How Did This All Begin?
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- čas přidán 24. 06. 2024
- This is the story of it all.
Link to my main channel
www.youtube.com/@metatronyt/v...
Link to my Japanese channel
www.youtube.com/@user-ne6jb8v...
Link to my video where I speak several languages
• How Many Languages Do ...
Language education - the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language - is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field.[1][2] There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.[3]
Need
Increasing globalization has created a great need for people in the workforce who can communicate in multiple languages. Common languages are used in areas such as trade, tourism, diplomacy, technology, media, translation, interpretation and science. Many countries such as Korea (Kim Yeong-seo, 2009), Japan (Kubota, 1998) and China (Kirkpatrick & Zhichang, 2002) frame education policies to teach at least one foreign language at the primary and secondary school levels. However, some countries such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Philippines use a second official language in their governments. According to GAO (2010), China has recently been putting enormous importance on foreign language learning, especially the English language.
History
Ancient to medieval period
Ancient learners seem to have started by reading, memorising and reciting little stories and dialogues that provided basic vocabulary and grammar in naturalistic contexts. These texts (and they seem to have always been coherent texts, never isolated sentences such as modern learners often practise on) covered topics such as getting dressed in the morning (and how to manage the slaves who helped with that task), going to school (and evading punishment for not having been there yesterday), visiting a sick friend (and how to find an individual unit in a Roman apartment block), trading insults (and how to concede a fight gracefully), or getting a new job (a piece of cake if you have studied with me, an ancient teacher assured his students mendaciously). The texts were presented bilingually in two narrow columns, the language you were learning on the left and the one you already knew on the right, with the columns matching line for line: each line was effectively a glossary, while each column was a text.[4]
Although the need to learn foreign languages is almost as old as human history itself, the origins of modern language education are in the study and teaching of Latin in the 17th century. In the Ancient Near East, Akkadian was the language of diplomacy, as in the Amarna letters.[5] For many centuries, Latin had been the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in much of the Western world. By the end of the 16th century, it had largely been displaced by French, Italian, and English. John Amos Comenius was one of many people who tried to reverse this trend. He composed a complete course for learning Latin, covering the entire school curriculum, culminating in his Opera Didactica Omnia, 1657.
In this work, Comenius also outlined his theory of language acquisition. He is one of the first theorists to write [6] systematically about how languages are learned and about pedagogical methodology for language acquisition. He held that language acquisition must be allied with sensation and experience. Teaching must be oral. The schoolroom should have models of things, and failing that, pictures of them. As a result, he also published the world's first illustrated children's book, Orbis sensualium pictus. The study of Latin diminished from the study of a living language to be used in the real world to a subject in the school curriculum. Such decline brought about a new justification for its study. It was then claimed that its study of Latin developed intellectual ability, and the study of Latin grammar became an end in and of itself.
"Grammar schools" from the 16th to 18th centuries focused on teaching the grammatical aspects of Classical Latin. Advanced students continued grammar study with the addition of rhetoric
You learned Japanese in Naples and I learned English in Tokyo, LOL!
To have picked up such a high level of fluency and naturalised inflection of English in just two years, Raff, just goes to show your proclivity for languages! I suppose it was a case of Sink or Swim; but still - it's quite an achievement. More power to your elbow!!
Hey, love your videos. If you lower your camera and people can see your hand movements, it will actually approve your view duration. Hope you see this.
I studied French and Spanish in high school but never had an opportunity to practice them and then life got in the way. I have become interested rather late in life in languages again and have begun to study Portuguese. I am delighted the internet gives so many more opportunities for language study and practice than when I was in my teens. I enjoy hearing your language journey and the videos that you discuss various languages and their mutual intelligibility or lack.
Como estão os estudos? Tá achando difícil?
