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Wanderlust - stop tempting me!!! | ||
Tags: Wanderlust | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5860 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 33 of 43 03 January 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
1) I have a Wanderlust to learn languages that cover most area of the world. Hence, I have a list like this: Arabic, Korean, Czech, Indonesian, Polish, Swahili, Hindi, Thai and Turkish. 2) I focus my efforts on German, French, Japanese and Russian. When I did not progress much, I turn to Indonesian and Czech for a "break". 3) Basic for Arabic, Hindi, Korean and Thai, I would give them up fairly quickly after I realized that I would need to divert most of my time or resources from other languages/ activities in order to overcome the initial barrier. I would rather perfect my existing languages instead of focusing up to pick up the basics of a tougher language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5440 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 34 of 43 04 January 2011 at 3:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I know, that's why I wrote that I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, because neither your nor Solfrid's remark have anything to do with what I wrote in the first place. My position is in accordance with the ethical principle that you should conduct yourself in a way such that you can wish for your own behavior to become a general law. Measures against Greece are already on the way, and Hungary has been criticised heavily by representatives of several European countries already. Nothing new here, everyone should know this from the news. The goal of these actions is to motivate these countries to adjust their current course. On the contrary, what you and Solfrid propose is to motivate countries to change their past. That is as absurd as it can get. It is an unfortunate coincidence that you brought up Germany as an example against someone who has German as his native language displayed in his profile. This might raise the suspicion that you deny someone the right to protest against undesirable developments due to hereditary guilt, and that a person is not allowed to learn from history. I strongly reject both implications: the first because it is based on superstition, the second because it contradicts reason. The EU was founded as a result of European history. Countries that want to benefit from this union but refuse to fulfill the duties that come with these benefits endanger the EU. There is a symmetry in my original post with respect to motives: I motivate myself to do or not to do something by means of motives that I want to see exerted on others. The fact that I managed to express this with so few words surprises me in retrospect, and it makes this post one of the best I ever wrote on this forum.
Yes, terrible and terrifying to all who claim rights but don't want to fulfill the duties attached. May they shake in their boots. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5929 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 35 of 43 04 January 2011 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As for resisting temptation, I often give in temporarily just to satisfy my curiosity about various languages and often the curiosity doesn't last long. One way I resist temptation is to remind myself that if I were ever in Hungary and met a lovely young woman in a cafe or restaurant and discovered that she spoke English as poorly as I speak Hungarian I would be very unhappy with the results if I tried to have a conversation with her. So I usually focus on the four languages I'm already studying. I resisted the temptation to actually learn Polish because, although I love the sound of the language, I cannot pronounce it at all. My tongue, lips and vocal cords refuse to make many sounds that would even remotely resemble Polish phonics. So I'm doing the 6 week Dutch challenge instead. In answer to your 3rd question, I did fully embrace wanderlust twice in 2009 and I coped by deciding to stop feeling guilty and simply chose to learn Finnish and Swedish. Edited by mick33 on 05 January 2011 at 7:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5105 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 36 of 43 04 January 2011 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I plan to learn French, Brazillian Portugese, and Russian in that order. My pipe dream goals include Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and written Arabic (looks pretty, sounds ugly). I can't even speak one foreign language so I feel that I have no business trying out the others for size... at least that is what I try to tell myself when I walk into a bookstore or library and start drooling over the language section. Edit: I suppose that when I really hit a wall in French, I'll dabble a little in one of the other two to give myself a break. Edited by Darklight1216 on 04 January 2011 at 8:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5701 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 37 of 43 04 January 2011 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
1. Too many. But I would do the ones that I have already started but am not currently working on, namely: Icelandic, Cantonese, Taiwanese. In the next tier I have languages that I'm pretty certain I will do at some point: Spanish, French, Danish, Russian, Japanese. Then the last tier are the pipe dream ones. These are quite liable to change at a moment's notice: Polish, Hungarian, Welsh, Bulgarian, Ancient Greek, Finnish, Portuguese. 2. I don't resist too much overtly, but I do force myself to never have more than five languages that are not at an advanced level. That is, in order to start a new language I must get a previous one up to a certain point. 3. I try to match my selections up with opportunities as they arise. For example, once I started going regularly to a German conversation table, I ramped up my German studying a bit. I started doing more Dutch because I was able to take a class a few months ago and also in light of this forum's challenge :). Otherwise I try to make small incremental progress (via SRS mainly) in languages I'm not actively pursuing. Edited by egill on 04 January 2011 at 10:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5339 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 38 of 43 06 January 2011 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sarcasm is a risky business in its written form. You do not get a sardonic smile or tone of voice through the pages. I do not object to anyone using any method to discourage themselves from studying a language they do not have the time to study. For that any method is as valid as any other. I was merely pointing out that if we are to chose ethical reason for studying or not studying a language we can always find reasons not to study any language - in the past or the present. My father spent 18 months in a German concentration camp. My family and my country lived through horrors through the war. Does that even make me stop and think before chosing to study German? No. Not one instant. First because I in general, for any language chose to separate my feelings for the people from my feeling for any past or present political regimes (and I love the Germans - they are friendly, trustworthy, hard working, well organized people that it is very easy to like) secondly because I think it is vital that we all let go of the past. If we Norwegians were to hold on to grudges from the past we would for ever be bitter at all our neighbours (the Danes for keeping us as a colony for 400 years and stealing Groenland from us, the Swedes for denying us our freedom when we wanted it in 1814 and for stealing the territories of Jämtland and Herjedalen, the English for putting up a blokade during the Napoleonic war which made thousands of Norwegians starve to death. You get my drift? We are not short of horrors in European history. But for German specifically, my main reason for not wanting to let any past events influence my choice, is that my father has nothing but respect for Germany, and if that is his overwhelming feeling after what he went through, who am I to judge, having met nothing but kindness from any German I have ever met? 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5278 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 39 of 43 06 January 2011 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, but on the other hand one would think that you of all people would like to disentangle political structures such as states, from the nations/ethnicities in which these political structures were founded and exist. The Greek and Hungarian nations and their languages far precede the current Greek and Hungarian states/governments and whatever their deficiencies may be. So what if Greece "has measures against it"? So what if Hungary "is being criticized"? What do those things have to do with learning the languages of the Greek and Hungarian peoples? I could understand it if you had some sort of personal animus (e.g. I hate them because "they" killed my family, a hypothetical scenario) but to conceive of an entire people, its culture, and its language, which in both cases discussed above stretches over more than 1000 years (in the Greek case, more than 3500 years), on the basis of the EU/German policy to those countries over the past 5 or 10 years, just seems so ridiculous. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5677 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 40 of 43 06 January 2011 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
*Ehrm...* Representing the only neighbouring country that has never screwed Norway over in any way (I don't recall Russia doing anything either, but it's just not possible that she never has :-]) I recommend a jointly-operated full-on surprise assault on Sweden -_- Finland and Norway will then divide its territory 50%-50%. I kid, I kid. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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