Several times I have started and restarted learning Spanish. Sometimes on my own, and sometimes with Thomas. I got the farthest along when studying with him, as he would often get a lesson or two ahead of me, and I would race to catch up so that he wouldn’t know more than me.

I also tried Dutch as an experiment with Thomas and my brother. We decided to all learn the same language together. We had all made a list of languages we’d like to learn and Dutch ended up being the common one. This effort lasted about a week, if even that. I don’t remember anything about Dutch.

About a year ago I decided to merge my interest in learning languages with my increasing interest in the Bible, and thus decided to learn New Testament Greek. I quickly learned the Greek alphabet, writing as many things as I could with my newly learned script. I studied well for a couple of weeks, but once again study time was pushed aside for all the other priorities in my life.

That brings us to today, where Thomas and myself have to decided to log our study of new languages online, for all the world to see. Now we must do well with our studying because we’ve made ourselves publicly accountable for it.

Personally, I’m excited.

Related posts:

1. Author Introduction – David
2. Author Introduction – Thomas
3. Japanese Tomboys

In High School, I took four years of Latin! I had some interest in the language – Ancient Rome was exciting. I remember we translated Caesar’s Gallic War Campaigns. We wrote strange children’s stories as a class project too. Sadly, Latin was the blow-off class at my High School, so I didn’t really learn any Latin. Vir in silvam ambulat.

What really got me hooked on language was people. In college I got a job at one of the dorm cafeterias. It was quite an international place. There was a guy from Brazil, a woman from Guatemala, a man from Mexico, a Kenyan, two people from Thailand and a whole gang of Japanese servers. Soon they were teaching me random phrases in their languages. Pom au ani ma hai khun (sorry if I butchered that, Thai speakers). Through them, I was introduced to even more foreign students and it opened up doors for me to do some international travel. Back at the university I ended up enrolling in a Japanese class and well, 8 years later here I am in Japan.

I am not fluent in Japanese, but I’m in a place conducive to reaching that goal. I’ve dabbled a little bit in other languages – French, Thai, Spanish, Dutch – but not with any dedication. When I came here I decided to focus on Japanese exclusively. For the purposes of this site, I have since recanted that decision and have added Pali to the mix. Pali is the language of the Theravada Buddhist Canon. It’s an Indo-European language on the Indo-Iranian branch, closely related to Sanskrit. Like Latin it is a “dead” language used only in religious circles and Pali classrooms. I live and breathe Theravada Buddhism, so it has long been a goal of mine to read the Pali Canon in its original language. More on Pali later.

Thank you for patiently reading my four-paragraph self-introduction. Next up should be Peter’s introduction and then we’ll start cranking out real posts. Feel free to introduce yourself in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Author Introduction – Peter
2. Author Introduction – David
3. Grinding Out The Pali

My co-author Peter and I have have discussed starting a language blog for a while now. We are both studying foreign tongues and we wanted a place where we could post about our progress and connect with other people sharing an interest in language. One of the toughest parts of learning a foreign language is keeping motivation levels high. A common cycle is this – we:

1. Feel highly motivated to learn a language
2. Dive eagerly into language learning materials
3. Settle into a consistent daily routine of study
4. Grow bored with the routine
5. Lose motivation to study
6. Stop studying altogether
7. After a long time of cooling off, go back to step 1

The problem is that at the end of each cycle we:

1. Lose our momentum
2. Forget much of what we learned and hence have to relearn it
3. Get discouraged, reinforcing any doubts we may have about our ability to attain fluency.

The key to winning is to keep our motivation level high while studying efficiently. One of the reasons Peter and I started this blog to help us and others do both of these. We feel that documenting our endeavors and having others follow our progress will motivate us to stay the course. We hope it will motivate you too! Please talk to us and keep us up-to-date on your progress.

In addition to providing updates on our personal language adventures, we will also blog on a variety of language-related topics.

From the about page:

Babelhut.com is a small space devoted to language and language learning. We, the authors, will write about our experiences on the path to fluency in our target languages and about other language-related topics that interest us. We hope you will share your experiences and knowledge with us too. Discussion is always welcome, and please don’t hesitate to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Stay tuned for author introductions and then a steady stream of posts. Welcome to babelhut!

Related posts:

1. Author Introduction – David
2. Multilingual Parenting
3. Author Introduction – Thomas