whatever makes you "glow"

It's been a while since I published my last post. This is because I had a lot of work to do for university, but also because I decided to put some serious quality time into my language learning. 

During the Easter holidays, I spent a week in Sweden with two of my friends. We don't speak Swedish but a friend of mine and I have recently started to learn Norwegian. When we heard people talking in Swedish - which is phonetically not so distant from Norwegian - we suddenly had a vivid connection to the Norwegian language and were totally motivated to put more effort into studying it back home.

In Sweden, we also met a German guy who studies in Brazil and can speak seven languages more or less fluently. If you need proof, watch this video! Unfortunately, he left Stockholm only one day after we had arrived, but on that one evening we spent together in our hostel's kitchen, he gave us many valuable tips and showed us some useful websites that might help us improve our language skills.

One of these websites (okay, it's a blog, not a website) is The Polyglot Dream. This is a blog owned by an Italian man who can speak ten languages. He blogs about his language learning skills, but also about the culture of different countries and about his trips to different places. Every post comes with at least one audio file - sometimes you can read and listen to the same text in as many as five different languages! I love blog posts with accompanying audio files because I feel that good quality acoustic input is often too little, but the most important phase in a conversation is the active listening - you have to understand what the other person is trying to tell you before you get to try to formulate your answer! I recommend you to listen to this interview about the role of talent in language acquisition. It lasts for half an hour but it is definitely worth listening to. Their views on the topic are interesting and it is highly motivational as well.

Some weeks ago I also borrowed an Italian audio book from the library. The book is called "Novecento" and it talks about a boy who is born on a cruise ship that goes back and forth between Europe and America. The boy becomes a piano virtuoso who plays for the guests on board. However, he refuses to leave the ship and people start wondering why...

I loved the story because it was written like a play and even contained poems. It was quite easy to understand, too. I have already decided that I will borrow some more Italian audio books from the library next week.

As far as Norwegian is concerned, I'm still searching for a good resource to use. I listened to a Norwegian radio station but there is mostly music and only little talk. It is a bit frustrating that my level is not high enough to follow a normal conversation yet because that limits the range of videos and audio files I can listen to. I listened to some children's stories but I was soon fed up with them because they were too ridiculous...to sum up, I'm still investigating Norwegian resources.

If you are still reading at this point, you might have wondered what the title has to do with all of this. Well, whatever makes you "glow", whatever makes you happy, excited, whatever you find intriguing will help you boost your level in a language :-)