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Mizunooto self-introduction. | ||
Tags: United Kingdom (UK) | Introduction | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| mizunooto Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4687 days ago 42 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin, Japanese, Polish, Kazakh, Malay | Message 1 of 7 04 February 2012 at 1:12am | IP Logged |
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Hi everyone! Here is my story so far. I hope it is of some interest. If not, look away now!
In the beginning I learned little bits of many languages. It was frustrating because I couldn't say much! My French was not bad (we did five years at school which gets you somewhere at least) and I got some basic Polish when I visited there for two weeks. I am thankful for my three years of school Latin, which was a massive help for Romance languages. So where are we now? Well, I finally got to the end of my "First Journey"! I have got a feel for all the languages I need to know, and a rough knowledge of the way they work. I got to grips with my second most difficult obstacle - Chinese characters - (up to about 1500 now, at least things make more sense when I look at them now), and finally started to get the hang of tones! Despite being a musician this was very hard for me - the hardest! So now I have a good picture of all my languages in my mind. It seems to be based on the map, and it is divided into blocks of similar languages, which I don't see as separate, more as different pronunciations of the same basic word with some local grammar changes. So what do we have? Germanic - German and Dutch are similar to English so they all go in one block. Then we go up to Norway which is related but I put it in a block with Swedish and Danish (obviously). Thanks to Latin I can get a good start and put Spanish, Portuguese and Italian together. I have spoken Spanish in Spain a few times, though I never learned it so that's a bit surprising :) French goes on its own probably because I know it better. So that suggests that when I get more proficient in the other languages I will not need the support of this "blocks" idea. Interesting! Another block consists of Polish-Czech-Russian which are very similar. Then from Welsh which I learned a very little bit, I include Irish and Breton (regardless of the reality, and evidently French is important for Breton!) I studied Japanese for some time so this gets me started with my "Asian block". in fact I would expect that Classical Chinese or some kind of old Chinese would be the equivalent of Latin and be of great help in this block. What do you think? I am doing Mandarin seriously now and I am starting to get an idea of the important root words. Not very quickly yet though. If you have written a book called "Chinese Etymology: the most important root words used in Asian languages", let me know! If it doesn't exist in English, I will work it all out eventually and certainly there must be some book about it in one of the languages round there. So anyway I am considering Mandarin as the essential language in this part of the world (whether that is accurate we will see, but this is just an ad hoc approach so far). Then we have of course the other Chinese languages/dialects which I group together, so far just Mand. and Cantonese but I will be looking at some others to include as necessary (e.g. I think Taiwanese is important). So really I have a few "super-languages" on my map. That's how I see it. Possibly when I get better at it this will disappear. It certainly helps me though. From now on I am going to get good at individual languages. I am on Mandarin now. It's my first time concentrating on one thing!! Usually I work well if I do short bursts of one thing, then forget about it, then miraculously improve without doing anything, and come back to it later. So it feels unnatural to concentrate on one thing only. But this is all an experiment, and the good methods will be retained, the bad ones rejected! All I can say is, I know a lot more Mandarin than I did two weeks ago. And in three years it will all be much easier, so all I need to do is keep doing one thing at a time. It's the bricks that make the wall. Even though, in this case, I think learning languages is more about removing walls. I'm doing it to communicate better, understand people who are different from me, and most of all to help as many people as possible. Soon it will no longer be permissible for "language barriers" to cause any problems whatsoever. And people will say - war, Krieg, guerre, what were these words? Good luck to you and apologies for inflicting this on you at great length! (PS there are a few languages on my list I didn't mention - those are to remind me for the future) Edited by mizunooto on 04 February 2012 at 1:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Marj Senior Member United States Joined 6556 days ago 257 posts - 283 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French | Message 2 of 7 08 February 2012 at 11:22pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome to the forum. You have an interesting way of looking at languages. Looks like you have a long language-learning journey ahead of you. Good luck with it!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6369 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 7 09 February 2012 at 4:22am | IP Logged |
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You have a large and interesting collection of languages. I wonder how you find time for them all.
Welcome to the forum. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5012 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 7 09 February 2012 at 8:40am | IP Logged |
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Welcome to the forum. Your blocks idea reminds me of things I have seen written by Professor A. in the section of the forum entitled "lessons in polyglottery". Im sure given your background you will love reading all the advice in that section.
Have fun! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mizunooto Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4687 days ago 42 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin, Japanese, Polish, Kazakh, Malay | Message 5 of 7 04 May 2012 at 3:40pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the replies! I'm wondering myself how to find time for them all recently. I will have a look for posts on that subject as I'm sure it has been mentioned many times.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4999 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 6 of 7 05 May 2012 at 9:00am | IP Logged |
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Welcome, brave one!
You really are ambitious, I wish you a lot of success. Will you keep a log? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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