If someone were to make a film about my life, my friends, one potential title would be Confessions of a Language Nerd. As of Friday, these two lovely dictionaries are the newest additions to my already-too-large collection of foreign language dictionaries. I bought them at my university’s bookstore for $0.99 apiece. That’s cheap, especially considering that they were originally $7.95.
See, my issue is that I have language lust. I’m sure fellow language learners can relate to this. Simply put, I mean that I have a massive list of languages that I need to learn. Here is a list, by no means exhaustive:
- Ukrainian: for research and general interest. I love anything Ukrainian.
- Serbo-Croatian: for general interest, as I really want to read Ivo Andrić and Miodrag Bulatović’s work in the original.
- Spanish: I studied it in school once and I like to finish things that I start. Plus I have developed a random and recent interest in South America, which made me have the rather obvious epiphany that by learning Spanish, I could get along in almost every South American country (except Brazil). Which leads me to the next point…
- Portuguese: another rather new interest of mine is finance, which is how I became aware of emerging markets. Brazil is an emerging market and knowing its language would probably be helpful. Plus Romance languages are my second-favorite language family after the Slavic languages.
- Polish: Great literature, fascinating history, and overall a really interesting and beautiful country. Need I say more? Oh, and Polish-Russian relations are a special interest of mine.
- Bulgarian: Why not add another Slavic language? Basically, I want to learn every Slavic language ever…
- Persian: the newest addition to my language wish list, added because of this article. The alphabet still scares me, but it sounds like a fascinating language.
- German: Well, I don’t really want to learn German, but one of my professors told me that I ought to, so I’ll probably end up learning it at some point.
- Norwegian: it sounds fun. That’s reason enough, right?
See why I have no time?! When I’m not writing my thesis, preparing presentations in Russian, or cramming random psychology concepts into my head, I’m trying to study languages. (Not all at once, by the way. My current language, aside from Russian, is Ukrainian, because that is the one I have the most urgent need for.)