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You are probably already aware that I like learning languages. I'm not fluent in anything except my mother tongue, English, but one day I hope to be. French and Japanese (also HTML, if that counts!) are my strongest languages, I think. Sometimes I focus on too many languages at once, because there's so much I want to learn.

The Romance languages are my favourites right now, mostly because I like the satisfying feeling of finding connections between different languages. When I was younger, I was mostly interested in Chinese and Japanese, I just did French because it was what they made me do at school. Now, I am absolutely obsessed with French and everything about France, because I want to spend a semester studying in either Lyon or Paris. I went to France as a child, but I mostly spent time at Disney. I did get to see the Louvre though, but back then I didn't appreciate the culture or history that much. I'm also interested in the French language in other countries. Even in my own country, the UK, French is present. It's even on our coat of arms, instead of English or even Latin like you'd usually expect. Anyways, I really like French, and I try to use it as much as possible, which is very easy since I live in Canada.

I'm also trying to practice my Italian as much as possible, because I am going to Italy again this year! The last time I went was also back when I was a monolingual child. The only word I picked up from that holiday was "uscita", which means "exit". Hopefully I'll be able to hold a conversation or at least order a gelato without relying on English.

To me, learning a language is like solving a puzzle. The more words and grammatical structures you learn, the closer you are to solving the puzzle and understanding the language. It feels so rewarding to be able to understand more and more over time. There are so many languages I want to learn, but not enough time. I don't think my brain will be able to hold them all, either. If you are interested in learning a language, but think it requires signing up for fancy classes or paying a lot of money for books, don't worry. In my opinion, anyone with an Internet connection has the tools to learn a language. Well, you probably also need a device to browse the Internet, but other than that, you honestly don't need anything! There are actually a lot more free resources online than you think. And if you keep scrolling down this page, you'll find links to some of them!



Currently Learning:
Français (B2, hopefully heading towards C1!)
漢語 (Unknown level)
Italiano (Somewhere around B1, I hope)

Saved For Later:
Română (Still a beginner)




Below are all the language related pages I've made, and some useful resources for you to use to help your own learning.




Misty's Language Learning Efforts of 2023

Laddering Italian with Assimil

Free French Learning Resources!

Language Learning Tips!

Duolingo Tips!

Things I Watched/Read in French
(Page is out of date now...)

Misty's Language Learning Experiences
(This page is also out of date...)



Helpful Resources For Any Language

Free Language Courses by the Open University - They have so many languages to try, and they also have free courses in other subjects too. The best thing is that you can download some of them to your Kindle to read offline!

Lexis Rex - A site with tools to help you learn many languages. I particularly found the French spelling game rather useful.

Omniglot - An online encyclopedia of languages. It's so detailed, you could spend hours browsing here.

Ramou.net (en français) - Un site qui a des ressources et leçons pour apprendre le chinois, le japonais et même le tahitien. Il y a beaucoup de pages utiles et intéressants ici!

Duolingo - Some people don't like Duolingo, but it has assisted me so much with my French this past year. I realised that for months this has been written on my site as "Duoingo", which is embarrassing.

Duostories - Unofficial translations of some Duolingo stories. Many languages on Duo do not have any stories, so this project translates them into many other languages. They have some less popular languages that aren't even on Duolingo, which is cool.

Reverso Verb Conjugator - This site helped me immensely during my Italian and French lessons.

Quizlet - Most people prefer Anki. For me, Anki doesn't help at all. If you're having trouble with Anki too, please try Quizlet. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's still so helpful, and much better if you're short on time. Plus, you can add cheesy clip art to each card if you want to. What can be better than that? (Yes, I know you could probably do that with Anki too.)





Cool Things in Other Languages

Ephemeris, a news website in Latin - I don't speak Latin either, but I saw this website and thought it was also cool. It's a news site, entirely in Latin. You'll probably appreciate the early 2000s web design it uses. Despite its older design, it still updates with current news. It's weird seeing Latin online and not on some ancient ruins. If Latin was still widely spoken today, I wonder how the language would've changed with the Internet? For example, what would be the Latin equivalents of words like "LOL"? I really want to learn Latin now, it looks so fun. I should probably focus on my other languages first though.

Italian Anime Openings - In Italy (and in other European countries too), they seem to make amazing anime and cartoon opening themes. Seriously, some of these songs are so good that I listen to them regularly. If you like Italo Dance or eurodance, you'll probably appreciate a lot of these. My favourite of these songs is the Yu-Gi-Oh opening, it's just so amazing. It's funny because YGO is one of my favourite comics too.

K-Pop songs in Japanese (and Chinese!) - A lot of people are familiar with these already, however I want to bring them to your attention cause they're super underrated. K-pop agencies usually make their artists release songs in Japanese to reach the market in Japan. Often they'll just translate their most popular Korean songs, but a lot of the time, they make original songs! Yes, I know sometimes the Japanese can be a bit awkward, but isn't it just so cool that these artists sing in more than one language? I know they're doing it for money, still I think it's so awesome! I only know some Korean, so for me it's much easier to sing along in Japanese. Some groups decide to sing in Chinese, I find this is less common though. My favourite of the Japanese K-pop is Daesung (or D-LITE, as he's called in Japan) and his trot albums for Japan. A few of the songs were originally in Korean, but I think some of them were made in Japanese first. They're all so much fun to listen to. BIGBANG's Japanese discography is also so good, even if they did rely on English words too much at the beginning.