Who am I?

Nobody special. I am not any more gifted than you or anyone else. I just happen to have a natural curiosity and fascination with languages which gives me the attitude that is necessary to learn. Anyone can learn with the right attitude.

All my life I have been fascinated with foreign languages. Before graduating from high school I had already taken 2 years of Spanish, 2 years of German, and 1 year of French! Since then, I continued to study Spanish, but also dabbled in Tagalog, Portuguese, and Italian, before my action-packed year in 2009, when I went from no prior knowledge of Russian to basic fluency. But as if that year wasn’t already hard enough, I also made it harder on myself by allowing my curiosity to form in Ukrainian and Polish.

How many languages do I speak?

I speak English natively, Spanish, and Russian fluently. My Italian is starting to get pretty good, now. I can have a light conversation in German or French. I can read basic Ukrainian and Polish, and Czech to a lesser degree — thanks to my knowledge of Russian — but I get lost when spoken to. What little I know of Tagalog and Portuguese is fun, and scores points with the natives, but is useless in any real life situation. Naturally, all this will change as you follow along on this web site.

Basically, I know a little bit about a lot, and a lot about a little. I’m not a fluent speaker of seven languages. But I will be! And so can you — there’s nothing that makes me special or gives me any advantage.

Why? What’s the point? What do I gain from this?

The main goal, always, is to travel the world and meet new people. I believe anything is possible and that you shouldn’t settle for anything less than your dreams. With this web site, I will motivate myself to follow my dreams, and hopefully motivate others to follow theirs.

But language learning has other benefits, too. Learning Spanish has had immediate benefit for me due to the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants throughout the United States. Learning Russian also had tremendous value as I’ve found myself in the company of Russian speakers in recent years. My French was never particularly good but I intend for that to change — with Canada so close to the north there is plenty of potential to use French.

As for the rest, I hope to use all of my language knowledge for communication with people throughout the world, both in travel and in online communication. In fact, this goal of worldwide communication will have a large role in the influencing my choices of languages in coming years. (Yes, that means at some point I will have to consider Arabic and Mandarin, though both are intimidating!)

Why one year? That other guy does it in 3 months!

While I would love to be able to travel to another country and stay there for three months learning their language, that is a luxury that I don’t have. But believe me, the moment I see an opportunity to do so, I’m going to take it! Meanwhile, my job and my responsibilities are here in the U.S., and if I do the work of learning the language here, I can spend more of my time enjoying my travels when I go, and less time studying.

This web site and this challenge is not aimed at the fastest possible way to acquire a new language. Instead, it’s aimed at a realistic goal which I believe anyone can achieve. And, moreover, it’s slow enough that I can still continue to have a normal life. If I’m going to do this every year, I can’t spend all of my free time dedicated to study!

So will it be just the one language each year

No. In addition to my focus on the target language each year, I will also be directing attention toward improving my knowledge of languages I have already studied. In particular, Russian and German. Russian immediately became my favorite language — like love at first sight — and I will forever continue to study it. I also really enjoy German, and since I never reached fluency in German that will be a side-goal this year.

I have decided to learn and write about my target language during the week, but to allow myself time to study, improve, and write about other languages on the weekends. It’s a nice diversion, and I hope it will also keep the site interesting for people who are not learning the same language I am learning.

And occasionally, I’ll even find time to pull a crazy stunt, like trying to become fluent in Esperanto in just one week!

What language will be next?

It’s still really early to say, but I am certain that it will not be another Latin-based language — that would be too easy after Italian. The following are already of interest: Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Turkish and Greek, arranged in order of my interest. Because I live in Chicago, where there may be as many as a million Polish-speaking people, my interest is pretty high for that.