Confessions of a Language Addict
When I was in high school, I took French. I worked in a small bookstore where business was slow and leafed through the selections for German and Italian. Then, one day, I wondered what Arabic was like. This was before the web, so I wound up going through Baker and Taylor warehouse inventory updates and, gads!, the old Books In Print, and got Arabic books from Teach Yourself and Hippocrene. The owner, whenever business got slow, would order a few more language books so he'd at least have those sales. And so I got a bit of Chinese, a bit of Japanese, and an awful desire: I wanted to know them all!
Over the years, as my bio on multilingua.info indicates, I've fussed around with twenty or thirty languages. In some cases, they're left to the side after a day. In other cases, I stick with them a while, then move on. But mostly I study a language, leave it to the side and it comes back to haunt and taunt me. I drop what I'm doing for a day or two, push forward a (very) little further, then try to get back to what I'm seriously studying at the moment.
Having recently run across some sites like Aspiring Polyglot and Lost in Translation, I have smiled in recognition of the frustrations of language learning - both the learning and deciding what to learn. Since multilingua.info has at least a few resources for a lot of languages, I decided it was time to offer a little bit about my background, and about what I'm finding out there.
What I have enjoyed most with multilingua.info is putting some sort of structure under my free-form interest while also showing how language learning begets more language learning, making it easier and more exciting the more you do. I don't think the site has conveyed my full enthusiasm, but hopefully it at least shows why I think you might as well study some Italian if you already know Spanish and so on.
The hard part of doing multilingua.info is that it has a relatively logical structure and organization, whereas my language learning does not. Even in a structured program for a single language, the language learner's journey is a series of stops and starts and leaps and stumbles that only continues if the flashes of insight that make it fun are remembered during the hard work of building up the next block of knowledge till you've learned enough for it to come together. This is better and worse with multilingualism - there's more to do, but more information available to come together.
In the next few posts, and thereafter whenever I take the trouble, I'll be talking about different aspects of my own language learning adventure. The rest of the time, I'll be mentioning books, language programs and language sites that I've run across and what value I think they offer.
Over the years, as my bio on multilingua.info indicates, I've fussed around with twenty or thirty languages. In some cases, they're left to the side after a day. In other cases, I stick with them a while, then move on. But mostly I study a language, leave it to the side and it comes back to haunt and taunt me. I drop what I'm doing for a day or two, push forward a (very) little further, then try to get back to what I'm seriously studying at the moment.
Having recently run across some sites like Aspiring Polyglot and Lost in Translation, I have smiled in recognition of the frustrations of language learning - both the learning and deciding what to learn. Since multilingua.info has at least a few resources for a lot of languages, I decided it was time to offer a little bit about my background, and about what I'm finding out there.
What I have enjoyed most with multilingua.info is putting some sort of structure under my free-form interest while also showing how language learning begets more language learning, making it easier and more exciting the more you do. I don't think the site has conveyed my full enthusiasm, but hopefully it at least shows why I think you might as well study some Italian if you already know Spanish and so on.
The hard part of doing multilingua.info is that it has a relatively logical structure and organization, whereas my language learning does not. Even in a structured program for a single language, the language learner's journey is a series of stops and starts and leaps and stumbles that only continues if the flashes of insight that make it fun are remembered during the hard work of building up the next block of knowledge till you've learned enough for it to come together. This is better and worse with multilingualism - there's more to do, but more information available to come together.
In the next few posts, and thereafter whenever I take the trouble, I'll be talking about different aspects of my own language learning adventure. The rest of the time, I'll be mentioning books, language programs and language sites that I've run across and what value I think they offer.
1 Comments:
Between your blog and "Aspiring Polyglot", I feel like I've found the few people who understand my language obsession. Your pattern of flirting with, dating, getting engaged to, and having torrid, short-lived affairs with absurd numbers of languages is something that seems to be torn right out of my own life. I learned Russian as a missionary for my church in St. Petersburg, then learned Czech and Macedonian fairly well in graduate school (Slavic Linguistics at UNC-Chapel Hill). I've fairly well mastered Persian, have fervently studied Arabic, Hungarian, and Azeri Turkish, and am working on Chinese and Hindi/Urdu. In the meantime, though, I constantly flirt with other languages (Georgian, Uzbek, Tajiki, Korean), but without any serious dedication so far.
I get to feel like I'm neglecting one language or another and am compulsively drawn to study again...pretty much what you have described in your post. My wife says that we could wallpaper our pretty large house with my mountains of vocabulary flashcards.
Anyway, I'm rambling on. I'm thrilled to have found your blog and I look forward to reading about your adventures in language.
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