Wanderlust frustration

These last weeks, I've been getting a big case of wanderlust. A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to speak Japanese and improve on my listening skills [by far my best skill in Japanese] which meant focusing on books which only contain romaji [the Japanese language using the Latin alphabet]. Back 2 years ago when I was really focused on learning Japanese, I would've refused to touch a book that contained any romaji but learning to read and write in Japanese is going make my efforts much more longer so I think I might go looking for some romaji books or even better, some audio resources to learn Japanese.

Then last night, after meeting a girl online who will be doing the same linguistics course at university as me and who is trying to learn Korean, I started thinking that it might not be a bad idea but I know from past experiences how weirdly hard Korean is, so I think I'll be forcing that thought out of my head.

For the most part, I've been learning Chinese this week, more specifically Chinese grammar which, to my uttermost delight, is incredibly simple and very logical [prepositions in Chinese come before the verb] but then I think about the huge vocabulary and all those nasty tones and it gets to frustrating because I know it will be ages before I'll be able to understand basic conversations.

Then I watched a music video on youtube called Esperanto by a German band which has some German, French and I'm pretty sure some Esperanto too. I thought "Esperanto, that's supposed to be an easy language and oh did I just hear the word 'sprachen'? That has something to do with speaking doesn't it. Maybe I should learn some German". But I'm already learning too many to add more to the pile so I disgarded that thought and then I started thinking to the languages that I can understand at a high-beginner to intermediate level [French and Portuguese]. Whenever I study Portuguese I now feel as though I'm not making any progress because I've learnt the basics and now I'm at that slow stage where I need to read and read in Portuguese in order to pick up vocabulary and less used grammatical structures and make some progress. And then I think to French, the language which I can read the fast and talk with the best accent solely due to 8 years exposure yet I'm still not sure how to say the 'this' in the sentence 'This is a book' in French.

To add more salt to the wound, I've just sat and wasted 20 minutes writing this post when I could've been reading how to write 'this' in French or some Portuguese vocabulary. So here's to an end of the whining about not making any progress! I'm a huge procrastinator and when I procrastinate I tend to think about languages in general but then I complain about not making progress in any of these languages. So from here onwards, I'm not going to waste time thinking about languages, I'm going to start acting and focus on what I have learnt and not about what I haven't learnt including the languages I haven't learnt yet.