What language are you learning and why?
I’m currently using Duolingo to learn Norwegian (the creators of the course write with the bokmål standard).
There isn’t a particularly good reason as to why I’ve chosen Norwegian- I have no family nor friends from that area of the world. I suppose I’d like to visit one day, but apart from a few choice phrases (“one beer please*”, “where is the bathroom?**”), there isn’t really a need to learn an entire language.
Sometime over the course of the past six years, I’ve found myself heavily enamored with the Germanic language branch. Being a native speaker of a Germanic language (English) and having taken a Germanic language in high school and college (German), I guess at some point, I wanted to consume more. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are readily available at this very moment in space and time to me through Duolingo. Yiddish, Icelandic, Old Norse, and Old English are on the bucket list. Faroese, Dutch, and “Pennsylvania Dutch” aren’t too high on that same list, but they’re there, and they exist. So I guess I’ll eventually learn them at some point too.
Which really, is the only really good reason anyone should have for wanting*** to learn a language. It’s there. It’s exists. So why not?
- *en øl takk
- **hvar er wc? [note: I don’t know yet how to say “bathroom” !]
- ***it’s important to distinguish the difference between wanting to learn a language versus needing to learn a language. Oftentimes here in the States, kids talk as though they are being “forced” to learn a foreign language at school, but what they may not realize is that the world will still cater to them, as they are an English-speaker. Elsewhere throughout the world, kids find themselves being forced to learn English as a means for future survival. Furthermore, even within the States, some first generation Americans (such as myself )will have an English-only household. There are many complex layers, usually stemming around issues of racism and xenophobia, at play here.
