I’m Vremita aka Vada, 18-year-old Indonesian girl. I like languages a lot.

I created this blog since I found many people asking me about languages and I decided to create a blog where I can share stories for everyone.

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I speak Indonesian and Javanese as my mother tongue. English as primary foreign language. Arabic for religious purposes. I got these languages since my childhood, so I can’t tell how I learned it.

My mother said the first letters I learned in my life were the letter “U” and “I”. I was still 1 year old. She said I could point to those letters, big-printed in newspaper, and tell if it’s “U” or “I”. Then the first correctly-spelled word I said was “Ibu”, the Indonesian word for ‘mother’. I was 1year4months old. So I guess my mother succeeded teaching me the “B” letter

I learned Russian when I was 13-15. But then I forgot it since I don’t have any friends to practice with. Now I could still remember some of it.

At 14, I tried learning Croatian, a language a bit close to Russian. But since I found it difficult to find learning resources, I registered to Serbian School, where I studied Serbian for a year. Then I re-learned Croatian back and added a little Bosnian. The three languages are quite similar to each other, so it wasn’t quite difficult.

At 15, I started to learn some Italian. This was my first challenging language experience. I risked my life by talking w an Italian w zero knowledge of Italian. That was really awful. Then I learned Italian for two years.

Half way of my Italian study, I got interested with French. So I learned this language along with Italian. It was quite confusing because the languages are pretty similar (they’re roman).

After I studied Italian and French, I could understand a bit of Spanish and Portuguese, so I enriched my roman languages with these another two. But until this entry is posted I haven’t really studied these two, I just learned them little by little, so I could just understand them passively. If I have to actively communicate with these languages, I often mix them with Italian, but usually it’s understandable.

I happened to studied a bit of Dutch using my mother’s Dutch course set (she studied Dutch), but I didn’t continue because I was too busy with roman languages.

At 16 I met some Turkish people in town, and this was my first language-first-learning-with-native. My coolest language experience. Very amazing. They taught me Turkish for a few months. Before, “Turkey” was never been occupying my mind, and just in two months, my life changed.

At 17 I got into an international student exchange and I learned a little bit Kazakh, Thai, Tagalog, and Chinese. I also recalled my Russian a little.

Back from student exchange, I went really crazy. I guess the student exchange had really ‘disturbed’ my mind about internationalism and foreign languages. So I studied many many languages, but only “basic stuffs”. Wide, but not deep. These languages included: Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Greek, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Welsh. There was no special intention for learning these languages; just for hobby, fun and knowledge.

In my late 17, my father went to India for business. I learned some Hindi after that. But I seldom use Hindi :p

At 18 (few months ago) I started to learn Greek in Kypros Greek School. Now I’m still learning this language. I also learned a bit of Hebrew, Latin, Irish, Luxembourgish, and Heuskara.

I’m also learning Lithuanian with help of my incredibly amazing Lithuanian friend in my city… I’m still learning this ancient language as well. It’s very beautiful.

And right now, I have super-intensive German course in German Study Center for my study. I also accompany the course with Dutch; I know it’ll be confusing, but it speeds up memorizing words 2x times faster (for me).

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To be honest I don’t speak fluently all those languages (ofkrz I’m not that super! If I were that brilliant I’d be somewhere else but here) ; there are languages that I use actively, passively, just fun-simple-phrases, or just beginner level – starting to learn.

Learning all those languages was loooads of work, days of nottata (begadang), thousand hits of google, hours even months of downloads, thousands of papers to print, Gigas of harddrive to save, hundred pieces of DVDs to burn (because my harddrive would’ve been full!!), hundred pages of exercises to be done, thousands of bucks, a whole lot of foreign friends, incredibly moments of miscommunication…

…and millions of mistakes.

I’ve learned something really worthy. Don’t hesitate to act, don’t worry about making mistakes when you’re learning. Because if you make a mistake then u learn it, you’ll never forget it for the rest of your life.

Have fun studying and goodluck..