In 2011, I spent 712 hours learning languages, compared to 615 hours in 2010. That’s a great success, and my goal for this year is at least 712 hours but hopefully 800!
Distribution by language, with quick summaries:
220 hours of Mandarin – started reading books in Mandarin
124 hours of Arabic – slowly getting somewhere
118 hours of Dutch – from scratch to quasi-B2
111 hours of French – mostly reading
47 hours of Modern Greek – developing a series for GreekPod101
31 hours of Italian – just maintenance
26 hours of Swahili – just maintenance
26 hours of Spanish – just maintenance
9 hours of Russian – a brief stint, quickly abandoned

Around the World in 25 Books & 10 Languages

I planned badly – I didn’t take into account that I would be flying without check-in luggage to see my family for the Christmas holidays and to the Junulara E-Semajno, so I was out of space to bring the remaining books with me and couldn’t finish them. I probably would have come up a bit short, but because of this, I’m actually 8 books short.

I read 17 books in 8 languages, missing only Esperanto and Latin (easy languages for me). I am still proud of this result because 17 books is a lot more than I’d normally read in 2 months, particularly when it comes to foreign-language books, which are always more of a struggle. And I am particularly proud that I finished my first originally-Chinese book for this challenge, a classic by Lao She called “二马” (Mr Ma and Son).

If you’d like to read my reviews of the books I read during this challenge, have a look at this special Goodreads bookshelf.

Anyway, there are also practical reasons you might want to know another alphabet. Especially if you’re living in the country, you need it for everything, from reading street signs and maps to figuring out where to ring at an apartment building.

Teaching foreign scripts has been my particular fascination, because traditional textbooks consistently do it wrong (or, more commonly, don’t do it at all). My first experiment in that area was the creation of a Greek alphabet course at Wikibooks. Next, a site to learn the Korean script – I still get several e-mails with feedback or support requests every day from that one, but no income. Earlier this year, I quickly threw together a course for the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet (in Esperanto) for those who attended the Internacia Junulara Kongreso in Kyiv. That one was received really well – knowing Cyrillic is a lifesaver in the Ukraine!

So I started working on book about an alphabet that gives a lot of students trouble: the Arabic one. This is an all-new course with lots of words for practice, unrelated to my failed 2008 attempt at RWP Arabic. I learned a lot since, both about writing this kind of course and about the Arabic language.

You can read a preview of the book and buy it from Lulu. There’s a paperback and a DRM-free ebook version. Please have a look and let me know if you like it.

Essentially, it treats Arabic like Devanagari, and with very good results. Arabic texts written this way really have a minimum of diacritics, so it’s easier to get used to not having the vowels. Rule 1 in particular helped me a lot in becoming less dependent on vowellisation. It’s strange that nobody else came up with this suggestion.

Sample text (randomly taken from a children’s book) with full vowellisation:
يَزُولُ خَوْفِي حِينَ يُشْعِلُ بَابَا النُّورَ الصَّفِيرَ فِي غُرْفَتِي

Same text with this system:
يزولُ خَوْفي حينَ يُشْعِلُ بابا النّورَ الصّفيرَ في غُرْفني

Same text non-vowelled:
يزول خوفي حين يشعل بابا النّور الصّفير في غرفني

More posts related to learning Arabic

The remaining problem was of course how to produce this distinction myself. My textbooks were supremely unhelpful, just talking about ‘darker’, ‘emphatic’ or ‘pharyngealized’ sounds without telling me how to produce this effect. Finally I came across Michel Thomas’ Arabic course and it had good advice: the distinction between non-dark and dark S is close to the difference between the S in “see” or “sorry” in English. If you keep the tongue position from “sorry” and combine it with different vowel (like “ee”), you wind up with the Arabic dark S, or something very close to it. The other dark consonants can be acquired by assuming the same unusual tongue position.

More posts related to learning Arabic

First of all, there’s the Dutch Challenge, which I initiated myself. So far I don’t know any Dutch; just what I can understand through my knowledge of German. I. e. my reading comprehension is okay, but I have no active skills whatsoever. I will be studying Dutch intensively until mid-February, focusing mostly on active skills. Then, I will be traveling to the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium in order to give a 1-hour presentation in Dutch at a language festival. From zero to lecturer in 6 weeks – crazy, isn’t it? Yet I think I can pull it off, with a motivation like that.

