I have tried several times in my life (with varying degrees of effort) to learn new languages, with 5 years of French tuition at school and 1 year of Italian at university however this has left me with very little practical knowledge of the languages. It seems the best I can must is remembering some vocabulary, and usually only in a classroom situation.
Now I am several years into my career, I have started learning a new language (Spanish) and have signed up to the 2012 beginner Spanish course at the Instituto Cervantes in London. This time around I am going to try a different approach and see whether I can successfully pick up the language.
I have started this blog mainly as a way of reflecting on my progress in trying to learn Spanish this time around and I will share any good resources I come across. If any of the things I discuss are of use to anyone else then that would be great!
Why learn a new language? (And why Spanish)
There are two main reasons that I want to learn a new language:
- A new perspective - I think that becoming accomplished in a different language would give me a new perspective on many things in life - the way I think is probably quite strongly tied to how things are constructed in English and I would like to become more aware of that.
- The challenge - I haven't been able to learn a language before and I want to prove I can do it. I want to try and identify the problems with my previous approach and see if I can correct them.
- Travel - I travel quite a lot and Spanish would be very useful to me - it is spoken in a lot of places and there are several places I want to visit in the near future where I can practice (Spain, Mexico, Argentina)
It remains to be seen whether the points above are sufficient motivation to learn a language. I am slightly concerned as there is no necessity for me to learn - I do not need to learn it for my job and I am not going to be spending any extended period of time in a country where I would need to learn the language in order to get by.
Challenges to overcome
Here are some of the problems I think I have come across before - hopefully I'll focus more on how to address them in upcoming posts:
- Associating foreign words with concepts. I have always had to translate foreign words and sentences back into English before understanding them as well as needing to construct a sentence in English and then translating it in my head before speaking it rather than the foreign language coming naturally. I think this is because I have been used to learning vocabulary by learning translations rather than by thinking about concepts.
- Getting immersed in the language - I never made the effort previously to immerse myself in the language (e.g. spending time outside of formal lessons speaking the language or listening to conversations etc). This could be a problem again - I am not going to be spending myself surrounded by Spanish due to work and I do not know any native Spanish speakers. Hopefully I can identify some good resources to listen to some normal conversational Spanish rather than just relying on specific course material.
