I try not to live a life of too much envy, but if there’s one thing that I am often green with envy of, are polyglots and their abilities to be able to competently communicate with people of various nationalities in their native tongues. Fewer things are as cool to me than seeing people who are able to change linguistic gears at the drop of a hat, multiplied by how competent they are at each language not native to them.
The more languages a person can bust out, usually the more envious I am, and there’s this one dude on the internet who probably makes his living through reaction videos of himself going around, mostly preying flexing on the Chinese, surprising them with Mandarin or Cantonese after putting himself in these deliberately orchestrated scenarios. He speaks a large number of languages competently, but he seems to have his niche creating content surprising Chinese people, which makes me resent this rare form of white privilege he’s capitalizing on, but at the root of it, I’m just jealous that he’s able to speak so many languages.
Now I can say that I can speak a number of languages myself, but none remotely close to my ability to read and write English. My Korean is adequate enough to be able to survive in Korea, but I wouldn’t be able to brog or be writing too many emails in Korean in a professional capacity. I think I know enough Japanese to be able to go to Japan and not be completely invalid to the locals, and I’ve been determined to learn Spanish, seeing as how it’s probably the most utilitarian secondary language to know living in America.
Needless to say, I’m not going to be producing polyglot content any time soon.
At the time I’m writing this, my Duolingo streak is up to 556 days, entirely on Español. I can count on one hand how many days that I’ve been forced to freeze, and every single one of them has been on account of being on cruises over international waters, and therefore being incapable of logging in to complete a single lesson.
Maintaining a streak is about the easiest thing in the world for someone like me to do. Committing at least 30 minutes a day for most of that duration is a different story, but I think I’m doing a pretty good job, and even on days in which “I’m away” I still make sure to get in as much Duo as I can.
I think I’m still very much a novice at the language, repeatedly tripped up by verb conjugation and utilizing the correct form of them for all the variables that can change their use, but for the most part I’ve felt my confidence grow throughout the last two years at being able to actually engage a Spanish speaker, and I know that if I’m not already there, I’m going to hit a wall where I won’t ever develop further unless I actually use the language among others, on a routine-like basis.
Either way, the whole point of this post is to build up to the fact that the culmination of my current track has led up to a milestone occasion, in a slightly not necessarily just ironic sense: I was able to download the Telemundo app, navigate through the 100% Español log in process, and successfully get the Spanish broadcast of Copa Mundial de la FIFA going because mythical wife had heard that the Spanish broadcast was way more entertaining than FOX’s English broadcast, plus without the cringey right-wing ads they inject during half and hydration breaks.
It did not disappoint, even if we noticed that any goal scored by Argentina got three elongated gooooooooooollllllllls from Andrés Cantor while goals scored by anyone else just two.
This, is almost up there with being able to speak with and haggle with Mexican shopkeepers in Cancun over another La Parka mask for my collection of La Parka masks, as well as being able to respectfully dap up and ask Mexican tourists in Seoul if they were having a good time in Korea, after the Korea vs. Mexico World Cup match.
Tiny interactions, sure, but positive ones, and ones that I wouldn’t have had the thought to even entertain engaging, had I not taken the forward step to learn another language in the first place.
Ultimately, the level of comprehension I’d love to be able to achieve is, like Nate McLouth doing an interview entirely in Español good at Spanish, but at the same time there’s also that concern that if my Español proficiency were to surpass my Korean, it would be pretty disgraceful in some sense.
Either way, neither is going to ever really improve if I don’t use them, and I feel like if I didn’t have so many obligations in my life, and were independently wealthy, among the things I would do to pass the days in the absence of needing to work, learning moar languages would definitely be up there.
But hey, hurrah for my improvement in Español, y con suerte seguirá mejorando.
