Progress

So around the beginning of November I decided that I wanted to dedicate myself to learning  new language. I have English down pat (hopefully), my french isn’t going to impress anyone but I can explain what I want and need sufficiently. I already tried learning Spanish back in Grade 10,11 and some of it has stuck with me since.

So I thought why not German. My one grandmother is from Argentina so I tried learning Spanish. Both my grandparents I believe to be from the UK or Ireland so English. My other grandmother is from Czechoslovakia.

After a quick google I fond the common languages were Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Yiddish and German. So quite a bit to choose from. I decided on German just because it has always been a goal to travel to Eastern Europe and I figured that speaking German would be the better bet for more countries.

So off I went learning the language through Duolingo. I stuck to my goal of 15 minutes per day for a few weeks until I started losing my consistency to the point that I stopped 2 months later completely.

But now I decided to pick it up again and give it another go. But first I thought to try out google. So I opened up the google translate page and selected German and English. And began speaking the few words/ phrases that I knew.

The results….

Were much better than I anticipated. Other than the word “Ich” which is “I” and the word for afternoon, google recognized what I was saying.

Even for my limited knowledge of the German language this little triumph was just so amazing to me. That I was pronouncing the words well enough that a software was able to pick up on what was coming out of my mouth.

This experience if you will has given me motivation to start again and hopefully this time I can keep more consistent with it.

Let me know what languages you have tried learning and what programs or strategies you use to learn them.

Ciao!