Very Personal Reflection
Dear Constant Readers,
I know it hasn't been a week yet since I last wrote, but there was some stuff I've wanted to write about, I guess mostly just to hear myself talk, but also to tell anyone who might care to listen. As with all my entries though, they concern my personal things, so I don't know of how much interest it is to anyone. I do like telling my friends (almost the only people who read this, I imagine) about things I have going on in my life, however, and that's the main purpose I write this blog.
When I was 15 or so, I started learning Esperanto on my own. I read about it in a book called "All About Language" by Mario Pei and heard it was one of the easiest, if not the easiest, language in the world to learn. After a while I started to consider learning this language, not for world peace, or universal communication, as the Esperanto community promotes, but because I was so eager to learn another language, something I'd dreamed about for years even when I was that young, and the promise of learning an easy language that one could learn quickly was very tempting. So I went to Amazon.com and bought "Teach Yourself Esperanto" and "Teach Yourself Esperanto Dictionary" and proceeded to work my way through the language.
No one really understood or supported me as I can recall. My family was confounded as to why I would want a language that is not even natural, has no native speakers (this is false, by the way), that has no practical purpose in the world, and has no one that I could speak with. Why not learn something more conventional?
Still, it was something important to me. I wanted to learn this language. I was also quite naive and inexperienced in language learning, which is another good reason I tried to learn Esperanto. I had never learned another language before, let alone on my own. I found out soon enough though, that learning solo was my preferred way, so I wanted to get it right.
The problem was, I had bad ideas about what it was to learn a language. It's not that my standards were too high: I think one should have high standards if they want. That's not bad. But my standards were too exact, and language-learning is an art. In art, there is not always room for exactness. In other words: I felt I had to master every word, every idiom, and drill myself to know it forwards and backwards.
The success I wanted in Esperanto kept eluding me. I expected that one I learned the language, there would be a feeling of accomplishment, like running a race and coming to an end. I practiced Esperanto in a chat room, and eventually felt that I had achieved a level of fluency, which to a point is true, but I never reached the level that I wanted to. I toyed with the idea of using other programs on the internet, other language exchanges, but aside from the Esperanto chat room, I didn't like chat rooms, and never pursued the options: I somehow didn't feel the urgency. Maybe I was being lazy.
It was during this though that I began to learn that learning a grammar does not equal learning a language. I learned course book backwards and forwards, and still return to it sometimes, but still couldn't figure out when I didn't have the "feeling" of closure that I wanted. I wasn't satisfied with what I had accomplished thus far, and often I just saw shortcomings instead of successes when I spoke, constantly referring to my dog-eared dictionary. I felt overwhelmed by vocabulary to be learned, and made up my own words sometimes, using the Esperanto feature of being a root-based language (one can string concepts together to create new concepts based on root words, simply put). But I didn't feel this was really helpful, and the amount official words I wanted to know started to frustrate me.
I never found anyone to personally speak with, there were no Esperanto clubs comfortably within the proximity of my area, and listening to Radio Polonia (the Esperanto broadcasting station I used at the time) didn't seem to be helping me much.
I never gave up on Esperanto, and never have. But priorities have changed a bit. Despite never falling in love with some aspects of the language, namely the sounds of it, I still enjoyed tinkering with it. I was disappointed in that it didn't help me learn other languages to the degree I thought it might. Instead, other languages have helped me learn Esperanto. I have never lost my interest in learning "uncommon languages", in fact I'm more interested in them than I am in many major world languages.
I attempted to learn the language again in college, rather relearn what I had learned and then finally get a level of satisfaction....By now, years later, I understood that there is no "closure" when one learns a language. It's a skill, not a race. Like learning to write. And I've learned to view my accomplishments in the light that they are steps in the right direction, not shortcomings where I've failed. I've written about this before, too, probably quite a bit.
