Introduction

Hello, my name is Ryan. I'm 15 years old, and I love learning languages. I've created this blog so I can start sharing my language learning journey. Here is a list of the languages I have experience with:

English is my native language, as I've lived in the US for my whole life. There's not really much to talk about here.

Korean is partially my native language, but I am far from fluent. My parents are immigrants from South Korea, so I grew up hearing the language and speaking a little with some relatives. I can understand basic Korean, but my vocabulary isn't large enough to understand material as advanced as Korean news broadcasts. My spoken Korean is pretty poor, as I was never fully immersed in the language as a child. However, it is still technically a native language for me because I can understand certain phrases instinctively without being able to explain why they work grammatically or even semantically. Even though I have Korean-speaking family members to practice with, I find it difficult to improve my Korean because I just find it very awkward to speak Korean to them when I've always spoken to them in English. It's also difficult to study it on my own, which I usually do for other languages. Since I have some native background, it's difficult to learn it how I learn other languages that are entirely foreign to me. I still use Korean occasionally, but I don't plan on actively improving my Korean in the near future, because of the frustrations I've mentioned, and my interests currently lie elsewhere.

Japanese has always been an interesting language to me. Besides English and Korean, it's the language I have the longest relationship with. From a young age, I was intrigued by Japanese culture and language. I learned hiragana and katakana on my own when I was in elementary school. I casually learned about Japanese grammar, and I realized how similar it was to Korean grammar. For a short period in middle school, I started studying Japanese seriously, but for some reason I still couldn't really speak it, or form my own sentences in my head. This is probably because a lot of my Japanese knowledge that I had acquired as a kid had remained passive, and it was just difficult to put it into active use. In my freshman year of high school (which just ended), I took Japanese 1, and I found it far too easy, so I am going to skip Japanese 2 and take Japanese 3 next year. The class has helped me start forming my own sentences. I hope this trend continues in the future. My goal is to be conversational, or around B1.

Turkish is a language I no longer learn or review, but it was the first language I studied seriously. When I was in middle school, I had read on online forums that Turkish grammar was similar to Korean grammar, and I thought it would be interesting to try learning it. Before I knew it, I had been swept up by the language. It was the first time that I had been dedicated to learning a language just for fun, and I had the realization that learning languages gave me great pleasure. Learning the language opened up an entire culture, and I found it exhilarating. At one point I was studying Turkish consistently, every day. I could have basic conversations with a classmate who spoke Turkish. Perhaps learning so much burned me out, because at one point I suddenly wanted a total break from Turkish. I haven't studied it or reviewed it in at least a year, and I don't have plans to anytime soon. I've forgotten most of my Turkish. However, Turkish was really my gateway into learning other languages seriously.   

Finnish is the language that I am currently the most dedicated to learning. I have learned it on-and-off for about one and a half years. I began learning a little Finnish just because it seemed interesting, but now that I've learned it for quite a while, I've gotten to admire Finnish culture and Finland. I think what has drawn me to learn Finnish is how different it is from most other European languages. I also find the sound of the language to be simple and beautiful. I hope to continue improving my Finnish, and my goal is to be conversationally fluent; somewhere around B2 or C1.  

Italian gave me the opportunity to use language in travel. Last summer, my family took a trip to Italy. Before that, I had never been to any other country that speaks a language besides English. I also had never thought about learning Italian until my parents told me about the trip. I decided to learn Italian so that I could use it on the trip, and given the circumstances, it was the quickest I had started and stopped studying a language. Italian kind of interrupted my plan to study Finnish. Anyhow, I studied Italian for about 2-3 months before the trip, and compared to the other languages I had studied, it was pretty easy, and I acquired it quickly. I enjoyed the trip immensely, and I was able to do things like order food and call a restaurant in Italian. It was great to be able to improve on my Italian daily by being surrounded by it all the time. Speaking a little Italian helped open up new conversations with Italian people, even though they were in English. When I came back home, I went back to learning Finnish, and realized how quickly I was forgetting Italian. Although I do a little review, I haven't studied it in about a year. Italian is definitely a language that I want to come back to. I am also planning to self-study for the AP Italian Language and Culture test. My goal is to be conversational, or around B1.

Here are some languages that I may want to learn in the future:

Hungarian has been an interest to me ever since I started learning Finnish, as they are both part of the Uralic language family.

Welsh, in my opinion, sounds beautiful, like some sort of fantasy language. It would be interesting to learn, as Celtic languages are known to be a bit peculiar to speakers of other European languages.

Thai has a beautiful script and would open up travel opportunities to a beautiful country. It seems like it would be very difficult though, as I have never learned a tonal language before.

Greenlandic has struck me as very interesting for quite a while. However, it being a very small language, I doubt I could seriously learn it unless I went to Greenland and learned Danish first, which is a language that I admittedly have little interest in.