You can read this ?👇
Já para nós falantes do português é algo difícil achar material gratuito para aprender outras línguas que não seja o inglês ( até o ingles é complicado)
SONO LE 3 DI NOTTE QUA A PALERMO... MA SE ARRIVA LA NOTIFICA CHE C'È UN NUOVO VIDEO BISOGNA FARSI LE CORSE PER GUARDARSELO
Metatron could you do a video on the Emilian language? There's an "I Love Languages" video on it, and also a very interesting channel called "Parler Emilian" which is full of stories and phrases in emilian
It's the most incomprehensible gallo-italic language together with piedmontese, lots of celtic (and possibly previously ligurian) influence maintained.
Hmm, he is quite... suspicious to say the least. He is creating his own "Standard Emilian" instead of just sharing his family dialect and he has made some questionable claim about regional and national history on his channel.
Emilian is so damn decentralized linguists are arguing if they are looking at two or three local languages instead.
he does have some strange idea about regional - national identity; but no point of concern, we're talking about language here
as far as proper use of the language, he's absolutely reliable (he speaks a variant of Arzan/Mudneis which pre-dates recent major italianizations) and overall has a good pronunciation.
the western emilian dialects have a minor lombard shift, because gallo-italic languages are a continuum. eastern emilian varieties (eastern bolognese and ferrarese) have a romagnol minor shift.
emilian dialects are part of the same language, emilian, hence they're closer to each other than the language which they're shifted to (romagnol, lombard, tuscan)
The way you challenge yourself, and also recognize your strengths and wins, is very inspiring. Thank you for sharing.
I'm Serbian, and I went for 4 days to Bulgaria, and I decided to learn Bulgarian language. It's fun experience, those two languages are similar enough, with some same historical influences from other languages.
But the best part is learning about "false friends" - a word that sounds the same in two languages, but has different meanings.
Maybe you could do video about those in Romance languages you speak?
Cheers!
Being of Japanese descent (I am hafu in Japanese parlance), I always feel envious when a gaijin can speak better than I do. I may have slighly better pitch accent than Metatron, but in all other aspects, he kicks my ass.
I am currently learning Italian and trying to improve my Japanese vocabulary and reading (kanji is def a pain in the ass). If I have all the time in the world, I would like to study French, Portuguese, and Polish. Indonesian would also be cool as it is related to my native language (I come from the central part of Philippines)
Going to Japan, and actually learning the language and making a living out of it at some point. Most people would find a backstory like that pretty cringy, but you really made it work. That's pretty impressive!
fratè i now live in scotland and english is my second language, and after highschool i never really studied again. along with english i studied french and spanish and, my brain being focused understanding english, scotish accent, asian english accent, irish, zealander accent.... i cannot speak french anymore. dang it. spanish is easy for us, so after 4 days in barcelona a few years ago i was speaking catalan like nobody's business hahaha, but, for a while we went out with a group of french guys and gals, here for a few months and daaamn my french was coming back.
if you don't talk to people, learning languages is a struggle. (btw my polish friend now is teaching english in japan, i'm so proud of her, her accent is frikkin perfect!)
I've been in tree time almost 2 months in Ireland and in the USA. I've been tre weeks in Ecuador to improve my Spanish. But my second language is Italian (C2). My first language is German (I live in northern Italy, South Tirol)
Thank You very much for this interesting video 🙂😊👍🏻👍🏻
It's realy funny how his Japanese boss was like : "you are Italian come make some pizzas in my restaurant" 😂
I took Spanish in high school and college. Spent 1975/1976 in Spain where I really learned how to speak the language. And then for some strange reason, when I returned to the US, I stopped studying/speaking the language for 30 years! Picked it up again when I was intent on moving to Costa Rica (I have only lived in one country where I didn't speak the language: Japan). And to this day, I still use it. Everyone says it's an "easy" language, but if you really want to access the richness of Spanish, that requires a lot of work.
Next language is Russian. I was a Russian linguist in the US Navy during the Cold War. I have two years of formal training at the Defense Language Institute in CA which I think is one of the finest language schools in the world. My teachers were wonderful. All native speakers. When the Cold War ended, my attention turned to other priorities and I let it lay fallow. Until I retired. I have always loved Russian and decided to take it up again. Now I work with 3 teachers each week and I love it. Now, Russian is most definitely one of the richest languages in the world. Sometimes it seems that there are a million ways to say the same thing, but that's what makes it fun.
