I decided to pick up another language. This time, I decided to learn Hungarian. And I must say, after almost two months, I have to say that I definitely feel like there were areas of my brain that haven't been used in a while, and now I am using them again.
See, it started back in December of last year. I was in Budapest spending some days during the Christmas holidays with the in-laws. And because I had quite a bit of time, I decided to download Duolingo. Just out of the blue. And I opted to pick Hungarian, mostly because given my situation, it would be quite useful.
I just regularly worked on it every day. Sometimes I would spend just a few minutes, but most times I actually devote about at least 30 minutes every day, if not more. And now I have learned quite a bit of things.
I still can only talk in the present. I haven't learned past tense nor future tense yet, so what I can say is still rather limited. But now I know how to do accusative case, as well as plurals. It's actually amusing my in-laws a bit.
The last time I have explicitly learned a language was 1998. I was in high school at that time, and that was the time I started learning German (it was required in my high school back then to pick up a foreign language, and German was my accidental choice). Then a few years later, in university, as a Linguistics major, I continued with German, effectively taking enough classes to qualify as a minor. I still haven't planned to move to Germany at that time. My German knowledge became dormant until I ended up moving to Berlin in 2012, where I actually became immersed in the language, and that is where I am now.
Beyond that, I haven't really explicitly learned a language since then. I have a few travel-oriented phrasebooks, but I can only say that I can fake speaking such other languages, e.g. Spanish or French; the latter where I end up beginning all sentences with "Je suis...". So now that I have been diligently using a language-learning app to learn Hungarian, I do feel that there's this area in my head that is now getting regular exercise, which hasn't happened in a while.
The interesting thing is that as I used to be a linguist, I can easily abstract away and explicitly articulate the rules that I discover regularly. And boy sometimes these rules can be vastly different from the languages I already know at the moment. After all, this is the first time I am exploring a Uralic language, so the level of uniqueness given the current languages I know should be rather high.
So yeah, we'll see how this goes. At least even though I don't think I would be a fluent Hungarian speaker any time soon (they say Hungarian is one of the hardest languages to learn out there), I definitely am earning a lot of plus points already with the in-laws.
