In this brief podcast, I will be discussing a brief history of the English language. I will move on to the similarities in Scandinavian languages and their "uniqueness."
If the player isn't working, I've given you a link to the podcast.
Similarities in language
I had some trouble finding a second person to answer a few questions about foreign language over all. There were a few that would have been really great to hear from but I ended up empty handed. Then it occurred to me that my mom has always find some way to communicate to non-English speakers. Through this she has grasped a small vocabulary of Papiamento (a Caribbean pidgin of Dutch, English, Spanish, and some Native American languages), and some Spanish dialects. She's been to Europe and spent some time in the the Caribbean. She's encountered many languages that intrigue her curiosity. So I believe that her input is vital.
1. What exactly in a language do you notice first? Is it the culture, the personality of the person that is speaking it? What exactly is it when you encounter another language that you notice?
When I first encounter a language, I almost immediately notice the culture, the attitude around it. It sounds so unique and enticing, so much that I want to know where they are from. If they attempt to communicate with me, that's a plus too!
2. What is the most striking appeal of a foreign language to you?
I would have to say it's sound, especially the melody. Some languages flow so poetically, while others are very guttural and harsh sounding. I prefer the flowing ones and not so much the ones that have harsh starts and stops.
3. Do you feel that the culture of the language is the most important factor in determining if you will study it? If not, then what is?
I would have to say once again it is the culture that is the most convincing. Some cultures are too reserved, while some are too free and talk far too much and loud. If the people do not want to talk to me, I'm not going to be interested in them.
4. Is a classroom your favorite way to learn the language? Or do you feel to efficiently learn it you must go abroad?Or do you feel that you need a few classes to get the basics and then go abroad to fully learn it?
I definitely would love to be living in the country as I am learning it. I might consider a class for the basics, but I'd rather just buy a small book and take it with me. One of the reasons to fully understand a language is to get to know the people. Basically I'm saying that I'd go anywhere and learn on the go.
5. Does it depend on the country? For example, would you rather study in an environment that is war torn and threatened by terrorism daily? Or would you rather be in a peaceful society that has genuinely communicative people?
I remember when I was in Switzerland trying to get on the subway. Everyone was looking at me like I was a foolish tourist. But there was this elderly man that came up to me and started speaking to me in German, when he figured out I didn't speak that, he switched to French. Then he tried Spanish. He then spoke a few words in English and told me that I had to visit an old famous church. It was this attempt of communication that meant a lot to me. That type of communication is what draws me to a certain language. Of course I would like to go anywhere, but if it is a country that is plagued with war, forget it.
6. Do you prefer a literal or symbolic language?
I love picture words. Things that make sense. I want a word that represents exactly what it means. For example, in a country that does not have electricity, they will not have a word for a "dishwasher." It may be more along the lines of a "bowlwasher." What I mean is that "a person that washes bowls." This means that there should be the word for the object, a word for the actor, and a word for the action. I prefer languages that have a lower morpheme-to-word ratio meaning Isolating. A simple language. Those that tend to just stick everything together is very confusing to me.
Today feels like a great day for interviews. I was able to get a "few" words out of one my long time friends, Charles A. Perrine, that shares the same interest of language. One of the tasks that his job requires is working with a transcription company via a translation service. So he has quite the experience when it comes to having to listen to a variety of foreign languages.
1. What is the most striking appeal of a foreign language to you? Is it the sound? The prosody?
As said above, sound is a big part of my interest in a language, so yes, prosody is important. However, it's not the only point of interest, nor necessarily the most striking for every language. What primarily makes a language appeal to me is different for each language, and often unique to that language, or at least uncommon outside it. This is due, I think, to a habit of being fascinated with things for the sake of nothing but esotericism.
Russian, for example, attracts me with the aesthetic of its script and with the mysterious but vaguely familiar culture behind the language. Mandarin offers a refreshing focus on tone rather than inflection and a beautiful writing system that promises a lifetime of study. The agglutinative Finnish hits the other end of the scale with unfamiliar and challenging grammar.
2. What draws you to a specific language? What convinces you to learn it?
Necessity would certainly do the trick, if it were there. As it is, the attraction to a language is decided by subjective evaluations of the aesthetic of its script and speech, expectations of how well I would like the culture (I anticipate visiting a country relevant to the language I take the time to study), and, to a lesser extent, such quantitative matters as how many people in the world I might find speaking the language or how desperately employers seek those people.