Lastly, there is German. I was stationed in Germany and ended up marrying a German woman. I learned the language pretty fluently in less than a year simply by speaking and listening. I am by no means at a C2 level, but I have no trouble navigating the vast majority of situations in German life and that gorgeous country.
One thing that has stood out for me in my study of languages is how, when I took up Russian and Spanish again, how much I still remembered. That's why I said they laid fallow in my memory. When I visited Costa Rica after not having spoken the language for many years, I simply just picked it up again. Very interesting.
Thanks for your channel, Metatron! I love the content.
@metatronacademy What do you charge to teach Italian? I was born in the US so a native English speaker (Chicago accent) but got Italian citizenship so I really want to learn it now. Currently I am using Babbel, Memrise and Duo Lingo but I know at some point I will need to speak with natives. My paternal lineage is from near Potenza in Basilicata so I would also be interested in learning the local dialect.
After I get fluent, I would like to pick up Austrian German as my mother has Austrian citizenship now and so I think it would be useful for me to learn that as well, especially if I am able to pick up that citizenship as well (Austria normally does not do dual citizenships but I might qualify under a special rule). If I keep going, French and Polish would also be interesting to me.
I've shared your video with Andrew Gold, who is also interested in languages. I hope you two can do a video together.
When you speak English like you do in this video, this is how I perceive your accent/pronunciation: I don't perceive you as an Italian speaking English; there's barely any accent and you're very well spoken. However, I don't quite perceive you as being English either, since your speach is missing certain native features I can't quite put my finger on, and there is the occasional slip up.
It's a bit uncanny, but your English is at an extremely high level. I just hear some one speaking English very well.
(When you do the cockney accent, however, it sounds weird. You get a lot of sounds right, but some are also wrong, or from a different area).
If you want a fun challenge in the future, by the way, try a slavic language; the grammar is similar to Latin!
Βravo Metatron
What an interesting journey. Thank you for sharing it!
Thank you for posting this video. I got to the point now that I'm able to speak in five languages: Romanian(native), english, french, italian and hungarian(verbal only, one of my grandmothers was hungarian). I learned english and french in school so by time I got to highschool I was fluent in both. I never left the country to learn another language, just in school. Italian I was lucky to have(in Romania) italian neighbors(from Firenze originally), that had kids the same age as me so I just picked it up playing with them. I got fluent after 2-3years, and weekend binge wathcing ItaliaUno channel helped😂. Hungarian is the one that I'm slowly lossing I noticed. I only spoke with my grandmother and she died in 2007, and I haven't spoken since. I can fully understand someone speaking it, but my vocabulary is getting rusty. And since I did my DNA test, watched your videos and heard classical latin spoken in tv series Barbarians it sparked my interest in learning classical Latin and I love the prononciation😁. (We had Classical latin classes in school to, that helps). Sorry for making you cringe by using the term volgar latin in another comment. I hope you didn't throw a book on the floor and walk away like you did in the video😂. Lesson learned. 😁
I enjoy watching the World Friends videos where they get two to four people of a language family (eg. Swedish, Danish, Norwegian or Parisian French, Quebec French, Walloon) and have them speak and see if everyone understands each other.
Today, I just watched comparing Sanskrit and Lithuanian, and being both satem languages of the Indo-European family, they were quite similar.
Wow! Your experience differs from mine in the sense that you know and have studied unrelated languages, whereas, because of my family background - my Italian father was a seaman - I learned several Romance languages as a child. I am almost twice your age but, in part thanks to you and CZcams, I am now also studying Latin, Catalan and Romanian and I'm also working to improve my "brasileiro", also because of family reasons. I am teaching my Brazilian niece, who lives here in Italy, English, which is what my eldest daughter did in Brazil, where my grandson decided to stay and now has 2 children. So my destiny is linked to Brazil!
