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.

I want to make a big dent in this pile in the next two months. My idea is an “around the world” theme. I picked 25 books representing 25 countries and all continents, and I will read all of them before January 1st. These books are written in 10 different languages, and I avoided German & English for the most part, so this will also be a linguistic challenge. Languages represented, in rough order of frequency: French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Latin, Greek, German, English.

Journey plan:

Join me!

This is a great chance to discover foreign cultures and authors who are less known in the English-speaking world. Have a look at the books I will be reading, maybe something interests you as well, or maybe you also have unread books that you can use for your personal round-the-world trip. The details of my journey, following the path on the map:

Egypt: Christian Jacq – Ramsès, fils de la lumière (Ramses, the son of light). This bestselling novel about Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II is written by an Egyptologist, meaning that it’s classes better than some wanna-be historian’s image of Egypt.
Turkey: Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt – Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. Another French best-selling book about the Middle East.
Greece: Από πού έρχεστε; A bilingual Greek-German reader about Greece.
Italy: Dino Buzzati – Lascia o Raddoppia; bilingual Italian-German
Sweden: Merit Müller – Mara en de kleur van het geluk. This is originally a Swedish book, but I have it in Dutch.
Netherlands: Arthur Japin – De grote wereld
UK: Lao She – Mr. Ma & Son, a Sojourn in London; A bilingual Chinese-English novel that sounds funny.
Canada: Michel Tremblay – Les Belles-Soeurs. I am looking forward to the liberal use of Joual (Canadian French dialect) in this drama.
USA: Gustaaf Peek – Ik was Amerika. The story of a Dutch POW who was shipped to America. A chapter of history that I hadn’t heard of.
Mexico: J.M.G. Le Clézio – Le rêve mexicain (The Mexican Dream). Essays on the Aztecs, the role of Cortes, Montezuma etc. and how the Western world might look today if the Aztec culture had been allowed to survive.
Colombia: Patricia Lara S. – Las Mujeres en la Guerra. Women telling about their role in the Colombian conflict.
Peru: Mario Vargas Llosa – Der Geschichtenerzähler. This book was selected as this year’s Free Book to be given out all across Berlin, that’s why I will read it in German rather than the original Spanish (El Hablador), maybe re-reading it in Spanish later. It’s about a man who goes to live with the Native Americans in the Peruvian jungle and learn their stories.
Chile: Joan E. Garcés – Allende y la experiencia chilena.
Suriname and the Dutch Antilles: Dylan van Eijkeren – Witboi. Another topic I never heard of before: about the relations between the Netherlands and their former colonies, and what’s really going on over there.
Tunisia: Apuleius – Apologia. Apuleius was a Roman writer, but he was also a Berber(indigenous North African), a very interesting person. The Apologia is said to be one of the funniest Latin texts to survive.
(Various African countries): An anthology of notable works by French-speaking black Africans, “Conteurs francophones noirs”.
Chad: André Gide – Le Retour du Chad. André Gide is a well-known name in French literature, and I have read far too little about Africa.
Congo: André Gide – Voyage au Congo. Ditto.
Australia: Trevor Steele – Flugi kun kakatuoj. An original Esperanto novel about an Aborigene tribe and the arrival of Europeans.
Japan: Kenzaburo Oe – Insegnaci a superare la nostra pazzia. As I’m not studying Japanese yet, I don’t feel bad for reading the great Kenzaburo Oe in Italian.
Ancient China: Shan Sa – Impératrice. I love Chinese-born French author Shan Sa for her novel “La Joueuse de Go”, which was horribly mistranslated in “The Girl Who Played Go”. Read this in French or don’t read it at all. Meanwhile, I’ll try another one of her novels.
Modern China: Annie Wang – From Mainland to Mainstream. Despite the title, this book is all in Chinese and I hope I will be up for it.
Afghanistan: Oriana Fallaci – Inciallah. Oriana Fallaci is an Italian reporter and this book, which I had started on before and found beyond my level, is a really interesting read. She illuminates not just the current situation in Afghanistan but also the historic causes, the Syrian-Lebanese conflict etc., all in the course of a long novel. I’m dying to read this; hopefully I’m not throwing the book down in frustration again.
Russia: Mikaelo Bronŝtejn – Oni ne pafas en Jamburg. An Esperanto novel about the legendary youth movement in the 70s in Soviet Russia.
Siberia/Russia: Julio Baghy – Viktimoj. A classic of Esperanto literature, about life in a Siberian gulag, written by someone who has been there and who is counted among the greatest of Esperanto-speaking poets.

