New Year.

Tomorrow's New Years Day [a new decade too] and since I'm the type of person who likes to start from afresh every once and a while I've decided that I want to change the way I learn languages [the difference between all the other times I've 'started afresh' and now being that I'll actually keep it up this time - I hope].

Due to being a student I often don't have a lot of time to invest into language learning. Advancing in a language revolves around you immersing yourself in the language as much as possible but I've gotten into the habit of intensively learning a language over a short period of time -a week long holiday perhaps - and then completely ignoring it for a month. I've realised that this isn't an ideal way to acquire a language. By studying so much over a short period of time, I soon [temporarily] lose interest in learning the language and it isn't getting me anywhere. Ideally I hope that by studying everyday but only for a short period of time -15 minutes or so - I will see improved results in my skills.

This blog is a way for me to track my progress and hopefully keep me from losing interest. I also hope to contribute to the language community a little by maybe posting interesting grammar tibbits I've come across or posting vocabulary lists.

Anyways, that's all for now.
I hope everyone has a great New Year!

First post.

After many [failed] attempts to start and maintain a blog, I've concluded that if I blog about something that is actually interesting to me, the chances of it continuing are pretty high. I suppose it's a no brainer really [which isn't helping my ego now that I've just realised it.]

So I've decided to start a blog of my journey with languages. I first became interested in languages when I was fourteen and wouldn't have fully discovered this interest had I not been so depressed with my lack of progress in English and Maths at school. The three main subjects compulsory to study in my year were Maths, English and a language - either French or Spanish. I choose French. Since I was failing in two of the main subjects, I put more time into the third and I loved it. Using a site called LingQ, my French kept on progressing and I soon became one of the top of my French class.

Soon, I wanted to branch on to discover more languages. Whilst browsing through youtube I found a video of the opening to a popular Japanese anime that I had often heard about, and out of curiosity I clicked to watch it. The video itself didn't captivate me but the song on the background did. I loved the sound of it. I hadn't expected Japanese to be filled with so many vowels. I typed the artist into the youtube searchbar and that evoked my still on-going love for Japanese music. But soon I found that I didn't only want to listen to the song, I wanted to understand it. So in September 2007, I started learning Hiragana [one of the Japanese alphabets] and I've been learning it on and off ever since.

Over the past two years, I've studied the following languages -
Mandarin
Japanese
French
Spanish
Portuguese

The main purpose of this blog is to track my progress in these languages and hopefully to give tips to others who are in the same position as myself.