Meanwhile, I won’t be neglecting my more advanced languages either. Last year my approach was to study two languages at a time – one beginner and one intermediate/advanced – and to rotate these every three months, and it worked well, so I’ll keep it up. Dutch will have to be my beginner language for the first quarter year, and for the advanced language I’m still undecided between French and Chinese. Due to the challenge I won’t have much time for the second language yet, so it does not matter at this point, I’ll do either or both until the challenge is over and then focus on one.

Last year kind of wound up to be a Mandarin-dominated year, and this year I’m hoping to do the same for Arabic, if I don’t burn out again. I have a lot more suitable materials now, which will be an advantage. I’m also planning to tackle Spanish at least a little bit, using my new book “Spanish for reading”, and I want to do a Listening-Reading madness, possibly for Russian, once my university exams are over. Ah yes, university. I really need to do something about that. And of course I’m still finishing up the active wave of Assimil Swahili.

Wow, this is a lot of stuff. I’m glad I developed a brand-new spreadsheet to keep track of my studies, the hours I put in, weekly averages and also general productivity. It’s a big improvement over the spreadsheet I used throughout last year, and last year’s already helped me so much… this will be awesome. If you want, you can get the spreadsheet as well and modify it for yourself – details here.

One more thing: my friend Pete over at the Language Fixation blog has started adapting to polyphasic sleep. I will give it another try as well, as soon as our guest leaves. Can’t wait! Look forward to reading my account here, as before.

Chinese: 236 hours – Success!
I was hoping to work on Chinese a lot, and I actually did so. I practised all parts of the language, too, including pronunciation, speaking and writing – and I did lots of listening (Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series) and reading. At this point I can sort of read “A Dictionary of Maqiao”, but long sentences tend to throw me off and it’s still not fun. I shall voluntarily continue with cartoons and Harry Potter first, or read “A Dictionary of Maqiao” in parallel with the English. Actually I read quite a bit of Harry Potter in L-R, except I got annoyed with having to invest as much time in aligning the text as in reading it, so I got side-tracked into writing a better aligner and stopped reading. Oh well. My active language usage has much improved, and I’ve learned more than 3000 new words this year. I will keep plowing ahead, but I hope that Chinese can be less of a focus in the coming year.

French: 140 hours – Success!
I read a whole bunch of classics, though not one-a-month as originally intended. I’m happy with the overall count though, because I also read two French-language fanfictions of 1700 pages (!) and 950 pages, both of them within the same two weeks. Reading French can be addicting when it’s not university-assigned stuff. I also completed about 40 pages of essays in French; in return I didn’t write much on lang-8 despite my good resolutions. The aligatorejo showed that speaking French comes more easily and naturally now, about as effortlessly as speaking English, so I’m happy with that. Writing French doesn’t feel the same yet, but I’m blaming it on lack of opportunity.

Swahili: 92 hours – Mostly success!
Staying true to the plan, I’ve used nothing except the Assimil course (and Anki, but no outside source of vocabulary) for Swahili. I finished all 100 lessons of the passive wave and I did a first pass over the first 50 lessons of the active wave as well, but I still need to enter a couple of them into Anki, the deck creation takes about as much time as the studying itself. Today I had my first Swahili conversation and it went
well. I gave a talk on Swahili at the Esperanto New Year’s event. Around 20 people attended the talk and I then found out there were 2 other Swahili speakers at this event. Annoying that they didn’t show up for the aligatorejo so I had little time to talk to them. Anyway, a quick test shows that I can understand 90% of the words in the “Little Prince” in Swahili and 85% of a random Wikipedia article; however, my
book of Swahili poetry is still incomprehensible except for a few phrases here and there. Even though it’s hard, I shall complete the active wave and do more tests before reading the little prince or studying any other materials in order to get the full assessment of Assimil. I am unhappy that I planned my time unwisely and didn’t finish the active wave yet. However, I spent a lot of time working on vocabulary and the
extensive Swahili grammar, so the active wave is going smoothly, it’s mostly an issue of entering all the phrases, linking the audio etc.

Italian: 13 hours – who cares anyway?
At first I delayed it because I wanted to do a 1 Month Challenge for Arabic, then later I couldn’t get into my books while finally finding the motivation to do more French, in other words Italian fell by the wayside. I did finish an Italian novel though and I greatly improved my reading speed so the next one should be more enjoyable. Hopefully
I’ll find someone interesting to practise speaking with too.

Greek: 91 hours – success!
I read the entire first book of Harry Potter, my first monolingual Greek novel, amongst other things, and I did so without consulting a dictionary. Right now, my reading level is definitely B2. My active language usage has improved a lot, too, but it’s still borderline B1/B2 I’d say, because I lost my tandem partner in the second half of the
year. I’ll keep working on Greek.