Re your languages, I know Chinese families both in Italy and in Spain and they come from the city of Wenzhou, where the local language is a particularly difficult dialect of the Wu language (Shanghai). My Italo-Chinese friends all speak Mandarin. The parents know some Wu, but don't speak it. The Chinese family in Spain is one generation behind, as the parents still speak Wu while the children speak Mandarin, Catalan, Spanish and English.
Lastly, for relaxation, you should study Spanish, which you have already proved that you partly understand. With very little study, you would have access to the Romance language with most native speakers. In my own experience, Spanish is particularly useful in the US. With my wife, who was born in Galicia, Spain, a few years we spent 3 months in Boca Raton (FL) and we spoke more Spanish than English.
I hate idolising people but metatron is my current idol
Language and history lover
I would love to learn Italian. I'm trying to learn French currently, and Spanish would be fun to learn too. I'm more interested in reading it though.
I don’t know if you have ever talked about it but how did you get your youtube name?
He did a video on this topic before! It's from the arch angel with the many wings.
I studied English literally since kindergarten. In elementary and middle school I also had private tutors and I went to British bookshop in Odesa, Ukraine. When I was 13 my father asked me If I want to study in British school in Spain. I said yeah... Whatever. And so in preparation for that I changed English tutor to University professor. And started studying Spanish too. Got my IGCSE and A-levels. After school went to do Foundation course in UAL. So funny when Londoners couldn't guess where I am from. Spoke too good but still had somewhat of an accent. Went back to Spain to study History of Art in Málaga.
Well, German on another hand I tried as a child, as a teen, as an adult... I can read I can understand basics listening to German, very bad in speaking. I wanted to go to Germany for work but as in 2022 I was in Ukraine and not in Spain, because of war I couldn't go. As I study myself I go on and off with the studies. And still have low level of German.
I did study French,and could probably pick it up again given the right circumstances.I can read Spanish a little and could probably learn to speak it.What would be a dream language?Gaelic or Cymraeg,not for any practical reason but because of curiosity about my ancestors.On a side note about Italian Food.I watched an Australian youtuber test what was called"Italian Style Mac n Cheese''.I don't know what it was intended to be but I am sure an Italian mama would not have recognized it as Italian nor would an American mama recognize it as Mac n Cheese.XD.It was a sticky mess of garlicky,bitter "cheese"(unidentified) mixed with pasta that had been cooked to disintegration point.
In Italy, I've never heard of traditional dishes that combine garlic with some kind of cheese. Never. It may be that they exist locally and I simply do not know them. However, I see a lot of them on the Internet now. I think they are experiments.
lol my town was a sister city with a town near My. Fuji, I’m one of 4 kids so my parents decided to send me to Japan every summer from 11 to 18, presumably to get rid of me lol now I live here and I don’t know why
Whats the difference between tonal and pitch language?
Wonderful story. Im not specifically interested in learning Japanese, but I would like to visit there someday and learning a bit of it would be useful. My main goal is to become proficient, if not fluent someday, in Latin, and then other classical languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, maybe Old English/Norse. Im much more interested in learning those than modern languages, but if I had to choose any modern languages itd be Italian, Sardinian, Spanish, Finnish, maybe Japanese, and maybe some Semitic language or east Asian/Austronesian language. One at a time tho. I also want to travel around the world, so that would provide good opportunities to be immersed in languages.
Also when I first saw the title of this video I thought it was going to be about the origin and evolution of language as a whole within humanity. I think a video about that topic would be great and interesting, if youre willing to make it.
Finnish 😃🇫🇮.I live in Finland. Sanotaan, että suomi on vaikea kieli 🤔 ?
@@anne-marie2972 I just like Finland and the Suomi language seems nice. The main difficulty would come only from not being related to my native language. It seems like the pronunciation is very consistent relative to the written form. And Ive heard there is/was a large Latin speaking community in Finland including Latin radio broadcasts.
@@anne-marie2972 I have done a bit of Finnish on Duolingo and plan to continue more in the future, but Latin is my main focus currently.
