I've been interested in languages and language learning since 2005, even though I've had the luck to live in a multilingual environment since I was born.

Languages I've learned or at least explored:

• Spanish
• Mandarin Chinese
• English
• Taiwanese
• French
• German
• Russian
• Turkish
• Persian
• Japanese
• Korean

Sometimes, I think that learning languages is the most stupid and hopeless hobby ever.

However, I'm still willing to do it and I enjoy it nevertheless. It's better than much of the other stuff I could waste my time on.

I wish I could remember a word and it's meaning by only reading it once. Unfortunately, memory doesn't work like that.

1. Too many words.
2. Homophones.
3. The relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary.
4. You must recognize every single word at once in order to be proficient in a language.
5. Rare and obscure words are plentiful. You may encounter then once but when you encounter them, you'd better know them.
6. Words with abstract meanings are difficult to learn.
7. Words tend to acquire different meanings that are somehow synonymous in the native speaker's mind, even though the relationship between these meanings isn't clear for non-natives.
8. Every single word is a world of its own.
9. Learning words amounts to learn an extremely vast array of topics.
10. Slang.
11. Inflection makes words unrecognizable.
12. Words always acquire new meanings.
13. Some adverbs are hard because they don't designate a thing but rather trigger a mental process in which clauses are emphasized, compared, softened, conditioned, etc.
14. The ability of creating new words.

I think that, in order to learn words, it is important to give words what could be called a “sense of place”.

When natives learn words, they are lucky enough to learn them in real use, and thus in the place where the word appears naturally. Many second language learners aren't that lucky, since they must learn everything from books, teachers or media, meaning that the places and forms in which they get in touch with the language are limited.

Giving words a “sense of place” means that different words are mentally associated with different places (physical or mental places), and that daily routine reinforces the knowledge of these words as one visits or revisits these places.

I've learned many languages only by reading newspaper articles. Thus, the only places where those language live are those articles. Everytime I reread those articles, I am reminded of the language. But when I'm not reading those articles, the language does no longer exist, because I don't have anything else to do in the language. I have no more places to visit.

Places are physical or mental entities. They have a concrete, permanent existence, while words in a foreign language do not. New words especially, they are forgotten as soon as they are understood. Giving words a “sense of place” is an attempt to give words a solid ground in which to live.

I guess what I'm saying here is that language learning should be made more lively. But this sentence doesn't fully describe what I feel. Immersing oneself in the language and letting it all come in, picking a word here and there sure works for children. But for me, it is somewhat uncomfortable to just learn a word here and there without worrying about the day in which things start to fall into place. I don't have that patience anymore. I'm not that ignorant either. I can try to grasp the vocabulary of a language at once, as a whole, and cover it as an explorer covers a terrain with the help of a map.

Since there are so many words, the only way to learn them is to divide them into groups and give each group a different treatment. And to give each group a different treatment, one should expose oneself to different experiences in which one naturally encounters each word group.

I want to all know words. Even the useless ones.

I want to know how you say “plough” in your language, even if I haven't even seen a plough in my life, in any language. I want to know, because knowing what the word for “plough” is, how it declines, where it comes from and what its phonetical structure is, tells me something about your language, and about you, native speaker of the language.

Love has something to do with learning words. You won't recognize the words the few first time it crosses your sight. They will seem awkward at first. How come such an ugly word means something so beautiful? How come such an insipid word has such a lively meaning? How come…? But words will grow in you, to the point you can't conceive other way in which the meaning, that particular shade of meaning, can be expressed.