The Ascended Blogger – Why I’m Taking a Break From This Site

Jared here. Since 2014 I’ve been writing on this page semi-regularly. There have been many successes I have had (Fijian, Burmese, English Creoles), many failures (Tumbuka, perhaps Greenlandic in a sense, Tuvaluan). But I think I’ve done enough exploring and I think that now I have other duties.

Allow me to be clear – I AM keeping this site live. There is no intention on my behalf to delete any of the content (although, no doubt, I think that some of my content has not aged particularly well). But looking at this patchwork site I see great mirth, great distress, and a slice of my life that I have devoted myself to.

I have gotten messages from many people throughout the globe saying that this website was the reason they chose to learn indigenous / Pacific / Jewish / Nordic languages. I am very grateful for that and that is precisely why I need to head on to other projects. For now. I may indeed return, especially if I get comments requesting particular pieces or problems.

In Summer 2019 I made a choice for me to focus more on my favorite languages. The languages of my heritage – Hungarian, Swedish and Yiddish – were first priority, in addition to ones related to my games (Greenlandic) or places I’ve dreamed of visited (languages of Polynesia).

And I decided that if I needed to sacrifice mediocre conversational fluency in many others, then so be it. Don’t get me wrong, mediocre conversational fluency IS an accomplishment to be proud of. I’ve encountered it all over the world. I would even argue it is the most popular foreign language mode, regardless of the language.

But now I have another job.

With climate collapse constantly being on my mind and mass extinctions of language present, there is another front.

I have to create content in those other languages to the best of my ability. I have to give other people a reason to engage. I have to contribute more thoroughly against what my friend Brian Loo calls the “Starbucksifying” of the world. And I feel that with writing English-language pieces, I really haven’t been doing that.

To that end, I will have to use my hobbies (gaming, cartooning, religion, intercultural dialogue, language pedagogy, among many others) in order to galvanize this world into the direction I want it to.

This blog was my training ground, in a sense. And now I’m ready to use my skills to create engaging content in smaller languages. Even as a non-native speaker. Because every little bit counts.

When I started this blog I thought that I would have to end it in about a year. When I started this blog I had tons of insecurity about my own language skills. That time has passed and I’m ready to move into a new direction.

I cannot do everything at once. I think that a lot has been contributed to the art of language learning, and many greats such as Steve Kaufmann, Olly Richards and too many others to list have been behind it.

I do not want to contribute to an already crowded field. If I do, then it will likely be more on how to learn endangered languages.

I need to use YouTube, Tumblr, my Facebook Pages, and many more in the fight against Starbucksification of the world. (Keep in mind, this isn’t about Starbucks itself, and this wasn’t my term, but rather the idea that people are shedding their local cultures for something more corporate and global).

I need to become the hero that languages of the Arctic, languages of my Heritage, and languages of the South Pacific need.

And that time is now.

And so to that end, I bid a farewell to this World with Little Worlds for the time being. Perhaps there may indeed be a time to return, especially if you want me to write about anything.

But for now, I hear destiny calling elsewhere.

Yours forever in fulfilling your dreams,

Jared Gimbel

Inerniliineq (The Conclusion) – 90 Days of Greenlandic

I should actually mention at first that due to various issues that came up in my life (ones that I’m going to detail in an off-topic post net month), I had to stop at around 70 days, but it is upon me to evaluate what I did right and what I did wrong.

For one, I don’t know if I’ll be doing the final 90-day video because of the interruption, but the prize for My Language Challenge is iTalki vouchers which I might not really want to use anyhow (not right now, at least). And there is just too much going on.

So what did I do wrong?

Three things I did wrong, three things I did right:

Wrong:

• I didn’t really find a meaningful way to make vocabulary stick. I expected Anki to do a lot of the work for me but often I kept on forgetting the words and eventually a lot of the cards were marked as leeches. There was some vocabulary that I acquired but above all I think that it is minimal in comparison to what I could have done had I focused more on word-pieces than on individual words (which I thought I was more prepared for but there are only so many 15-letter words you can swallow).