Arabic: 43 hours – cancelled
Started with a 1 Month Challenge, which was fun, but then my Anki was piling up too quickly and my textbook didn’t have nearly enough exercises for all the things it was throwing at me, so I got overwhelmed and burnt out, cancelling this in favor of more Chinese and French. Will try again in 2011 since I found other materials now; if all goes well, I shall focus as much on Arabic in 2011 as I did on Chinese in 2010.

Others – Success!
I spent 28 hours actively improving my Esperanto and Latin. For these languages I’m not counting the countless hours I spent talking/reading in them or even teaching them, just the time I spent studying and trying to improve myself. Another bright aspect is that I successfully avoided wanderlust this year – only 3 hours of Spanish, 3 hours of Russian and one hour of Maori all year!
All in all, I reached an average of about 12 hours a week of language study, including the time I was traveling or sick. It’s a good result, but leaves room for improvement, and that’s what I shall do next year, with the help of my new awesome spreadsheets. Took me a while to optimize everything, now I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do when everything is set up right right from the start (hopefully).

Well, I’m addicted to learning vocabulary. Yes, addicted is the right word. I can’t go a day without. It’s too much fun. How? I will tell you, but I want you to first promise that you’ll give it a try. I suggested this tip to many people, and most were skeptical at first, but those who tried it still randomly come up and thank me for it. It changed the way they learn languages.

The secret is Anki. Anki is a small, unprepossessing piece of software, open-source (though maintained and continuously improved by one Damien Elmes, who also provides awesome customer support) and available for all platforms including smartphones. Anki doesn’t look as fancy as some highly-marketed commercial software like BYKI, but in functionality it’s much better. Let me go over a few things I love about Anki.

For one, there’s the algorithm, the most important part of any SRS (= spaced-repetition software). Anki’s algorithm is well-honed, only asking me words when I’m on the verge of forgetting them, easily transferring them into my extra long-term memory. It’s also possible to tune the algorithm e. g. by giving different default intervals, or by specifying that forgotten words should be asked again right away / in 10 minutes / after 8 hours or the like. This makes Anki suitable for different styles of learners, as well as different subject materials. For example, I also study Go problems on Anki and these I don’t want to see too quickly again; while for pesky Chinese characters 10 minutes or less seems to be optimal for me to make sure I learn them.

Speaking of Chinese, one of the key features of Anki for me is the ability to have unlimited “sides” to a card. For Chinese there’s the issue of learning characters, pronunciation and translation. Using actual paper cards, I never know whether to put the pronunciation on the character side or the translation side. If I put it with the characters, I don’t learn to recognize the characters. If I put it with the translation, I don’t learn to build a link between the concept and the Chinese. This problem is not exclusive to Asian languages though. For example, for European languages I like to have another field for grammar, another field for related words, another field for a sample sentence, another field for a translation of the sample sentence… and then Anki allows me to test myself in any direction, not just word to translation but also translation to word, word to grammar, sample sentence to sample sentence translation (all automatically generated based on one-time entry)… and Anki allows me to specify what I want to see when quizzed in each of these directions, e. g. when I quiz myself on Chinese characters to translation, I also want the pronunciation of the characters to show up underneath the translation. When I quiz myself on translation to Chinese characters, I want to see the pronunciation underneath the characters, plus an example sentence or two. This flexibility is awesome.

Even more awesome is that Anki does auto-completion for Chinese, so I only enter a Chinese word and Anki will already try to fill in the translation and pronunciation for me, so entering vocabulary doesn’t take so long. There are also many awesome decks (for many languages) already available for free in the “Shared Decks” section (like a marketplace, but all free), e. g. a huge, well-made deck covering almost 10,000 Chinese words including all the HSK levels, and a deck with 20,000 Chinese sentences for those who want to try AJATT‘s 10,000 sentence method.

For Japanese there is also auto-completion but for other languages there is something almost as valuable: remembering keyboard layouts. So if I use a Greek keyboard layout to enter my Modern Greek vocabulary in the “Front” field, and then a German keyboard layout to enter the translation in the “Back” field, and I switch back to the front field to enter another word, my keyboard layout will automatically be set to Greek again. Same for Arabic. You can’t believe how much time this saves me!

