The 9 Languages I’ve Tried to Learn - (Some I Failed)

Contents

• English 🇺🇸 

• Greek 🇬🇷 

• French 🇫🇷

• Japanese 🇯🇵 

• Wollof 🇬🇲 

• Norwegian 🇳🇴 

• Spanish 🇪🇸 

• Cantonese 🇭🇰 

• Finnish 🇫🇮 

Over the years I’ve learned 9 foreign languages. Some successfully and some were complete failures lol. And with various reasons and goals behind why I started learning each of them.

I think it can be easy to see people in the online space that know all these languages and only see the success stories.

But the fact is that many of us have failed before managing to do it successfully.

This blog post is my stories behind these 9 languages that I have learned. Some to fluency, some just basic phrases and very simple conversation.

But they all have a story behind them.

It’s a life-long passion of mine to learn languages. Something that only kicked into full gear 3-4 years ago when I finally figured out how to do it.

I’m not some kind of language prodigy but have struggled in the past and not getting to where I wanted in certain languages. But I’ve learned from my failures and it’s made my understanding of the whole process of learning deepen.

My hope is that you can learn from my successes as well as my failures. And to get a window into my story of language learning plus some fun facts that you probably didn’t know.

Here are the languages I’ve learned in the order that I’ve learned them.

English 🇺🇸 

English was my first foreign language although the next one of the list I started learning around the same time. I learned English in school from age 10 although I’ve been around the language much longer.

Me and my brother would actually watch cartoons that wasn’t dubbed in Swedish but rather the US versions in English.

My parents also thought it was funny that me and my friend from across the street would constantly watch the 80’s movie Ghostbusters when we’re like 6 or 7 years. Because we couldn’t understand what they were saying or even read the subtitles.

It’s tough to say to what extent but somehow I think it had an impact on how familiar the language felt that I heard it from an early age.

Learning English was a slow gradual process of many years of exposure. But I’ve always felt so “at home” in the language. 

I remember being in Greece with my family at around age 9 and asked my parents how to say: “I’d like a glass of water” in English. They told me and so I right away tried it.

Just to see that I could actually communicate with people and get my message across at an early age was a thrill for me.

In High School I watched tons of American movies and TV shows. And I watched them without subtitles and that really improved my listening comprehension a ton.

I discovered how powerful lots of input is to be able to absorb a language.

Another experience was when I was in Junior High School and we were given the assignment to read the book “the Giver”. It had quite advanced vocabulary and the teacher had a list of the most challenging words written down to go along with the book.

I still remember some of the words like “meticulous”, “scrupulous” and “hearth” that I learned from that book. It was an early experience of the powerful impact reading has on expanding vocabulary.

Now after having lived in the US for several years, and using it more than even my native language Swedish, I feel in some ways more comfortable with English than Swedish funnily enough.

In my mid 20s I lived in the US for a couple of years. Being completely immersed in the culture was a childhood dream come true for me.

I got to experience what it’s like to be completely assimilated in a foreign culture and also being treated as an American. Most people didn’t even realize I was from Sweden and that was somehow a lot of fun for me to be a bit of a chameleon .

I really enjoy the part of my personality that comes out when I’m speaking English. Because all languages have their own personalities. And being so comfortable with it has served as a kind of “benchmark” of what is possible in other languages.

Greek 🇬🇷 

Me and my family used to go to Greece almost every summer when I grew up. A family member who lived there spoke fluent Greek so I would often ask her how to say certain phrases like “check please!” or “where’s the bathroom?”.

I was around 9-10 years old at the at the time and I just loved being able to communicate simple phrases with the locals.

I learned how to order food, greetings and names of different milk shakes (super important for a kid to know). But not much beyond that.

It was still a very meaningful experience that left an imprint on me. Especially now looking back. 

Just the experience of instantly getting to try out what I had learned on natives and getting the feedback was a lot of fun. Something I still enjoy doing to this day.

I didn’t care to good or anything like that which I think has really influenced my lack of pressure with language learning that I still carry with me to this day.

Greek is a language that I find very beautiful and I’ve always appreciated how relaxed the Greeks are. A wonderful culture and heavenly food.

French 🇫🇷 

In Junior High School I was given the option to choose either French or German. I chose French and had classes every week for 3 years.

