My Language-Learning Journey so far

25 December 2020

Hello everyone and happy holidays! My name is Nihar and I like to learn languages. Language-learning has come easily to me, since I speak two languages natively, Marathi as my mother tongue, being the first language of my family, and English as the language of the United States, where I’ve grown up and currently live, so I find language learning to be an easy way to manifest my love of languages (I’m a linguistics major), as well as impress people.

Past those two languages, I started learning Spanish for a little while in elementary school, but I don’t really remember much of that; the vast majority of my learning Spanish comes from when I started taking Spanish in eighth grade. I studied for five years in junior high and high school (taking AP Spanish my senior year), and I’m now on a track to receiving a minor in Spanish; I’ve just finished my first semester of college.

In 2018 I began teaching myself French, and this was the first language I taught myself (and technically the only one), as I was going to France the following summer. In the summer of 2018, I learned all of what my school teaches in French 1 & 2. I kept learning throughout the rest of the year and the next year, but when I went to France I realized there was so much more to learn, so I kept learning it. I took my university’s placement test for French for fun and got a 412/600, and just two days ago I took a fluency test and it placed me at a B2 level, though the test was solely reading, and my writing and speaking are far worse.

Somewhere wrapped up in this journey is German. I can’t remember when I started learning German, but my dad speaks German so I was able to pick it up somewhat from him. I’m certainly significantly worse in German than I am in French; I think my score on my university’s German placement test was 224/600.

Thank you for reading, and here’s to a joyous holiday season and a better 2021!