Anki also has extensive plugin abilities. While I was studying Chinese characters last year, I really liked a plugin that told me how many characters I knew and how they compared to a) frequency lists and b) the HSK official character lists. I could e. g. see that I covered 95% of the HSK 2 list, and then click on it to see which characters I was missing. Click on any character to come up with a dictionary entry for it… awesome. Other plugins extend the kind of data Anki can handle, e. g. there’s a plugin for importing Smart.fm vocabulary, or one for viewing Go games / Go problems in .sgf format as part of the card. Anki natively already supports images, sounds (I made an Esperanto deck with every word recorded), video, HTML, LateX and clozes on cards. A good use for images is studying geography, e. g. learning to recognize countries on the map, also learning their capitals. My boyfriend is addicted to a deck like that.

Ah yes, addiction. The sense of achievement that comes from watching all those words wander into your long-term memory (hitting “Show next in 6 months” etc.), the stats underlining your progress, and also the simple, satisfying way of going over lots of cards at once in the 10-30 minutes I study an Anki deck every day. On the computer I use the numeric keypad 0-4 to rate cards, making the mouse unnecessary so I can go very quickly and lean back comfortably while doing this. Even better with the iPhone version, which I’ll use in bed, on the couch or (even better) on the subway and in the elevator, turning every moment into valuable language-learning time.

Get Anki and tell me about your experience with it!

… a continuation from part 1.

How to improve your…

Pronunciation: if you don’t know how to pronounce a foreign word, Forvo.com has a huge database of recorded words for many languages, mostly done by native speakers. If you however need to know how to pronounce a complete phrase or even a complete text, go to Rhinospike.com instead – there you can request that someone should make a recording for you (for free).

Reading comprehension: the best way to learn how to read foreign texts is – to read them. If they are beyond your level though, for example if you try to read a Mexican newspaper after only studying Spanish for 5 hours, use WordChamp (the “Web Reader” function). This will add translations to all words, so that you can rapidly move over the text and start to understand it. It’s much faster than looking every word up in a dictionary, and additionally this tool is able to understand conjugated words. There are also some browser plugins that will do the same thing. You can use these to read not just your own texts, blog posts or foreign newspapers online, but also lots of literature for example – this is a great collection of links to sites that have online literature in lots of languages, such as the Project Gutenberg. And if you prefer somewhat simplified texts, there are some websites for that as well, collected here. Also LingQ has simplified texts in a bunch of languages, and an in-built on-click translation system to boot. Parallel texts (here and here) are also very useful to beginner and intermediate students – there, one column is in the language you’re studying and another column is in your native language, but both feature the same text, so you can compare meanings and constructions across languages.

Listening Comprehension: first, there are podcasts that propose to teach you languages, such as GermanPod101, where I’m project manager, or any number of them available through a quick search on iTunes. Most of these are for beginners or lower-intermediate students. If you’re beyond that stage, there are foreign-language audiobooks (books that are read to you). Audiobooks are becoming popular now, but often they’re expensive. At Librivox.org you can find open-source free audiobooks in several languages, and there’s a more complete listing of such sites here. If your listening comprehension isn’t good enough yet though, you could try listening to an audiobook in a foreign language while reading along in your own language – a lot of words will become clear and they will enter your vocabulary with little effort. This method is called Listening-Reading (see explanations by the inventor) and some resources have been collected for it at Bilingual-texts.com, or you can mix & match your own with the literature and audiobook links above. If you’re a bit more advanced, you may also like to listen to something while reading along in the same language; for example some news sites offer recordings of the news as well as transcripts of them. Or you can watch videos in your target language with subtitles in your language – Dotsub collects subtitled videos online, or there are always DVDs. If your DVD doesn’t have the subtitles you want, you may find some at OpenSubtitles.org, and of course the internet is also your friend if you’re looking to get movies in your target language.

Writing: to get better, you should write a lot in your target language. That’s why I like the service at Lang-8.com, where native speakers correct your foreign-language texts for free. Busuu.com is similar, though it’s only good for a limited number of languages. In exchange, they offer courses and ideas what you could write about.

Speaking: even if you live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, you can speak your target language every day. How? Use italki (or one of many similar websites) to find partners who will talk with you via Skype. They will help you learn their language and you will help him learn yours. Normally you speak half an hour in one language and half an hour in the other, but this can change if your level of language knowledge is different. If you however don’t have the time to do the exchange or if you’re still unable to talk at all, you should find a paid tutor at Myngle or Edufire. Compared to a random native speaker, who cannot explain things or empathize with your situation as a learner of his language, a tutor is often a better choice, especially if you’re not very advanced yet. The advantage of online tutoring is that you can easily find many native speakers of your target language and choose the best teacher from among them, while in your city there may only be one qualified teacher, or even none. I also like online tutoring because it saves me the time I’d otherwise spend commuting.

