Another bout of wanderlust has graced itself with me. I decided to watch some of Lost which I haven't watched in age and ended up watching the episode where Sun reveals to everyone that she can speak English. So, I had all the nice vowels of Korean flowing through my ears for a good 45 minutes. Then I decided to browse through the internet looking for things about Lost and stumbled across this page, which lists all the languages the characters speak - Korean, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Latin, Turkish etc - and boom! Wanderlust returned full on force!
That being said, this wanderlust is different from the other wanderlust periods I've had. First of all, I still want to continue studying Chinese. Secondly, this wanderlust isn't necessarily a bad thing. The previous wanderlusts tried to steal the spotlight from the main language I was focusing on and they didn't bring any benefits other than to sate my curiosity about other languages.
However, now that I'm doing linguistics, this wanderlust may be beneficial. In Morphology, we learnt about agglutinating languages (1) such as Turkish and circumfixes [2] in Dutch. In phonetics, we learnt that the Korean alphabet [hangul] has some letters which represent how the sound is pronounced using our vocal organs. In syntax, we compared some English word order with Dutch and so on. Next semester is all about Society and language, the Brain and language and my favourite: historical linguistics and language families. Suddenly Latin is looking quite appealing and learning some German to be able to contrast some of its features with English wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Different people learn different languages for different reasons. Language learning has been a hobby of mine for the last 4 years now. I'm currently learning Chinese with the aim of someday being fully fluent in a foreign language at university. This means being able to read and listen to Chinese as well as being able to construct my own grammatically correct sentences both on written paper and face to face with some native Chinese speaker. I'm slowly accepting the fact that being fluent in 15 languages is a dream and nothing but a dream. That doesn't mean to say that I can't understand the basics of 13 languages and be fluent in 2. Understanding a language and being fluent in a language are two different things. To me, it's much easier to read a language and listen to a language [both passive skills] than it is to speak and write in a language [both active skills]. I like knowledge and I love understanding things. So I think I might try to understand the basics of a few more languages, not so I can claim to speak the languages, just so I can understand some of them and take some of the grammatical knowledge I gain from those languages and apply it to areas in my linguistics degree. No more guilty wanderlusts! Bring on the German!
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