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Extreme Dabbling | ||
Tags: Dabbling | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| wharrgarbl Newbie United States Joined 5848 days ago 27 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 5 16 January 2010 at 7:05am | IP Logged |
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First of all, I didn't know if the "Language" drop down thing was supposed to be the language I'm learning or the one I'm writing in. So, to clear it up, I'm not learning English right now.
In fact, this log is a little bit different than the other ones in this room. The objective is not to learn any one language to any degree of proficiency, but to sample many (22) languages. In the process, I will decide which languages I would like to study in the future and probably decide I never want to see a lot of them again. I will also talk about the materials I use so you all can benefit from that. Here is the list of languages that I will try: Portuguese Haitian Creole Jamaican Patois Swedish Norwegian Danish Icelandic Maltese Turkish Russian Farsi Irish Japanese Thai Filipino Indonesian Swahili Afrikaans Quechua Serbo-Croatian Latin Hungarian Every Friday, I will pick a random language from the list. Over the span of a week, I will learn ABOUT the language and study very introductory grammar and vocabulary. Activities involved may include: -Reading the Wikipedia article on the language to learn about things that make it interesting. -Doing a few lessons in a free introductory course of the language. -Adding some of the language's music to my music folder. (Recommendations are welcome, I like rock and metal mostly.) -Writing my thoughts about the language and the course here for my use and yours. If you think this idea is stupid or shouldn't be posted here, let me know. I can always do it on my own, although I like being able to keep a log like this. Anyway, I'm off to go randomly pick a language. I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| wharrgarbl Newbie United States Joined 5848 days ago 27 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 5 16 January 2010 at 7:31am | IP Logged |
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Language 1: Maltese
Maltese, the official language of the island of Malta, will definitely be an interesting start to this journey. While it is classified as a Semitic language, the majority of the words in Maltese are loanwords. Wikipedia claims that 50% of its words come from Italian and Sicilian and 20% from English, but these numbers are debatable. One thing I found interesting is that each word origin (Romance, Semitic, English) has a different system of pluralization. Coupled with the fact that Maltese also uses a separate plural to express duality and the system is full of irregulars, this noun system seems rather complex. Maltese also preserves the Arabic feature of trilateral verb roots conjugated with infixes, prefixes, and suffixes. However, it allegedly only has two tenses, so that should make the verb system slightly easier. Overall, Maltese seems like a very unique language and I look forward to learning more about it. Tentative courses: Maltese Grammar and Survival Maltese If anyone knows of any music from Malta that isn't in English, recommendations would be much appreciated. I don't think I'm going to get too many of those though. :P 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5851 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes  1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 5 16 January 2010 at 10:01am | IP Logged |
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I find your log idea very interesting, because your dabblings will give interested readers an overview over many languages and will help other people to decide as well, which languages they should learn. For me it gives me background information about some languages which are quite unknown to me, as for example Maltese. For some years I had a penfriend in Malta, so I am reading with interest, what you write about this language.
What I know about Maltese is that Maltese is closely related with Arabic (some words sound very Arabic), but it uses the Latin script. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 16 January 2010 at 10:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bastet Diglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 5913 days ago 28 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 5 16 January 2010 at 11:16am | IP Logged |
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Wow, that is extreme! I look forward to reading your blog and learning more about these languages.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 5 16 January 2010 at 12:28pm | IP Logged |
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WOW! Being a simpleminded fool, I didn't even know Malta existed, so this is my first
brush with Maltese. I just looked at that Grammar link you gave us, and although I'm not really a scholar of Arabic or anything, I was surprised at how much I understood of the sentences they provided, just from the very little bit I know about Arabic. I had no idea. Thank you so much for creating this log! It'll be lots of fun to follow your wanderings, and I'm sure I'll even pick up some languages to put on my wish list! I wonder if Maltese people could get by with just their own language in Arabic speaking countries, say in a tourist situation. I know there is Italian influence as well, but it would be interesting to see how mutually intelligible something like MSA would be with Maltese. Edited by annette on 16 January 2010 at 12:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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