simonaslangblabblr

[simonaslangblabblr]

Back with a clownish post

My sister got a new phone, and her weather app translated "tod" (abbreviation for "today") with the Italian expression "cespuglio d'edera" ("tod" in English) instead of "oggi" ("today" in English)

[simonaslangblabblr]

How Music inspired me pick up new languages - German / Deutsch

Hallo Leute!

Today I wanted to share another language that I picked up because of music - German.

As you might suspect, I started to learn German because of Tokio Hotel. I was 13 and it was 2012, I was about to start my last year of middle school and, by the following summer, I would have to choose what to focus on in high school.

Note: in Italy there are different types of high schools with different fields of specialization - you can find professional schools, accounting and economy-focused high schools, high school centered on modern languages, science, art, social studies, classical studies, and more. After middle school, when you're 13-14, you have to choose among one of these school types.

In summer of 2012, I was kind of willing to reinvent myself, and I was quite attracted by alternative styles and subcultures as well.

This was the perfect territory for my Tokio Hotel obsession to grow. Starting from Monsoon, I slowly discovered the world of Tokio Hotel.

I'm not kidding when I say that finding out about them changed the trajectory of my life in many ways: I literally started wearing a side part as a reference to Georg's side part that he sported from 2006 to 2011.

My overall style also got heavily influenced by them, I indeed started wearing all-black outfits and leather jackets (which sparked a whole other obsession for leather clothes).

This was the time where I started discovering my own music taste, stirring away from my cousins'taste for the first time.

As you can see, Tokio Hotel's music and artistry clicked with me in so many ways, but let's skip to language. During this time, it was also time to choose my specialization for high school.

I was anything but sure about what to choose. I was getting good grades in the other languages that I was studying (English and French) and, while everyone around me was quite agreeing that a high school centered on modern languages was the right fit for me, I was still hesitant.

Until the one thought popped in my mind:

Let's learn German so I can meet Tokio Hotel and understand their songs.

Yes, I really chose my high school based on a band that I was obsessed with at the time.

And it stuck: German became my favourite subject in high school and I even majored in it at university, both for my Bachelor and my Master's degree.

Over the years, I have obviously found out about other genres and artists, including another German band - Cinema Bizarre - so obviously my love for Tokio Hotel became more moderate.

However, after some years, I rewatched an episode of Tokio Hotel TV that I was completely obsessed with when I was in middle school:

This episode is in German with English subtitles, so the first time I watched it I was completely reliant on them in order to understand what was being said.

After a few years of learning German, instead, picking it up again after many years and realizing that I was able to understand what everyone was saying without reading the subtitles was really my "I did it" moment. I almost cried while watching it.

So this was my very long story of how music helped me choose a language to learn, and for German in particular, it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life, one of those decision that I'll always confidently claim, no matter what.

Do you study German? If so, what was your inspiration to start learning this language? Have you had a similar experience with another language?

[simonaslangblabblr]

I'm a speaker Portuguese. Sorry for the late answer.

Tudo bem e obrigada pelo feedback, poder falar com os falantes nativos é uma das melhores motivações para aprender um novo idioma!

[simonaslangblabblr]

Why does studying feel like a chore sometimes?

Hi everyone, today I want to talk about the fact that sometimes studying really feels tedious, even if it's something you enjoy and even if it's not bound to deadlines imposed by school or university.

I personally experienced this during the first lockdowns in the pandemic. I had a lot of free time because I was home, but I could not start studying Korean to save my life, I was literally forgetting about it. Indeed, I ended up putting it off until I completed my Master's degree in 2024.

I was not taking it lightheartedly: it was supposed to be something I enjoyed, yet why was I procrastinating it so hard that I was forgetting its entire existence?

🤔The possible answers to my case

Now, I'm not good at self-acceptance, but I tried thinking about all the possibilities without beating myself up, but also while maintaining some objectivity:

We were all home, but it was not a normal time. It was a time where nobody would have known how the future would have been and this could have definitely stressed out our brains.

I was still in university, which meant that I had different priorities at the time. Sum it up with the aforementioned stress, and it becomes much easier to put self-studying at the very last place of your mental list.

I had chosen a language that, for a native Italian speaker, was objectively difficult, because of how different it is (the two languages are not even in the same language macrogroup). Korean grammar also seems to appear very intricate for most language learners across the Internet, from what I've seen.