3. Do you prefer a language that utilizes a writing system that is similar to the one you use now? Do you prefer a literal or a figurative language? Meaning, do you like something to mean exactly what they say, or poetic and a much deeper meaning known exclusively to the culture?
The further a foreign language deviates from the familiar alphabetical writing system, the more it must compensate by having less to worry about in other areas. This is just me, though, and my lack of time to really dive into an all-around challenging project. If I had nothing but free time, though, I would get as far away from familiarity in the writing system as I could -- again, for the sake of the esoteric. Here in the real world, I find myself more attracted to languages using a non-Roman alphabet, so that they offer a dose of oddity while not being too much to deal with.
I've never dabbled in any language out of necessity, so abstractness has certainly never been undesirable, and the idea of having to unravel a wholly different way of thinking can be greatly exciting. Sometimes pragmatism takes over and I find myself indecisive in this regard.
4. Do you prefer an isolating or an agglutinative language? Would it be easier for you to understand an expressed idea that basically represents a sentence? Or do you want a language that has one simple morpheme for each and every idea?
Agglutinative languages are fearsome but it would be amazing to master such a thing. Isolating languages certainly would seem to simplify things. English is more toward that end of the scale, besides, so isolating languages seem somewhat more accessible for it. I imagine that an agglutinative language wouldn't necessarily be any more difficult to understand once the rules of the thing were learned, but a more modular approach would result in one less aspect to wrestle with.
5. What is the essence of language? What do you want out of leaning a new language?
Communication with people who offer fascinating new -- or like-minded -- ideas, the nature of which is hinted at by the characteristics of the language itself, is the primary goal. Access to an unfamiliar mentality is in there, too. Any language offers these in some way. Aesthetic may decide which language I focus on first, but in the end it would be wonderful to be able to have some connection with any given person in the world by way of ability to communicate.
Hello, readers! I'm Elle of easyusabledesign.blogspot.com, and I'm here today to tell you a little about what I've learned about Japanese.
Japanese is one of those languages that most people know is hard to learn, but only the people who have tried to learn it really know why. There are a lot of reasons why, actually, but today I'll be focusing mainly on the different aspects of Japanese's written language.
Historically, the Japanese language didn't actually have a written language when it was created. And even when they did integrate a written language, it was piggybacked off of an already existing language- namely, Chinese (Japanese Language, 2012). After two thousand years of adapting the Chinese characters for their own uses, only about five thousand kanji are commonly used in the Japanese language (How many kanji are there? 2012), and of these only about 40% retain are actually based off of Chinese counterparts (Japanese Language History, 2012).
Consider this kanji:In both Japanese and Chinese, this character means "house". However, combine the character with the character for large, 大, to make 大家, and suddenly you've got "everyone" in Chinese and several distinct meanings in Japanese- "expert", "landlord/lady", or "rich family" (Ahlstrom, 2012).
More recently, Japanese has adopted two alphabets, used for various reasons- カタカナ, or katakana, andひらがな, hiragana. Katakana is typically used to phonetically spell out loanwords from other languages, while hiragana is used to write out particles of speech and write out pronunciations for kanji. Unlike Kanji, each character in katakana or hiragana represents a phoneme. Katakana's characters tend to be sharper, whereas hiragana's tend to be more rounded.
Lastly, I present to you the least often used of the different Japanese alphabets- Romaji. It's a bit of a stretch (to me, at least) to call it an alphabet on its own, seeing as it is the Latin alphabet exactly, but it is typically used to introduce non-Japanese speakers to the phonetics of Japanese words while skipping the added task of learning an entirely new alphabet.
So here, we have the word "House" written in all four of the different Japanese writing styles:
家 (Kanji)Thanks for reading!
Sources:
Ahlstrom, Kim. Denshi Jisho. (2012) Retrieved from jisho.org.
Japanese Language History. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.foreigntranslations.com/languages/japanese-translation/japanese-language-history/.
Japanese Language. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/site/japanese_article.html.
How many kanji are there? (2012) Retrieved from http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/how-many-kanji.html.
