The Flemish polyglot

It’s the holiday season and I have 2 weeks off work. What better moment than this to immerse myself in all the languages I am learning. I will log here what I do and when I do it. No logging of time spent, this always ends up in a race against myself, I prefer to focus on the process and to enjoy what I am doing. The past year I almost forget how instantly happy language learning always made me feel. I have my drive back now and I only want to have fun! Day 7 I hadn’t planned it like this, but what a perfect last day of my language immersion week. 3 italki conversational lessons! This is my first time using italki and I am pleasantly surprised. I use their app on my iPad and I find it very intuitive. It didn’t take me too long to figure out where exactly is what. And where I could find my favourite teachers. I decided to go for conversational classes only, since I study the grammar at home and the main thing for me is to feel comfortable using the languages actively. ...

The year is coming to a close, so it is time to reflect upon how my language learning went the past four months. Earlier this year, I almost give up on language learning completely because of unrealistically high goals. I was focussing so much on getting pages and pages of vocabulary into my head and on studying more and more hours … that I forgot how much fun it actually is. Therefore I decided to not set any more goals but give myself a set of ‘guidelines’ for September-December. I posted them here on August 30. Let’s see how I did! English and French are still my main working languages. My goal was to read books in both languages, which I didn’t do. But I did watch a few episodes of Secrets d’histoire in French, I read a history magazine in French and I did listen to loads of youtube videos (mainly on language learning or anything language related). So although I did not do what I set out to do, I have practised listening skills for both languages. Two more worki...

Although I had forbidden myself to study any new languages this year, I just can’t help myself. But hey, the year is almost over, so that doesn’t really count anymore, does it? There are 2 languages that have always been lingering in the back of my mind, Icelandic and Afrikaans. I had no plans to study these in the near future however. With Bulgarian (A2) and Korean at a lower level and Spanish (upper B1) and Italian (lower B1) at an intermediate level, I have enough on my plate as it is. But … A few weeks ago I watched one of Lindie Botes’s videos, in which she answered the question: How long does it take to become fluent. If you look at the languages that a polyglot speaks, so she said, you might notice many languages from the same language family, such as Germanic languages. If you are a native of let’s say Dutch (like I am), she continued, you will easily pick up Afrikaans and on top of that, Afrikaans is a very easy language to learn. And then it clicked. Why not go f...