Adventures in Language Learning
Croatian. My first Slavic language.
I love learning languages. It's one of my favorite things. I'm fluent in German and used to be proficient in Arabic. I've dabbled in Spanish and Swedish, and a little in Chinese and Slovak (which is also a Slavic language but I only learned some handy words and phrases so Croatian is still the first Slavic language I'm actually learning). I've also studied some old languages: Old High German, Middle High German, Old Saxon and Gothic (a dead Germanic language). I can partially understand Old English because of studying those other old Germanic languages. Someday, I aim to teach myself Old Norse. When I was in middle school, I made a list of the languages I wanted to learn, and although that's not my focus in life, part of me would still like to learn them - particularly Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish and Scots Gaelic, and Welsh.
Languages are fun!
But back to Croatian. One of my priorities right now is learning Croatian. I got a couple text books, signed up for a free government course, and started taking one-on-one lessons over WhatsApp video calls twice a week. I'm working through the book and the online course very slowly because most of my focus is on memorizing vocabulary and verb conjugations I'm learning in my private lessons, but I am working on the languages from all these angles. It's tiring when I'm also trying to write, but it's fun.
Lots of studying going on!
The early stages of language learning are really fun. It's a lot of memorizing, but you make progress quickly and it doesn't take long to become able to string together simple sentences (however poor your grammar may be at this point). And you start to learn the patterns of the language, which is one of the most interesting parts for me. You learn your first few verb conjugation patterns and then each new verb fits one of those patterns, so each new verb helps you learn the pattern more and more quickly. Same thing with learning languages - the more languages you learn, the more quickly you're able to learn new ones because your understanding of language structures increases with each new language you study. Add some linguistics courses into the mix, and you notice things like the fact that, unlike in English, the voiceless stops in Croatian aren't aspirated (p/t/k). That immediately improves your ability to accurately understand (and spell) what someone else is saying, and your own ability to pronounce the language more like a native speaker.
My English to Croatian dictionary.
The more you study something and practice a skillset, the better you get not only at that particular thing but at related things, as well. And since such great strides are made in those early stages of language learning, you can see your progress not only in the language, but in your ability to learn new languages and to recognize languages' underlying linguistic structures. It's really cool.
The same thing goes for reading and writing (and I inlclude watching film/TV in "reading", thanks to the two film studies classes I took in undergrad). And so many other things.
What kinds of things have you studied and/or practiced enough to build that kind of cumulative knowledge and/or skill?