What is Morphology? Well in linguistics it is a term that refers to the formation of a language. This involves the morpheme, which is the smallest unit in a language. Sometimes it can be a word, but generally it is not. For example, The word unforgivable is three morphemes. The prefix "un-", the root forgive, and the suffix "-able." A low morpheme per word (Isolating) language means little to one morpheme representing a word (Loos, 2004). Purely Isolating Languages almost always have a ratio of morpheme to word of one. Chinese is a prime example of this. If you look at the sentence "I sold my dog yesterday," in Mandarin, "my" is two separate morphemes and yesterday is one morpheme instead of being two as in English.
The other type of morphology is a Synthetic Language. It is essentially the opposite of Isolating. That means that instead of having low morpheme to word, it has a high morpheme to word ratio (Loos, 2004). This is the majority of most languages. But there are some that are far more synthetic than others. Sometimes this is to the point where literally one word can represent an idea that needs to be explained in a sentence in lower-morpheme-order languages.
For example, in Yupik, tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq is a word that consists of seven morphemes (Loos, 2004). Which of course in English is 13 words. The idea in the word expresses "He had yet to say that he was going to hunt reindeer again." This is an extreme, and falls under the category, agglutinative, literally meaning to glue together (Loos, 2004). However there is Fusional language. These similarly have a lot of morphemes per word, but are rather unintelligible. They are consisting of suffixes, root mutations, and prefixes. They are put together so well, each part cannot be deciphered unless looked upon as a whole. For example, the medical word hypercholesterolemia derived from Greek, is formed by "hyper-," meaning elevated, "cholesterol," "em," meaning blood, and "-ia" which is a grammatical ending (Loos, 2004).
Besides the morphemes being perfectly fused together, there are some languages that undergo change during conjugation. Romance languages deal with this heavily. Take the Spanish word Hablar, to speak. The stem is Habl, to express "I speak," you add an -o to form Hablo. If you wanted to express "I spoke," you add an "é" to form hablé. Some verbs require a root change when indicating tense and mood (Loos, 2004). Which of course, is very well known for Romance languages since there conjugation schemes seem to be nearly endless.
So basically you can break down into two forms of morphologies:
So you decide. Do you want to speak a language that has a word for everything and grammar being the least of your problems, a language that deals with just as much grammar as you deal with now (that being English), words that contain numerous compounds, or would you rather learn a language that is involved in high context or low context? It's your decision. Go with what interests you most.
Sources
Loos, E. E. (2004). What is an isolating language?. In D. Day Jr., P. Jordan & J. Wingate (Eds.), Glossary of linguistic terms. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm
Loos, E. E. (2004). What is a polysynthetic language?. In D. Day Jr., P. Jordan & J. Wingate (Eds.), Glossary of linguistic terms. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm
Basically it all boils down to the basic part of a language, the sentence. Several sentences make a paragraph. Several paragraphs make a story. We all like stories; they help us create a world of fantasy and freedom. Now all languages have stories, and they tell them differently. The chance that all languages developed the same formation is essentially zero. Less than half of the word's languages (based on population) follow a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) formation. about the same portion uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). The rest of the world uses Verb-Subject-Object (VSO)(Meyer, 2010).
SOV essentially means that in a sentence, verb comes last (Boeree). In a way it similar to speaking like Yoda would. For example, if I were to say "That meal was delicious," in a standard SOV language it would become, "That meal delicious it was." "I fed my dog this morning before work," would become "My dog this morning before work I fed."
SVO is used in English syntax. As you read this sentence, you can clearly see its usage. This would be an easy concept for a beginner in a foreign language to grasp. If you were visiting Sweden and wanted to tell someone that you wanted to eat pizza you would say: "Jag vill äta vissa pizza." It means exactly that and no worry of having to rearrange parts of the sentence to match its order. Jag, the subject (I), vill äta, the verb (want to eat), and vissa pizza, the object (some pizza).
Basically there are three main structures in use. Of course they will seem different to you, but that is normal. If you want a challenge, you could attempt Russian. It has no rules on order and all are used in common day speak (Meyer, 2010). So saying, "I like apples," "Like I apples," and "I apples like," mean the same thing.
Sources
Boeree, G. (n.d.). Basic language structures. Retrieved from http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/basiclangstruct.html
Meyer, C. F. (2010). Introducing English linguistics. (p. 36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MWbrvUiYzSkC&pg=PA36
It may not be the first thought, but there are forms of language that require no speaking, and no writing. It can be as simple as a facial expression, or as complex as Sign Language. At first glance, most people just see "signing," the equivalent of speaking and assume that the hand-signs directly represent a simplification of the language in that country. There are many people who even fail to stop and think that Sign Language is just as rich and complex as any other language. In fact, there are many different signs, each having a base, such as Spanish, British, American, German, and French.