You should dabble in near eastern languages! Like Arabic. Romance languages took some lone words from Arabic
I do wholeheartedly encourage you to continue your study of Modern, and then eventually Ancient, Greek as well as Classical Latin! The former I've had to put on hold as I am currently working on enriching my already fluent Spanish and on learning the rest of the Romance family, starting with Portuguese and the other languages of Iberia.
When I was in middle school, we were able to pick additional languages, and I had noticed a couple of years earlier that it was pretty easy for me to learn English. I remember I picked all languages possible (French, Spanish... I don't remember what other languages there was), but none of those courses came to be, because there wasn't enough participants. It was mostly because our teacher told our class, "don't pick up extra languages if you don't want extra work." I was so frustrated. In the end all I got was a few extra English courses.
I was able to start French and German in high school, also I managed to improve my bad Swedish somewhat, and study some Japanese on my own, but all in all I wish I would have had encouraging teachers earlier in my school years.
Great experience and so much knowledge!
I’m a Portuguese native speaker, almost fluent in English and Spanish (though having a heavy accent), I also have an intermediary knowledge of French and Italian, basic German and looking forward to learn Catalan as I live in a place which speaks it.
Irish-polyglot here...... my goal is to get to level A2 in most of the languages that had a heavy influence on English. Or otherwise connected to English. Frisian, Northern French, italian ( as a living proxy for dead Latin) , Welsh , Danish , Afrikaans, lowland Scots, and a tiny bit of Greek. When Shakespeare becomes easy, i will know i nailed it. ❤ i would also throw in Spanish cos its got a huge number of speakers and, is therefore very useful.
So, you were big in Japan.
Sono americano e parlo un po` italino. Io e mia fidanzata (ora mia moglie) aveviamo fatto piani per il nostro viaggio di nozze di andare in italia. Pensavo di imparare italiano per fare la communicazione più facile. Anche mi piaceva l'italia perchè mi piaceva l'imperio romano da quando ero giovane e ho avuto un progetto al'università che riguardava l'italia. Dopo nostro il viaggio io continuo a imparare perchè mi piace. Per la futura voglio viaggare ancora in italia. Penso di andare nel'estate qualche periodo per lavorare. Mia moglie è un insegnate così non ha bisogno di lavorare nel'estate. Per quanto riguarda me voglio lavorare in una gelateria. Preparo ogni settimana gelato per io e mia moglie, e qualche volta mia famiglia e amici. Penso di comprare una machina per la gelato per 1.000 dollari e fare un piccola azienda.
Dude be sharing his entire life story
Considering how frustrated you are at times at misinformation in articles you read on your channel, I imagine you reading the menu of the Italian restaurant you worked in in Japan and saying "you morons! It's not spaghetti bolognese! It's spaghetti con ragú al bolognese!" or something like that
I cannot fathom a time where the Metatron did not speak English.
When you go back to his earlier videos his British accent was much stronger, now it skews American 😂
Isle of Tenerife,
Spain,
Africa.
Brilliant!
You've produced an amazing video, again, and your English a joy to listen to.
As you said yourself, like anybody you occasionally make some small mistakes in your learned languages.
The only three mistakes in English which stood out for me in this video were:
1. When you said "a good ear" to me it sounded like "a good year". This may of course be dialectal, and I've a feeling that it's said somewhat like that by probably some southern hemisphere speakers, some southern English, and maybe some Welsh people.
But to my Irish ear, and therefore to any American ear (Irish is a bridge dialect between British mainland English and American) it sounds weird.
2. You said "day offs" instead of "days off".
3. "Double down" (implying negativity) instead of "double" or "double up" (a positive annotation).
Again, I do love your amazingly good and very natural and dynamic use of English, but the language geek in me tends to fixate on fine details, hoping to help you improve, and hoping I've not offended or annoyed you.
Best wishes,
Patchy.
Hey man you did not touch the followings: how you ended up with history and how you go about your daily study. It would be great for the viewers if you would dwelve on how you study, on your study techniques and so on. So whats in the kitchen?