Honestly though I just tried to cruise through the class. I was quite bored because we learned mostly about  the language rather than how to actually use it to communicate.

I would take pride in speed-studying my glossary lists 15 mins on the break before class and mostly nailing them. But of course, after that weekly test I had forgotten it all so it was of very little use.

For many years I didn’t really like French very much and how it sounded. It just didn’t appeal to me. But for some reason that has recently flipped so now I quite like how French sounds!

And me being very interested in cooking and french cuisine it would be interesting to get to immerse myself in that culture even more.

Me and my wife stayed a night in Paris on the last leg of our Honeymoon and we still dream about the breakfast we had (see pic below).

Knowing French would have been handy at that time.

I have no plans of learning the language in the near future but who knows where the adventure of language learning will take me.

Me and my wife enjoying an unforgettable French breakfast during the last leg of our Honeymoon.

Japanese 🇯🇵 

I was 17 years old and we had a week-long Easter Break from School.

I found out about a program called Rosetta Stone and since I was watching quite a bit of Japanese anime at the time I thought it would be fun to learn the language. 

I jumped in with a passion and studied at least an hour every day for a week. And I loved it.

After that I just stopped and never went back to it (I was more preoccupied with music at the time). Funnily enough I can still say highly useful phrases like “there’s a boy under the table”.

Japanese is such a beautiful language and me and my wife are slightly obsessed with their culture.

The amazing food, the impeccable gardens, the cleanliness, the layout of their apartments, Japanese anime and their space ship toilets and bathtubs - I mean, what’s not to love?

I still haven’t been to Japan but it’s 100% on my list to go there. Would really like to take some time to explore the country and culture. It’s somehow so different from the rest of their world. A fascinating place.

Interestingly enough their are some overlap of Japanese and Finnish culture so Japanese people tend to really like Finland. And I’ve always felt the languages have a slight resemblance in the way they sound.

Wollof 🇬🇲 

This one is probably the most surprising on the list as I don’t think many of my friends even though about this.

During my jazz musician studies in the Royal College of Stockholm (around 2009) our university offered a “Gambia Course” so I just jumped on the opportunity.

It was a 3-week fully immersive experience learning about their incredible dancing, music and culture.

While being there I ended up spending quite a bit of time with some people working in the kitchen where we lived. And they didn’t speak any English.

I asked those who knew English how to say things and started writing down words and phrases in Wollof in this notebook I was carrying around. Just to be able to ask “what’s for dinner?”, recognizing some food names and say some basic things.

I had several pages full of phrases that I wrote down, even though Wollof is interestingly enough only spoken and doesn’t have a written language.

Never used it much beyond that trip (other than a while ago when I encountered a shop owner in Finland who was from Gambia) but it was such a great experience that I’ll always remember.

It taught me that even if you just learn a little bit of the local language - people will really love you for it and you’ll be able to connect with them on their terms and get a window into their lives that you wouldn’t otherwise get.

Norwegian 🇳🇴 

Back in 2013 I started working on and off in Norway. Something I’ve continued to do every year since then.

I would go for a month or two, sometimes longer, and work intensely for a season. And then I would travel for a few months before coming back.

It’s been an unexpected part of my journey that I have enjoyed immensely. The Norwegian Fjords is seriously some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Norwegian is quite similar to Swedish so I could have gotten by with speaking Swedish while being there.

But I like learning a bit of the local language whenever I travel somewhere and thought it would be fun since I was already there. 

I wrote down new words and phrases on my phone and asked a lot of questions. I never studied it but it was just through interacting with my coworkers every day and being curious that I learned more and more.

Today I’m very comfortable in the language even though it’s quite hard to gauge my level since I can always “cheat” and use Swedish words whenever I don’t know the Norwegian word.

Norwegian has one aspect that makes it really challenging to learn. And that is that not only do they have 2 official languages - Bokmål and Nynorsk but they also have a seemingly infinite amount of dialects.

Even just traveling 10 mins people will use different phrases, pronunciations and vocabulary. So often I feel a bit confused to who I should mimic when speaking it. My wordings and accent has changed quite a bit over the years from being in different towns to work.