 

• I often listened to a lot of music to the point of diminishing returns. I already know a lot of the lyrics of these songs by heart and a lot of that vocabulary doesn’t always translate to conversational tools (although some definitely can).

 

• I often listened to a lot of radio even though my ability to comprehend it was sometimes good nad sometimes questionable.

 

Perhaps what I should have done: read more stories, memes and blogposts, and tried to learn Greenlandic with them the same way that I teach Yiddish to my students with stories, memes and blogposts as well.

 

What I did right:

• At around the halfway point I started using Anki clozes inspired by Bartosz Czekala’s Vocabulary Labs course. I added audio with them. It felt like surgery to go through the flashcards but despite that I felt that I did learn a lot of natural speech patterns and it corrected a lot of the mistakes I was making.

 

• I think that the videos I made were good despite the fact that the 60-day video had a bit too many hesitations and mistakes. I also made a point of reading a lot of the Greenlandic-language comments and feedback. Thanks to this project I now have dozens of new Greenlandic friends who will help me, not only with languages but my upcoming video game projects!

 

• I was fantastically persistent for the first 70 days, only having missed my father’s birthday in July in terms of 30 minutes of study. That itself is a victory.

 

So what will I need to do going forward?

• Drastically alter my flashcards if I found out that they are not working. This is hugely necessary because sometimes I found out that it was WAY WAY WAY too hard and I just was flashcarding other languages on the subway instead (with even highly advanced Swedish being the path of least resistance over intermediate Greenlandic).
• Take a break from immersion for a while. I already seem to have done everything in that respect but it isn’t translating into fluency.
• Use my connections that I have and the new pages that I have liked in order to get tiny pieces of vocabulary, one by one.

For the next 90-day challenge I’ll be doing Tahitian in honor of the year of indigenous languages. It begins tomorrow!

 

My Motivation is in a State of Emergency

I just uploaded my Day 30 video for Greenlandic on Facebook (the final installment for the 90^th day will be a conversation with a native speaker. And before you ask, yes, I have access to them. Many of them, in fact).

But I can’t help but notice over the course of the past month that, with the exception of financial earnings (and, to some degree, even that), my motivation is virtually gone. It has gotten so bad that I’m not even motivated to have fun anymore, oddly enough.

What exactly is going wrong?

I can theorize.

• The routines are not helpful at all

My retention from Memrise is virtually nil at this point, minus some occasional passive-understanding bonuses. It feels like a chore to me, almost, even for languages that I really, really want.

I remember when I was in Jewish school that there came a point in which I asked myself what the big idea about reciting the prayers every day was, given that I had recited them so often that I can (still) remember all of them. Now if only I could memorize OTHER languages with the same efficiency.

Which gives me another idea…

• Create new routines

In Orthodox Judaism there is the idea that one should pray three times every day. A set of texts that are recited, partially out loud, partially silently, and also regulated by time constraints (the morning prayer, afternoon prayer and evening prayer all have to be recited at certain times).

Perhaps in some respects I should treat my phrasebooks like prayer books, and read through them, even silently, on a daily basis. That way, I can actively memorize a lot of the material very well even if I have only passive understanding of it.

• I want to build other areas of my life, too

I want to be a better game designer, better at understanding relationships at all kinds, better at connecting with people with whom I have nothing in common. I love languages, but sometimes I feel that too much of them blocks other areas of development in my life as well and I have to be conscious of that.

 

So what do I do know?

Well, on top of the 30-day Speaking Challenge which I’ll be doing tomorrow for Greenlandic and likely either Hawaiian or Tahitian (I’m leaning towards the latter), I think I should follow the prayer book routine at least for a while and see where it gets me. I’ll probably do it with my Greenlandic phrasebook, recite one portion of the book in the morning, another in the afternoon and another in the evening. (Like in the Jewish understanding, sometimes I can stack the afternoon and evening sessions back-to-back).