My attention span got objectively worse: in order to check the news, I was constantly scrolling either on Google or on social media, which made it harder for me to focus. My grades at university did not resent from it, but it made me harder to pick anything study-related outside of my uni workload.

The whole situation, as a result, has made me exhausted and quite detached from my interests and parts of my "identity" pre-pandemic, and I'm still trying to reconnect the pieces nowadays.

🌈 Is it over now?

I'm not sure that the situation is completely solved right now - I definitely do not forget about Korean anymore. However, I have also accepted that life happens and we do not have the same level of motivation every day, and that's okay.

I also implemented some strategies to ease the problem:

I committed to reducing harmful screentime and doomscrolling in order to fix my attention span;

I planned my exercises for every language in advance, so I do not have to stress over what has to be done;

I waited until the end of my university studies before picking up Korean again: sometimes, we're just too busy for the mental load that a certain hobby requires, so the best solution might also be to wait it out until you have more mental space.

I hope this post was useful in case someone had been feeling the same way recently. You got this!

If you have been through the same problem and solved it, how did you do it? Do you have any recommendation?

[simonaslangblabblr]

The one language I quit completely

It's been more than a week since I opened my Langblr and I wanted to sort of "celebrate" with a confession post.

Let me start by saying that I believe that, rather than choosing the "wrong" language, people often choose the wrong moment to start learning a new language: maybe it's a busy time, maybe it's exam season, maybe it's a "work in progress" type of moment where nothing is certain and it's impossible to set up a routine.

However, with this language it's different, because I really cannot see myself picking it up again in the near future, no matter how hard I try.

And that language is Russian.

I started studying it as part of my Bachelor's degree in Translation, and at first I was really enjoying it. Then came Covid (and a new, insufferable professor) and it quickly became more of a nuisance than an interest.

After finishing my Master's degree in International Communication, I tried picking it up again, but it just wasn't clicking anymore. To make things worse, my dad (a shameless Putin supporter with whom I have a terrible relationship to this day) had also picked it up during my "hiatus", which has probably acted as the nail in the coffin of my journey.

Obviously, it was not an easy decision and, while saddened to have had to come to such a conclusion. However, I will be forever grateful for what I have learnt from this language, which also gave me some basis to ease my learning path with Slovene, since they're both Slavic languages.

This post is in no way meant to scare you off if you want to learn Russian, the reasons behind my decision to quit are indeed deeply personal. Still, I think it's important to normalize shelving some projects without being ashamed - we only have 24 hours a day, it would be impossible to do everything at the same time and at the same pace!

Have you ever quit learning a language completely? Which one was it?

[simonaslangblabblr]

12.01 - Distracted on Sunday

Sundays are usually the days where I do a cohesive review of all my languages, as a way to say "I'm ready for the next topic".

While studying Turkish, Slovene and Portuguese has been quite normal, when it was time to practice Korean I suddenly became distracted by some reviews I was checking online and ended up only writing a few "symbolic" sentences, one for each key topic.

One of my general goals for 2025 is to use my screentime more wisely and, while I have managed to cut off most of my time on social media (with some flexibility with Youtube and Pinterest), I still find it difficult not to look after constant entertainment sometimes.

Do you often deal with this? Do you have any strategies to stop this sort of craving?

EDIT: I added a small detail

[simonaslangblabblr]

11.01. - Studying after a busy Saturday

Today, I hung out with one of my friends the whole day and, while it was amazing to see her, we walked a lot and now I'm exhausted, so I will keep my studying as simple and brief as possible:

instead of my normal Winx episode in Portuguese, I will watch a shorter video and summarize it

I will limit my Turkish practice to Quizlet exercises

Sometimes it's okay to redimension our workload when we are feeling tired. How could we learn any language if we're not well rested?

How was today? Did you also have to reschedule or rethink some tasks for the day?

[simonaslangblabblr]

07.-09.01.2025 Update

Hello again! Unfortunately I did not have much time to update my progress so here's a quick recap (I know it's not really in-trend with most studyblr posts but I wanted to give a quick update anyways):

07.01.

I watched a Youtube video in Brazilian Portuguese with Portuguese Subtitles

I was supposed to start a new topic of Slovenian Grammar but instead I decided to keep focusing on the feminine declension because last week I only managed to tackle the regular declension, so I'm using this week for the irregular declensions

08.01.

