A Return to Languages

I’m starting language learning again after a year long break, and I’m doing it through intention setting. I don’t have a written plan or set schedule. I’ve simply set my goal of relearning Mandarin, French, and Spanish to the levels I was at before, but one thing has drastically changed:

This time I’m learning these languages just for me. I don’t have a school program I’m trying to get into or any real reason I need to learn these languages to any particular degree of fluency other than that I want to. As I write this, I’m identifying this as an area I need to explore further because knowing more clearly why I desire to learn these languages will help me with motivation & determining how to approach these languages.

Understanding Why for Motivation

Many times over the years I’ve taken breaks from language learning. I’ve always found myself drawn back in out of pure curiosity & desire to learn. My entire personal brand is built around language learning because I love it so much & because it’s a thing that I’m knowledgeable about, but I don’t always like doing it. This is my biggest goal going back into language learning: to love my process & truly make it my own. I want to romanticize the shit out of, not only language learning, but all parts of my life so that I wake up every day excited for what is to come.

But I’m not only a language learner, and that’s important to note because I spend a great deal of my time practicing karate, yoga, gardening, and taking walks around the Vigil Village, where I live, walking my dog Snoopy & spending time with my family. So let’s go through language by language and look at how each of my three target languages are connected to who I am & discover my motivation for learning them.

Mandarin

This is my newest language that I started learning roughly two years ago. I studied it for a year then took a year off. I’m most interested in this language right now because of its connection to my karate practice, energetics, herbology. The style of karate I practice is called Shaolin Kempo Karate. It’s based in the Shaolin Temple in China, so we have a quite a bit of Chinese culture & language embedded in our curriculum. The reason I took a year off of language learning was because I went on a bit of a spiritual quest. I learned how to activate kundalini energy or qi in myself and to facilitate this for others as well. At some point during this past year, I began my struggle through an introductory herbology course with the goal of learning about Chinese medicine & beginning to grow my own herbs as I study so that by the time I get good at it, I’ll have my own garden to harvest from. Looking at what I’ve what I’ve just written here, it’s become clear to me that my Mandarin practice is not just studying the language - it’s finding ways to learn more about the language as I practice these three other skills.

I have already started practicing Mandarin again using Duolingo. This is something that I was doing previously and that was beneficial when I was in the beginner stage of French & Spanish. I contemplated going back to taking lessons on iTalki but decided against it for now because I want to further explore learning my own way. My focus right now is on being consistent about practicing Duolingo daily to refresh what I’ve already learned and memorize more vocabulary & grammar structures. Once I feel good about my progress with this, I’d like to add on a writing practice of some kind, like choosing some words that are related to my other three skills and finding a fun way to practice writing them.

French

Honestly, I don’t know where to even start with French. It’s a language I started learning several years ago because I needed a third language, and it was accessible in a time when not many languages & online programs for other languages were. What I’m getting at is that I never really a strong desire to learn French, and I still don’t. I don’t not want to learn it, but I also don’t really have a good reason to learn it either. But given how much effort I’ve put into getting to an intermediate level, I’d like to maintain the skills I have - or least had.

Ways that I can do this that don’t feel like I’m forcing myself to do something I don’t want to are reading comics that I already have and meeting up with a French speaking friend I have locally. I’d like to also have some kind of writing practice, but every way I think about writing French feels like a chore. I’m leaving this area open for now and keeping these ways I can practice French in mind for when I feel like my Mandarin routine & practice is stable enough to add more language practice to.

Spanish

I definitely feel like my Spanish skills have regressed because I’m no longer reading, writing, speaking, and listening as much as I was when I was completing my bachelors degree. I still use it when I’m talking with family, but I’ve forgotten words, and I don’t feel as fluent as I once did.

A goal I really want to achieve with my Spanish is to be able to read complex literature as easily as I can in English - which sometimes isn’t saying much. Now that I think about this actually, reading more literature in English has been helping me improve my overall reading abilities. Although I would really like to jump right into a Spanish novel, a more achievable goal would be to read original Spanish of an English translation I’ve read. Otherwise, the amount of effort required to read the book makes it seem so daunting that I don’t want to do it. I want to become a better reader, and the way to do that is to find ways to practice that I’ll actually be consistent about doing even if they are very small steps. The first step here is to keep reading the book of bilingual poems by Pablo Neruda on my bedside table in English & Spanish - just reading & not worrying about how much I understand or how much I rely on English or which language I read first even if I jump back and forth between the two. I just need to read in the way that gets me reading.

A later goal for my Spanish is to travel to Mexico where my step-mom’s family lives. I’d like to do a kundalini activation for them down there - currently, I do bilingual ones up here when my Spanish speaking family attends. Which now that I think about it, this is another cool overlap between the energy work that I do and language. I’m not sure if there’s a name for it like qi or kundalini or prana, but there definitely is a deep culture connection in the Spanish speaking world to energetics. This is the area that I see potential to learn more about but not one that I feel like I can put into words at this moment.

Starting & Progressing with Goals

I’ve always found that the best way to get started is to jump in & start, so I’ve done just that in two weeks it took to write this post to completion. I’ve been consistent with my Mandarin practice this month on Duolingo & character writing and I’ve begun to dabble with integrating my Mandarin into my herbology & karate. And this is where we part this time - until the next phase!

Book recommendations are books I’ve read that I felt drawn to share with you as I created this blog post. These are affiliate links from Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases❤