Do You Enjoy Learning a Language?

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I study languages for enjoyment and this year I plan to consolidate the languages I already have and enjoy spending time with them.

Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I’m back in Vancouver after a month or more and I want to talk about enjoying language learning and I’m going to talk about how it affects me, personally. A New Year, we’re thinking of New Year’s resolutions, I’ve always wanted to learn Arabic, Farsi, Turkish. I kind of want to get into that Middle East, Central-Asian part of the world that I don’t really know much about. In fact, I took with me a book on how to learn the Arabic alphabet and stuff and you know what? I just haven’t got the motivation, to be perfectly honest.

What is pulling me back is not my lack of interest in those languages, but rather the fact that I want to enjoy now, this year, the languages that I have already learned because my Korean isn’t where I want it to be, obviously my Polish isn’t where I want it to be. I want to work on other languages because I enjoy the languages. Obviously, that initial period when you’re breaking into a new language is a lot of hard work. It’s like initially planting your garden, but now I’m at the stage where I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor more. So, recently, I’ve been doing more Ukrainian, I had a couple of conversations in Ukrainian and I’m going to go back to my Korean. So this year is going to be a year of consolidation and Arabic, Farsi, Hindi or whatever is going to have to wait until next year and we’ll see what happens next year.

I think it’s very important, unless you have to learn the language for an exam or you have to learn it for your work, but for many language learners and certainly in my case, I learn languages for enjoyment and I love doing it, so why would I put pressure on myself when that strong motivation isn’t there. It will come and when I do have that strong motivation I will claw my way through the difficulties of the Arabic writing system, dealing with a brand new language and getting to a point where I can actually start enjoy learning it. I’ve done that now for Polish, I’ve done it for Ukrainian, I’ve done it for Korean and now I have the opportunity to go in there and enjoy my reading and listening, eventually talking to people, watching movies and stuff. So this year I’m devoting to enjoying the languages that I have already engaged with.

So that’s my kind of New Year’s position on languages for this year. Thank you for listening, bye for now.