GreenTea

At the moment? My favorite non-English song would be Sandpiper by Kalafina. They are one of my favorite groups! If you've never heard of them, I definitely recommend giving them a try asap. They are all about harmony and their songs evoke visions of lore & fantasy, and I can just squeal about them for decades. That aside, I feel Sandpiper in particular is very beautiful, and I love the lyrics, too. Here's the live performance from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P_8oUY1Bwc @Saholy: That video was like a huge advertisement for a vacation spot! The song is super catchy though. @Kangoo: I've heard of this song but never actually listened to it. Now that I have, I can concur that it is a gem! I love it. @Kektheman: There's something about French women that makes a song more enticing for me. I'm just too lazy to go out and actively look for songs. Thanks for introducing Zaz to me! I'm going to check out her other songs too. :angel:

With incredible bias, I must say that my favorite language is English. I find it to be the most expansive, flexible, and easy-to-twist language of them all. That's probably a wildly ignorant statement to make considering it's the only language I'm actually fluent in. As for least favorite, I'd have to say Spanish. It never actually sounded beautiful to me as I'm sure it does to billions out there. That, and the fact that my grades were always terrible in Spanish class. I just couldn't get the gender assignment thing right for objects, and when I had questions about it, no one was ever able to really explain to me the whys and hows. I'm the type of person where if I don't understand an equation reasonably well, I won't get it at all.

This is so embarrassing! /sigh/ I feel like such a geek, but... my first time wanting to learn a foreign language was after seeing anime trailers in Japanese for the first time. I used to watch Pokemon religiously as a kid and that led me to watching some other anime. I didn't even know they were from Japan until one day we got a DVD of Fushigi Yuugi (terrible show, btw). The DVD had trailers for several other shows, not to mention there was the option of watching the episodes in English or Japanese. It was a bizarre moment in my childhood when I actually realized "Pokemon are from Japan?!" After getting into Japanese, I discovered Chinese and Korean... And then got interested in Thailand, and Vietnam and Singapore, and India, and the Middle East, and Africa. Next thing I know I have a bachelor's degree in International Relations. (Thanks, Pokemon!)

From personal experience, the biggest motivator for me was without a doubt having a friend that spoke another language. Especially when I would go to their home and hear them chatting with their non-English speaking relatives. It always made me feel left out! I never actually considered studying Spanish until this happened to me. It has gotten me interested in Chinese as well, whereas I never really thought about learning it before. I think if you had to live in a foreign country where the majority of people spoke a different language from you, that'd obviously be a huge motivator. Another big motivator (not for me personally, but I have friends that have experienced it) is wanting to know your lover's native language. If you have someone that you're interested in who can speak another language, it's only natural you'd want to learn it too, right? : )

I think once you learn something it's really difficult to "unlearn" it. You've just temporarily forgotten. I find this happens to me often with Japanese. Living in Florida for much of my adult life, I don't have many opportunities to use it outside of school. Now that I've been out of university for about 2 years, I haven't used it at all, so if you were to drop me smack-dab in the middle of Osaka I'd be clueless for a while. BUT I think that once you've studied and learned something once, that process of relearning should be much easier than the second/third time. I first really began studying Japanese in High School (though honestly I wasn't very into it back then). After High School, I just kind of forgot it until I had the chance to take it again in college, and wow did I pick it up quicker. I think it's because I already knew the material and it just really jogged my memory and solidified it in my mind. Right now, I think what I've "lost" most of is kanji memorization. If I see it, I can read it but if I have to remember off the top of my head and scribble it on paper I definitely can't. As for the best method of relearning the material.... I think that depends on what your learning patterns are. I find reading/writing to be the best refreshers. For getting better at speaking the language, I'd say hands-down you need to regularly converse in Spanish with a fluent Spanish speaker (or multiple if possible). This is another thing I struggled with learning Japanese because I had no one to verbally practice with.