Judith's language learning blog

I’m not sure if you heard of Hunch, it’s a pretty cool free site to help you come to decisions about just about anything. I created several “quizzes” (decision-making engines) about language-learning there and I’d appreciate your feedback – you can also just make an account on Hunch and start improving those quizzes.

What should my next foreign language be? (considering 45 languages so far, I’d appreciate help adding others)
Should I learn Esperanto?
How can I learn a foreign language? (evaluating your aptitude for self-study, classroom study, study abroad etc.)
Which program should I use to learn a new language? (still very sketchy)

Considering the audience of this blog, you may also like Which non-English movie should I watch?

If you’re like me and several other forum members I know, you have books on all kinds of subjects and languages that sound interesting but that you may never study, you have dozens of started projects and you frequently re-decide what you want to concentrate your energy on.

I now found a book that seemed to know me better than I know myself. It also had an instant wowing effect on everybody else I know with the above-mentioned issues. The book is called “Refuse to Choose!
“, written by Barbara Sher, and after devouring it over Christmas break I can recommend it to everybody here. The book reveals more about yourself and puts you at ease with who you are, but since that was not much of a problem for me, I found another part most rewarding: the part where the author provides lots and lots of helpful tips and techniques to enable you to pursue your dreams. From where and how to start via time management techniques to how to finish projects that deserve to be completed (or that your boss/school requires), there’s a lot of helpful content.

Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

I always notice that mastery of the affixes is essential for understanding Esperanto and for speaking it fluently. The thing is that many Esperanto speakers never have a very big vocabulary… but you don’t need one if you have fully mastered the affixes. Sometimes I even wish that German or English or other languages had a reliable affix system like this, because I start a sentence and find that I’ve temporarily forgotten a word, or it’s on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t get it out. Let’s say it’s the word “auxlo” (= auditorium). If you have trouble coming up with that word in Esperanto, you can continue speaking without a noticeable stop and people won’t even know you’ve been missing a word, because you’d say something like “prelegejo” (prelegi+ejo = to lecture + place = lecture-place) and that’s a perfectly fine way of expressing yourself. In fact, it’s considered good language usage to say “prelegejo” instead of “auxlo”, because it enables beginners to understand more easily, particularly if they come from a non-Indo-European language background.

Since it’s so crucial to understand agglutinated words quickly and to be able to come up with some yourself without much thinking, I’ve decided to post some exercises here for you to improve your understanding of Esperanto affixes…

I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but beside working for GermanPod101 and teaching private German classes online, I also created a German course for people to study on their own on the iPhone. It’s a brand new concept, involving many tiny German lessons rather than several long ones. It’s just perfect for the iPhone. When you’re waiting for the elevator, or any other of those myriad of small time wasters every day, you can just whip out your iPhone and do a German lesson in that course. You don’t have to be afraid of starting something you can’t finish, and you’ll be slowly but surely making progress in German.

For just a few days, this iPhone app is now priced at only 3 Euros / 4 dollars, as we’re preparing to send out a free upgrade to 50 lessons. Once the upgrade has been approved by Apple, the regular price will go up to 5 Euros, so get this app now – you’ll never see it that cheap again!

Get it now!

I thought I’d share some of my favourite resources for Esperanto. I will divide this into information for the might-be-interested, study materials for the definitely-interested and cultural resources for those who have actually learned at least some Esperanto.

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I am back in Germany now, back on regular internet, so it’s time for a post. Today I would like to comment on the movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” by Michael Moore, which I watched the last night before leaving Atlanta.
WARNING: this is not just a movie critique but an expression of my political/economic beliefs, so don’t read if that might offend you.

Since today, I know 2000 Chinese characters!

I’m really grateful to the creator of the cross-platform vocabulary trainer Anki and the creator of the Hanzi statistics plugin, which allowed me to learn this many characters and to keep track of the number – a great motivator for me.

