French???

I love languages!  Unfortunately I’m basically still monolingual.  My high school did have Spanish classes but they didn’t really focus on really learning the language so most people would take 2 or 3 years of Spanish and still know nothing.  When I was 14 to be honest the last thing I wanted to do was learn Spanish.  But I had no other options.  I would complain about rather learning another language like French or German but that was completely out of the question.  Well I ended up taking 3 1/2 years of Spanish in high school and now I’m minoring in it in college.  I still am not even close to being fluent or really even being able to hold a good conversation in Spanish.  I can hold simple conversations, but I make a lot of mistakes.  And I can’t seem to write a sentence without there being some grammatical mistake.  I can get the gist of most anything I read in Spanish (though I still struggle at times).  And hearing spoken Spanish still blows my mind at times (or most of the time).  To be honest learning a language can be a pretty discouraging process.  There is just so much to a language.  I think part of the reason I am not where I feel I should be after so many years of studying Spanish is that those first few years I didn’t really care and didn’t study any outside of class time.  Hopefully now that I care about learning Spanish I actually will! 

Well I will continue to study Spanish all throughout college and going to Uruguay will help immensely.  I also have friends who help me with my Spanish and we will sometimes talk and that helps too.  This upcoming semester I am going to do something a bit different though.  Since I will be in England I won’t have the opportunity to take a Spanish class, but French is an option. Though I don’t know if it is a good idea or not I think I’m just going to have to take it.  Well I do have to now since I’ve already signed up.  It is exciting but absolutely terrifying at the same time.  I think that it’s just been so long since I started learning a completely new language (outside of studying bits of languages just for fun) that I forgot what it’s like to not know any of a language you’re trying to study.  In Spanish I can write sentences even thought they might not be correct but I can get my point across for the most part.  I can’t do that with French so I feel like I’m a bit over my head.  I did consider waiting to study it until the fall to start but I wanted to know something of the language before I get into the classroom and get graded.  So I’ve been trying to learn a bit on my own.  It is not easy, and I don’t even know where to start.  I knew some Spanish before just because of living in an area where there are several Spanish speakers, but French is a whole new deal.  

We will see how it goes.  I have decided only to take a semester of French just so I can have the experience and get a basic understanding of the language.  After that I will return to studying Spanish.  Though I am excited about the prospect of learning French to be perfectly honest it’s not my first choice for a third language.  That would be either Portuguese or Norwegian.  But French is very interesting and will be good for me to be challenged like that.  It is a widely spoken and important language so I do look forward to studying it.