I have always loved languages, ever since I was in middle school and took an experimental class on the basics of French and Spanish. I fell in love with French, and continued my education up until my junior year of college. At that point, I could speak and write it fluently. To this day, I can still run through verb conjugations, translate short text, and think in French.
I am fascinated by languages, how they evolve and their nuances. I should have studied linguistics. I swear, I keep coming back to this over and over again.
So when I discovered a site called Memrise that gave free language lessons on just about any language, I was so excited. I could start learning again! I could feed my addiction. While the free lessons aren’t as good as say, college classes, they are enough.
And did I mention they are free?
They use the concept of flashcards, rote memorization, and clues called “mems” to help you learn — and retain — the material.
So naturally, I decided to refresh myself on French. It is kind of embarrassing how horribly I did for awhile. I guess I really was rusty.
But wait! I wanted to learn more. (I’m a freak, I know). I was interested in Esperanto, which is a constructed language (like Klingon) that was to be a universal second language for the world. It never quite got off the ground, but there are native speakers of it and children in some countries learn it as a precursor to other languages. How freaking cool is that? I wish we could have that here in the U.S. I would have loved it. Esperanto seems to be a combination of French, English, and Spanish. A lot of words are like the English equivelents: “helpi” means “to help,” “kompreni” means “to understand or comprehend” and “birdo” means, not surprisingly, “bird.” But there are other words that are a bit elusive. “Flugi” means “to fly,” “fenestro” means “window.” So far, I’ve finished one course and I’ve started on the second.
And then there’s Latin. Having so much fun with that one. It’s cool to see where our words came from. Although there are a few puzzlers: “argentarious” for “banker,” but the word for “money” is “pecunia.” I don’t see a connection there. But I seem to remember them despite having no connections.
And lastly, because I’m insane and an overacheiver, I also added Irish and Scottish Gaelic to my growing list of languages. I’m Irish, and I’ve always dreamed of learning Gaelic. This one is challenging. There are no associations between Gaelic words and say, French words, or Latin, or even English. It is all new territory for me and my addicted-to-languages brain. I’m a huge fan of keeping the brain and mind as active as possible, so this will help me when I get older. And it’s fun! Of course, it’s a bit weird to be screwing up constantly and calling it fun, but I mentioned I was a freak, right?
So how do I keep it all straight? Well, I was blessed with a brain that can store things in “file cabinets.” So for instance, there would be no Latin in my French “file cabinet.” They’re would only be Esperanto in my Esperanto “file cabinet.” Irish and Scottish Gaelic go in their own “file cabinet.” What also helps is that I do one language per session. So far, I haven’t mixed anything up yet!
I also dabbled a bit in constructed languages way back when. I used existing languages as a base and built from there. My languages had actual grammar rules and conjugations and everything. I even translated a poem I wrote in French into one of my constructed languages called Rahlian. It was so cool.
The four languages are the following: Rahlian with a French and Czech base, for a dark fantasy world; Rekka with a Latin base for aquatic beings in a dystopic Earth; Tallosan with a Spanish and Portugese base for a dark fantasy world; and Kail with a Czech and Romany base for the same dark fantasy world as Tallosan and Rahlian. It was a lot of fun and I miss it terribly.
So, yeah, I dig languages. Bet I could curse at you in several of them, too.