I've been interested in languages and learning about other cultures since I was a child. My personal history is a bit confusing, but I'll try to explain it as best as I can.
Moving around as much as I did allowed me to experience more cultures than most people would embrace in their lifetime. While I was growing up, my mother spoke German around the house, I later went on to study German throughout high school and became fluent. I was born in Texas and I knew quite a bit of conversational Spanish, and to this day I understand the language when it's spoken, but I'll probably answer you in English for fear of misspeaking. Most of my family friends - I've always referred to them as my aunts and cousins, are Filipino, so I grew up hearing Tagalog and learning to cook traditional recipes like Pancit and Lumpia. I started to get interested in K-pop and J-pop during middle school and I started watching watching K and J-dramas to try and learn the language. I also enlisted the help of some international friends to guide me.
All of this goes to say that I'm just interested in learning- whether it's languages, cultures, religion etc! I am a big believer in humbling yourself and admitting that you don't know it all. There's still so much that I don't know about the world and I'm looking forward to educating myself and being educated on it. In my mind, the best way to do that is by active learning.
I'm currently in the process of learning: French, Italian, ASL and Korean.
One of my favourite learning apps over the years has been Duolingo (http://www.Duolingo.com).
They, seriously making learning languages so easy to do and it's such a fun process. They do have an app for on the go learners, but the computer based site holds so many more activities: bots that you can chat with (both on the app and the webpage), interactive stories that you can read through for comprehension, skill strengthening time based challenges that you can start, vocabulary sheets for words that you struggle with and support group/communities that you can join to encourage each other. And maybe best of all, the app is free! The paid version of the app removes the ads that you have to click away from after each lesson in the paid version.