For example, British Sign Language (BSL) uses two hands to form the letters of the alphabet while American Sign Language (ASL) uses one (NIDCD, 2012). Despite that the UK and the US share a spoken language their sign language is similar to the difference of Chinese and Greek. This difference is due to how ASL developed its signing system from France (NIDCD, 2012). Space i.e., the area in front of the signer is used for syntax. Facial expressions and body gesture represent are used together to form meaning (Liddell, 2003). If you were to keep them in one spot, it may be interpreted as a humongous complicated and technical word. That space in front of the signer is just as vital as the spaces between words in most languages.
At homes in deaf communities, a different sign (a "type" of sign language) is used at home. This is called a home sign (NIDCD, 2012) and many families have their own. An interesting fact about these communities is that if you put several of the children with their own sign and no knowledge of any other sign in the same room, they will develop a new sign language to communicate with each other. ASL also has accent. Depending on where the signer lives, the location or space where they sign, i.e., height, will differ (Walker, 1987).
Everyone has a different way of signing, reflecting everything about their personality(NIDCD, 2012) just like how yours is revealed when you speak. Your culture, will reflect how fast you sign, just like in many countries the rate of speaking is far more elevated than in English(Liddell, 2003). Unfortunately you can't use ASL in Mexico and many other countries. A simple sign for mother, could be a nasty pejorative in another. I leave you with a video from Expert Village on a few basic expressions in ASL.
Sources
Walker, L. A. (1987). A loss for words: The story of deafness in a family. (p. 30). New York: Harper Perennial.
Liddell, Scott K. (2003). Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
American sign language. (2011, June). Retrieved from http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/pages/asl.aspx
Basic words in sign language. [Print Photo]. Retrieved from http://www.deafedge.com/image-files/basic-words-in-sign-language-hello.jpg
Passions for language differ from everyone else. Your social life, private life, and educational life are big factors in the ability to "decipher" language. Now when I say "decipher," I am speaking of how you look at it, how you read it, and how you write it. The ability to use the artistic brain and creativeness. Those who tend to be more art oriented find it easier to utilize ideograms. Someone who is art oriented will be able to see a different side of the language that most fail to conceptualize.
Ideograms, or rather picture words, are grammatical entities that represent a sound while visually looking like a picture. Ideograms are similar to hieroglyphs, but are able to be broken down into smaller pieces (called radicals) and represent an entirely separate group with different pronunciations (Tsai, 2006). For example, the Mandarin word for "eclipse" is:
日食 (Rì shí). It is composed of two characters that mean "sun" and "eat" respectfully. If we were to speak of a lunar eclipse, it would follow similarly,
月食 (Yuè shí), "moon" and "eat"
Take a look at the image below. What do you see? You may at first just see some random Chinese character, but when I tell you it is the one for "to eat," what do you see?
Look at the top of the character, it resembles a bamboo hat. Below the hat seems to be something that represents a man holding a fish and taking a bite out of it. Do you see it now? This is the essence of an ideogram. To make things simpler, when you see a sign high in the air that resembles two golden arches, what does that mean? "McDonald's." When you see a siren wearing a crown, that represents "Starbucks" (Lewis, 2012). Fork and Knife on the side of the Interstate, that represents "restaurant." The world is literally polluted with these images, and you know more than you think. Signs from car manufacturers, fast-food restaurant chains, clothing and apparel outlets, and electronics, so many that maybe languages like Chinese and Japanese are not as foreign as one may think (Lewis, 2012).
Mandarin at first glance is overwhelming due to the strokes. When you open up a Mandarin dictionary, you will not find it alphabetized or arranged by sound. In fact, it will be arranged according to stroke count. Take in consideration the words:
water, (to) see, mouth, bamboo, one, two, and heart. In English, these words would be arranged to: bamboo, heart, mouth, one, see, two, and water. (MGBD, 2012).
But it Manda rin? No. This is how they are arranged (MGBD, 2012):
一, 二, 口, 心, 水, 竹, and 車. When transliterated, yī (one), èr (two), kǒu (mouth), xīn (heart), shuǐ (water), zhú (bamboo), and chē (cart).
