I feel like the primary purpose of this blog will just be to catalogue when I level up in languages on Duolingo, but hopefully I'll have some more interesting posts about language and language learning too.
For the first fourteen or so years of my life, I was mono-lingual (English). But then I took German in high school. My ancestry is completely German, so I felt a bit foolish that I didn't know my ancestral language. Then since it seemed that all of the smart kids in high school were taking French, I added that my junior year. By college, I felt like I was missing out because I didn't know Latin. Running across some Italian quotes in some books I was reading one summer made me feel ignorant for not knowing Italian.
By this point (2013), I had discovered Duolingo, and, basically, this whole thing snowballed. In 2015 alone, I started learning six languages (three in one month!). Currently, I'm up to fourteen foreign languages, and I figure that by this point, I might as well try to surpass Noah Webster's twenty-six.
Here's a list of languages I'm studying, along with (sometimes rough) dates of when I started them:
- English (native language)
- German (fall 2006)
- French (late 2008)
- Latin (August 2011)
- Italian (9 June 2014)
- Dutch (August? 2014)
- Spanish (2 May 2015)
- Norwegian (28 May 2015)
- Esperanto (28 May 2015)
- Danish (24 September 2015)
- Russian (2 November 2015)
- Polish (10 December 2015)
- Hebrew (21 June 2016)
- Greek (10 October 2016)
- Welsh (3 January 2017)