That way I’ll have everything memorized before I know it and internalized with the exact precision with which I remembered the prayers.

This should be fun.

Oh, and the half-way point of 2019 is upon us.

See you in July!

The 2019 Polyglot Gathering: Personal Lessons and What I’ll be Doing Next

Here I am watching as the sun sets over Bratislava and a thunderstorm appears to be in the works. I’ll walk outside and enjoy the twilight but first I’ll need to relate a bit about how things went from my perspective.

The fellow attendees at the conference were curious, accepting, not in the least bit critical, vulnerable and kind. Often in the “real world” I sometimes hear comments like “let’s continue in English because I speak English better than you speak my native language” (I know, right?)

But the way things appear at Polyglot Conferences, everyone has a series of ladders and it doesn’t really matter how far you up on them…or not…you are, as long as you have some drive to go higher or even taste a language for a little bit.

There were also great lessons in vulnerability. I saw in genuine action that fluency is not perfection (and come to think of it, I never heard almost anyone speak non-Native English without some type of grammatical mistake. AND THAT’S OKAY.

Corollary: it’s okay to speak any language non-natively with mistakes too, as long as you can communicate and patch your errors one-by-one, which may indeed take a lifetime or never fully get perfect, but that’s the beauty of learning, isn’t it?

In any case, I had a humbling experience realizing what it was like for people to present in their non-native languages. I was a lot more reserved. I was energetic and I second-guessed my grammar a lot. I thought “wow, the speakers of Yiddish and Swedish are gonna give me a bajillion dislikes when these videos come out”.

My first thought after concluding both was that they were disasters. But later on I then realized that despite sometimes fumbling for words, using too many filler words, or even sometimes making Norwedish errors in my Niuean presentation, that’s okay.

It was really the first time I’ve done it and it gave me a newfound appreciation for the many speakers of other languages who gave talks in English as well (and I think I can compare myself favorably with how they did).

I didn’t have the same quality of the “taking a class with Jared is like getting a drink from a firehose” that I have with classes I teach in English (and my classes in other languages are like that but they’re usually not filmed, which was the big issue in making me nervous. I’ve taught dozens of classes in non-native languages before, just not with a camera in front of me that was headed straight to YouTube. I even noticed that when the camera was off I became a lot more natural and less nervous.)

But I guess that’s okay.

My next project will be to improve my Greenlandic and Danish both substantially for the sake of  “Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures”, a task that will last ninety days at least.

Greenlandic I speak…okay but not well, and Danish I speak well but I’d like to speak better. I’d rate them as A2 and C1 respectively. I am already developing a plan to get a lot more Danish music as well so that I can create a full-fledged environment of being immersed in both languages (I already have a lot of Greenlandic music but I’m open for more suggestions, too).

The current challenge I’m doing is this one: http://mylanguagechallenge.com/

The requirements: film a 10-minute video after 90 days speaking your target language (or, should you choose the reading or the writing tracks, choose the appropriate avenue). I do have access to native speakers and a lot more than I thought was possible a week ago.

So here’s what happened.

I uploaded a video on Facebook of me speaking Greenlandic for a minute. A Greenlandic friend of mine asked to share it in a group, which he did, and then it became viral in Greenland generating hundreds of likes and I woke up with endless friend requests from all over Greenland (which I accepted because I’m making a video game about Greenland and because it is my favorite country, too!)

I got comments like “we should crowdfund his vacation here” or “he speaks better than most Danes who have been living here for a decade have” (this was something explicitly told to me by my host mom in Greenland. Info checks out.

Well this is going to be fun. Time for me to enjoy the Slovak twilight one last time for this journey.

Thanks for making all of this so memorable!

Quality Games: My Plans for Immediately After the Polyglot Gathering

Greetings from my hostel in Vienna!

So with two presentations, three performances and two mini-talks I’ll be giving at the Polyglot Gathering next week, it occurs to me that next week it all comes to an end and I’ll be in the real world again.

