I started studying Polish🇵🇱 on April 24, 2019. I was in a pretty miserable place mentally, and I wanted something to throw myself into. I've never had a great answer to the question of "Why Polish?", though. I was interested in The Witcher at one point, but these days I have negative interest in the franchise (except for the first game, which I think is great janky creativity with a unique personality, before the AAA sandpaper removed all the most interesting ridges...). I had also been interested in Russian for a while because I liked the sound of it. Polish is pretty similar, but only requires learning a few new characters (ą, ę, ż, ź, ć, ś, ń, ł) instead of whole new writing system. I guess maybe I was feeling a little hipster at the time too, wanting an interesting conversation point? That actually has been pretty successful. People always seem to be inquisitive when I mention I'm studying Polish... though one time someone asked me to say something in the language, and I said a line from Borat (unknowingly... until they started laughing), which was unfortunate.
I went pretty hard on studying Polish for a year or so, using the quite helpful resoruces provided by the /r/learnpolish subreddit. I used a mix of Memrise and Anki decks, supplemented by a bit of grammar research. Problem is, it's hard to find good learning resources for Polish, and at some point I started falling off a bit – until I discovered a gamedev aquaintance had just started studying it as well. Pretty unexpected. I was glad for it though. We started conversing in Polish (or, for me, a constantly dictionary-diving version of Polish) online, and that actually helped foster a friendship, which I'm thankful for! It was around this time I picked up studying again, except I decided to try out Duolingo.
🚨Duolingo rant🚨Something I've come to learn about Duolingo is that it teaches you very little over a very long time (makes sense, considering they make money from ads/paid subs...). It throws stuff at you that you have no foundation for understanding, and it expects you to just eventually infer how the language works? It also has these exercises where it throws a Polish sentence at you and you have to form the English version of that sentence by selecting the correct English words from a list of pre-determined options. Not only does this mean you don't really have to recall anything since the options are already laid out in front of you (and it's pretty obvious which ones are wrong), but it also capitalizes the sentence's first word amongst the options, so that basically gives part of the answer away! It also tends to show you the exact same question just in slightly different ways (but not different enough to be helpful)! It's super dumb, but it's also super easy and smooth. It's a pretty evil design, honestly. As of this writing, I have a 896-day "streak" (I missed some days here and there but you can "freeze" your streak by spending in-app currency, lol). At this point, I feel like I'm only continuing to use this app because I don't want to lose my stupid-ass streak.
Anyways...
I also studied a little Norwegian🇳🇴 since my Polish-learning gamedev friend is Norwegian and because I desperately want to visit that part of the world. Studying these languages came at the expense of studying Japanese, the other language I was most interested in learning. Practically all media I enjoy most is Japanese – board games, tv/film, video games, manga, etc – so it was probably pretty silly of me to not study that in the first place. Since I've recently become deeply interested in doujin board games, which are rarely translated to English, I've had my spark of interest in learning the language renewed. My partner and lots of friends have been studying it for a while, so I'm in good company. There's also a shocking amount of excellent learning resources compared to Polish. So, I started studying Japanese🇯🇵 on November 12, 2022. I'm very much leaving Duolingo behind for this. I'm trying out an approach my friend Jake wrote up. It's going well so far. I feel like I've learned more in a few days than I would have from months of Duo. I'm doing my best to find a routine/pace that I can keep up. Let's see how it goes!