Talk With The World

Interestingly enough I the only languages I consider to be mine are Catalan and English, the first one being well ahead of the second as it is my mother tongue. I consider myself as bilingual as Spanish is also a language I acquired since I was young, despite this, I feel more comfortable expressing myself in the two languages mentioned before; This might be a matter of self-consciousness, as I consider my accent to be “too Catalan” when speaking Spanish and sometimes feel embarrassed. Is this a matter of dialectal privilege? I reckon it probably is, either way, I’d like to read your opinions in the comment section.

 

 

Throughout my life I have learned other languages, there are some that have miraculously survived the past of time: French and German (how original). I took two years of the first in high school and then taught myself by listening to music and engaging in conversation with distant relatives of mine. The second is my father’s L2 and you’d think that I’m tremendously lucky, well… That didn’t go that way, I didn’t learn much German in my childhood so I had to wait until my late teens when I started going to a language school and then progressed to university. Looking back, this is probably the generation of my family where more languages are learned, as my parents do speak several languages: my mother speaks Catalan and Spanish but also learns English and German, while my dad speaks all of those but does not have such good “formal” formation on the first two, as his education was mostly in Germany where Spanish was spoken at home but rarely written, and learned Catalan later on in life. Most of my grandparents are either monolingual or bilingual in Catalan and Spanish because a) they immigrated to Catalonia or were born in Catalan-speaking territories. For the information I’ve gathered from my great-grandparents they were monolingual, there was no need to learn more languages as they had never abandoned their hometown where there was everything they needed to live.

 

 

Other languages that I’ve learned throughout my life have been: Norwegian, out of sheer curiosity when a YouTube video appeared on my feed and liked the sound of the language, I wasn’t very successful though, I self-taught myself for a couple of months but later desisted out of lack of contact with native speakers. Then came Korean, I lived some of the years were South Korea suddenly became a country that aroused interest in the West and I fell into that, interestingly enough the music and TV shows were secondary to me (I found it somewhat fetishizing and slightly creepy) and was more interested in the day-to-day life and traditions. I learned the writing system and I still can read and write it, the only problem being i learned very little grammar and remember barely any vocabulary due to lack of more “formal” learning. In the end (a year and a half ago) while on my Erasmus at the University of Liverpool I took a three-month Basque module which I really enjoyed and had the chance to learn a lot, but I find it rather absurd that it is easier to learn Basque in the UK than it is to learn it in Catalonia, why do you think that happens?

 

All in all, and loosely according to the CEFR, I have created this table that summarises my languages:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What about the future?

 

I would certainly like to prove the language levels I have got and get certificates of them, as there is something we call titulitis that affects more and more employers nowadays. Apart from this, I would like to learn more Basque so whenever I visit a Basque-speaking territory I get to blend in properly. I would also like to learn German outside of a classroom as well as a non-European language as one of the aspects I enjoy the most of language learning is engaging with different cultures and changing my views, which ultimately makes you happier.