January is the month of resolutions. Someone start doing sport, stop smoking but I do my Language resolutions. In 2016 I was able to improve my French, as I moved living in France. I feeling confident when I speak to French people and I can even sometimes understand their jokes!… yes, I’m working on it. Also, 2016 was my Spanish year. I can understand a lot of information and I had some experience of speaking with a native speaker.

Swedish

Well, 2017 will be the year of Swedish. I’d already started learning it before but my motivation disappeared somewhere and I gave up. Now, I feel like I want to continue, and maybe it will be a good base to start learning Danish or Norwegian. Or, maybe some day I will visit this country (I’m very excited about it).

German

My aim is to achieve B1 level. I would like to speak correctly, not just understand this language. By the way, it is super fun to find similar with Swedish, Russian and Ukrainian words. Here in Alsace, almost everyone speaks German and I find it so cool. When I hear that people « jump » from French to German so easy, it gives me motivation to learn.

Italian

The Italian language is my favorite one. I love how it sounds, its pronunciation, its words… But I was always afraid to confuse Italian and Spanish in my head. Now I am certainly ready to parlare Italiano.

Chinese

No, for the moment I don’t have the strict aim to speak fluently Chinese. It’s just my curiosity. I learn it 15 minutes per day with « Hello Chinese » and « Chinese skill » applications on my phone when I don’t know what to do. To me, it is a fun way of spending my free time instead of wasting it. I also enjoy its pronunciation and different sound levels. It’s like music classes!

Esperanto

Hopefully, I don’t have to spend a year to learn Esperanto. People say we need just 150 hours to learn it. So easy! Honestly, when I first started to read a text in Esperanto I could understand 80% of the information. I mean that’s cool! There are so exceptions at all! Nouns finish by « o », adjectives finish by « a ». There are three tenses: present (finishes by « as »), past (finishes by « is ») and future (finishes by « os »).And there are only two cases – Nominative and Accusative. Isn’t it great?

Now I give you some reasons to learn Esperanto.

Reason #1

It is a great base to learn other languages. As I told you, for the first time I understood 80% of the text. Esperanto took a lot of words from Latin languages, for example: lingvo – a language (lat.), kuiri – cuire (fr.), kanto – a song (esp.) and so on. Also, it has similarity with Slavic languages, and even Chinese!

Reason #2

Over 2 million people speak Esperanto and 685000 people learn Esperanto on Duolingo. There are a lot of Esperanto communities and you can find new friends all over the world or maybe use it as your secret language among your friends.

Reason #3

Esperanto has its own culture. You can find songs, stories, books written in Esperanto. By the way, Esperanto is the 32nd language of Wikipedia and it’s even more popular than Greek!

Esperanto has its history. It was created by Polish doctor and polyglot L.L.Zamenhof in 1887. He wanted to make Esperanto an international language, that is why he gave this name « Esperanto » – espérer – to hope.

You can listen to a song in Esperanto here: Liza Pentras – Bildojn

For the moment I use Esperanto in 12 days application. It is available in different languages (I chose Ukrainian!). Every day you have different text with audio. There is also a grammar page and a vocabulary page. After that, you can practice your skill by doing exercises.

Well, that was my language list for 2017. What is yours? Write me your comments below.