The first language I started studying was English. I was only six years old, and still not able to read or write in my own language (Serbian), but I could spell words such as mother, door, window and ‘the cat is under the table’ – Random! I know. But my father believes that children can easily learn a language before the age of ten and so it all started.
I am fluent in Serbian (Croatian/Bosnian which is almost the same language, but people like to have different names) and English. In primary school I was taking German as well, but was never good at it. The main reason (besides me not liking the way this language sounds) was that it was not logical that certain words that were feminine in Serbian were masculine in German. So after two years I gave up, and started taking Italian and Latin. These languages were not as difficult to understand as I grew up listening to and understanding Spanish from radio and TV.
During high school I was able to learn intermediate Italian and am now able to understand movies, read short texts and have small talks. At the UR I decided to start taking Russian. I liked the language, and it is a Slavic language so I already had some basis. I also discovered that being older it does take me longer to learn a language, so I guess my dad was right. I decided to take Russian also because it is one of six official languages spoken at the United Nations, and as it is my dream to work there one day it became useful.
However, not going abroad to Russia, I ended up in India where I was forced to take Hindi as a part of my program. Well, this was something entirely new for me! For the first time I had to learn new alphabet, and sentence structure that I entirely unfamiliar before. Instead of saying ‘My name is Nina’ I had to start thinking and saying ‘My name Nina is’. How weird!? It was really hard and challenging, and by the end of the semester I loved it and was so proud that I was able to chat with people in the street, while buying vegetables, or just to my host parents.
After that last semester I ended up taking Spanish in New Zealand. It just happened to be a good chance to take this language that I already knew a bit, but never took an official class. The class was very well structured, but I was bored because it was the first level and I was not a complete beginner. I still think it was a good thing to take and learn some grammar while improving my vocabulary in Spanish.
At the moment I am taking Hindi again. I feel it would be a waste spending all that time learning impossible grammatical structures for nothing. And by time I also started loving the sound of it! Maybe I should have tried harder with that German 10 years ago. I think I like having a combination of theoretical (grammar, vocabulary) and practical learning experience where I can practice the theory. My goal is to revise Hindi I already know, and upgrade it next semester. Namaste.
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