Kan jy dit asseblief herhaal?

Can you repeat that?

I think when I'm learning a language the easiest way to learn it is to read and hear what people are saying.  So when I go to a new country I love to take the bus, and sometimes the metro, and watch as signs go buy while also listening at how stops are pronounced.  Of course it's also nice to hear people speaking around you to pick up on the way they speak or the way things are said and the different accents.

There are some places where they don't announce the stops on the buses.  These are harder places to learn the language on your own and usually this requires you to annoy everyone everywhere on how things are pronounced.  Luckily for me, when I was in Ireland I was in a relationship with someone who spoke Irish and didn't mind at all telling me how things were pronounced.  Perfect!  Well it would have been perfect if the relationship had lasted longer.

When I lived in Holland I was able to pick up the language because they do announce the stops on the bus and the bus was very cheap so I took long rides around town just staring out the window.  I could have been fluent very quickly had I stayed there longer.

Now I'm old.  So apparently when you get older it's harder to learn languages.  I'm not sure if that's actually true but I'd prefer not to think so, so I won't do any research on it.  I'm going to stay optimistic and try to learn my languages.

Here is the new one I've come up against, as a linguaphile I sincerely want to learn as many languages as possible, but I have come to the realization that it's just not possible to learn every single language that I wish and do the upkeep to keep it current.  So which languages do I learn?  I want to have the most access to the most people in the whole world.  That's the goal.  Well I know English.  French I will need to get fluent in again.  Then of course Spanish.  Now I love Russian but it's actually not spoken in all of the countries where it used to be because of the end of the rule of the Russians.  Some people might even be offended if you try to speak Russian to them.  I think it's still quite widely spoken but there are some places I would need a back up.  I have heard that some Eastern European countries have begun to use German as their second language, so that may be a good option.

It seems like the most practical languages to learn for where I want to travel are German, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and probably Mandarin Chinese.  I probably won't start on Chinese anytime soon but it would be useful to learn in certain situations.

I think the best way to learn is of course to be submersed.  I hope to be able to learn languages as I travel.  For now I will take my time being a mother and in the spare time I have, learning a language.