You live in America?
I've had an interest in learning languages since I was a kid but I never got fluent in anything, which I really regret. I think for me it was the work that was required (there was no internet or CZcams back then) and the lack of real understanding of how to study language, not a specific language but how to study language as a discipline. I've taken French in middle school (I'm in the USA), I studied Spanish on my own, I joined the Navy and studied Arabic but discovered I had a learning disability I never knew about so I ended up having to change jobs. I tried to get back into French (used Duolingo) but that never stuck, I studied a little Greek so I could converse with people over the basics when I visited the country. I had a friend in college who was Finnish so I picked up a little of that. Then I tried to actually focus on language learning and went to something I had no experience with, Portuguese. I realized at that point I didn't know how to study language and ended up quitting then browse CZcams for all kinds of stuff related to the learning process. I then focused on German four years ago. I went into that hard trying to replicate my experience in the Navy, then I hit a grammar wall and just had no concept on how to approach that, to study it, to internalize it, or just to find practice exercises. So again, I kinda gave up, though I've just been Duolingo for the last four years with German (I currently have a 1432 day streak going on for whatever that's worth). I just haven't devoted time to sit down and consume content, which I think for me is the actual recipe. I just got burned out and distracted with other interests. But, I'd like to become fluent in German, go back to French, pick Arabic, then go to modern Greek and either Norwegian or Finnish, that way I'd have a lot of options for moving to EU and maybe retiring there. Italian would also be great but I've already go a whole ass plate full of dreams that probably won't be realized anyway. :P
Great content, thanks for the introduction to how this started.
I'm currently trying to get my JLPT N1 here in Japan, but I've been here for 10 years so I feel I am conversationally fluent. Recently I took up Irish as well.
Oh man, N1 is hard even for nativr speakers 😅
Are you pursuing a career in academics?
@@FlagAnthemNo it's just for my ego haha and maybe for a potential future job.
On Duolingo, I've studied Chinese, Turkish, Polish, Italian, Arabic and Welsh. I did watch some video on CZcams on Arabic of the alphabet, which seems easier than matching the sounds on duolingo, I found Chinese easier to match the character to Chinese word.
Turkish and Polish as there is a community in my home town.
Italian as it the second easiest language for English speakers to learn, first was French but I found it too nasally, although I did watch a CZcams vid yesterday how to pronounced the nasal vowels.
Welsh as it the language of my home and birth.
Hello Metatron. I was quite good at languages, learning French from age of nine then German from thirteen. Many of my neighbours were from other European countries, several of the women being southern Italian.
I gave languages up at sixteen to concentrate on maths and science, but I did apply to universities that did science and a language with a year abroad and ho on the school trip to Germany, despite no longer taking the subject.
One university asked me if I would learn Danish. My northern dialect having origin in the time of Danelaw, this would really appealed, but I would need to be really good at my science too.
I knew I would struggle to get the grades, since I was slow in exams, so I accepted offers to Scottish universities, where you could add subjects, like in US and swap focus during the degree study.
Perhaps I was trying to do too much and I had flu and was in bed for three weeks before my A levels in England. This really messed up my grades, but I still got an A in general studies, for which a second language was needed. I got offered a place at my home university for Archaeological Science, but I chose to go to do a Science degree at one of my original choices that did a year abroad, only without the option to go. The course lecturer remembered me and knew I had been ill. He had tried to do all the exams I was doing at that age and knew it was a lot.
I toured Europe that summer with a friend who had Pakistani parents. He had family in Germany. I found in the 1980s that I ended up speaking more German and took my friend's cousin round Heidelberg, that I studied at school and had been to, since it was a topic for his German class also. I found that my German was getting better than my French. I also picked up some Urdu.😮
At university the first friend I made was Alok Sharma, who became a government minister in UK. I last saw him on TV between the King and PM.
I used to chat with the lads who were going to go to France, in case I got the grades to swap, but the option I might have got was with a year in Toledo, Ohio.