There is one character to fear and love at the same time. It is so rare you would never have to memorize it; but if you ever saw it, you would know it almost instantly. The character is Biáng, and used only in the name of a noodle dish.
So much writing for so little to say? It may seem like overkill, but take a look at the characters inside, they all represent a story. This is a rarity and the most common stroke count for the most commonly used characters is eight to nine strokes. Hopefully that can allow you to relax for a bit. If you want to explore radicals and other Chinese words, I highly recommend using: MDBG Chinese-English dictionary . I have found it to be quite informative.
Sources
Lewis, B. (2012, May 1). Why chinese isn’t as hard as you think: over 8000 words of encouragement for potential learners. Retrieved from http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/
Tsai, C. (2006)Frequency and stroke counts of Chinese characters. Retrieved from http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/
MDBG. Radical/strokes lookup. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=radicals
Now an abjad is similar to an alphabet, the only difference is that it does not have letters that represent vowels, and is usually written right-to-left (Ager, 2012). To repeat what I've said earlier, it would be difficult for an alphabetic user to comprehend such an idea.
For example try reading this: TH QCK BRWN FX JMPS VR TH LZY DGNow you can easily fill in the vowels, you have seen this phrase before (hopefully) and it becomes: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
See? It's just another representation. Now thankfully these "alphabets" do occasionally, and I mean that it is rare, to have some markings that allow you to know which vowel to say.
Here are the two main scripts using an abjad:
The Hebrew abjad
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ך ל מ ם נ ן ס ע פ ף צ ץ ק ר ש תThe Arabic abjad
غ ظ ض ذ خ ث ت ش ر ق ص ف ع س ن م ل ك ي ط ح ز و ه د ج ب أUnderstanding this script involves becoming more active in Middle-Eastern culture. A possible reason that these scripts are written right-to-left could have to do with why the left and is considered unclean. Association with it is equivalent of hygienic purposes only (Smith, 2012). This could be one of the cases, but it has been commonly agreed by linguists not so. Their reasoning was that most of the people who finally had the script and began using it, were writing both right-to-left and left-to-right. It just happened that when the masses came together, it was the standard to write right-to-left.
Why am I bringing this up? Because these text are considered sacred in their countries and defacing it is an insult to the entire people. Learning to respect a culture and gain knowledge about it, will be one of the most useful things to do when learning a new language.
Take a look at how an abjad looks when put together:
English: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Hebrew: שועל החום הזריז קפץ מעל הכלב העצלן.
Arabic: قفز الثعلب البني السريع فوق الكلب الكسول.
Sources
Ager, S. (2012). Types of writing system. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/types.htm#abjads
Ager, S. (2012). Types of writing system. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com
/writing/arabic.htm
Ager, S. (2012). Types of writing system. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hebrew.htm
Smith, S.E. , and Bronwyn Harris, eds. "What are some Middle Eastern etiquttetTips?." wiseGEEK. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Dec 2012.
Let me ask you one thing, what exactly is it in a language you look at most? What about how it is appeal in written form? Is it the curvaceous letters? Or is it the sharp and jagged edges? I'm speaking of how a language is written. In our native tongues, we do not always give much attention to the to the way it is formed. We simply just look, and read without a taking a moment to realize where the characters originated from. Language changes constantly which is how the various writing systems exist today.
