Back to the Future;)

Hey, we are finally moving towards the present and you will see for yourself how much easier it becomes with each successive language that you can't  help but move on to the more "difficult" ones.

Now after the "usual" ones like French, German, Esperanto and Russian; I just wanted to explore another language which was unique in ways that these languages are not i.e. these have changed with time whereas apart from a select few languages which are "alive" and the ones which are "dead", all languages change with time. So, I began to look around and I previously had Sanskrit at school so that was out of option since it was still a fresh nightmare from the school life. Then, I just came across Icelandic, remember I had a World map in my room. I noticed this tiny little Island in the middle of the Atlantic, I looked things up and the language sounded pretty cool to me, not to mention the breathtaking beauty of Iceland ! Plus, with this language there is a certain "being different" factor, you see only about 350,000 people speak the language and for such a small native speaking population, the literature  that it produced in the middle-ages is wonderfully different and almost feels almost nostalgic of the way things were in the past. Not to mention that we are talking about the Viking past;P

Of course, there are very few resources which are to be found for the language but if you look them up in a smarter way, you will find literally tons of resources. You can still read the Sagas, which were written a thousand years back, that's how little the language has changed with time. You gotta respect the persistence of Icelanders, with which they just keep their language "pure" or in other words, the clear preference for the language is to coin new words from within the traditional vocabulary as opposed to the borrowed terms. Well, I respect this persistence.

Then again, being a modern and highly developed economy there are just so so many podcasts in the language that you can listen and there is this free course on the net by the name Íslenska fyrir alla, which is really fun to go through, once you get going.

After all, who isn't fascinated by the Nordic Gods; Thor, Odin, Freya or Loki etc !!

I kept studying it on and off, though never regularly but I found that whenever I returned back to the language most of the words came right back as well. So, this eased my anxiety about "losing" the language. I think, one can only lose the active aspects of the language, not the passive ones. This was the beginning of my general interest and fascination with the North and the Nordic.

At the beginning of the 4th semester, say about last August. I decided to explore the "mainstream" Nordic languages and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it's a common saying that you get 3 languages instead of just 1. Though that is certainly true, there are subtle differences between Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Initially, I went on with the Swedish language as it makes it's presence felt even in Wikipedia, has more than million pages over there. This is just an indication of the presence of a language on the internet and I find that this correlates with the number of people who speak the language a the mother tongue. Of all the Scandinavian countries, Sweden has the highest number of native speakers. 

But this time, I wanted to study the language a bit differently, to test a new technique which had been forming itself at the back of my mind. I went right on with the a book and having a background in German and Icelandic, most of the words were just so similar that I was happy I was able to understand about 80 percent of what I opted to read. Needless to say that there is no dearth of resources for the language on the Internet, think about it, this is after all, the language of the Nobel Prize;)

I can honestly, tell you that the entire process was becoming easier and was losing much of the initial "difficulty" that had inspired me to take this on in the first place. Plus, from My studies [ I read far wide, sometimes deep;P ], I was gravitating towards the beauty of the Dialectic and was learning to respect and understand Differences in a ways which had never occurred to me before. Things like, perhaps differences exist only so we may gain more of an individuality, both at the individual as well as at a larger community level. Why not look at these differences differently and appreciate them more, but instead of obsessing on them why not focus on the similarities. How this realization came about in practice is the reason why I decided to learn Norwegian, Polish and Spanish as well.

You know, after a while the entire process becomes automated, more efficient and more natural for that reason. The main and the biggest hurdle is just deciding to get started, once you do, it's a snowball. It builds on itself, gets bigger and bigger with time and moves faster and faster. I did the same thing the last three languages that I did with Swedish, I went right on to a book, read it through and then just started to make the language a part of my life through podcast, through music, through movies, blogs anything at all.

Then I time came that I yearned for a challenge , being perfectly aware at the same time that I am not really "fluent" in any of these, but well, it depends mostly on need. None of the languages that I did was out of a dire necessity to talk, but rather just to explore and widen my horizon. I did ! And when the time comes, probably towards the beginning of next year, I will focus exclusively upon a select few of these languages which suit my needs and my interests best at the time and just speak them through, be really fluent in them. Of course, it's gonna be difficult, No one said it's gonna be easy; that's how it's supposed to be. All Good Things come about with Hard Work. Period.

Now, in the next post I am gonna talk more about the way I kept motivating myself, for it did get monotonous at times and there were moments in which I just felt like shelving the whole thing up for a while and just doing something else. I always found myself, immersed in these languages in one way or another, these have become an intrinsic part of my life, of my Weltanschauung, of how I express myself, even to myself. It's a change, an irreversible change, like evolution. You should do it, I promise you won't regret it, ever !!