A Way to Recognise a Word Nerd

(A prologue to a series of posts about languages)

One of my very happy memories consists of strolling my sleeping baby through a beautiful park. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. OK, I'm pulling your leg. It was actually a very ordinary street with no birds, but the sun really may have been switched on that day. If it was, I wouldn't have noticed anyway, because at that moment I was too busy eating some delicious organic caramel waffles while at the same time (here comes the weirdo part) deciphering the tiny letters of the contents list on the package. I was looking at the similarities and the differences between the words for "cinnamon" and "wholegrain wheat flour" in all the romance languages I could find there. (Canela, canela, cannella, cannelle, harina de trigo integral etc.) If you ever catch yourself, your child or someone else doing this sort of thing with sparkles of excitement in their eyes, you can be sure you are dealing with a word nerd. The waffles do not necessarily have to be organic.

I know that most people are not so head over heels in love with language. But almost everyone has a hobby, a job or a cause they are passionate about. Maybe you are someone who is interested in ice-hockey or history or in advancing animal rights. You may like science or science-fiction or punk music or celebrity gossip magazines. You name it. Whatever is "your thing", it is highly probable that there are people out there talking, writing and maybe even making videos about it in English / Spanish / Polish / Chinese.

Here lies one of the secret weapons of how to learn a foreign language: Find ways to use the language you are learning for the same (or at least similar) purposes that you use your mother tongue or another language you are already comfortable with. Use it to read a story you would find endearing in any language. Use it to talk to a person whose company you would enjoy even if they were speaking in your mother tongue. Write about something that is meaningful for you. This sort of thing becomes easier as you are getting more and more advanced in your language, but I think that even for beginners, there are choices what and how to learn. For example, I often study lessons about food earlier than others, because they tend to be more tasty. Like with so many activities in our life, we often learn the most in the moment when we are not pushing ourselves to learn at all, at moments when things are just flowing.

I wish you a lot of flow in your language learning and elsewhere.