The language journey goes on: the emotional side of learning and discovering languages

I started with the Maleo-Polynesian languages, to Chinese, the ones of the Indochinese peninsula, Korean, Japanese, and so on.

The emotional side of language learning

I really liked the website http://proel.org/.

It is simple, but it allowed me to have an overview. I was really even emotionally involved in what I was reading and finding out.

My favorite language family, the one I found the most fascinating, was the Paleo-Siberian languages. It is a group of languages spoken in the Easternmost corner of Siberia, in the Kamchatka peninsula and surroundings. 

I used to feel genuine anxiety when reading that a language was in danger of extinction.

My second favorite family was the Altaic languages, the language family of Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchu, spreading from the Northern and Western borders of China up to… well, Greece.

I remembered I had found another website, https://altaica.ru/e_index.php. At that time, the English version was minimal, while most of the pages were in Russian. It seems that now the English version has improved. I loved Russian, but it was too difficult to learn alone while going to school.

I had no clue what I was reading about when I used to hear about cases, declensions, and so on! I just felt terribly frustrated looking at the texts and not being able to understand even a sentence!

The journey went on from the Altaic to the Uralic languages. I was fond of how Finnish sounded, but another group tour made me soon discover my real first great “language love”.

Tagalog was cool, but in the end, I never read that much about the Philippines nor learned the language enough to have a proper conversation.

This is why I don’t really consider a “love”.

Every language is a love story

For me, learning languages is really like having a love story.

There is the over-excitement of the first moments when you start discovering it, then the pure love without the excesses and then… well, the interest may also simply fade away at some point.

The language I’m talking about is Hungarian, which intrigued me during a trip to Budapest and Prague. This was another life-changing moment, but I will tell you more about it in another article.

The impact on the years ahead

All of this happened between 2004 and 2007.

Back to the story of my school, these three years marked my first contact with foreigners at school, I mean migrants.

At that time, at least for my generation born in the early 90s, not many Italians had this chance.

I live in Brussels, a very international city, but when I hear from some compatriots that they are amazed by being in contact with so many nationalities and cultures, well, it makes me smile. I find it a bit naive. I think you are in contact with a really international environment when you deal with people from outside Western Europe. 

When I was at school, there was a sort of untold apartheid between Italians and foreigners, be they from the first or second generation. Now 20 years later, the difference is visible.

It takes time.

In my case, I found my Italian classmates terribly boring. Luckily, my friend from the Philippines introduced me to a group of students with a migration background.

It was a totally new experience. I loved it.

Moroccans, Albanians, Chinese, Peruvians, and other nationalities were represented. It was simply fantastic. Thanks to a Moroccan girl from another class, I also got curious and spent a summer learning the Arabic alphabet. She was so lovely that she even gave me short Arabic “tests” with sentences to make, verbs to conjugate, etc.

This group is also the real reason why I ended up changing my job almost 20 years later.

But, we will see it in another article ;)