I practiced the use of Passive forms in Korean. Wednesday is often the day where I have the lowest energy, so I only revise one language

09.01. (today)

I watched an episode of Winx Club in Brazilian Portuguese and wrote a recap of what happened.

I have the feeling that one of the tasks for Thursdays got accidentally cancelled on my digital planner (I use ToDoIst), because, as you can see, there are no tasks related to Turkish. I will investigate this and update you as soon as I can.

In the meantime, happy study y'all!

🎧 El Dorado by EXO

📖Cleopatra and Frankenstein (Italian Version) by Coco Mellors

[simonaslangblabblr]

How Music inspired me to pick up new languages - Korean / 한국어

안녕!

Today I want to start a series of posts with all the different ways music inspired me to pick up new languages, starting off with Korean.

I know what you might think, but this is not the only language that I first got to know through music, so stay tuned for the next parts!

Yes, like many Korean learners out there, I started learning Korean because of K-pop. When I first started listening to K-pop in 2012, Gangnam Style by PSY was being played everywhere, and it inspired me to dig deeper. Firstly, I was captivated by BigBang's Fantastic Baby, but the song that really dragged me into the rabbit hole was I Got a Boy by Girls' Generation.

I was fascinated by the flashy colors of the music video, the diverse outfit choices throughout the song and the amazing voices of the band's members. Check the video out by yourself to get a better idea, because there's really so much going on:

So, what really clicked?

Besides being capable to understand the songs (and, later on, K-Dramas), I was fascinated by the geometric shapes of Hangul, and the fact that the letters correspond to individual sounds made it more intuitive to learn than other Asian writing systems.

Obviously, liking K-pop alone was not the only factor that pushed me to learn Korean, but if I had not come into contact with it, I would have never noticed how fascinating Hangul was and I would have never started in the first place!

Do you study Korean? Did you start because of K-pop as well?

[simonaslangblabblr]

Hiii, I'm so happy someone wants to learn Portuguese.

Hii, thank you! Are you a native speaker or a fellow Portuguese learner?

EDIT: typo

[simonaslangblabblr]

04.01.2025 - Turkish and Portuguese

Today, aside from practicing Turkish through Quizlet and written sentences, I practiced Portuguese by watching an episode of Winx!

I personally find this a fun way of learning languages while reconnecting with my inner child, but I will give more insights into how actually useful this method is in the next posts.

Do you study using cartoons and/or films? Do you enjoy it?

[simonaslangblabblr]

03.01. - New grammar topics in Slovene and Turkish

Today, I started revising the new grammar topics that I first tackled on Tuesday.

As per Slovene, I finally managed to switch topic from the declension of masculine nouns to the declension of feminine nouns. It was messy, but it was actually easier than the masculine declension, probably because I'm slowly getting more familiar with the gender-case-number system of the language. Yay!

Concerning Turkish, I revised the concepts of my latest lesson on the app Busuu, focused on the usage of the verb "to be". It was messy, but somehow fun. One thing that I love about this language is the fact that a lot of grammar elements can be determined by adding a suffix at the end of every word, which scratches my brain the right way but also comes with some mess, hence why so many mistakes!

Have you studied any new topics today?

[simonaslangblabblr]

How and why I fell in love with Language Learning

Hi everyone! I'm Simona and I'm an aspiring polyglot from Italy.

I've been studying foreign languages since elementary school, when I started learning English, and as I grew up, I realized that foreign languages was something that I absolutely loved and wanted to keep in my life, especially because I've also been wanting to travel and explore the world since I was in middle school.

Once I started university (majoring in Modern Languages, of course!), I started my first attempts of self-studying Korean in my free time. During the pandemic, however, my motivation and focused dropped significantly and I shelved any self-studying project.

That was until 2023, when I re-installed Duolingo again and started learning Portuguese.

Now that I've graduated university and started my 9-to-5 job, I am striving to learn Portuguese, Turkish, Slovene and Korean, as part of my goal to be able to speak 10 languages by the time I turn 30.

I'm turning 26 this year, so I do not have many years left, but my education surely helped me immensely, as I have managed to become fluent in English, French and German through school and university.

In addition to this goal, I'm trying to be as present as I can be while learning, which translates to integrating language learning apps with written practice, specific media and grammar resources.

With this blog, I hope to find some other polyglots to share and comment ideas with, as well as a further tool to stay accountable in my language learning journey.

Well, I think I've yapped enough, now it's your turn: how did your language learning journey start? What are your learning goals?