Kachii.com

Learning foreign languages has to be one of my more obscure hobbies. I can’t say that I’ve had loads of influence in my life to learn foreign languages. My dad speaks a little French, and my grandma speaks a lot of French but that’s about as far as our family goes. I started learning French in school when I was about nine which I continued until I was sixteen, achieving a grade B GCSE. I also had two years of compulsory German in school which I don’t remember enjoying. When I was thirteen I told my mum that I wanted to learn Japanese. She told me that if I couldn’t even learn German, she wasn’t going to bother paying for me to have tuition in Japanese. That idea found its way out of my window pretty quick.

After I left school I realised that if I had paid attention in lessons I might be better off now – there would be a whole new internet world opened up for me, in French! I tried to bring myself back up to speed with French and was a member of a French language pixel art forum. That was a few years ago. I also expressed a brief interest in learning Korean. Then I remembered, I wanted to learn Japanese!

Six years after originally hoping that I could learn Japanese I set about doing it on my own. There were lots of resources for Japanese learning popping up all over the internet. I browsed through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar and Nihongo Resources. A few months later I had purchased a textbook and a couple of dictionaries. A year and a half later and I’ve passed the JLPT level 4 and have over ten textbooks and an assortment of Japanese reading material and am hoping to join intermediate classes at university in September 2008. It’s just another thing for my parents to brag about. Oh, how I hate having to speak Japanese to please house guests.

Despite all the rigorous Japanese studying I still have an interest in learning Dutch – which I own another textbook for. I have many Dutch friends online and it would be great to be able to communicate with them in their native tongue, even though all Netherlanders speak fluent English! I have also recently contemplated learning Arabic and Latin. You could say that I was somewhat desparate to become a polyglot.