Jan
Jan
Babel No More
When I recently received a copy of the new book Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners…, by Michael Erard, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A few other language bloggers have recently commented on the book, and while I tried to ignore their comments in order to
Jan
Jan
Reading Greek, part II
I’ve talked about the Greek alphabet in the past, but as I mentioned last week, there are a few more things one needs to know before effectively reading Greek.
Greek is not a fully phonetic language. A few letters can be pronounced in more than one way, and a few sounds can be represented by…
Jan
Jan
The haphazard construction of the human mind
I recently finished reading Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind… by Gary Marcus. It’s an entire book written just about the brain and how it works, so as you can imagine there’s a lot of information in there to help learners. The book even contains an entire chapter about language.
Marcus repeatedly uses
Jan
Jan
Typing in Greek
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m not yet spending any actual time studying… the Greek language. I plan to begin studying intensely when February begins, but for now the most important step is comfortably reading and writing in the native Greek alphabet. Once I begin focused study, I don’t want my progress to
Jan
Jan
Early steps to learning Greek
For my first month with Greek, the plan has been to ease into the language. The Greek language is written in a different alphabet than any to which I am accustomed, and if I’m going to learn this language it will be necessary to be able to read the words I see in lessons, tutorials,…
Jan
Jan
New language mission for 2012!
As I mentioned in my last post, my first goal in choosing a language this year was that I pick something which I will have many opportunities to use. In that post, I listed out several considerations, and I think it’s important to go through a similar process when choosing a new language project for…
Jan
Jan
Choosing a language that you will use
In spite of the fact that my advice to others has always been to pick a language not for it’s features, or interestingness, or uniqueness, or whatever, but rather to choose a language that you will use…, I failed to follow my own advice with my choice of Turkish last year and that led
Dec
Dec
With 2011 in the books, what will 2012 bring?
This year didn’t go as well as I had hoped, but it wasn’t a total loss. And 2012 starts soon! There’s no reason I can’t be much more productive next year.
I won’t reveal my next language project just yet, but I can say this much: unlike this year, my next language will be one…