Going to try @amillionlanguages' One Year of Languages challenge, here are my rough goals for 2022!
January: Spanish
February: Arabic
March: Swedish
April: ASL
May: Russian
June: Czech
July: Northern Sami
August: Japanese
September: Hungarian
October: Mandarin
November: Serbo-Croatian
December: Yiddish
My alternatives are: French, German, Swahili, Catalan, or going back to Portuguese.
My daily goals are:
Do at least one lesson each day at the minimum
Watch or read educational content (on pronunciation, grammar, culture, etc.)
Try to write and/or speak a few sentences
Listen to music or watch non educational videos in target language (probably not every day but still frequent)
And an optional goal is to play a game with at least the ui in a target language! Can't do it with all of them of course but Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Mandarin I feel will have plenty of games translated to them :)
For 2020 I’ll be following @amillionlanguages ‘s Year of Languages Challenge! I love learning about different languages, and this seemed like a focused & disciplined way to gain a basic understanding of a language without committing to years of study. My main resolution for the new year is to maximise my productivity by breaking the months up into short study routines, so this challenge is a perfect starting point!
The languages I will be studying for this challenge are:
January: Egyptian Arabic dialect
February: Egyptian Arabic dialect
March: Polish
April: Estonian
May: Moroccan Arabic dialect
June: ‘Levantine’ Arabic dialect
July: Maltese
August: Turkish
September: Welsh
October: Thai
November: Tamil
December: Spanish
I will very likely be visiting Egypt in February, so I didn’t want to study another language while visiting and forget the Arabic I learnt when I needed it most!!! Other than that, I will be following the original language-a-month formula.
I’m studying Modern Standard Arabic, so I thought this challenge would be a good opportunity to familiarise myself with some of the spoken dialects! I limited myself to 3 dialects so they wouldn’t take over the challenge, but I’ve yet to choose between either the Lebanese, Palestinian or Syrian dialects. I’m going to see what resources I can compile for each and decide closer to June.
I also would love to study some Maltese because a Romance-influenced descendent of Sicilian Arabic sounds fascinating! The little bits I’ve seen of the written language look stunning and I want to learn how the phonology & grammar of a Semitic language adapted to the Latin alphabet.
Estonian and Polish are the first languages of two of my close friends and although they are lovely languages in their own right, I want to learn these to be able to speak a little with them. Hopefully they get a good laugh out of my pronunciation!!!
Welsh is an important language for me, it was my Taid’s native language (he didn’t speak a word of English until he was 12), so I’d love to learn it to keep my family history alive. I live very close to the northern Welsh border, so I’ve always visited and had opportunities to experience the language first-hand, which I can’t say for any other language.
My favourite thing about language learning are the beautiful scripts. Tamil & Thai have drop-dead GORGEOUS scripts, so I will be focusing more on writing in their respective months. I am excited (& intimidated) for these because they are both from language families I have never studied before!!!
I’ve studied a teen tiny bit of Turkish in the past, so I’d like to revisit it. I remember loving the vowel harmony systems and the aesthetic of the written language (I think it’s interesting how a script/writing system fits the language, maybe in this month I will also look into Ottoman Turkish to see how the Arabic abjad fit the language in comparison to the Latin alphabet!).
I have a basic (re: Tourist) knowledge of Spanish, but it has a lovely phonology, is spoken in many countries and has loads of resources for study, so it looks amazing to learn! My dream is to visit Andalusia and see the beautiful Islamic architecture. One day I WILL see the Court of Lions!!!! I’m interested in seeing the extent of Arabic’s influence on the language, even if it’s limited to arcane vocab.
I am 99% sure I’ll stick to these languages, but I might rearrange which months they correspond to if need be.
Tbh it was hard narrowing it down to 12 languages (and then 11, RIP Nahuatl), but a concise, focused month of study will not only teach me more of a language than looking into one as fancy strikes me, but also how to structure short-term, effective study plans/projects, which is a life skill I NEED to learn this year!
Good luck to everyone else participating in this challenge, I wish you all the best in your language studies and 2020! Happy new year!
I've decided to do German this month, my brain is really soaking it up right now so I think it will be easy and not too stressful for now, which I think I need right now.
For February, I am going to study Arabic. It's a language I have tried to study before, as I had a phase of hyperfixation on religious studies that peaked with Islam. But I ultimately only learned about half of the script and a few words and phrases.
I remember one moment I got particularly discouraged was when I was reading a Wikipedia article on something related to Islam and it had a word written in both Arabic and Persian, and I could read the Persian word, but was unable to read the Arabic one.
This time I intend to better learn the script, it's really my biggest goal for the month. I think in the past I got too far ahead of myself, so this time I am going to take it slow. Arabic is a language I really would love to learn, so I think this month will be less of a dabbling experience and more setting up the foundation.
I've been debating whether or not I should make this post, I don't really want to make it, but my goal with this blog is to be honest about language learning. I feel really bad about this, but I think I am going to have to call it quits on my year of langs.
I've been experiencing a lot of memory loss recently and I'm struggling with it a lot, especially when it comes to language learning because it feels like I'm losing everything. I can do okay when I'm actively doing lessons, but its hard when I'm not. I feel like a lot less information is being retained and I'm not sure I can keep up the work to make up for it right now.
I still want to learn languages, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make much, if any, progress for a while. With that in mind, I feel like it will be a bit pointless to try to keep with my year of langs. I am mostly going to just try to do maintenance for now and slow things down. I really wish I could have done the whole year, but it feels like it would be lying if I said I could...
For April I think I'm going to dabble in Romani. I found a book for learning it that seems interesting, though if anyone has any resources they would like to share that would be plenty welcome :).
I do feel a bit bad about deviating from my plans, but I realize I couldn't have predicted how I was going to feel for a whole year.
So March was a pretty lazy month for me. I didn't get very far with German, and retained even less, but I'm okay with that. We can't be at our best all of the time.
Though lurking in the back of my mind is a doubt of if I am going to finish my year of langs... I'm not sure how much of my original plan I am going to stick with, it feels like a lot of my initial interest and excitement has faded, and some languages I don't even want to think about dabbling in right now.
But I'm not giving up on language learning! For now I am going to basically play it by ear and see what I feel like doing when each month ends, and ultimately, if nothing else, I will stop the year of langs and focus only on the languages I know that I enjoy learning.
To be honest, I'm not sure what my plans are for March. Things are weighing heavy on my mind, and for now I can't give an answer on what I'm going to do.
