1. Spanish. This one is a given. Nowadays, depending on where in the U.S. you are, it has almost become a necessity. Plus, it's just one I have always wanted to learn. When I was 6, I had a next-door neighbor who couldn't speak any English. I couldn't speak any Spanish... but we still played together. She would point to something and say what it was in Spanish. Then I'd say what it was in English. Somehow it worked out. In 5th grade, I was the only kid on my bus who didn't know Spanish. I always wished I could understand what they were saying. My middle school didn't have languages as a class option, so I started taking Spanish as soon as I got to high school. One of the first days of class, the teacher had me read something - in Spanish - out of the book. She then looked at me with confusion and said, "are you a native speaker?" haha! Apparently my pronunciation was so good from the get-go that she thought I was a native speaker. And hey, my name is Marisa... spelled the traditional way (with ONE s) ...
2. Russian. Yeah, so some may think that this one came out of the blue, but really it didn't. It started in high school. I did an honors choir thing and one of the songs we sang was in Russian (it was actually the Tetris theme! -->the music is a Russian folk song!). I just thought it sounded so incredibly cool. And below the English spelling of the text was the Russian - in Cyrillic. I had absolutely no idea how to read it, but it looked awesome. That same year, my dad went on a business trip to Russia and brought back all sorts of cool things from there. Then, I had 3 or 4 friends called on missions to Russia. My freshman year a guy in my ward whom I became friends with was from Russia. And for some reason, the cable we had on the TV on our floor in the dorms had a Russian channel... I'm still not sure why. Somehow, I always ended up being close friends with people who served in Russia. I randomly happened upon this unknown foreign singer whose music I loved... and eventually found out she was Russian, and in fact singing in Russian. Seriously, how does that even happen? A few family friends in my ward back home speak Russian. A bunch of my favorite movies have lots of Russian in them, and I hate not knowing what they're saying! And then, the same Russian friend from freshman year randomly ended up being in my Biology class 3 1/2 years later. That was the semester that I decided I was finally going to buckle down and start learning.
So on my own, in December I started to learn Russian! I found a sweet program online called byki.com - which I highly recommend, as it is free - that gives you flash cards with pictures and the vocab words, and does it in 5 different steps so by the end there is no way you don't know the words! It is absolutely fabulous... but only so far as learning vocab words. As far as formulating sentences, understanding the roots, adding verbs and their respective conjugations... I needed a bit more help. So for Christmas, I got a Russian grammar book, a "555 Russian Verbs" book, and an English-Russian dictionary (and a Russian Book of Mormon). I was really good at studying it for about a month and it sort of died down from February/March until... now, actually (I was a bit pre-occupied in those months in between!). Last week I finally got back into it and was surprised at how many of the words from byki I'd remembered! That program seriously rocks (it comes in 70+ different languages too, fyi). This week I FINALLY started trying to figure out and understand the basic grammar. More to come on that...
3. Italian. It sounds cool, I would love to go to Italy, and it would be awesome to know the language once I finally make it there one day. Plus, one of the biggest reasons is because it is very similar to Spanish... so once I fully pick up Spanish, Italian won't be that difficult to learn.
4. Portuguese. This one is quite similar to what I just said about Italian. It is even more similar to Spanish and thus, won't be too difficult to learn if I have a solid foundation of Spanish first.
5. Ukrainian. Again, a similar answer to 3 and 4, but Ukrainian and Russian are quite similar as well. If I become fluent in Russian, I want to learn Ukrainian as well, since they are already share so many close similarities.
Well there you have it. For those of you who didn't know, now you know: I love languages... and I have a whole list of ones that I want to learn in my lifetime. Hopefully I will get to all 5 of those, but if not... I'd be relatively satisfied if I mastered Spanish and Russian. Those are my main two. What are yours? :P
1 comment:
All good languages to know! I should be better at Spanish than I am and I loved learning ASL which I've now forgotten a lot of. I can't say I ever really wanted to learn Russian, although it would be cool to sound like you're going to kill someone every time you said something. I did try to learn some French. I know a couple of phrases. I'm so happy you have a blog!
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