Welcome!

And so it begins…

Well, actually it began a while ago. But so begins the documentation of my efforts. You will see
a lot of language-learning blogs out there, and I understand if you don’t want to go ahead and
read another one…

but maybe you’ll find something in here you haven’t thought of or seen before!

Ok, you’re still here! Welcome to my new blog. This blog is about my journeys learning languages from around the world. My hopes are to learn as many languages as I can in my lifetime, and
to speak to as many people as I can from different parts of the globe. My plan is to give you a
sense of the nitty-gritty daily grind of what learning a new language is like and show you
the progress that can be made learning a language on your own (NO CLASSES NEEDED!).

My goals for this blog are:

• to learn one language each year (I’ll specify what I mean by learn in a sec)
• provide you all with one video a month of me practicing my new language (this is mostly to keep me accountable, but might be fun to watch!)
• try to integrate helpful knowledge from my day job (I’ll fill you in on this later)
• and give you any tips and tricks I learn along the way

I’ll keep you, the readers, updated on what topics I’ve learned throughout each month and
journal any experiences I have in my new language. I might throw in some experiences with
my “old” languages as well.

So here’s what I mean by LEARN. The way I want to consider “learning a language” for the
sake of my yearly goals, will mean that I can comfortably hold a conversation about a variety
of topics with a native speaker without having to use a translator. That means, not a lot of long, awkward........................ pauses, and confused faces 😕😕😕. Of course, I won’t know every word, but I will know enough to talk about the word so that my communication partner will get it. This would be the same in reverse if he/she uses a word I don’t know. I guess this would be considered a B1 level? You can see what the levels mean on Wikipedia here: https://goo.gl/FjkPPM

Additionally, I will be trying to maintain/improve my current repertoire of languages. And this
will all be done on the side of having my wonderful day job and enjoying time with my family.

Here is my current language repertoire (all at varying levels):

• English (my first language)
• French
• Spanish
• ASL
• This year, I’ve been working on Mandarin!

I’ll keep you all posted! Stay tuned for upcoming posts about how I’ve learned these languages so far, and what my day job is all about. Please comment
below if there is a language you’d like to learn or have already started. À bientôt!