Being loved but not the way we need it

@ Svetlana

Я во Франции

@ Tired_Wanderer

Hello

First of all thank you. Second, your English is extremely good, surely better than mine. Yes, languages has been and is an extremely rewarding tool in all aspects. The fact of interacting with people from many different origins, either living in their countries or meeting them personaly elsewhere has given me a valuable source of understanding and references to compare, aside from the sheer pleasure that I extract by just communicating.

I always first started learning languages on my own, just like that, at home. I started at the age of 16 with German (Spanish being my mother tongue). I would spend just hours and days and months doing the exercises, taking the words from a dictionary and put them in a notebook. It was always a very exciting feeling when I was able to translate my first paragraph without help. I moved to the US at the age of 17 to do my last year of highschool, and I kept learning German on my own, I never attended classes, only went to take the examinations in order to get my diploma, that is, the study was always at home (usually lying on a sofa).

Then I moved to France at the age of 23 to do half a year of university.

Then to Holland for my Erasmus program

Then to Germany for work four about 3 years plus another year for an MBA.

Then to England for 4 years, and Ireland for half a year.

Then back to Spain, then to Estonia.

A key for learning languages was to work with the right book. When I first started Russian I chose the wrong book and was discouraged after a few weeks and dropped it. But I retook it again with another book and that made the difference.

Modern books are commercially based and are full of pictures, scramble letter games and similar dumb things. It is like the pretend you to have a good time and not put the effort. If you dont put the effort you dont learn.

It has to be a book where it is all basically grammar, well structured, in the right order, so that you can learn systematically. Some books in German were extremely good there. In German you do need to study with a very precise order, otherwise, you will get lost with the declinations.

Probably the languages respond to my being more interested in what is outside than in what there was around me. After having lived in the West for many years and really know it too well, I love the East, Eastern Europe, and I dont want that it becomes “westernized”. That would be another subject for relating but the values of the Old Eastern Europe were and are a treasure.

If I am to relate this experience to the site, I would say that all that was made in a “house of horrors”. My father a sadistic, and my mother not a clue where she left, as she abandonded the house when I sill crawled on four legs. I didnt have a good day at home, and quite a few scars remain today after many years, but it was clear to me that I could only count on me, maybe that pushed me to gather the means to be able to communicate with someonelse.

O

Yes,

Hi

I am just a simple person, the struggling was motivated by the understanding that staying without doing anything would leave me in a worse situation forever. I just had to get out of there. However, I was a disaster in identifying opportunities in life, so looking back on in years, I can tell you that I would have been able to achieve much more with a million times less effort if I had had the right character to adapt to social environments. So, the richest tool you can ever have in life is your social engineering abilities to get you what you want, aside from a minimum of background knowledge in the field you want to be active in life.

O