Learn from a qualified linguist in the field of language acquisition who has learned 2 languages as an adult. Hi I'm Lochlann, and I teach people how to learn languages, and have been learning them as a hobby since around 2019, but my experience with language goes back way further than that. I grew up in a monolingual English household, but my extended family each spoke a minority language, Cantonese on my dad's side, and Anglo-Romani on my mum's. My parents speak neither of their heritage languages as they "aren't useful", so I didn't grow up with them, but I heard Cantonese in particular from my grandmother and extended family. I didn't have much if any contact with other foreign languages, nor did I begin to start learning another language until I was 13 and started at a new secondary school, where I had to study French, then German, then Spanish and Italian. I remember being dropped into my first French class and being completely overwhelmed, I didn't know how to pronounce any of the words and it seemed like I was just bad at it. Lucky for me though, I lived in the middle of England and not France, so it wasn't an important subject anyway... right? Well, let's fast forward a few months and we start learning German alongside our French lessons; I LOVED German, it felt intuitive and logical and it was great, but I was never actually able to hold conversations in it because the school system hid so much of it from us and didn't encourage us to go out and explore this language. Once our teacher left the school, I never did German again. The same thing happened with Italian. It wasn't until I took Spanish in the year before my GCSEs that I felt like I could maybe get somewhere, with languages, even just to the tourist level, and I made some really good progress but I never got to speak, and I couldn't understand anything that was said to me, I could only read simple texts and put sentences together in a very messy-but-comprehensible way. During this period, I took my first trip abroad to Europe, going through France and ending in Catalonia. Seeing all the road signs in foreign languages, seeing languages I didn't even know existed, and just being somewhere totally different to the English speaking world really lit up my world, but it felt like I was forever going to be barred from all this new stuff and left out. At the end of my GCSEs I ended up with a D in Spanish and was back in that mindset of "maybe languages just aren't my thing". In 2019, I downloaded DuoLingo and tried learning Dutch. I failed. In 2020 I took to Russian, I failed but learned a good deal in 6 months, and had achieved a tourists level of the language, far less than I would be happy with nowadays in the same amount of time, but I didn't know what I was doing at the time. Then In 2021, I took a trip to Romania for a month. I spoke no Romanian, but I still had my choppy secondary school Spanish which consisted of about 50 words at this point and those 50 words saved me because for some reason, lots of Romanians have some knowledge of Spanish. From this I learned Romanian and Spanish are related, and that there are language families where learning one language gives some understanding of another. I come home, I knuckle down and learn Spanish using a new method: flashcards and a grammarbook... and Netflix. In 3 months I was capable of conversation and went to Spain for a month... and couldn't understand a word anyone said to me. My spoken Spanish had improved, but I was still hopeless at two-way communication. When I returned home I felt defeated, but carried on. It was around this time I got into teaching English as a Foreign Language, and this is what completely changed the way I learn languages. I dove deep into applied linguistics and read study after study on language acquisition, started my degree in modern languages and became a Trinity College qualified EFL teacher, I returned to French, wanting to test my new method on what seemed to me to be an impenetrable language from my childhood. in just over a month I could understand most of what I read and about two thirds of what I heard. I was able to fluidly hold conversations and be understood. I have since refined the method to be able to make words more memorable as I was constantly forgetting words mid conversation, and have a focus on getting a feel for the grammar without explicitly reading up on it first. Today, my French is conversational, Spanish feels very comfortable, and I am now working on Welsh using the most effective method yet. So why do I want to help you learn a language? Because I know what it's like to desperately want learn something and feeling like it is out of your reach and not knowing why. Ever since hearing Cantonese in my grandmother's living room as a kid I've wanted to be able to speak a different language, and now that I've learned the how of it, I want to help people like me do the same by showing them that it isn't that you can't learn a language or that your bad at it, it's that you haven't found the right method. The other goal for me, is in language preservation. Like I mentioned earlier, I do not speak Cantonese. In my family it will become lost when my grandmother passes. This is a shame as it is such a beautiful and rich language. Since moving to Wales, I have fallen in love with Welsh and I can see that Welsh is in trouble and I would like to help anyone who wants to learn it to do so effectively, and to build good memories with the language.