The second friend I made at university was studying computing, but I met him due to an interest in wargames. This became the thing I was most interested in when not studying. I got to play for the university team and keep up my interest in history and other countries. I also found I was not bad at computing. As for video games, the game that was in the student bar was Atari Star Wars. A group of us played it to try to set a high score over a full day, but the last one failed to lose the "lives" in time before we "clocked" the score back to zero. I could play with my eyes closed to impress kids in the year below.
After graduation, jobs were not easy to find. See "Brassed Off" and "Full Monty" about my region. I went back to do a year closer to home studying computing. I eventually got a job in science using both this and my degree. Occasionally my German was useful to translate for things from a sister company.
After a few years the company moved production to Germany and I got redundancy, just in time to go to US for three months. In Texas I stayed a month with my friend's family. The US side were of Spanish ancestry, from before the time of English speakers there. My host was embarrassed that my Spanish, picked up from French and TV, was better than his kids. We got to visit Cuidad Juárez.
In Canada I got talking in French with a Canadian of Irish ancestry who spoke French. I had never got into a conversation in France like this. Canadians are just friendlier generally, though I think people in Paris have no time for anyone. I did get asked out by a French girl at university, but she was half Spanish and I reckon it showed in her friendliness.
Another friend at university was Greek. She was surprised I could read some Greek and Russian. I explained that we were both science graduates and the Greek letters were used in that and maths. Also I painted Russian Napoleonic and ancient Greek figures with flags and the like displaying words.
I used to try to watch German and Dutch TV on the old Astra satellite analogue channels. When TV went digital these disappeared.
My language skills did not really get used for a while, but then my girlfriend's family got a house in Spain. I hoped it would be like "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" not like "Benidorm". It was a bit in between with it being in Valencia province, but I realised the people spoke similar to Catalan.
I started watching CZcams more during lockdown. Before that, I avoided the internet as I use a computer all day at work. My interest in history got me to watching this and History With Hilbert, both of which look at language and where it comes from, which is how I first got interested. I also watch Scotland History Tours, on which the bits in Scots language are interesting as it is like a cross between my Yorkshire dialect and German.
I took 2 years of Latin in high school because I was always intrigued by that part of history. I was especially excited when we used Julius Caesar’s journals to translate. I wasn’t an exceptional linguist, but I enjoyed it and I can see where some of our English words originated from.
modern Greek \o/
You have Hebrew on your belt. Snatch Old Babylonian too! Would be easy for you.
I also learned Spanish in curious way. I was only able to take one semester of Spanish at the University. I then made some friends in Texas that spoke either both or just one of English or Spanish (both either Tejano style or Mexican style). Later, while renting a mobile home, I had neighbors from Honduras renting a mobile home next. They got kicked out suddenly (bad landlord who did this over and over again). I let them move in with me. Difficult to understand, but great immersion. One told me to come work for his boss in construction. That was one single day with some English from the boss (who was from Durango, Mexico).
I am sure he told the boss to only speak Spanish to me. So, living in Spanish at home, work and partying in bars on the weekend.
So, I was in full immersion without leaving the country. Later, my Dad moved to Guatemala. He doesn't speak Spanish. I commuted back and forth between Texas and Guatemala. Then I moved to Monterrey, Mexico and told him to move there also.
So I had full immersion in Texas, Guatemala and Mexico.
NB, if you want to learn Korean, move to Monterrey, Mexico. Because of the car industry, Korean is now the language taught there instead of English because of the need to speak it for work.
My native language is Dutch. In high school I learned German, French and English. I was good at French, especially grammar. During a school trip in Paris it turned out that I can't start a conversation. This is because we don't learn to converse at school. I had interests in India and started learning Hindi for myself. I was accepted for a student exchange program in India. For a whole year I spoke only Hindi. I speak fluent Hindi. I also learned Bengali and Sanskrit there. Although my native language and especially my native dialect is very similar to German, I still speak better Hindi. Living in a country where the language is spoken for a while is a good remedy to become fluent in that language.