filed in Greek on May.15, 2010
Alphabets are scary things — when you understand an alphabet, you are sufficiently equipped to intuit many things about the text written in it, even if you don’t actually know a word of that language. However, when you don’t understand the alphabet, you find yourself saying, “It’s all Greek to me!”
filed in French on Apr.25, 2010
When I first got started this with Italian, I started by looking for the alphabet and its sounds, and I used YouTube to hear them correctly pronounced by a native Italian speaker. But several of my readers are learning French, and I never really got things started for them. So today I’d like to just explore the sounds of French.
filed in Russian on Apr.24, 2010
In a comment on a recent post, someone pointed out that he was learning Czech and that my Russian posts are helpful even though he can’t understand any of the Russian words that I write. Today, I’d like to show everyone how easy it is to learn the Russian alphabet and start understanding those things I write.
filed in Esperanto on Mar.28, 2010
Since choosing to become an active member of the language blogging community, I have started seing Esperanto mentioned a lot. While I have had some basic understanding of what Esperanto is, I didn’t really know any details about it. After seeing it mentioned a few times in response to last week’s post about reasons to learn Spanish, I decided to take a little time to discover what Esperanto is about.
filed in Arabic on Mar.27, 2010
Last weekend I decided to learn to read Arabic. I’m not talking about learning any words, building any vocabulary, or even being able to communicate or understand anything. I just wanted to learn how to read this strange-looking language.
filed in General, Italian on Feb.08, 2010
Now that we’ve got our alphabets learned, let’s take a deeper look at the sounds of letters and letter combinations, and learn a little bit about spelling.
filed in General, Italian on Feb.07, 2010
Some people have the fortune of a life that allows lots of travel, and for them, the best way to learn a language is, without a doubt, immersion in a country that speaks the language. For most of us, though, our careers or families keep us planted in one spot for most of the year.… continue reading
2010: Italian
I am on a mission to learn a new language fluently every year. This year I am learning Italian. You can follow my progress via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS!