If you haven't seen the backstory of why I've set a lofty goal of being a functional polyglot, you can find that here.

But that is the goal: to follow through on several languages I either have some background in, or have taken classes in, to become conversational. It's definitely ambitious. And to have any chance, I need to have a think about how I can get there while juggling medical school and the general chaos of life.  

The biggest reason for this is a lack of time and energy. I know I'll struggle for spare time and energy especially when it comes to learning stuff traditionally, aka out of a textbook. That's an important thing to acknowledge which has spawned 2 key ideas in my mind:

  1. The language learning must become a habit. This is something I have zero doubt about as someone who's taken Spanish classes in both intensive and semester-long (i.e. 1 day a week for several months) format. Once those classes ended the regular exposure to Spanish ended, then the amount of Spanish I could speak slowly went down the drain. There is a little roadblock here: I live in sunny Australia and don't know any native Spanish speakers (or even many people who are learning Spanish). So I have get a little creative.
  2. The language learning must be practical and realistic. So if that is more of a passive approach instead of intensively testing myself every day on new words? Then that's the best approach because it's the one most likely to be sustainable. In my mind this goes pretty hand-in-hand with point 1.

So with these 2 points in mind, my idea to start off this journey is this: to learn through art, movies, tv shows, or books in my target languages. The holy grail? An entertaining TV show with realistic dialogue and double subtitles (both English and my target language). I've got a few ideas to experiment with in terms of how I can maximise or complement this approach (see pile of colourful but barely opened textbooks above), but this will be the foundation I try and build on.

Of course, the whole mission behind WIP is to learn by doing and to share that journey with the world, so I fully expect to refine this approach. The most important thing is to get started. Further updates to come: remember to follow my Instagram and this blog.