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Advice for a beginner polyglot. | ||
Tags: College/University | Beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| na40 Newbie New Zealand Joined 5393 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Studies: French | Message 1 of 2 21 July 2009 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
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Prof. Arguelles,
First I should introduce myself. My name is Nathan and I am a 19 year old living in New Zealand. I study Political Science, German and also have included a couple of Linguistics papers. I work part time, but that doesn't take up too much of my time. My papers don't require me to spend a lot of time in class, so I end up having to organise a lot of my own time. This means, daily, I probably have around 3-4 hours spare to spend on my language learning. This is probably a lot more if I managed my time a lot better. As I said I study German at university, so I would say this is my main second language. I want to start to really study French and Russian as well. My motivation draws from my fascination with each of these cultures and also, in terms of my future career goals, they are invaluable. In the future I would love to study Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese. Though, my dreams are limitless! I would say my level in German (based on the CEFR) is about an A2. In Russian and French I have a very limited knowledge. My main concern/question is really that of starting out. Unfortunately I don't have much of a disposable income so purchasing a wide range of Assimil ir Linguaphone courses in the languages I want to learn is not really an option for me. The library at my university does have a small range of Teach Yourself and other course books however. What would be your advice so that I am using my time efficiently? Do you have any recommendations? You are an inspiration to anyone that aspires to become a polyglot. Thank you for allowing others to benefit from your experiences in language learning! Regards, Nathan 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| flatlandllama Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6877 days ago 35 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, Vietnamese Studies: Khmer | Message 2 of 2 21 July 2009 at 10:44pm | IP Logged |
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Before the professor has a chance to answer, let me just throw in something real quick. Look around at your library and make sure there'snot something more. Sometimes it just takes a bit of looking in person rather thanon the computer. Second, use the uni's interlibrary loan system if you can. With ours, I can get quite a few different kinds of materials on many different languages, even less commonly taught ones so German would be easy to get a hold of. I can get pretty much any assimil book I need if I decided it was necessary. That said, interlibrary loans are often for shorter periods than normal book so there's no way to finish, say, an assimil beginning German in the allotted time...how you get around this is to digitize the book and audio. Take a camera or scanner and go to town...then you can keep it on your comp...as for the audio, go for a cd if you can but if you have cassettes then justhook your computer up to a tape player and run audacity, a very useful free program. I'm not saying digitize so you can you know sell the files to people. Just do that so that you can work through the books at a pace reasonable for yourself. Last thing, when your browsing on ILL, don't justlimit yourself to linguaphone or assimil. They are great books, but the resources from other libraries all overnew zealand or internationally are vast, and it would be a waste not to get a hold of as much of that as you can while you have time in school.
Peyton Standefer 1 person has voted this message useful |
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