learning languages

Intro

Some of you may already know what my language learning house of cards is, but let me tell the rest of you too.

To begin with, I am currently fluent in two different languages - finnish, my first language, and english. Well, ignoring speech, that is, but to be fair I do mess up my speaking in finnish as well so it’s not really a problem with my fluency.

But languages I am learning? That, my fellow most-likely-humans, is a fun list!

I am currently studying six languages. We have Swedish and Russian which are good generally but also because I am finnish - meaning I live in a country which is squished between those two, and even our history has been bouncing with them. Simply said, it’s useful in many different ways to know those two here.

While we’re still within Europe, I am studying French. Like with many of the languages, I study it for fun, to get access to more media like books, and also sincerely because I am a bastardous creature of chaos, and it brings me great joy when I think about possibly ending up in a situation in which person A and person B speak language X in front of me or in my near vicinity, because they think I do not understand it. Get what I mean? Well, anyways, I consider French to be an overall useful language, and it’s not on the challenging end of the spectrum for me either - meaning that it’s not as much of extra work as some other languages could be.

Then! We get to Asian languages! Well, sadly that currently only covers east-asian languages, but nonetheless. I am studying Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Out of those, Japanese I have been studying for the longest, thus it also ends up being the one I need to put the least effort in - I can already read it, pronunciation is familiar, etc etc.

Nowwwww, moving forward!

Differences between learning different languages

Now that we’re done with introducing which languages I’m learning and which I already know, let’s talk about what makes them different to study!

First of all, we have the amount of materials, resources and overall learning opportunities.

If I compare Mandarin Chinese to English in that, it looks horrible! Actually the same with Korean and somewhat with French and Japanese, but the latter two are better off. Why am I not including Swedish and Russian in that list? Well, being a neighbouring country to both, which also has belonged to both at some points of the history does have some perks to it. Swedish is actually a second legal language here, and a mandatory subject to study, so I’m not exactly lacking in the materials.

There are also two HUGE differences when it comes to studying these languages! The writing systems and pronunciations.

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, which is incredibly different from finnish, which can be spoken completely monotone. Well, on that note, a lot of finnish people have a thick accent due to two reasons when they speak in English - finnish doesn’t require you to open your mouth a lot to be clear enough, and it is pronounced as written (most of the time).

Korean writing system, hangul (한글) is very logical and thus it was easy to learn. In fact, due to my longer experience in Japanese which has kanji, Russian ended up having the hardest system for me to learn! The cyrillic alphabet hasn’t still fully stuck into my head, while by now I full sentences in Mandarin Chinese, including stroke order. Going back to Korean for a bit, the system is the easiest one of them all because it was made to be that way - one monarch in Korean history wanted to increase literacy, so he made the new system. In hangul, a word will consist of syllable block(s), which will usually have 2 to 3 characters in them (emphasis on usually), they’re always written in a certain way from left to right and so on, read that way as well, etc. Simply said, it is a logical system, and the maximum stroke count is way less than in any characters based on chinese (kanji being only one example).

When it comes to pronunciation, Swedish, French and Japanese are the easiest for me. French is a bit weird one on that list, but it’s really only there because I was exposed to French way more when I was 8~12 years old, so I’m just more familiar with it than Russian.

Korean pronunciation is easy in thhhhheory, but only in theory. I don’t hear it a lot on my own, so I have to hunt down examples and things to listen to (which I will talk about further in the blog by the way) to improve my speaking.

Japanese is logical to me, since a lot of the time the pronunciation is similar to finnish. Although, I must it that finnish does shine through a lot in my Japanese - a clear example would be the syllables using the letter R - Japanese does not have L and R separately, but finnish on the other hand has rolling R letters.

On that note, Russian would be challenging due to a similar reason but opposite - the different sounds in the language are not natural to me, so it still feels very foreign and clumsy for me to speak in Russian.

Prioritising

When it comes to learning all these, on top of my actual courses, keeping up a social life (ittedly online but nonetheless), and having time to relax and to spend on my own separate projects & hobbies, I have to prioritise.

First of all, my first and most important priority is my health & mental health (the two are connected very tightly). While at first you could think that refers to relaxing and resting, it does cover hobbies as well, since getting to spend time on my hobbies improves my mood usually.

After that we have my courses and generally academic things.

