Diary of a Language Freak

TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/06/18/persian-fight-and-revenge/

*Spoiler alert*: this episode is highly personal and includes a long rant about my life some years ago. Maybe it’s a bit off-topic, but if you’re listening to this podcast that’s part of the package. Feel free to skip how much you want.

In the last episode, I told you about Hungarian and online communities. It allowed me to get to know people on the Internet for the first time.

However, just like it happened with my other “language loves”, something else arrived at some point and made my life take another unexpected turn.

We’re in 2011, November. 

I start reading about geopolitics and that was a quite hot moment for a particular area of the world: Iran. 

The more I read about it, the more I get curious because I realize how ignorant I was about it.

It soon became something irresistible. 

As usual, I headed to Omniglot.com to get some information about the language. Of course, I was so ignorant that I probably thought it was Arabic or something similar like that, and then… I heard an audio file of probably one of the most beautiful languages I had ever heard.

TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/05/25/hungarian-and-online-communities/

Hungarian was another one of my great language “love stories”. It was the first one that made me show up on the Internet and allowed me to realize its potential.

Once again, it started with a trip to Budapest. However, unlike the case of Russian I explained in the previous episodes, I was not prepared ahead of it, but I got curious only once back.

I got interested in it because I had put Russian aside since it was too difficult to learn on your own (I mean, I was 15 and had no clue about “cases”, declensions, verbal aspects, and so on… it was really too much of a mess).

I remember I had gone to a bookshop in my town and asked for a Chinese and Russian phrasebook, which I still have!

After that journey, I went to that place and asked for a Hungarian one. In that case or shortly after, I also got a small dictionary that I used so much that now is almost torn in pieces - but of course, I am keeping it as a memory for the rest of my life.

My curiosity came from some things told by our guide in Budapest. She was great, but she had just given some information about the language: the typical info like that it’s a far relative of the Finnish language and so on… the basic stuff you tell a group of not-so-young Italians on holiday.

But, for me, that was enough.

Again, the sound of the language was crucial in making me like what I was learning.

Another point that “triggered” me positively was that while I was getting information about the language, a pretty frequent point was that it was super difficult. My typical reaction in these cases, still nowadays, is: that’s bullshit. So, I saw it as a challenge I wanted to defy. If I could learn it, that meant it was not that hard 🙂

TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/04/30/when-did-i-start-teaching-italian/

I was not very used to hearing foreigners and their “wrong” Italian. For me, correcting them sounded absolutely natural. Especially, since I hate being corrected without understanding “why” something is wrong, I would do the same with them.

TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/04/30/the-language-journey-goes-on/

In the last episode, I talked about how Tagalog was important to me.

It is an idiom on which the official language of the Philippines is based.

Starting from there, I began discovering all the main Asian languages in a sort of ideal journey from those islands to Europe.

I started with the Maleo-Polynesian languages, to Chinese, the ones of the Indochinese peninsula, Korean, Japanese, and so on.

I really liked the website http://proel.org/. It is simple, but it allowed me to have an overview.

I was really even emotionally involved in what I was reading and finding out.

My favorite language family, the one I found the most fascinating, was the Paleo-Siberian languages. It is a group of languages spoken in the Easternmost corner of Siberia, in the Kamchatka peninsula and surroundings.

I used to feel genuine anxiety when reading that a language was in danger of extinction.

My second favorite family was the Altaic languages, the language family of Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchu, spreading from the Northern and Western borders of China up to… well, Greece. I remembered I had found another website, https://altaica.ru/e_index.php. At that time, the English version was minimal, while most of the pages were in Russian. It seems that now the English version has improved.

TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/04/29/after-the-cyrillic-alphabet-tagalog/

So, in the last episode, I talked about how I found out about the Cyrillic alphabet.

At the same time, I had fallen in love with the Russian language, but it was too complicated to learn with the resources I had at that time, of course.

A last memorable point from that time is that during the tour in Russia, as I mentioned in the previous episode, I became a sort of mascot. I was not only the youngest (which is not surprising in a group tour), but I was the only one who could read some signs at least. It was very relevant at that time!

(...)

Anyway, let’s go back to Italy: my primary school has finished and… and? Secondary school had to kick off.

The most striking difference at that time was that in the primary school, there were no immigrants.

When school started, though, I didn't have much contact with the migrants. There was a sort of undeclared separation between the two groups: Italians with Italians and foreigners with foreigners.

Until when...

⁠TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/03/24/comment-jai-decouvert-les-langues/⁠

Bonjour à tous,

Je m'appelle Chiara et je viens d’Italie. J’habite à Bruxelles, et j’aime apprendre et enseigner les langues. Avec les années, les langues m’ont permis d’avoir plein d’expériences inoubliables, donc j’ai décidé de les partager à travers ce podcast. Les langues sont aussi devenues mon job à temps plein - je vais te raconter plus sur ce sujet aussi.

Aujourd’hui, je voudrais parler de mon premier contact avec cette passion.

Chaque fois que je parle de ça et de ce que j’ai fait, beaucoup de fois, évidemment, la réaction typique est: “Carrément tu as un talent naturel!”

Mais franchement, si c’était qu’une question de talent naturel, je me serais peut-être attendue à le découvrir un peu plus tôt. Peut-être, au moins j’aurais imaginé une expérience différente avec l’anglais à l’école, juste pour donner un exemple.

Ce présumé talent n’est pas apparu pendant toute mon école primaire. Je me souviens que j’avais beaucoup de confusion dans ma tête au regard de l’anglais.

Je n’en comprenais pas la logique, je détestais comment il sonnait, je trouvais embarrassant de regarder l’enseignante imiter la prononciation en faisant des têtes bizarres pour montrer comment il fallait dire les mots.

Le taf de mes rêves c’était d’écrire: rien lié à l’apprentissage des langues ou à l’enseignement.

Le moment qui m’a fait aimer les langues est arrivé seulement à la fin de l’école primaire.

An unexpected passion: from hating English in school to discovering languages and dedicating the rest of my life to them.

TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/03/24/how-i-got-interested-in-languages/

Join me, Chiara, an Italian language enthusiast living in Brussels, as I share my journey into language learning. Discover how a childhood trip to Russia sparked my passion and led me to become a full-time language teacher. Tune in for inspiring stories, practical tips, and the secrets behind mastering new languages.