And I always hoped that somewhere in the world I'd run into another Esperanto speaker in person. Finally, 7 years later after opening the book to learn it, I did. I've written meeting Judith and Chuck earlier in my blog, and although now I try to speak with them both in Esperanto, as they are the only speakers I personally know.
Speaking with them though has opened my eyes though, making me feel that I've lost something all these years. When I started out, I tried so hard to learn this language, and yet somehow the success I wanted, fluency, which, by the way, is like trying to pin down water with a fork, somehow got away from me. I've fallen out of touch with the culture that goes with it. Did I know if I would like it? I don't know, I was quite young and didn't really trust other people I met online, plus I had no way of meeting them even *if* I did trust them. But I never had the chance, or gave myself the chance, to find out if I would like the international, rather unique culture that has developed around it. I've become quite out of touch with it, what little touch I had in it to begin with.
And I feel that I let opportunities get away when I had the chance to really seize something. Chances to use all the resources at my disposal (chat rooms, language exchanges, voicechats, God only knows what else) to build up a decent working knowledge of the language. After seeing how they could have worked for me, I wonder why didn't I do that? I could have been somewhere further than I am now. That's kind of a silly thing to say, you could say that about anything almost. But I really feel it in this case.
The thing is, I'm only realizing this all now. I have refined my learning methods quite a bit, and have relaxed quite a bit too in being so harsh on myself, but I still try hard to learn what I can, and have don't like seeing gaps in what I've learned, where a word is missing, or a passage is hard to read, or something like that. It happens often still in my German or Spanish or Esperanto. There's not quick cure for it, it's just learning, and it's supposed to be fun. Sometimes I don't know how people do it though. I don't feel I have yet. To be able to read a book in another language without having it feel like reading instructions to building a grill, ie, more like a chore than a pleasure.
So why do it? Because I know that it will come. But when? There's no closure, but when will I be comfortable with what I learn? Those are standards I haven't even set myself yet, because I don't want to set a boundary for myself.
I think for some people, doing what you do must really be both a labor of love and faith. You have to love what you do, because even when you get frustrated, or realize how much ground you may have lost, you have to know that that's part of the game, and if you didn't know that, you had to have learned it sooner or later. And also faith that you can do it. Some things are bubbling to the surface here, I'm seeing. One is pretty obvious: That languages are pretty important to me. That's not shocking. The other one is though, that if I'm talking about faith in believing in myself, even though I have a hard time seeing results sometimes, I must have a lot more confidence in myself than I originally thought. I've always personally believed I'm really, really good at what I do in this field. So when I get stuck in a common conversation about someone telling me how they want to email microphish files to their account so they don't have to screw with the damned machine anymore (OK, that's not that common of vocabulary, I can't even spell microphish right, but maybe you get the idea), I'm not sure how to react.
This is a scary thing for me. This is a hobby I've loved so much for so long, that when I sometimes don't even know how to look at it, what does that mean? I believe that somehow, I was meant to making linguistics a part of my life. As I've tried to make clear, I have other loves in my life, and seek a balanced one, if there is such a thing, but this has been one of the most important things within myself.
I think, ultimately, I am comparing myself with others, great linguists, or people who have someone learned something I admire. That's a no-no that I have to guard against falling into. I used to be amazed by how many languages a person could speak. I still think it's pretty cool, but far less dazzling. What amazes me now is the depth to which some know them. I used to be hellbent on accents and perfect pronunciation. And those are still of high high high importance to me. As is grammatical accuracy and all those frills. But the more I've learned, thought, listened to others, the more I see the importances of learning how to express myself in a way I want to...that's more important to me now. And that's also the hardest part of learning a language well, the eloquence. The soul in the poet's body, maybe.
There's a difference between being inspired by someone, and comparing yourself to them in such a way you feel overshadowed. You shouldn't be that way. Get in the light and make your own shadows. And I have sooooooo much left to learn.