Languages, in that, are not simple. First of all, I do sometimes take French as actual courses - the material I mainly study from in my free time is just past course materials too. Besides French, as I already mentioned previously, Swedish is a mandatory subject here, so I do have courses on it sometimes as well. In fact, the next one starts in a bit over a week.

But they’re also a hobby for me. Something I genuinely enjoy. I did lose ion for them at some point, but that was a whole different ordeal, and baby I’m shininG now so you bet I’m rocking it. Progressing further and further in a language makes me very happy, since it shows fairly quickly to me, and learning new things does keep me in a fresh and content mood more.

But which languages am I actually prioritising then? The answer would be Swedish, Korean and Russian. French, Japanese, and Mandarin are a bit slower on that, although Japanese is more relaxed to begin with.

Swedish I have a course on, Korean is just because I’m on a roll, and same for Russian after I managed to find a good course and ended up even getting the paid version to get full access for it.

Different aspects of learning

But what all is it built out of, anyways?

Although it depends a bit on the reason you’re learning the language for, there are generally a few main points to focus on.

Vocabulary! Without building up vocabulary for yourself, it gets hard to sometimes even understand other people, let alone speak for yourself or write your own text. There are various ways to build it up, and your reserves are also split into active and ive - if it’s ive, you would understand it if someone said it, or you saw the word, but unless it’s active, you won’t it when you’re speaking or creating your own text. For this, I’d say that it’s very important to focus on your active vocabulary, but building up ive reserves can help in the long run. Think of it like, easier to transfer a file from location A to B than creating a completely new one.

For this, I recommend reading things - even song lyrics, webtoons, comics, manga, the news, articles - whatever you feel like could keep you interested in. Have a hobby? Look up content about it in your target language. A travel destination? Local language. Just try to get it around you as much as possible. Hecc, make small cards and tape them in the bathroom so that you’ll see them every time you’re there. Label your toothpaste, your mother’s computer, the produce in the fridge. Flashcard sets using apps like Anki and Quizlet, or other similar ones, for when you’re on the go. Listening to podcasts, shows, music, and such in your target language.

Next up, grammar! Covering things from sentence structure, tenses, forms, to pronunciation rules and special exceptions. While it can be a hassle, it’s better to stick with going over grammar as well, since you might wind up making some mistakes repetitively if you don’t understand the rules behind what you’re doing. For many people, it will make it easier to all those rules if they can connect them to some examples - to take that further, you can make them extremely weird or silly. Say, a grammar about sentence tenses, make sample sentences about a parrot with stiff back muscles. Maybe the parrot's name is Jared. Maybe he never learned to read, you know.

Most brains find it easier to things if they’re connected to something else, and humour can be a good link. Go shine, be that parrot talker. Don’t give a parrot’s feces about other people’s opinions on how silly you may be with it - you don’t necessarily need to share those with them in the first place, but if you do and they laugh, just stick with learning and then see at the end who can refer that poor parrot to the doctor’s office, and who freeze up because they can’t if the word they’re thinking of meant parrot or corn.

Lastly, I’m here to hold the holy grail of pronunciation in front of you. I consider it a separate section, since one can, after all, speak perfect sounding spanish by mimicry alone and they don’t understand a single word besides “mama”.

Having good pronunciation can get you very far in actually holding conversations and speaking with other people. If I came here and started speaking English like I would pronounce finnish from a text, I doubt many would understand what I was rambling about (not that that would necessarily change much then though).

For pronunciation, there are several ways to improve it, but depending on the language they would be a bit different, as well depending on what kind of learner you are. Some languages have materials around which basically analyze the mouth movements, tongue positions, etc, for the different sounds and sound combinations, some have phonetically written pronunciation instructions available, and sometimes you can benefit from just mimicking via your own analysing - pick a person talking in your target language, on a video clip with good view and sound quality. Look at how their mouth moves, how wide, and so on. Try to produce the same sound until you get it right, and voilà, a nice pronunciation right there.

Talking out loud as often as possible, or even mouthing the words can help surprisingly much. I said it in the previous section, but again - you’re allowed to be silly, not be serious and look foolish. Hold a dialogue by yourself in the living room, exaggerating everything and using hairbrushes as pretend microphones - everything goes!

Resources for learning for free

Although I can only provide resources for some of the languages I learn, here we go anyway.

Starting with Russian! My hardest one, and originally surprisingly hard to find resources which suited me.