Reading all these books before the end of the year will be a tough challenge, especially as I still have to work and I will be traveling a lot within that time span (our annual trip to the USA and Christmas visits to family). However, I am also looking forward immensely to reading every book on this list, and to buying more books.

Post your recommendations, tips and comments below.

For me, the problem was that I unknowingly set my goal too low. I wanted to be able to read Spanish for pleasure. It seemed like a good thing to be able to do, and I’m not really motivated to know Spanish any better than that because I’m sure any fluency will just fall into disuse like my Italian did. At the beginning of the challenge, I had a lot of trouble reading Spanish, having to spend a lot of time figuring out what sentences mean. However, I had barely spent 20 hours when it became very easy for me. Maybe I was just missing some really common words, or a conversion recipe for Italian & Latin words, but anyway, at 20 hours I had basically reached my goal. I kept on reading for a little bit for a total of 28 1/2 hours, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I got caught up in some exciting programming projects. So… yeah.

I will try a more ambitious goal for the next 6 Week Challenge, which will be in August. I’m debating between Arabic and Indonesian – Arabic because I had a lot of false starts with that language, and Indonesian because it seems more likely that 6 weeks could make a real difference with this language, also it’s on my long-term hit list. Any opinions?

For now, I’m looking forward to the next Tadoku Challenge, which will run from July 1st to the 31st. Interested? It’s a bit inconvenient that I will be at the Internacia Junulara Kongreso (huge Esperanto meeting) in Kyiv from July 14th to the 21st, and you know that going to a foreign country always makes me learn a bit of their language. I long-since decided that I would finally run my intense Russian Listening-Reading experiment on this occasion, and if it works well enough, I might even go to the Cheboksari Language Festival in October to further improve my Russian.

So unfortunately my desired Tadoku target – re-activating my Italian and/or improving my Chinese – will have to take a back seat to learning Russian for the first two weeks of July. I’m hoping to get some Italian reading in during the IJK though, or maybe read some Italian fanfiction when I’m too tired to do more Russian. If only I could find a Chinese fanfiction site… Anyway, whatever happens, July should be good for my languages.

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!

Here’s the evaluation of what I did in the second quarter (May to July 1st inclusive):
47,5 hours of Chinese
28,5 hours of French
13,5 hours of Swahili
57 hours of Modern Greek
15 hours of Esperanto (only counting studying, not using the language)
4 hours of wanderlust (Spanish & Russian)

With regards to progress towards my goals, see this detailed post on the language-learning forum.

According to plan, my focus languages should be Arabic and Italian now, though I’m loathe to leave Greek now that I can finally enjoy Harry Potter in Greek! It seems I’m quite close to my goal there. With Swahili I’m progressing much more slowly than expected though, and even my Chinese and French haven’t benefitted as much as I had hoped, so this year will remain challenging.

For the next quarter, I’m tempted to see how far I can get by tackling Arabic intensively for one month before going back to my routine. I like the idea of a 30-day challenge that might help me discover new things about myself.

I’m also thinking of trying to go completely vegetarian for 30 days, because some people have reported significant increases in concentration and productivity from that. I’m already eating mostly vegetarian as I don’t like to cook meat. I only eat meat at restaurants, when invited somewhere or occasionally lunchmeat on bread. I wonder if eliminating it completely would have any effect – anyway I don’t think I’d miss it. If you’ve gone vegetarian, please let me know what your experience was.

In weeks 18 and 19 of my quest, I did…

Chinese: 6 hours; learned 310 new HSK words in Anki and studied some Boya Chinese. By the way, this Anki deck contains only the words consisting of more than one character, because I already mastered all the characters last year.

French: 8 hours. I finished reading “Le rouge et le noir” and I ordered a bunch of other French classics, which I shall start reading now. I’m also trying to improve my accent by studying dialogs in Quebec French, which a Japanese university put online.

Greek: 10 hours; 9 new lessons, so now on Assimil lesson 73 and rapidly (well, not so rapidly) approaching the end. I’m also studying Greek almost daily with Rania still, that’s how the majority of my hours come in, and I’ve resurrected my Greek Anki deck after noticing that I just wasn’t remembering some words that Rania had told me.