The rest: if you have a question about a language you’re learning, if you don’t understand the grammar, need help finding websites, are looking for a good textbook or don’t know how to learn efficiently, there are special forums about language-learning that will provide answers. For grammar or vocabulary questions about a particular language I typically recommend the Unilang forum because it unites native speakers and students of lots of languages, including very obscure ones. For questions about language-learning in general, new study methods or evaluations of textbooks / language programs, I recommend the how-to-learn-any-language forum. That one is Esperanto-phobic for the most part though, so if you speak Esperanto, join me for a more open-minded, more international language-learning forum.

Don’t forget to have fun learning languages!

P.S.: If you know other great free websites for or about language learning, please let me know!

First, to get a taste of a language, I normally read its article in Wikipedia and I look over the most important phrases in this language – http://travlang.com/languages/ is a great resource for that, even though it’s full of ads, because they have resources on lots of languages and even made native-speaker recordings. There’s also a much more complete phrasebook, which is almost like a course, available from 50languages.com. For the really obscure languages, this online “language museum” can give me a first impression of the language’s sound.

The internet is good for much more than just getting a first impression though. You can also learn languages completely for free online; there are lots of free online language courses. Of course those are often not as good or not as complete as commercial courses, but there are also great and really complete courses online, for example the course in Modern Greek from Kypros.org with more than 100 lessons, the German course by Deutsche Welle, or this Korean course put online by Sogang University. (This blog post won’t try to be a comprehensive listing of available good online courses, my other site tried to do that.)

Sometimes there are even online courses that used to be (or still are) sold commercially. For example, the American Foreign Service Institute allowed many of its language courses from the 60s to be published online at this site. And there’s an awesome commercial multimedia course in Modern Greek (including video!) here, made available for free. LiveMocha is a website that offers courses for a whole bunch of languages, but they are pretty bad. The best webpages are those that only teach one language, for example Lernu for Esperanto – this has to be the most awesome most complete free language site ever! Would that more languages had sites like this!

Apart from complete courses, the internet also offers great tools. I shall list them according to their learning goals. If you goal is…

A bigger vocabulary: www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html lists online dictionaries for all languages. You don’t want to learn all the words of a dictionary though, so have a look at the Unilang.org basic wordlists with around 600 of the most common words for any language (select category “Unilang Basic Wordlist” and choose your target language). There are also various topical word lists. If you’re not sure how to use a word, or how to say something correctly, www.tatoeba.org is a multilingual database of phrases, in which you can search your word. For memorizing words, definitely try out the free open-source software Anki, which is much better than commercial programs. It’s cross-platform and even available for mobile phones.

Grammar: There are online grammars (for example the complete official reference grammar for Esperanto) just like there are courses, but there’s not one page good for all. Let me just mention Verbix.com, which can conjugate any verb in more than 50 languages.

In my next post I shall look at ways to improve your pronunciation, your reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing and speaking, and also some misc sites. Meanwhile, you can already tell me: what are your favorite language resources online?

Update: part 2 now available at http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2010/09/03/learning-languages-online-part-2/ – and my app Intense German has been approved for the app store! Yay!

Unlike some other bloggers that I read, I did not feel any improvement in focus, concentration or other health benefits from going completely vegetarian as opposed to having a small serving of meat once or twice a week. Maybe others had a very heavily meat-based diet and changed to a diet heavy in vegetables in order to experience this effect; if I eat a big serving of meat (or cream / cheese, for that matter) I definitely feel sluggish afterwards. Anyway, as there seems to be no particular benefit in going completely vegetarian as opposed to my previous diet, I decided not to deny myself my favourite meat dishes anymore. For example Sui Cao, a Vietnamese soup with dumplings. Yumm!

I did 22 hours and 6 textbook units of Arabic study – a far cry from the immersion that I intended to do, but real life intervened. Generally this past month of language study hasn’t been good, I had other things to do, such as taxes, playing/studying Go and spending time with our houseguest. 22 hours of Arabic, 15 hours of Chinese, 13 hours of French, 1 1/2 hours of Swahili, 3 1/2 hours of Greek, 55 hours of language study total… I suppose it’s better than the 10 hours/week that I averaged in weeks 20 & 21, but I’ll see what I can do for the rest of the year.

I also revamped my tracking again, setting up goals for reading and writing in various languages, doing Anki reps and studying Go, because I rediscovered my passion for this ancient Asian strategy game.