Expanding my meme repertoire :D

help me to be confident, trust my intuitions more. Also, mastering languages is definitely a leverage for works.

I've always loved reading novels from different countries and cultures, and I've always been suspicious that 1. the translations aren't conveying the full meaning and beauty of the text and 2. what gets chosen to be translated depends more on what someone thinks will be popular and not a full representation of what's truly out there.

There is so much great literature I have now have access to without a intermediary. I've been slowly working through this ridiculously long 2500 page untranslated webnovel for >9 months, and it's now become my favorite book.

Plus, my brain gets a jolt of immense pleasure when a word / idiom I learned pops up in the wild or I understand a joke, reference or poetic phrase. It's incredibly addicting.

For me in my head it's as simple as "people I can't understand" and "people I can understand".

The entire continent of south america suddenly became less foreign and moved over to "my peeps" when I crossed the threshold of fluency of Spanish because I could understand them now.

Same has happened with France (and to a lesser extent Quebec).

Now it'll be I can understand the ex-soviet union.

By the time I'm done (Mandarin and Arabic) I'll have moved a big chunk of the entire planet into "not totally foreign".

Reading books and blog posts from sites like Manifest Channel, reference: https://canalmanifesto.com/ helped improve my Portuguese vocabulary. I also enjoy watching anime and taking note of what lines or expressions characters usually say. I have also learned how to read hiragana and katakana because of watching anime.

For me it's like increasing the resolution of the picture of my subjective world, when instead of pixel art I get 800x600px, then 1900x1200 and then 4k. When I'm able to hit more precisely what I was intended to express or define for myself. More starting points, more kind of fulcrums for reflection or reasoning. No one single cultural paradigm is enough for me anymore. Perharps, it never was, but language learning puts this in practical terms so that I know how and where I can quench my thirst.

The enjoyment often comes from improvement. Finding how you are starting to be able read texts and get what they say, listening to audio / watching videos and all of a sudden being able to follow what is being discussed. Those moments make it seem worth it.

yeah . it is right. it is too fascinating to know new world . to do something that make me happy when i see i can understand a passage in another language

I think I get the most enjoyment from learning languages by watching TV series and movies and not to have to rely on subtitles. For example I used to watch Cuentame (como pasó) which is a drama about a Spanish family living through the last years of Franco's dictatorship and the time since. It did jump the shark some years back but the the show was good up until the events of 1982.

When I started learning Spanish I used to watch it on TV here in Finland with subtitles in Finnish and enjoyed it immensely. I later discovered that I can watch the series on RTVE's (sort of Spanish equivalent to BBC) own website with Spanish subtitles.

This is great because I don't really like the newer episodes and in Finland they only show newer episodes at the moment as far as I know. So there is a clear pay off for my efforts which I find quite rewarding.

I also like the feeling that I get when I learn grammar of a new language. I get really nostalgic for some reason when I start to learn conjugation patterns in a new language such as Catalan. It reminds me of a time when the world was my oyster and it was a simpler times.

Mais oú sont les neiges d'antan.

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