i always thought it would be cool to be at least bi-lingual but it is so hard to keep disciplined. what motivates you to learn these languages?
My motivation is usually derived from a variety of different places, and it depends on the language I’m learning as well.
French and Spanish are spoken broadly across the globe, making them useful to know, and I also want to connect to my Cajun and Cuban heritage in particular. Other than that, both languages are relatively easy for me because of my liturgical Latin studies, I’ve had some exposure to them from a young age, and I’m a very curious person who likes to know what random words mean.
Icelandic is just an utterly fascinating language to me, and is surprisingly easy to pick up on. It has a reputation for being monstrously difficult, but the real difficulty lies in finding the resources to learn it.
In all cases, my motivation pretty much boils down to fascination. When I was first starting out, I was a mono-lingual native English speaker, pretty much, and the idea of speaking a different language seemed incredibly abstract to me. At first my brain kind of organized new foreign language words into the same mental dictionary as English words, which made it seem impossible.
Eventually I found my way of thinking about it. You kind of learn to “label” words subconsciously as being
English or non-, and things get smoother from there. Eventually you’ll be ready to get familiar with different grammar rules, and you can slap together all the words you know in the correct order.
And I’d say to feel daunted or discouraged is a complete and total motivation killer. If you let yourself believe at any point that you’re hopeless and doomed to never be bilingual, you’ve only killed your chances by giving up. If you’re having trouble staying consistent, try taking smaller bites of language learning at a time. Sometimes it’s worse to try to be a juggernaut. You may not remember it well, but you learned English a little bit every day while making LOTS of mistakes.
If you’re patient with yourself and stay curious, you’ll feel like you’re learning secret info that no one else knows while having a blast doing it. And hey, life gets in the way; we can’t immerse ourselves in foreign languages
constantly. Not unless you’re rich and can do an immersion program thingy to live in another country for a year. Don’t be surprised if it’s difficult to make time in your day to study a language. Sometimes there just isn’t time.
All that being said, a little bit adds up to A LOT over time. It’s worth it if you’ve got the right mental disposition.