I thought it might be interesting to hear what experiences people have on here with languages.
I started learning (Mandarin) Chinese in 2014. I had graduated from high school a year early but, for various reasons, I didn't immediately go to college. This wasn't really a "gap year", since that term makes me think of people going on luxurious trips around the world or at least working in some capacity. I just sat in my room without going outside. Until the spring of 2015, when I started seeing a therapist, I don't think I spoke aloud with anyone except my parents. Very early on though, I think maybe a week or two after I finished high school, I bought an old Chinese textbook and downloaded the tapes that were supposed to go with it off the internet. Over the summer and fall working through the textbook was pretty much all I did.
Now, almost 7 years later, studying Chinese is still my only real hobby. It has really taught me how much time you can put into something and still be nowhere near where you want to be. When I started studying Chinese, I imagined that language learning was like a progress bar filling up, that there would be a day where Chinese was officially learned for me, and I could move on and study other things. I guess my expectation was that if I could comfortably talk to Chinese people about most things and could comfortably read novels without constantly checking a dictionary, then my work would be finished. But that's not really the case at all. In reading, I'm constantly discovering, like, some super simple character I learned in my first year or two has some other meaning I've never noticed before. Or I find myself in social situations I've never been in before that seem to require a vocabulary that I haven't acquired. The most extreme example of this was playing Mahjong for the first time, having the rules explained to me -- there is this whole micro-language I'd never encountered before for talking about that game. Though less extreme examples happen almost everyday.
And beyond all that, there's something much more complicated, which I'll call the cultural element, since I can't really think of a better word. I don't want to say too much, because I feel like I'm totally unqualified to talk about culture and cultural differences in any intelligent way -- but I've slowly realized that in learning a language that you weren't born into, you are taking something that doesn't belong to you, that you can never hope to fully understand, and there's a certain responsibility that comes with that. I'm still coming to terms with it. It's not something I had ever even remotely considered back before I started learning Chinese! I guess I'd thought language was like this module you can just install in your brain then be done with, which isn't really how it works. You have to actually talk to people, read people's writings, consider shared experiences that you were never and can never be a part of, yet still try to do your best to understand. In doing that, there's a whole universe of complexities that arise.
In the last six months I've started very casually learning Japanese. I just want to understand song lyrics! And well, there's also a bunch of books I want to read with no English translations -- but that's still a ways off. It's weird how simultaneously easy and hard Japanese is. It's easy in the sense that, even at the basic level I'm at, I can play through games in Japanese and still understand 80% of what's going on. This is of course because I know what most of the Chinese characters mean (though they are sometimes used in very different ways from how they're used in Chinese). When you combine that with some basic Japanese grammar knowledge (and also all the katakana English words), it's possible to at least read the language and vaguely understand things. But Japanese is incredibly hard in the sense that it basically contains all of Chinese (or at least a certain form of Chinese) as a subset, so I have to relearn the pronunciation of every character, but there's also the completely different native language coexisting in there that has its own multi-millenium history and its own idiosyncrasies that I'm now just barely beginning to understand. It will be a very very long time until I'm even remotely comfortable with spoken Japanese.
So that's me. What about you? Share your experiences!
