A polyglot myself, I luckily stumbled the other day upon a great new acquaintance as far as language sites go. An Italian polyglot by the name of Stefano whose knowledge and interest in my mother tongue Finnish truely impressed me.

He has a YouTube site called linguaEpassione with lots of quality content, and more coming of course.

Stefano’s thoughts about studying Finnish and the response from Finns to his avid interest in their small language reminded me of the response I got from my Greek teacher in Stockholm University. There is this sense of gratitude almost towards someone wanting to learn a very foreign, and possibly difficult language just for the sake of being able to converse in that native tongue. And of course have it perhaps developing into something bigger later on.

It is second nature to a polyglot to walk into a bookstore the first thing when you come to a foreign-language city, and buy a few language books or at least a dictionary so as to start learning the language straight away. Or some of it.

Of course, these days you can just skip the bookstore - though I hope you don’t - and just start learning online, way before you even enter the country. That’s what our friend Stefano also did. And does.

So here without further ado, Stefano in his own words in one of his videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkKGhNWtnk

We all learn a new language from scratch, but it is a big help when you are surrounded by it as a small child (and learn your mother tongue), or as a teenager (abroad as an exchange student). And as an adult you have these days these many wonderful ways to be surrounded by it in the form of vlogs or other online sites - or just plain travels abroad. One way or another you need to be immersed in the language, and learn it like a child would, yet in our own unique way. Whether being grammatically correct or having a fantastic pronunciation or having a superb language app in your cell phone is the thing for you, or a combination of any of those - your efforts will be rewarded.

I once had a fellow student learning Danish not by memorizing too much about anything of the language, but by simply munching the words in her mouth till they came out as something intelligible to the rest of us. And she sounded more Danish than the rest of us, naturally!

There are many ways to learn. All you need is the motivation to do so. And if you have the passion…