My interest in languages might have one of the highest ROI’s for what produces joy in my life. The social aspects of language learning and The beauty of the language barrier are things I hold dearly. I don’t know if I could ever aptly describe the plethora of small joys and energizing interactions I have gotten from this disposition.
Like many other Americans in school, I had experience taking Spanish classes, but I never got involved. My first hit of self-study was in 2020, my friend had gifted me a Busuu plan and together we learned Japanese Hiragana and Katakana. Because of years of watching anime, I picked up basic Japanese quickly, I even had plans to study it in university, but that didn’t pull through.
My interest kindled into obsession when I discovered Ikenna on youtube in December 2021. The whole “Polyglot shocks native speakers” genre was just exploding with Xiaoma and even now I still watch channels like LanguageSimp and KuzuLanguages. Watching strangers react anywhere from pleasant surprise to “Please come stay with my family when you visit!” enchanted me with the fantasy of doing it myself.
Some of these polyglots started to see the virality of what they were doing and knew there was a huge market for people who wanted to learn the way they did. I was certainly one of them. I began to learn the best practices for study, I quickly got on Anki, (Spaced repetition systems) and immersed myself in as much reading and listening as I could. When my work at the time hit a wall, I stopped with Japanese. I visited mexico and later that year moved to Austin, so I decided to pick up Spanish.
Spanish is my first success with “learning to fluency” I suppose. Though I still have plenty of gaps that make me feel dumb sometimes, I had the first big “click” in the language when I was in Spain for about a month in October 2023. Ever since then I’ve been able to have conversations with just about whoever and I can converse reasonably enough with a bit of clarification or pauses needed here and there.