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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| lackinglatin Triglot Groupie United States randomwritingsetc.blRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 62 posts - 146 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, Modern Hebrew Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 2 22 March 2010 at 12:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I wrote this up for myself, decided to put it here as well. I'd love feedback from this community. I've just done a ton of reading recently, and had to finally do some output.
I'd also love advice on how to go about this. I'm just at the beginning of my journey of Polyglottery. My current plan is to be an English Teacher abroad, use that as an excuse to hop to various countries and learn their languages. Speaking of which! What degree is most conducive to that career? Education, Linguistics, Languages...? I'm not really interested in money, though I realize in certain countries being an English teacher pays rather well. And the question that underlies this whole post... How should I go about this? Should I start studying vocab for Japanese and Chinese now, before I get to formal study? I'm *terrible* about organizing my time (and have a lot on my metaphorical plate), so any tips on how to stay consistent with study? I'm about to have two weeks off of school starting on Thursday, so I have some time to establish some good habits before the grind starts again. How can I reach these goals? Would it be possible to hope to finish 3/4ths of my primary list in 9.5 years? ========== So, I've been somewhat interested in this field my entire life, and over the past couple of years I grow more and more serious about becoming a polyglot. It was a vague ambition as a teenager, if a serious one... And now... (wow, I'm not a teenager anymore. Weird. I still don't think I've adjusted to that. It's only in quiet moments. Back to this note!)... ...And now! Now I can communicate effectively in 3 languages--specifically, English, Esperanto, and Hebrew, in that order of quality. (As a side note: I think I will, for the rest of my life, not refer to myself as 'fluent' in a language until I can qualify for level 3+ according to the following chart: http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale3.htm ; by that standard I am 'fluent' in two, soon to be three. :) As of 3.16.10, my languages stand as this: 1. English, ILR 5 2. Esperanto, ILR 3/3+ 3. Hebrew, ILR 2/2+ 4. Spanish, ILR 0+ (plus unusually high listening comprehension from growing up around it.) So where will I go? I had previously planned to learn Arabic next. Lately Spanish has been more and more attractive to me, and when someone offered to teach me in exchange for teaching, I decided to take the opportunity. Planning long term, I think my language learning priorities look like this: 1. Hebrew I have all the resources one could ask for in the language, and should take advantage of this as much as possible while I have the opportunity! I desire this language for the eventual purpose of being able to read the Bible in its original languages, primarily, and because I want to learn a foreign language *well*, to an academic standard, and am currently planning to do university entirely *in* Hebrew because A) It's cheaper than American universities. B) It's a high quality university. C) It has a language immersion program that is very well developed. All that aside, it's nice to have an insider's view on the middle east from at least one side--and Hebrew is much, much easier than Arabic. 2. Spanish I have a strong background in this language, it's an easy language, and it has a huge number of speakers--barely more than English, actually. I'd like to go ahead and capitalize on my background ASAP. I feel I could get this language to near native fluency (5 on the scale) if I worked hard for 2 years, and I could be a very functional 3 with just 6 months of medium intensity effort, maybe 30 minutes to an hour per day. I'm not currently giving that (mostly because I'm still trying to become organized in this process), but that could be a reality. I have lots of Spanish speaking friends and family, so that's worth something. I also have a long dream of taking a road trip (bicycle trip?) from Texas to Tierra Del Fuego, and that'd be silly and almost pointless without knowing Spanish. 3. Mandarin Chinese The more I search out languages, the more this language becomes a serious desire for me. While I feel perhaps more in tune with the Japanese culture, Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world, and provides an excellent base for other oriental languages. It has a rich history, a fantastic geographical landscape to explore, and probably the world's most interesting (and possibly the most ancient that is still used) writing system. Learning a tonal language is also probably better done sooner than later. Chinese is also not as hard as is commonly thought, though it is indeed very hard. The grammar has some things in common with English, actually--not so complex, but ambiguity leading to fixed sentence structures that become a bit of a maze to handle correctly at the higher levels. China is also currently the leader in the "Go" world, (I think it may have been inevitable, and it may stay that way for a long time), and many see it as an upcoming superpower. The issue that is unavoidable is the monumental task of memorizing thousands of characters that have little to no phonetic data in them! That aside, the spoken language isn't honestly so bad. With Spanish, Chinese, and English, I will speak the 3 most spoken languages in the world, and have access to huge percent of the world in its native languages. I will also have stepping stones into three different linguistic families (Germanic/Romance/Sinitic)--Hebrew is a fourth linguistic family (Semitic), as well. (Esperanto also has about a 10%+/- slavic root basis, if you want to count that. ;) 4. Portuguese (/French?) Portuguese is one of the handful of languages with over 100 million speakers, and would complete the South American picture. I have always been fond of the idea of Brazil, and this would also open up some access to parts of Africa and a couple of other interesting areas in surprising places throughout the world. It also would be a natural progression from Spanish, and so should be relatively easy to pick up. On the other hand, Portuguese doesn't sound quite as pleasant as some other languages (countryside French?), and Brazil is a harsh place. On the other hand, I don't have any strong motivating factors to learn this language. I have one close friend who speaks it, but we live an ocean apart at the moment, and she's a native diglot (PR+EN) speaker anyways. I think when it comes to language 4, I will have to evaluate whether this or French is more fun at the moment... because when it comes down to it, if it isn't something you enjoy, you won't do it. At least, I know I won't. 5. Japanese Japanese is 9th and last language on the list of languages with over 100 million speakers (it has 130 million according to some estimates, with perhaps 2 million non-native speakers). The writing system, of which I've already dipped my toe into, will be helped a huge