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Posted by Mommy Woobie on March 31st, 2008 in Philippines

I’ve always been a fan of languages. In fact, I speak 4 in total: my dialect (ilokano), Filipino, English and French. The last one was a bit of a big move for me. It took a lot of effort to learn, and a lot of resources. Language courses in schools are expensive, and one on one sessions with knowledgable native speakers, more so.

Being in class with 20 or so more people who were all groping in the dark too with the new language can be intimidating. In assignments, I was always looking for the more active students to partner with. The exercises were fun and sometimes we would go to other places to practice what we learned for the day.

A sudden thought: If you count Baby Gibberish, that’s five languages that I know.

I learned languages out of curiosity, and of course genuine interest in breaking the language barrier. I lived with a room mate that had a French Language Software and I did not have any choice but to listen. When we went our separate ways, I found myself missing the “oui’s” and the “non’s”, so I went out of my way to learn it on my own.

Now however, I came online and started living here, I found several resources that I can use to increase my knowledge of French, such as Language Learning Software. Although, now that we’re planning to migrate to the United States in the future, I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to learn to speak Spanish as well. A bonus for online learning is that there is an option to get free resources and software downloads. Bonuses come in the form of reading foreign language articles and playing language games.

My experience with a foreign language opened up a part of my mind to how other people formulate sentences and utter expressions that are equivalents to what I use normally. Playing with a language made me more sensitive of the cultural differences, but at the same time, it widened my knowledge of other people’s cultures and traditions.