As much as I really like speaking multiple languages, there is one thing that needs to poke its head in.

Multiple things, that is.

For one, there is the understanding that maybe I should focus more on quality rather than quantity. I’m not going to lie, sometimes I deliberately finding myself using English in hostels in Austria and Slovakia JUST so I can feel vulnerable and get detached from my identity and self-esteem being entirely hinged on being a polyglot.

And a polyglot I will remain, mostly because I have to retain my knowledge of Yiddish and Nordic languages in order to earn money.

And the second thing, is, of course, my game, “Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures”, which was delayed due to a number of personal crises in my life.

So starting with next week I’ll be focusing almost all of my language efforts on Greenlandic and Danish (my fluency in Danish notwithstanding, but I want to get better in terms of my accent and vocabulary) until “Nuuk Adventures” hits stores.

This will mean a lot of sacrifices on my behalf, but my languages should serve my professional life, not the other way around (unless it happens to be convenient).

Once Nuuk Adventures is out, I’ll likely be learning the language of the place where the next “Kaverini” adventure will take place. I’ve decided it but I can’t reveal it quite yet.

And I’m not going to lie, part of me is very excited to get a language to near-native fluency. Sure, my knowledge of other Nordic languages isn’t going anywhere and I’ll be retaining my Hungarian and Yiddish as well (and likely some Modern Hebrew), but nothing else is certain.

Perhaps I should say “thank you for understanding” in the event you’re disappointed. But this is a new beginning for me that I knew was coming for a while.

What I Had to Give Up to Become a Hyperpolyglot

Well I’m going to make a number of announcements now.

While my Slovak studies have been continuing due to the fact that I will be presenting at the Bratislava Polyglot Gathering in 2019 (one presentation in Yiddish on Kiribati and another presentation in Swedish about Niue), I am probably going to retire from my hyperpolyglot life once that spiel is over in June.

I need to be clear about something: I will NOT return to speaking just English, given that my livelihood depends on my knowledge of Nordic languages and Yiddish (as well as, to a lesser extent, languages of South Pacific).

I just feel as though I had to make a lot of sacrifices in order to become that imposter-syndrome-riddled legend. And now I want to live for myself rather than my reputation.

I am glad to have “dated” so many languages and cultures, but now I’d like to settle down and really get to intimately know my favorite languages. These would be, in no particular order, Yiddish, Scandinavian, Finnish, Hungarian, Greenlandic, and Polynesian in general but with a focus on Tahitian and Hawaiian.

My English is EXTREMELY good, even by native speaker standards (I tested in the 99^th percentile for vocabulary). I know that there literally might not be enough time for me to get to that level in my “favorite languages”, but I’d like to get closer.

Also the pressure of trying to get me to speak better (Spanish / Modern Hebrew / French / etc.) has been bothering me. I somehow see it as friends who would encourage me to break up with a girlfriend I really love.

So as a result of that I may stop attending language exchange events as often as I used to come June. But maybe I’ll pop in occasionally.

Here’s what I felt I needed to give up as a result of becoming a hyperpolyglot:

 

1. A Sense of Belonging

 

I became “that guy”, in a sense, the one whose reputation as a “language genius” always proceeded me. ALWAYS.

I never really could find myself connecting to my American culture on a deep level. I gave up American television and news. I found myself permanently apart from the country I spent the most time in.

Even though I felt significantly “at home” among foreigners of all types sometimes, I constantly felt as though I was American first, speaker of their language second.

I became the bridge. A true member of none of the cultures I partook of, but a genuinie member of none of them.

 

2. Full-Time Fluency without Doubts

 

There were exceptions to this, but often with the languages that I had to spread myself thinly to maintain, I felt that my knowledge of idioms would be thinner than I would have liked, even then I worried about my grammar sometimes.

At first I figured that I didn’t really WANT native-like fluency, but with each year I feel that it is what I want in the languages I want most.