For those who have read this whole thing, I appreciate it. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Tristan
I know it hasn't been a week yet since I last wrote, but there was some stuff I've wanted to write about, I guess mostly just to hear myself talk, but also to tell anyone who might care to listen. As with all my entries though, they concern my personal things, so I don't know of how much interest it is to anyone. I do like telling my friends (almost the only people who read this, I imagine) about things I have going on in my life, however, and that's the main purpose I write this blog.
When I was 15 or so, I started learning Esperanto on my own. I read about it in a book called "All About Language" by Mario Pei and heard it was one of the easiest, if not the easiest, language in the world to learn. After a while I started to consider learning this language, not for world peace, or universal communication, as the Esperanto community promotes, but because I was so eager to learn another language, something I'd dreamed about for years even when I was that young, and the promise of learning an easy language that one could learn quickly was very tempting. So I went to Amazon.com and bought "Teach Yourself Esperanto" and "Teach Yourself Esperanto Dictionary" and proceeded to work my way through the language.
No one really understood or supported me as I can recall. My family was confounded as to why I would want a language that is not even natural, has no native speakers (this is false, by the way), that has no practical purpose in the world, and has no one that I could speak with. Why not learn something more conventional?
Still, it was something important to me. I wanted to learn this language. I was also quite naive and inexperienced in language learning, which is another good reason I tried to learn Esperanto. I had never learned another language before, let alone on my own. I found out soon enough though, that learning solo was my preferred way, so I wanted to get it right.
The problem was, I had bad ideas about what it was to learn a language. It's not that my standards were too high: I think one should have high standards if they want. That's not bad. But my standards were too exact, and language-learning is an art. In art, there is not always room for exactness. In other words: I felt I had to master every word, every idiom, and drill myself to know it forwards and backwards.
The success I wanted in Esperanto kept eluding me. I expected that one I learned the language, there would be a feeling of accomplishment, like running a race and coming to an end. I practiced Esperanto in a chat room, and eventually felt that I had achieved a level of fluency, which to a point is true, but I never reached the level that I wanted to. I toyed with the idea of using other programs on the internet, other language exchanges, but aside from the Esperanto chat room, I didn't like chat rooms, and never pursued the options: I somehow didn't feel the urgency. Maybe I was being lazy.
It was during this though that I began to learn that learning a grammar does not equal learning a language. I learned course book backwards and forwards, and still return to it sometimes, but still couldn't figure out when I didn't have the "feeling" of closure that I wanted. I wasn't satisfied with what I had accomplished thus far, and often I just saw shortcomings instead of successes when I spoke, constantly referring to my dog-eared dictionary. I felt overwhelmed by vocabulary to be learned, and made up my own words sometimes, using the Esperanto feature of being a root-based language (one can string concepts together to create new concepts based on root words, simply put). But I didn't feel this was really helpful, and the amount official words I wanted to know started to frustrate me.
I never found anyone to personally speak with, there were no Esperanto clubs comfortably within the proximity of my area, and listening to Radio Polonia (the Esperanto broadcasting station I used at the time) didn't seem to be helping me much.
I never gave up on Esperanto, and never have. But priorities have changed a bit. Despite never falling in love with some aspects of the language, namely the sounds of it, I still enjoyed tinkering with it. I was disappointed in that it didn't help me learn other languages to the degree I thought it might. Instead, other languages have helped me learn Esperanto. I have never lost my interest in learning "uncommon languages", in fact I'm more interested in them than I am in many major world languages.
I attempted to learn the language again in college, rather relearn what I had learned and then finally get a level of satisfaction....By now, years later, I understood that there is no "closure" when one learns a language. It's a skill, not a race. Like learning to write. And I've learned to view my accomplishments in the light that they are steps in the right direction, not shortcomings where I've failed. I've written about this before, too, probably quite a bit.
