Study a Language

I had the privilege of being born into a bilingual family. English and Finnish. Finnish being one of the hardest languages in the world (to me it's still a challenge, though I was born and raised in Finland)!

I have always been fascinated with languages, not those taught at school, but the ones that were far from me, such as Urdu, Swahili, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean. When I was in my pre-teens, I used to listen to Hong Kongese pop music, not kidding! I would memorize the songs but had no idea what they were singing. In my teens, the same with Urdu and one Hindi song. Then I moved onto Swahili, which I again picked up after my first child was born. I got far with my studies, even got to visit Tanzania, but after moving to Canada I have forgotten most of it:(! I just don't have enough east African buddies here like I did back in Finland to practice with. You know who you are, I miss you guys so much!!!!!

So, where we live at the moment is pretty much smack down in Korea and China town. What a great opportunity to study and practice these languages. I decided to go with Mandarin, because it's the most spoken language in the world, it is a mystery to me, it has characters that are thousands of years old, it has only 4 tones (compared to Cantonese!!), and I have always been a big fan of Chinese movies, food and culture.

I did a few library courses, read a few Chinese For Dummies Books and got a bit stuck. I didn't want to stop there, and since I had embarked on such a challenge, I was blessed enough to find a private tutor! I am very very blessed! Living on a single income, with a growing family, there isn't much disposable income whatsoever. This lovely lady was wonderful enough to meet where I could afford her lessons, though she is worth much much more! God is good!

I want to encourage you to pick up a language. I believe that by learning one language, it makes it easier to learn more languages in the future and opens up perspective. Time flies anyway, so in one year, even though you only took 30 minutes a week to learn a language slowly, you would have at least been studying for 26 hours in that year, which is 26h better at a language you would have not known anything about. Invest in learning a language.

More ideas on Managing Time HERE

What languages do you know fluent or semi fluent? Which languages would you like to learn and why?