Follow the language meanderings of an English teacher and language enthusiast.
Original music by Jonathan Huggins
Transcript:
Hi everyone and welcome to this first episode of the Language Meanderings podcast. My name is Jonathan. I’m an English teacher and language learning enthusiast. I’ve been learning languages for 20 years now. I’d like to talk about in this first episode just to introduce myself a little bit and layout the premise of this podcast.
So I started learning languages back in 1995 when I was in my first year of high school. I started with Spanish and 2 years after that I decided to start learning some French and a year after that some German, and in my last year of high school I visited Europe for the first time and I really fell in love with France and decided to continue learning French and that’s what I specialized in at the university.
Instead of doing a study abroad program I decided to finish my studies a lot earlier, so I finished them in 3 years instead of 4 and then I moved to Paris and studied French literature and musicology at the Sorbonne, Paris 4 university. I was there for several years and managed to get a diploma in musicologie and I started teaching English at elementary schools and later in businesses at La Defense and different parts of Paris and in 2008 I decided to move to Mexico City.
So I’ve been here now for about 7 years and I have two children who were born here. So, my son is now 3 years old and my daughter is a year and a half and they are both growing up in a trilingual environment here where I speak to them only in English and their mother speaks to them in Spanish and French.
So, I’m constantly being surrounded by French and Spanish and English on a regular basis, so I’m going to share a lot of tips that I can think of for learning in a bilingual, trilingual environment and this year I’ve been taking as a challenge Benny Lewis’ “Speak in a Week” crash course to learn a new language every week and I plan to do that for the rest of the year and right now we’re in the almost end of February and I’ve been doing this for now a month and a half to start with Turkish, Swedish, Swahili, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Malagasy, Quechua, and this week I’m taking a look at Persian.
So I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about this goal in terms of How am I going about learning the expressions, the vocabulary, the pronunciation? What’s my goal at the end of a week? Do I remember any of the vocabulary the next week or the following week? So, these are some very good questions that I’m going to be discussing in upcoming podcasts related to each particular language that I’ve been studying and what resources I’ve used.
Thank you for listening and I look forward to your comments and your feedback and hopefully we can have interviews with listeners and leading language specialists and people who blog about languages and use youtube and make their own podcasts. So I’m really looking forward to sharing all these language learning tips that I can to help people not only learn their first foreign language, but to continue learning second, third, and multiple foreign languages. I don’t think it’s necessary to limit oneself to just one language or a few languages. I think we all benefit from knowing a little bit of many languages and living in a multicultural society.
If you’d like to schedule an English class with me or hear more about my language meanderings, you can visit my website at hugginsinternational.com or send me an email at hugginsinternational@gmail.com. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to the next podcast.