Happy New Year to all you LingQers. I am not going to repeat these greetings in 21 languages. I just want to express how much enjoyment I receive from being part of this community of enthusiastic language learners.
I am sitting here in Olomouc, in the Czech Republic, with my wife and son. Today we visited the town where my parents grew up, Prostejov. Complete strangers on the street where my mother lived invited us in for food, cookies and drinks. They promised to find out more about my mother’s family from the local municipal administration. We had a lively conversation for over an hour. I was able to connect with these people because I spoke to them in Czech on the street, and then continued the conversation in their apartment. It was a magical encounter.
History is like time, fleeting and elusive. We can’t go back in history, and we can’t go back in time. We can, however, take advantage of the present.
I will be taking advantage of the present in the coming year, to learn more languages. I wish all of you the same.
I add to Steve with my Happy New Year wishes to all LingQers!
I can understand your feelings, Steve, because I had maybe similar feelings when I was strolling several years ago along the streets of Ashkhabad in Central Asia where I had spent the first years of my life and where I felt both as a stranger and as the traveller coming back from the long journey to the other planet.
I heard and remembered some turkmenian words and together with them all my childhood, my grandparents and my dad which I can’t see any more.
Thanks for your wishes, Steve and Evgueny! I also wish all LingQ members a happy new year!
I am currently in Brittany with my parents, who bought a house in the Breton countryside. The weather is not always great, but I like the local culture a lot, even if this isn’t the most typical part of Brittany. I definitely want to learn Breton in the future.
I will do my best to devote my 2014 to learning Russian and Catalan while improving my Polish and Romanian, and keeping all my other languages alive.
I hope I can travel more than I did this year, starting with Spain and Portugal in January-February.
Best wishes to everyone,
Michele
Thank you and a happy New Year to all of you.
Alles Gute für 2014!
@Steve: I understand what you mean. My mother and grandmother were born in the Czech Republic too. Some years ago we withed the small village where they have lived. My grandmother showed us the house of her family and the house of her husbands family and the other family members. Immediately a middle aged lady invited us over for a lemonade and a chat. It was a bit difficult because we speak no Czech. She informed her mother, an old lady who remembered my mother’s family and she still spoke some German. We felt really welcomed. It was an amazing experience for us. It was the first time I saw where half of my family comes from, and I found it quite impressive. It is a good feeling to know where you come from. I wish you and your family a really nice time in Europe and all the best for 2014.
