Learning Spanish — Part 14.5
Someday, I may need to change the title of this series. This is kind of an “intermission” update.
For the last almost 3 years, I’ve been studying Spanish. Am I fluent? Not yet, but I am confident I will be, and that comprehensible input is working for me.
When I took this on, I considered it a “10 year project”. I wasn’t going to accept being a monolingual person anymore. I didn’t stop, even if the first or second thing I tried plateaued for me the way I tried it.
I still plan on doing a big end-of-the-year update for Spanish, but I realize, if I ever want to add a 3rd language, it would give me a big boost if, after I do my 1 hour of Spanish a day, I do like 10 minutes minimum of a 3rd language. Even 1–2 minutes a day.
Everyone has their reasons for picking the languages they want to learn. For me, I think I’m settled on Mandarin Chinese. Between Spanish, Mandarin and English, according to a rough search engine query — I would be able to speak to over 3 billion people (including second-language speakers of all 3).
Get K’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So I think I’ll try like this.
- Spanish is my priority. I don’t study Chinese if I haven’t finished at least an hour of Spanish.
- I’m not worried about reading/writing Chinese now. I feel like when starting from near-zero, there’s a huge jump between “superbeginner” to “mid-beginner”. I feel I would be really happy with myself if I could get to mid-beginner at a leisurely pace.
- Not promise myself too much/overcommit — I plan to try this as a short experiment and see how I feel at the end of the year.
I just realize, when you’re working with a time-scale of “10 years”, you can fit a lot of things in that amount of time, even if there isn’t a lot of time each day.
So who knows, maybe in a few months I’ll be calling these updates “Learning Langues”. Happy self-improvement! And to those who observe it, happy Veterans Day.