And I always hoped that somewhere in the world I'd run into another Esperanto speaker in person. Finally, 7 years later after opening the book to learn it, I did. I've written meeting Judith and Chuck earlier in my blog, and although now I try to speak with them both in Esperanto, as they are the only speakers I personally know.
Speaking with them though has opened my eyes though, making me feel that I've lost something all these years. When I started out, I tried so hard to learn this language, and yet somehow the success I wanted, fluency, which, by the way, is like trying to pin down water with a fork, somehow got away from me. I've fallen out of touch with the culture that goes with it. Did I know if I would like it? I don't know, I was quite young and didn't really trust other people I met online, plus I had no way of meeting them even *if* I did trust them. But I never had the chance, or gave myself the chance, to find out if I would like the international, rather unique culture that has developed around it. I've become quite out of touch with it, what little touch I had in it to begin with.
And I feel that I let opportunities get away when I had the chance to really seize something. Chances to use all the resources at my disposal (chat rooms, language exchanges, voicechats, God only knows what else) to build up a decent working knowledge of the language. After seeing how they could have worked for me, I wonder why didn't I do that? I could have been somewhere further than I am now. That's kind of a silly thing to say, you could say that about anything almost. But I really feel it in this case.
The thing is, I'm only realizing this all now. I have refined my learning methods quite a bit, and have relaxed quite a bit too in being so harsh on myself, but I still try hard to learn what I can, and have don't like seeing gaps in what I've learned, where a word is missing, or a passage is hard to read, or something like that. It happens often still in my German or Spanish or Esperanto. There's not quick cure for it, it's just learning, and it's supposed to be fun. Sometimes I don't know how people do it though. I don't feel I have yet. To be able to read a book in another language without having it feel like reading instructions to building a grill, ie, more like a chore than a pleasure.
So why do it? Because I know that it will come. But when? There's no closure, but when will I be comfortable with what I learn? Those are standards I haven't even set myself yet, because I don't want to set a boundary for myself.
I think for some people, doing what you do must really be both a labor of love and faith. You have to love what you do, because even when you get frustrated, or realize how much ground you may have lost, you have to know that that's part of the game, and if you didn't know that, you had to have learned it sooner or later. And also faith that you can do it. Some things are bubbling to the surface here, I'm seeing. One is pretty obvious: That languages are pretty important to me. That's not shocking. The other one is though, that if I'm talking about faith in believing in myself, even though I have a hard time seeing results sometimes, I must have a lot more confidence in myself than I originally thought. I've always personally believed I'm really, really good at what I do in this field. So when I get stuck in a common conversation about someone telling me how they want to email microphish files to their account so they don't have to screw with the damned machine anymore (OK, that's not that common of vocabulary, I can't even spell microphish right, but maybe you get the idea), I'm not sure how to react.
This is a scary thing for me. This is a hobby I've loved so much for so long, that when I sometimes don't even know how to look at it, what does that mean? I believe that somehow, I was meant to making linguistics a part of my life. As I've tried to make clear, I have other loves in my life, and seek a balanced one, if there is such a thing, but this has been one of the most important things within myself.
I think, ultimately, I am comparing myself with others, great linguists, or people who have someone learned something I admire. That's a no-no that I have to guard against falling into. I used to be amazed by how many languages a person could speak. I still think it's pretty cool, but far less dazzling. What amazes me now is the depth to which some know them. I used to be hellbent on accents and perfect pronunciation. And those are still of high high high importance to me. As is grammatical accuracy and all those frills. But the more I've learned, thought, listened to others, the more I see the importances of learning how to express myself in a way I want to...that's more important to me now. And that's also the hardest part of learning a language well, the eloquence. The soul in the poet's body, maybe.
There's a difference between being inspired by someone, and comparing yourself to them in such a way you feel overshadowed. You shouldn't be that way. Get in the light and make your own shadows. And I have sooooooo much left to learn.
For those who have read this whole thing, I appreciate it. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Tristan
posted by Tristan | 10:23 PM
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