First of all, we have http://www.russianforeveryone.com/ , which is actually well reviewed if we go look at blogs recommending places for learning Russian. 100% free, just looks distinctively old as a web page, but that’s a minor detail when we consider the quality of especially the cyrillics learning section, as it provides sound examples from English. For example the letter written as B, named ve, sounds like “the v in voice”. This is really helpful in the beginning for many people, since there are new sounds to memorise.

Secondly, for Russian we have an app called Tobo Russian. It does have ads, but it’s a good one for learning new vocab. when you’re on the go, or if you don’t have the possibility, capacity, etc, to study anything more complicated.

HelloTalk is an app which has multiple languages available, although you can only select one you’re learning if you’re using the free version. Has Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, German, Vietnamese and Turkish in the learning section, but you can select many other languages as one you’re learning, in which case you’ll mostly be interacting with other people. You list the language you speak, and the one you’re learning, and people who speak the language you’re learning and want to learn the language you speak, will show up to you in a section, you can chat with those people, etc. There is a translation option, option to correct other people’s messages and posts, and of course other’s have the means to correct your mistakes as well, if you post and happen to make some. I’m of course personally using it only for some languages, and have over time, but from what I’ve seen it is a fairly friendly place, and people are often polite too.

If you have Spotify, you can go to the search option, type your target language in, and then select “podcasts” from the bottom of the list. This will most likely give you an extremely varying selection of quality. The more popular the language, the better your chances are to find some good quality podcast or few, which you can listen to when you’re doing chores, lazing around or commuting. Although you might come across some very strange podcasts too, that's just the risk you’re taking with the internet.

Google Play has some E-books, some being free, some not being free. Sometimes you might come across a free PDF, but I recommend exercising some healthy cynicism with some of them. If there is a library service online available for you, those sometimes have audiobooks and e-books as well, and of course the physical library might have something in it as well. After all, if it’s done within the last 50 years, for languages it’s not too bad. Just don’t pick a random 50 year old animal care book, no no no.

Many of you have already seen Duolingo around, but an IMPORTANT note ing it! If you’re learning a language which belonged to their original selection from years ago, you are fine - Spanish, Italian, German, French, Swedish, etc. But please stay far away from for example, the Japanese course! It, like many other of the newer courses, provides partially bad information or badly worded, the grammar is weird, your learning might not be well balanced, etc. Don’t get me started on the Finnish course…

Originally recommended to me by other people here in SA, for Korean I use https://www.90daykorean.com/ and Teiuda. The latter I only have as an app, but 90DK is also a free app. They are good in all rounds, and have gotten me to a very good start in the language.

Lastly, I will also aggressively & lovingly yell, scream, etc, that YouTube is a thing! If you are bothered by ads, and have access to a computer, you can get a free ad-blocker and it yeets most things outta the way. But you can find teaching videos and channels for many languages, and some of them are actually very good. For example, in Korean when I was still learning the hangul system, the channel 빅키샘Miss Vicky was very helpful in getting hang of it all!

Why you probably shouldn’t do what I do

I usually would not recommend learning 6 languages at once, on top of your normal studies. I have a relaxed version of the curriculum so that gives me some more time than others may have, to begin with.

I would also like to point out that while having ADHD does also mean that I need medication to be able to function and such, that and being autistic do also give some perks, like my memory sometimes being like a sponge for information I am interested in. You don’t want to ask me about eunuchs, please. Nor start a conversation regarding my ADHD medications.

My system for studying is quite carefully constructed, I have researched which methods work for me the best overall, and so this is currently possible for me without it being a burden. I am also not even doing any incredibly fast progress either, but progress nonetheless.

Finding resources which fit you, studying methods which fit you, a good time to squeeze even that 5 to 20 minutes in, to study extra on top of everything else? I tell you, it isn’t the easiest thing to do most of the time.

Outro

Well, you’ve gotten all the way here. Congratulations if you read through this all, and especially if you got anything useful out of it - or just some laughs. Somehow it took me only a bit over two hours to write this all, and that too nearly in a row, and we’re at approximately 3K word count.

Happy Valentine’s day I suppose, enjoy your Sunday, treat yourself and please aggressively cuss toxic people outta your life, using another language. You deserve it. Don’t bow down for those fools, you got this.

(Also does anyone want to recommend music to me in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Russian? I gots it otherwise but finding good music can get a bit tough, yannooo)

I’m out now. Eating my chocolate. Because I deserve it. It’s unwise to ask me when I’ve last slept, but it’s all good. Shh. Where did I put my chocolate though...