So long, technicalities.

Yeah, learning a language when we don't have a linguistic background can be daunting and put you off from learning. Being born into an open-minded culture can be a huge advantage, where you are brought up with learning, reading books and watching movies in their original languages, (not dubbed) subtitled, so that you acquire that multitasking skill of keeping up with the movie while reading.

Growing up in a country where the language background syntactically welcomes other languages (like Latin), can certainly add value to a CV and agilize our network. It certainly opened up a few doors for me.

There are a few out there which already offer that boring part of the technicalities, the grammar, the syntax, etc. I used to be really strict with all that, thinking people would not take me seriously if I didn’t follow the correct process. Like with all other linguists, I always had the tendency to correct any mistranslations on the telly, or if something was incorrectly said or pronounced (it bugged the hell out of me!). Life showed me that although that’s important, that’s not the only thing I should be worried about.

On the note of skills and passive income, last year I thought putting together a Portuguese course together, I thought it may be worth a shot, but I never really got around to doing it. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time, or I was too hung up on the language technicalities, or it was not for me. So when I went over it just didn’t feel or sounded fun as I had initially thought, so dropped it.

As it happens, sometimes we just need to take a break from things, to distance ourselves from something, especially when that thing is taking so much from our time that we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. We don’t see an end to it, because we keep going back, amending or redoing it.

It's the same as writing. I have always liked writing but when blogging came about, my concern was essentially to obey the expected blogging rules and format. And that stuck to my mind so much that in between blogs created, and then deleted, I just kept that obsession, which stripped writing of what I loved about it. Again, and again, and again.

Since I decided to go back to it in a more honest and open way, without worrying so much about the form, the ideas seem to flow more naturally and in higher volume. Why are we so stubborn to keep hold of learned ways as if they were officially set norms as if change was a bad thing? Again, going back to the idea that our minds are so programmed into set and comfortable ways that a step beyond it feels like committing a crime. In what way is the fear of the unknown a creative characteristic?