Here are the basic categories:
An alphabet, now that is something you should recognize right away. Why? Because you are using one to read this blog right now. An alphabet is a scripted system that consists of both vowels and consonants, representing nearly every sound made in the spoken language (Ager, 2012). English, French, Spanish, are just a few of the many languages that use this type of writing system. Most will use a Latin-based alphabet, but have additional letters to accompany their own set of phonemes. For example, The Icelandic alphabet has two unique letters, and many accented and diacritical marks (Ager, 2012). That essentially can sum up the majority of European languages, and having knowledge of a Latin-based alphabet makes most languages seem less foreign. Not all alphabets use this base; there are a few others that can make you squint your eyes and wonder what they are saying. Cyrillic, Greek, and Hangul (Korean alphabet) are the other common bases. Let's take a look at them:
The Cyrillic alphabet:
Аа Бб Вв Гг Дд Ее Ёё Жж Зз Ии Йй Кк Лл Мм Нн Оо Пп Рр Сс Тт Уу Фф Хх Цц ЧчThe Greek alphabet:
Αα Ββ Γγ Δδ Εε Ζζ Ηη Θθ Ιι Κκ Λλ Μμ Νν Ξξ Οο Ππ Ρρ Σσ/ς Ττ Υυ Φφ Χχ Ψψ ΩωThe Hangul (Korean alphabet)
Consonants: ㄱㄴㄷ ㄹㅁㅂㅅㅇㅈㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎFor most people who are learning a secondary language, they will feel more comfortable using a script similar to the one they use in the one they speak now. So those using an alphabet will feel others that use one to be, "readable." Now all languages are readable, it's just a misconception that you can't read Greek, Farsi, or Chinese. It is just something you are not used to. To understand this, try to imagine you never learned to read (Ager, 2012). At first glance, you would have no idea how to comprehend it. It is that same feeling, and you just need to learn how to read. It's just starting all over again so do not anticipate to much about it.
Take a good look at the following samples of text in Icelandic, Russian, Greek, and Korean. Meditate on them. Evaluate all their curves, edges and overall view. Ask yourself, which one looks most appealing. There is no wrong answer. If you found what you are looking for then great! If alphabets are not what you are looking for, then look into the post on Abjads.
English: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Icelandic: Fljótur brúnn refur stökk yfir latur hundur.
Russian: Быстрая коричневая лиса перепрыгнула через ленивую собаку.
Greek: Η γρήγορη καφέ αλεπού πηδάει πάνω από τον τεμπέλη σκύλο.
Korean: 빠른 갈색 여우가 게으른 개를 뛰어 넘는.
Sources
Ager, S. (2012). Types of writing system. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com /writing/types.htm
Ager, S. (2012). Origin of writing in Korea. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/korean.htm
Ager, S. (2012). Cyrillic alphabet. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm
Ager, S. (2012). Cyrillic alphabet. Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm
It's not that simple of a question as you may initially think. Picking a second language involves a much more complicated decision making process than the average fast- food order. As someone who is absolutely fascinated by language and all of its aspects such as: morphology, phonology, orthography, and syntax, I can't stop myself from dabbling into various languages. This can become a stressful issue at some times. I have gone into studying a language that is so different from my own that I found myself giving up too quickly. This method, for most, usually ends up in disaster. A language like Japanese for example, has so many deterring factors that makes it one of the most difficult languages to learn. This particular language has cultural, lexicon, syntax, and a writing system so vastly different from English that it is overwhelming. These factors are what pull or push you away from what you are looking for.
First of all, to set a baseline, my native tongue is obviously English. In high school and college, I spent my time studying Latin American Spanish. During those times I was constantly looking for the next language, and dabbled into anything from Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and American Sign Language. Most recently, I started working on Swedish, all on my own. You may be thinking, "how did I get to that? How did I make the decision to learn an obscure language like Swedish?" The answer was, " I like the sound, the melody, how it is written, and how easy it was to remember words." In fact, I was picking up Swedish faster than Spanish and that was one of the reasons why it drove me to continuing down that path of Swedish fluency.
Let me tell you why I am sharing this with you. I want to help you. When I was learning my first language, I had the choices of French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, which was increasingly overwhelming for me. I know what works. I know how to help you make the better decision. There is no right or wrong language. You have different tastes than mine and I cannot change that. Do not feel like you are alone in the world. Most people have no idea where to begin and are lost in the vast world wide web of unacceptable and unreliable sources. Such sources that speak of learning a language for the sake of popularity, dispersion, and population, are not reliable because they do not encompass the full view.
This blog is to stop those problems from happening to you. It is to educate you properly, guide you in the safest and wisest direction, keep you humored, and especially keep you encourage so that your self esteem remains high. The last thing I want is for you to lose interest in something so beautiful and wonderful. Language is fun, and enriching your knowledge with a part of someone’s culture is one step closer to communicating with them. I will be practical and easy to comprehend. Most importantly I will help you go through the thinking process of how to choose from your favorite languages, ones that seem of great interest, have pleasing sounds and an eye-pleasing writing system. All languages have these factors and many more and it is up to me to help find one that best suits your tastes and experience level. I have laboriously sought after many sources in my life and after being able to learn and understand the basics of at least two foreign languages, I can say that I am qualified to assist you in your time of need.
