I'm currently trying to learn Russian and it's incredibly hard. I've been at it for more than a year now, I know perhaps a bit more than a thousand words and when I try to watch a youtube video in Russian I catch a few words here and there but that's about it.
This makes me realize how hard it is to learn a foreign language, which makes me wonder : how the hell did I manage to learn English? Granted, it took me many years, but still I'm just amazed I managed to do it at all.
As I recall, I think the most decisive part of my progress in English was that period I had during which I was spending most of my time watching US TV shows and movies. I distinctly remember that when I began, I needed the subtitles, sometimes even in my own native language, to follow the plot. I think the tough part was not so much the vocabulary, but the idioms and the speech patterns. Anyway slowly but surely I relied on the subtitles less and less, until one day I suddenly felt like that I didn't need subtitles at all. I can even recall which series it was : suddenly for this series it was like my ears were finally working : I could hear what was said and it immediately made sense in my head. It felt quite sudden, though maybe it's only with hindsight that it feels that way. Who knows.
In any case, I just felt like expressing how difficult and in a way mysterious the process of language learning is. I don't know if I'll ever manage to master an other foreign language as well as I master English, but if I ever do, I'll be proud of myself because damn that's a challenge.
This makes me realize how hard it is to learn a foreign language, which makes me wonder : how the hell did I manage to learn English? Granted, it took me many years, but still I'm just amazed I managed to do it at all.
As I recall, I think the most decisive part of my progress in English was that period I had during which I was spending most of my time watching US TV shows and movies. I distinctly remember that when I began, I needed the subtitles, sometimes even in my own native language, to follow the plot. I think the tough part was not so much the vocabulary, but the idioms and the speech patterns. Anyway slowly but surely I relied on the subtitles less and less, until one day I suddenly felt like that I didn't need subtitles at all. I can even recall which series it was : suddenly for this series it was like my ears were finally working : I could hear what was said and it immediately made sense in my head. It felt quite sudden, though maybe it's only with hindsight that it feels that way. Who knows.
In any case, I just felt like expressing how difficult and in a way mysterious the process of language learning is. I don't know if I'll ever manage to master an other foreign language as well as I master English, but if I ever do, I'll be proud of myself because damn that's a challenge.
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