I saw it this way (and the book “Babel No More” manages to point to this): I put most of my chips on the languages I liked most and then spread many of them thinly across many others.

Now I’m going to put all of my chips on the eight languages I like the most. And the fact that Scandinavian languages and Yiddish are closely related, not also to mention the Polynesian family, gives me an advantage in that respect.

I don’t want to sound “learnerese” anymore in any of my languages. I want to sound completely natural. And I got there. But only with a few. But even with those view I want to get better.

I also knew seventeen languages to conversational fluency, but even with half of those I felt as though many of them had holes. Holes are okay. Even very good speakers of English as a second language have them. But I want to make the most of what I can get and that will involve optimizing my skills.

 

3. Leisure Time

 

This is self-explanatory. I had to convert all of my free time to maintenance. Walking around? You better be listening to audio in one of your target languages. Playing a game? Same.

It took an unbelievable toll on my mental health. The idea that I had to maintain my reputation all of the time meant that everything that wasn’t explicitly related to my career had to go to language learning. The only fun I really had for fun’s sake was video games but even then it was usually to note “what is this game doing well? How about not so well?” concerning what I would incorporate into “Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures” and other projects.

 

4. Security and Confidence

 

Language learning is highly vulnerable because there IS a point where you will sound like an idiom. I got told that my accent was terrible. Sometimes I even got told to stop speaking the language.

And that’s not even going into what was said about me online. Whenever I would read some things, entire days if not weeks would be plunged into despair.

Even with fluency, either professional or conversational, I interpreting things that native speakers said very seriously. “Pretty good” was code for “needs work” or “not passable”. I would interpret anything other than endless praise as “you better work on it!”

And even then I would sometimes interpret praise as the fact that I needed work on it too. (It had to do with a post I read saying that native speakers don’t praise each other’s language skills).

It was a neurosis that I was aware of from my days in religious school as a pre-teen. The endless “shoulder checking” and the idea that God would always punish you for every small thing…and only now while writing this do I realize that it ended up in other areas of my life without realizing it.

 

5. Ability to Converse with Certain People

 

This is an odd one. Because my life became so internationalized, there were people to whom I could connect to VERY easily and others whom I could barely manage a conversation with at all.

Among most internationals, I didn’t need to explain the whole Macedonia naming controversy at all. Among many Americans, it was necessary. And many people throughout the world only imagine the South Pacific as “Hawaii, Fiji and Tahiti and that’s it” (Kiribati required a lengthy explanation as did Tuvalu or the Federated States of Micronesia). And that’s not even mentioning the constituent countries of New Zealand (such as Niue).

I didn’t want to learn about American pop culture too deeply. It felt fake for me. Sometimes it cost me the ability to connect with people. Although with other internationals we could always talk about our cultural differences or about the things American locals were never asking us about.

 

6. Time to Relax

 

My polyglot career became everything and it consumed every aspect of my life. I always wanted to get better, almost like an addiction in a sense. I wasn’t allowed to relax because I figured “someone else out there is doing a better job than you are and YOU have to keep working!”

Again, this was another transmuted neurosis from my high school and college days in which I was a “striver”.

 

Bonus: Pressured to learn popular languages and get good at those.

 

Do I need to say more about this? Some people barely believe languages outside of Western Europe exist. The idea that my heart was elsewhere some people found confusing.

If you love something, go ahead and choose what you love above all else. And that’s what I’m going to do.

First Week of 2019: Review

Today was extremely difficult with me having had a translation job that literally ate up my entire day. That said, however short a post I have to write I thought I should write something now that 2019 is one week over.

