Learning French, English, Russian, German, Slovak — Persistence and Motivation
If you ask me, what are the two key factors for learning a new language successfully, I would say Persistence and Motivation.
Nowadays due to globalization, knowing one or two foreign language is almost a requirement for most of the countries. As so, people have to go out of their comfort zone and study a language that may often not be their favorite.
Learning a new language can be a tough job, especially if you hate the language. Why would you learn something that you hate? Well, sometimes it’s just necessary. Like taxes.
French
My native language is Bulgarian. I studied French for the first seven years in school. I thought I was good at it back in the days, but around twenty years later all I know is Bonjour, Tre Bien, Avion, petite, and a few others.
I didn’t practice French because I didn’t need it. It’s very easy to forget a language that you don’t use.
Even if you studied something for years day after day, all it takes is time to forget the learned by simply not using it.
What about the process of learning?
See, primary school or high school is usually not that great of an environment to study a language and be fluent in it. Sure, it helps to start from a young age, but it doesn’t mean you will going to learn that much.
In the example with my French, I studied grammar and did a lot of exercises at school, we read long texts and understood the context behind, we learned many new words and wrote them repeatedly. The main thing I missed was actually speaking in French and having a long conversation as in real life.
We needed more speaking and less repetition of words and exercises.
7 years of study and then nothing. That was my story for the French language. Au revoir.
Russian
My Russian story is a little more complicated. I started learning it in school when I was around 14 years old. We had the class for a few years, a 2 years gap, and then continued studying it.
As Russian is quite similar to Bulgarian, I could already understand some of it. Здравствуйте, ребята! With this phrase, our teacher would usually start the lesson. It means hello kids.
Russian was fun, we sang some Russian patriotic songs, as our teacher was from Russia, we learned poems, and we did the usual exercises and grammar learning.
Russian grammar is the hardest, learning all the different cases makes it a struggle to speak properly. As the cases are 6 in total and they all have different rules that change the ending of the words, it takes a lot of practice and discipline to learn them.
I am still terrible with these cases or so-called падежи. At my peak of studying Russian, I knew a lot of these rules, and my level was around B1/B2. The only problem was not knowing enough words, but otherwise, I was a sound student who practiced his grammar.
Similar to French, I started to forget all the Russian grammar and words that I once learned. After finishing high school and going to university, I didn’t use Russian at all.
You can see the pattern with my languages already.
That would be the end of my Russian journey, but then I met my current partner whose native language is Russian. This restarted my motivation to learn the language.
Now I had the desire to learn it again and a person to regularly speak with.
It’s probably one of the best scenarios to have, in which you already knew a fair bit of the language and also have your favorite person to be fluent in it.
It’s still not my priority and I lack the persistence and discipline to learn again the different cases and new words even though I had someone to immensely help me if needed.
Anyway, I’m confident that with time I will keep learning Russian and will master it. До свидания!
English
From all the learned languages, English is my most successful and probably a more inspirational story to tell.
Although English is the most common language to learn in my country, I didn’t start learning it until the age of 14. I had my French and Russian studies, but never English until then.
Once I got in high school, we had this one year of intense English classes with 3–4 hours lessons per day.
As you can imagine, I was terrible at it, the worst student from the entire class. We were progressing quickly every day and I couldn’t catch up fast enough with the English material.
I would only score E and F grades (or in our system 2 and 3s) and was almost going to fail the year, but finally barely passed at the end.
In the next two-three years of high school, I was getting a little better, but still embarrassingly bad in English.
Then, something happened in the last year of high school.
I decided that I really want to study abroad, possibly in the UK. The problem was that my English was still not so great, but I had to pass a TOEFL or IELTS exam with a certain number of points to be accepted at the universities.
From terrible, I had to become pretty great in English, in less than a year time. I had the huge motivator to be accepted in university and just needed to be disciplined enough and study every day for a year.
And so I did!
I had private courses with my teacher, was studying daily by myself, and also took a pre-TOEFL course in the last few months before the university acceptance deadlines were over.
The day of TOEFL came, I went there and did my best for 4 and a half hours, and then I waited. The results came after a few weeks and I had 90 out of 120. Not so bad for my one-year intense studying and full transformation.
The University of Strathclyde in Scotland that I chose as one of my top 5 universities accepted me with this score and I was very very happy.
Now English is everywhere around me ever since those studying days. My work is in English with people around the globe, I watch English shows, read English books, communicate, write and think in English.
I would have never imagined it when I was failing all of these English exams in high school.
Here we are now, writing stories in Medium. Funny life.
Slovak
Yes, I didn’t expect to learn Slovak either. The reason behind is that I live and work in Bratislava now.
Surprise, surprise, you never know what you will end up doing.
Slovak is part of the Slavic languages group. It is similar to Bulgarian and Russian, but also quite different. You will have a much better understanding if you are Serbian or Polish.
For me, I don’t enjoy learning it that much. I can understand a little bit in a daily conversation between my colleagues at work but have a hard time speaking it myself.
I went to some Slovak courses for beginners and learned at home for some time, so I actually know the basics, but that’s all.
Not sure if I would ever be very proficient in Slovak as it’s not really my goal, but I learn some words and phrases from time to time which is better than nothing.
I can order a beer in the bar and buy food in the shop. At least, I will not be left hungry or thirsty.
If we come back to the Persistence and Motivation factors, I lack both of them in regards to Slovak, and even though I am in the country for almost two years, I speak very little for that time. Uvidíme sa skoro!
German
German is the most recent language that I want to learn and have been trying for the past few months.
German must be the 2nd most important language to know in Europe. Many of the countries here have it as an official language and it is very searched and demanded on the business market.
If you are thinking of a business language to learn, German is a great choice!
Duolingo is my best friend for now in my learning journey. I try to be disciplined and go earn some points on the site every day. When you miss 1–2 days, then, you lose the habit and don’t come back to it for the entire week or even more.
Try to do even the shortest learning session, but do it daily.
Even 10 minutes of learning is better than nothing. It’s definitely hard in the beginning when you know nothing and there are 20 new words every time you read something. But after some time, you feel the progress and it gets a little easier after each session.
It’s all about the small steps. Bis bald!