I have a friend who speaks around 10 languages or so but has jokingly said: “Norwegian can’t be learned” for this very reason.

It’s funny but there’s a lot of truth to it.

Norwegian sounds a bit like an old-fashioned, funny and more flexible version of Swedish. I really enjoy learning their sayings and wordings.

Getting to see incredible scenery like the “Geiranger Fjord” has been one of the many perks of working in Norway.

Spanish 🇪🇸 

This one was a bit of a failure lol.

Spanish was a language that I had been interested in for a long time. I tried to take a Spanish course in High School but I just couldn’t get it to fit into my schedule.

5-6 years ago I was in the US for 6 weeks and the house where I was living I was surrounded by Spanish speakers. My roomies and most of the people that came by all spoke Spanish.

My desire to learn it was ignited.

I found out about this free language app called “Duolingo” so I started using it every day.

And I wrote down a bunch of useful words and phrases that I picked up by asking the Spanish-speaking people I was around.

I got started using some of it to communicate right away.

I learned some during my stay but I wasn’t super focused on it. I even continued using Duolingo for 10-15 mins a day for like a year after. I believe I finished all the lessons that was available at the time.

However, it didn’t make me anywhere near fluent or even conversational.

With the methods I know today I’m confident I would get there very quickly if I decided to go back to learning it.

And I would take a completely different approach to it.

Cantonese 🇭🇰 

I went to Hong Kong in 2017 for the first time.

I completely fell in love with the culture and people. A deep fire in me ignited to learn the language. I just had to learn Cantonese.
(read more about my Hong Kong & Cantonese journey in my blog posts: How My Love Story With Hong Kong & Cantonese Started & How I Learned Cantonese From Scratch - Part 1 (Year 1))

This is when I really learned how to learn a language. Cantonese was so different from any language I spoke so I knew I couldn’t just pick it up without the right methods.

It was a life-changing experience for me and gave me so much confidence and clarity on how to learn a language.

If you’d like to know more about some of my methods and mindsets that I used for learning Cantonese (and Finnish) you can download my free guide below:

I’ll never forget the feeling of being able to use only Cantonese and zero English during my online Cantonese lessons.

Cantonese might very well be my favorite language of all time.

It’s just so special. There’s nothing like the feeling of speaking it. It’s fast, funny, with a lot of depth, tons of slang and a flexibility that feels very liberating. It somehow just represents and feels like freedom to me.

And you can be very expressive speaking it. The fast-paced nature and energy of it somehow really fits me and my personality.

Me and my wife absolutely love Hong Kong and it’s culture. So much that we spent the bulk of our honeymoon there.

Finnish 🇫🇮 

I had been drawn to Finland since I was a teenager. I couldn’t put my finger on it but there was just something deep and profound about the country and it’s culture.

And I really liked the language. It somehow felt so different and I liked the way it sounded. Like this other-wordly fairy tale language (which is no wonder since Elvish from Lord of the Rings is based on it).

A couple of years before I met my wife I dabbled with an app called Memrise to learn Finnish for a few months. Didn’t learn much.

Nothing wrong with the app but just learning isolated words doesn’t get you far when learning a new language. Especially not a language like Finnish where the words take a seemingly infinite amount of different forms depending on what you’re wanting to say.

Then when me and my wife Heta met I definitely wanted to learn it and learn it properly. And applying what I knew from learning Cantonese I now knew how to do it (read more about it in my post: How I learned Finnish (Without Studying Grammar) - Part 1).

Probably 95% (if not more) of my Finnish learning have been through reading books. And I’ve only read books that I’ve been interested to personally read.

It helped me absorb the grammar and vocab naturally and intuitively in a way where I also got to leverage my personal interests. It was a huge eye-opener of not having to rely on grammar studies to learn a language.

Nowadays I’m quite conversational in Finnish and improving all the time. Me and my wife speak it more and more with each other.

It’s our “secret language” for when we don’t want others to understand (unless we’re around Finnish people).

It honestly feels like a teenage dream come true to be married to a Finnish woman and get to speak Finnish every day 💕

———

Hope you enjoyed reading about my journey of the failures and successes I’ve had in learning languages. Maybe some of you can even relate to parts of my story.

What languages have you learned and/or failed at? Would love to hear so feel free to comment below.