Thoughts:

• On free days (the likes of which the first days of 2019 were), I had absolutely no problem meeting my daily goals at all. Once I realized that my freelancing was going to be making an even BIGGER comeback shortly after the new year, I realized how I sometimes didn’t have enough time to manage putting in 50 Greenlandic sentences in a day. Daily goals are good if they are bit-sized, but sometimes things happen (whether that be illnesses or emergencies or suddenly finding yourself having to do something).
• So my first week of Tibetan didn’t go particularly well. I credit this to material not being “fun”. It occurred to me that given that I have material from Mango Languages and uTalk for Dzongkha but not (yet) for Tibetan, maybe I should pivot with devoting the first half of 2019 to Dzongkha (Bhutanese) and the second half to Tibetan. Already I’ve been seeing results and poised to be able to have my first conversation in Dzongkha. Even a “field trip” with plans is in the cards! (…to another neighborhood in New York City. Not to Bhutan. Sorry.)
• I figured that I should also adopt a “light version” of my goals on certain days.

With that in mind. Revised goals for January 2019:

• 30 minutes of Dzongkha study every day (thanks to MTA never working this is easy).
• 50 sentences of Greenlandic sentences into your Clozemaster Pro database (except for super-busy days).
• 10 sentences of Greenlandic sentences to be reviewed every day in Clozemaster Pro.
• 1 video of Dzongkha every day, no matter how long. Any level is good.

How are your goals going?

Hello 2019! (And New Smaller Plans!)

For some odd reason I feel a certain flower of hope blooming in my life right now. Perhaps this New Year is going to provide a lot of healing as well as a lot of intrigue. Just the way I like it.

Inspired by All Japanese All the Time, I decided to implement a new strategy of learning in my life (and not just for languages). Namely, I have to have quantifiable goals that are either OVER or not.

“Be fluent in language X” is not one of those goals (if there is no test for it, anyhow, as would be the case for most languages of the developing world as far as I know).

However, “write X sentences a day” or “read a book for Y minutes every day of January” IS a quantifiable goal.

2018 saw me draw up a HUGE list of languages that I wanted to touch, very unrealistic precisely so that it would stretch me to my limits. It didn’t work out that way, so instead I’m going to focus on mastering two this year (or getting “good enough” at them).

2018 saw Hungarian and Fijian go on my resume, and while they both need improvement that will likely come with time and exercise (given that I can understand most material in either this will be a way to “cement” my skills, especially on the subway or while walking).

2019 may or may not see me forgetting languages (I was introduced to someone in December with the words “this man has forgotten more languages than most people speak fluently”. Okay, then. I’m happy.) But seeking to explore something new to invigorate my life (as well as something I can use in areas of New York City), I’m turning towards the Himalayas.

My two primary focuses for this year will be Tibetan and Dzongkha (which I will always spell correctly from now on).  With “Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures” looking at a release in the second half of 2019, I’m going to be focusing on that throughout the year (as well as using my Greenlandic studies to pay homage to the UN’s year of indigenous languages).

 

For Greenlandic, my goal is as follows for January:

• Write in 50 sentences a day into your custom Clozemaster Pro course.
• Do 10 of those sentences.

For Tibetan, my goal is as follows for January.

• One YouTube video each day.
• 30 minutes with the book.

 

When February comes around, I’lll adjust the goals so as to fit with my reality.

As for maintenance, I’ll be watching one video per week in each of my fluent languages, if possible. If I have a conversation in any of them, or have a class in any of them, I am exempt from the video.

Also, I know I say this every year on New Year’s Day, but happy birthday, Slovakia! This year I may even get to SEE YOU!

2018, or Every Great Story Has a Low Chapter

Last year I was so full of hope and energy that I drew up a HUGE list of languages that I wanted to at least touch in 2018.

This year, I look back and I see that I significantly underperformed. Yes, I finally managed to have Hungarian conversations on a weekly basis. Yes, I finally got conversationally fluent in Fijian (and even Tuvaluan for some time). But concerning my videos? Made a LOT fewer of them. Writing blog posts? The same.

That said, I really should look back and celebrate my success (and I’ll reveal my goals for 2019 tomorrow that are going to be VERY small. Perhaps too manageable, in a sense). I was watching Hungarian videos every day during my workout and understanding the general points of almost all of them. I practically didn’t need any more learner audio anymore. My grammar has a few rough edges but aside from that, very good.

