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.

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