amount by my previous knowledge of Chinese, and there are some loan words. While Japanese is much easier to pronounce (not only are there no "tones", it also has less than 150 sounds in the entire language--English has somewhere in the league of 8000, no one is exactly sure) and I imitate the sounds of the language relatively well, the grammar is extremely complex, and will be really, really difficult. The Foreign Service department rates Japanese as the single hardest language for Native English speaking monoglots to learn, though from my extensive reading on the subject, I'd have to say I find myself convinced by Professor Arguelles that Korean probably edges past Japanese in that respect. I don't really find any attraction to Korean, however. As far as difficulty, #2 (Japanese!) should not be laughed at, and it's certainly a close second. (Chinese is probably third, though probably not Mandarin--Cantonese has 8 tones! Perhaps Mandarin is fourth. ;) At the end of the day, however, I also find myself really attracted to Japanese culture. I love this people who value honor, humility, and peace so highly, and sympathize with the struggle to hold to traditional values while modernizing--something that Japan takes a lot harder than America has. 6. Koine Greek I don't know exactly where to put this language into this list, though I consider putting it above Portuguese. It's necessary to be able to read the whole of the bible (except the bit of Aramaic, which I think I'll just be content with closeness to Hebrew and reading other scholars' work on the topic), and my goal is to be able to do so before 30. So it needs to be written somewhere, and the dilemma of how to fit it into this list is just as much a dilemma of where to put it in my life. I don't have time now, so probably about the time I start looking at Mandarin I'll begin to deal with that question in earnest. Anything beyond these 6 is very much a wishlist, and I should probably be content with speaking those well. These 6, plus English and Esperanto (which are not on this list because I use them, and thus don't need to actively study them), will be 8 languages, which should be tipping the scale. Here's to dreaming, though! French French strongly competes with German in my mind. After learning Portuguese (?) and Spanish (claro ;), I may find it easy enough to prefer it, as it isn't nearly as difficult as German. At the moment I have a close friend who speaks French natively, and that draws me more to it... but I'm not making this choice now, so who knows where I will be in the future? I would want to learn the French spoken in the countryside, as Parisian French turns me off... it just sounds arrogant, most of the time. The verbs aren't to be trifled with, but after my early 6 languages, they shouldn't be too much, and there should be a ton of cognates from English (which takes its high vocabulary from French, low vocabulary from German), and Spanish (/Portuguese?). French opens up lots of Northern Africa, would make Haitian Creole comprehensible, finish off Canada (save for the native languages), and is also a language of literature and scholarship of times past. German Links to English, which helps, and is one of the major languages of 19th century intellectualism. There is a ton of German theological and scholarly humanities research that is still worth being able to access. Germany, also, is really a beautiful country, and I like most German travelers that I've met. German is a genuinely difficult language, however, getting a 3/4 difficulty rating from FSI for both complex grammar (and perhaps difficult pronunciation? Those vowels look intimidating). It also has a limited area of influence, not serving you much outside of Germany and Switzerland and a handful of other places in Europe. Arabic It's much lower on this list than it used to be. There are a couple of reasons, some of the primary being the difficulty coupled with the low return on investment. Most Arabs abroad speak the language of those around them, and the dialects are highly divided. To speak with people on the street comfortably, you have to know a dialect--but to understand the news, you have to know "MSA", essentially an academic dialect that would sound very weird and foreign to speak on the street. (Like talking Shakespearean English on the streets, or something.) The Q'uran is yet another dialect to itself, practically, and so the amount of study to truly take advantage of Arabic is huge, and fraught with obstacles. I'd like to get the rough basics of the dialect from Jerusalem, as my own kind of souvenir, but I don't plan on taking this language as far as I once intended to. All that being said, understanding the news in Arabic would be super cool/useful/interesting I'm sure, and I would be understood by pretty much the whole Arab speaking world, even if I couldn't understand them and would sound funny. After this, it's just a couple of random ones that are appealing for various reasons, but would need some major life event that is as-of-yet unforeseen to cause it to rise high enough on the list to be seriously considered. American Sign Language Shouldn't be too hard, and I love the idea of being able to communicate with your hands. Visual signals are a form of wireless communication, just like auditory ones--but this one allows you to direct your speech clearly, and to be amplified at a distance that exceeds auditory signals (i.e., if someone has binoculars, they can speak with me as far as the curve of the earth and their height allows). It's also just novel to communicate in a way that doesn't use your voice. It should also be fairly easy, considering it's based off of a spoken language that I know very well. Japanese Sign Language also has a lot of adherents, so that's worth considering if I do end up speaking Japanese; Mexican Sign Language is third on the list of hand languages. After that, Israeli Sign Language. (The odds of me working this far down this list are not so high, though!) Urdu/Hindi It's in the top spoken languages, has a crazy script, and a very interesting country. Cherokee HECK YES. Save the dying language! I'm 1/32 or 1/64 Cherokee, as well, so that's something. Maybe I would put Lojban here? But there just isn't a speaking community, so it's not worth it. I'd rather just expand my Esperanto. Speaking of Esperanto, one of the cool things is that I can speak my Esperanto with people from all over these languages. A great way to break the ice in any country without having to use English, which is sometimes insulting to expect of others. I'll probably be practicing and teaching Esperanto wherever I go anyways, so I don't feel it needs to be put on the list--if it were on the list, though, I'd have a hard time placing it, like Koine Greek. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5384 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 2 22 March 2010 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||
Linguistics + studying some languages. Unless the school requires a degree in Education. You need to know ahead of time what problems your students will have and you need to understand why. A degree in education won't do that. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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