Given that Hungarian is one of my heritage languages that I want to speak for the rest of my life, I am glad to know that I finally made significant progress in it.

As for Fijian, it was okay when I was in Fiji and just continued to get better as a result of listening to audio books (read: the Bible, because I sort of don’t have anything else…yet. Aside from songs) as well as my birthday present of Clozemaster Pro (which enabled me to add custom sentences).

But I digress.

The fact is that if you are reading this, you are some variety of achiever. Someone who sets very high standards for yourself. You should expect that one point in your life will be…underwhelming.

AND THAT’S OKAY.

Perhaps one thing I also did this year that I’m “ashamed of” is the fact that I would announce a change of plans every month or so in the second half of 2018.

But you know what? That’s okay too. Because sometimes you need to experiment around with your grand visions.

As for my goals that I’ll be revealing tomorrow, well…I’ll be bound to them by oath, in a sense…to ensure that I get results.

A LOT MORE than what I got this year.

Here’s hoping all of your dreams come true!

Jared

Jared Gimbel: The Story You Never Knew

Tomorrow is my birthday (when I’ll be writing something else).

As my 20’s come to a close tomorrow, I will forever remember this decade of my life as the one that transformed me to a confused follower into an internationally-minded, confident explorer.

Around age 24 I started to invest seriously in my studies of Jewish and Nordic Languages, thereby setting up the primary basis of my income (until my video games start coming out!)

Around age 25, weeks before my 26^th birthday, I discovered Tok Pisin for the first time, one of the most transformative experiences of my life that left me with a soft spot towards the developing world and I am in awe of how efficient and poetic Tok Pisin is on every level. It serves as a testament to human endurance, that even when being enslaved and bereft of dignity, humans will hold onto culture, humor and the resilience that defines us all. Other Creole languages I studied since then from the Atlantic and the Pacific had very much the same features.

At age 29, I was told that my parents were floating the idea of travelling to Fiji. Within the following days, I went to Barnes and Noble and got myself the Lonely Planet Fijian textbook and began memorizing phrases IMMEDIATELY.

There is a lot of victory that I had over the course of the language journeys of my 20’s, but there are also the stories and sides that had deep defeat as well.

Sometimes I made silly mistakes in classes on the most basic level, sometimes even concerning things I said about the English language.

Within every one of my language successes I had dozens of times in which I encountered discouragement from native speakers or “beat myself up” because of my high standards.

While my videos were gaining traction in Palau and Kiribati I also had to deal with an angry Subreddit and woke up one morning to an entire webpage dedicated to insulting me. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened.

When abroad I worried that I would never “get good” at the target language and sometimes called up my family on the verge of tears. I also sometimes was made to feel like a stupid American or, even worse, that my religious upbringing in my teenage years left me with a permanent handicap in how I understood the world. (As a girl I dated once told me, “you know a lot about books, but you do not know life”.)

I also had to realize in my later 20’s that there would be a lot of dreams I needed to let go of. I couldn’t seriously become native-like fluent in a language I didn’t really care about (and unlike most people, the “languages that I didn’t really love” were actually the global giants of Western Europe. My heart has been with “the little guys” for quite a while now. )

In all likelihood, barring romance with a Spanish-speaker or business or tourism, my Danish will always be better than my Spanish, no matter what. But I’m okay with that because hearing Danish spoken on the streets of New York City (or anywhere else) always makes me happy. I remember one time when I was returning from a Bar Mitzvah in Washington D.C. I get off the bus and Penn Station and I hear a teenage boy on the street saying, “ja, det er jeg meget sikker på” (Yup, I’m really sure of that”) into a  smartphone. I smiled and knew I was in New York again.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to be someone else and I still remember a teacher in the Paideia Institute telling me that “life is too short and too precious to be wasted on something that you don’t care about” (that was Barbara Spectre, in case anyone who was also in the program is reading this).

