Alan Palmer's Language Chat Podcasts

Hello everybody For my weekend words today I'd like to discuss ways to make language learning more interesting. Often, people ask us why we learn one or more languages. We sometimes ask ourselves why. This question seems particularly interesting sometimes as we don't always have easy answers. Personally speaking, I often answer that I learn languages "as a hobby" like we do when we take photographs, collect things, read books, watch films. Is it a good idea to compare learning a language to these activities that we would usually consider to be hobbies? I am not sure. I suppose learning a language is something that is interesting to do, keeps our minds occupied and there is something to be gained by learning - we eventually get to communicate with other people who speak the language - whether these are native speakers, or other people learning the language. If we have no-one to speak the language with, then how do we keep interested in learning? We need to find reasons than make us more interested in keeping g