The characters I know split as follows:

By HSK Level
Basic: 99.75%
Elementary: 86.97%
Intermediate: 44.31%
Advanced: 20.6%

By frequency:
1 – 500: 100.0%
501 – 1000: 94.8%
1001 – 1500: 78.6%
1501 – 2000: 51.8%
2001 – 2500: 35.8%
2501 – 3000: 19.4%
3001 – 3500: 8.2%

Neato!

I love being able to recognize most of the characters in the subtitles of the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series. I’m already on episode 41, so that’s 30 hours spent watching Chinese with Chinese and English subtitles. Actually a lot more because I tend to re-watch, and I’ve also watched some future episodes that were recommended to me. Studying Chinese has become a really fun activity, I’d love to spend entire days on it. Alas, I have to work and also prepare a trip to the states, starting next Wednesday.

Today I reached a first milestone in Spanish!

My study of Spanish consists exclusively of classes with Edufire teacher Enrique, who has mastered the art of giving conversational Spanish lessons in a way that has students talk most of the time and right from the very first lesson. Obviously I had heard the odd Spanish expression before, for example “sabes” or “no hablo espan~ol”, and I can draw on my knowledge of Italian, Latin, Esperanto and French (in order of usefulness). However, I haven’t looked at any grammar book, vocabulary list or lesson, just taken these classes with Enrique, maybe eight or ten of them.

One thing is that I’m getting a feel for the nature of Spanish, as reflected in my guesses becoming more and more accurate. Today I still guessed “sesanta” instead of “sesenta” for 60 and was totally wrong with “estade” instead of “verano” for summer, but when I said “a causa de los esclavos… or something”, totally expecting to be corrected, I was correct!

However, the real reason I’m calling this a milestone is because during today’s one hour lesson, we had quite a natural conversation, touching upon various things from tonight’s language party to my upcoming trip to the states, previous trips we both did, what we think of various cities, and so on. Normally there is at least one point during the lesson in which Enrique has to bring up a new topic in a rather abrupt way, or ask several less-than-related questions to make me practise a certain point of grammar that I got wrong, but today the conversation was coherent for a full hour and I never felt as good about expressing myself in Spanish!

Go, also known as Igo, Weiqi (围棋） or Baduk, is one of the most ancient board games known to man. It was invented in China more than 2500 years ago. Recommended by Confucius himself, this game has been a standard part of preparation for a nobleman’s or warrior’s career. Spreading to Korea and Japan between the 5th and 7th century AD, Go became also one of the arts the Samurai trained. Asians believe that the Go board can not just represent the strategies and tactics of battle but also that it is a representation of life itself.

What I love most about Go is its surreal elegance. The rules are as simple as you could wish for, hardly more difficult than those of Tic Tac Toe, yet the game they create is so profound that you could (and some do) study it full-time a whole life long.

At every point, you have a choice between more than a hundred legal moves. This makes the game a natural target for AI research, since brute-force calculation is not an option. Humans however see slow, clunky moves, fast, swift and maybe even too reckless moves, ugly moves and moves of a zen-like beauty.

Go is a game I cherish, even if I can’t give it as much time as it deserves. If you would like to learn this beautiful ancient game, try the Interactive Way to Go or check out one of my lectures tomorrow: for Americans or for Europeans.

Finally, here are some of my favourite quotes about Go:

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.”
– from Shibumi , bestseller by Trevanian

“While the Baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.
– Edward Lasker, chess grandmaster

“That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.”
– Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

After 11 days and oversleeping a couple times, I was feeling worse rather than better. My boyfriend got worried and convinced me to get a good night’s rest and forget about this experiment for the time being. Since I now have lots of work piled up that I couldn’t do while tired, I finally followed his advice. Well, I tried. Apparently, my body right now totally doesn’t like sleep. If at all, I sleep some time between 5am and 9am, but only intermittedly. I still managed to feel fine and get a lot of work done yesterday, but today I’ve felt sluggish all day again. I will play it by ear, sleep when I can and wait for my body to decide when it wants to sleep.