In college and in high school I was deeply religious and looking back I think it was largely not because I myself wanted it but because I myself was afraid of divine punishment. In 2013 I made the decision to walk away from religion, bit by bit, and there were a lot of woodland walks where I was worried that some force was going to punish me if I made the decision to turn on the computer on Saturday. Shortly I realize that my fear was preventing me from having the life that I wanted and that I had actually thrown away many years and opportunities on account of being someone I didn’t really want to be.

I became ultra-competitive deep down inside. Hardened by my experiences in higher education, I had learned to become ruthlessly perfectionist to the degree that several friends told me that “no human being can [feasibly] live like that”.

I figured that in any field, whether that is in business, romance, success in getting clicks on your blog posts, etc…that you had to be as GOOD as you possibly can in a world of infinite choice, otherwise you would be thoughtlessly tossed aside in favor of someone better. Perhaps the first time I really experienced something like this was with the college application process, but it was deeply toxic because only years later did I realize that we live in a culture of fear in which our deepest insecurities are made omnipresent so that we can be sold stuff more easily.

Throughout my entire life, even as a toddler, I had known that I was very different. At age 3, I was perusing atlases and wondering about what life was like in areas far away from the DC area. At age 29, here I am in a room in Brooklyn and to my left is a bookcase with language learning books from every continent (except Antarctica). Then as well as now, I somehow felt as though my interest in places and things far away from me would be a cause for stigma.

One time I even had someone at Mundo Lingo tell me that learning Kiribati was not a wise investment because “they’re going to be underwater soon”. I was calm with him but deep down inside you can imagine how furious I really was at this display of heartlessness.

With each growing year I see that there is an ongoing struggle for control of the world, between ordinary people who want to save it and those who treasure short-term profit above humanity and don’t care if the world goes to pieces because of it. Too many people have told me that my work with languages of Oceania / the Arctic is essential to the assist in the struggle of the former.

With each language of the developing world I learn, I see man’s inhumanity to man even more pronounced with each page. But despite that, I also see that the human tapestry is something to admire in all of its glory, despite the fact that I’ll never get to experience the whole thing no matter HOW hard I study.

To some degree it shook me to my core. I saw exactly how rigged the system seems to be in favor of the world-destroyers and doubted my ability to change anything.

But I’ll end on this note.

April 2013. I’m in Woodbridge, Connecticut, my parents’ hometown (for Passover). I go to the library one day and I go to the travel section and I find a book on “Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands” in the language section. I discover the Greenlandic Language for the first time and I fall in love. I obsess about it and the very thought of me seeing another Greenlandic word makes me giddy.

I go to the library the day afterwards and I take a digital camera with me. I photograph all of the language section (it was about five pages or so) and then I go home and I make flashcards out of it on Memrise (it was the first-ever Greenlandic course on Memrise. Now there seem to be about a hundred more from all languages!)

Despite the fact that I was not good and it (and still don’t think I am) I wrote blogposts about my experience, consumed Greenlandic TV and music and told many of my friends about it.

In 2018 I’ve noticed that, at least online, there is a lot more recognition of all things Greenland. Especially in the language-learning communities. Back when Memrise had hundreds of course categories available on the app version (before relegating them only to the Desktop version), they had a Greenlandic category…one that was added because of something that I myself did. Thousands of learners have at least sampled the language from the looks of it. And it seems that Greenland-o-mania will grow even more with my release of “Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures” later next year (despite the fact that it got delayed MULTIPLE years on account of difficult circumstances in my life).

Perhaps I had a part in bringing about this “revolution”. I will not know for certain, but back when I made the Palauan video series I actually encountered several commenters saying that they were inspired to teach Palauan to their significant others because of my videos.

That’s. Not. Nothing.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m going to go get some gifts. I’ll say this: Clozemaster Pro in its custom sentence packs is going to be HARD to beat!

See you at age 30!