Swahili: 2 1/2 hours; 4 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 46. Yes it’s far from the recommendation of one Assimil lesson a day, but these lessons are difficult, I have to study the vocabulary with Anki to retain anything at all, and right now my focus languages are still Greek and French.

Esperanto: 3 hours of translation work.

SPANISH: New addition! Since it is getting increasingly likely that I will be spending January and February 2011 in Argentina, I just decided that I should learn better Spanish. I may even make it my focus language for July-September, instead of Italian. Right now I don’t really have extra time, so I’ve resolved to just spend 10 minutes a day whenever possible studying an Anki deck with the 10 000 most common Spanish words. I’ve done two such sessions so far and found that I can understand 364 of the 400 most common Spanish words.

To give you an overview, in the first quarter of 2010 I did:
87 hours of Chinese
38 hours of French
19 hours of Swahili
16 hours of Modern Greek
2 hours of Italian

Actually I found that studying too many languages at the same time leaves little time for each language, which in turn means not just a longer time until fluency but also a greater rate of forgetting. So I am now declaring two “focus” languages for each quarter of the year and knowing that I have e. g. Arabic scheduled for later this year helps me ward off the urge to do something about Arabic right now (a technique I learned from this book). My focus languages are:
January to March: Chinese and French
April to June: French and Modern Greek
July to September: Italian and Arabic
October to December: Arabic and Swahili

This does not mean that I will do ONLY those two languages in the respective months – I’m also allowing some “maintenance” time, especially for Chinese, Greek and Swahili, because progress in Chinese is hard to come by and because I’m going through Assimil courses for Greek and Swahili, which require short study sessions over a long period of time. And of course I’m not going to forget English, Latin or Esperanto because I keep using or teaching it.

Actually I’m quite unhappy with scheduling French like this, because my passion for the language has died out and I have to force myself to work on it. However, I need to get better at it before my final university exam in French studies. I shall have to read a lot of French classics (subject of my oral exam), I have to improve my spoken French fluency (for the exam) and I probably have to improve my written French (for the thesis). It’s not fun though, and in the first quarter of 2010 this has lead to a rather excessive focus on Chinese. Well, things could be worse.

So, to log my progress for weeks 16 and 17:

Chinese: 5 hours; now at 2557 known HSK words in Anki and I did some random reading, one or two classes… I’m also constantly reviewing the deck of 3000 characters that I learned last year and I’m trying to acquire 5000 Chinese sentences as illustrations of the HSK words and to improve my feel for the language, much like the AJATT method suggests. My goal for Chinese is to become able to read “A Dictionary
of MaQiao” in the original Chinese and to hold a 45-minute spoken conversation in Chinese
without switching to another language by the end of the year.

French: 1 1/2 hours; still reading “Le rouge et le noir”. In the first quarter I managed to read one French classic a month, but this one is dragging on a lot. The story is not uninteresting, but my reading speed in French is very unsatisfying.

Greek: 10 hours and 7 new lessons, which means I’m now on Assimil lesson 64. My goal for Greek is to reach B2 level and gain the ability to read the book “Τα ταξίδια του Σώκρατη” by the end of the year. Apart from Assimil, I’ve also signed up for Myngle’s “Full Immersion” package, meaning I’ll have a half hour Greek lesson almost every day for one month. I’m really enjoying the lessons with Rania, she’s an awesome teacher.

Swahili: 2 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 42, and I’m starting to understand random Swahili sentences e. g. in the Youtube comments. If you’re familiar with Assimil, you’ll know that everything so far is passive, while the active phase will start with lesson 50. I’m looking forward to this! My goal for Swahili is just to complete the Assimil course by the end of the year and I’m trying not to use any other materials until I have done so; it’s an experiment in how far Assimil will really get you, especially for an exotic non-European language.

Esperanto: 5 1/2 hours Well, for Esperanto I’m not counting conversations, reading, watching movies or the like, but just the kind of activity that requires mental focus and that teaches me new words in Esperanto. Right now, this would be the translation of the subtitles for the old German movie “Die Feuerzangenbowle” (= the fire tong bowl). Every German has seen this movie (it sparked a tradition of getting drunk on fire tong bowl once a year while watching this) and since there’s no official English translation, just a bad fansub, I believe it’s safe to say that the movie is unknown outside of the German-speaking countries. I’m hoping to share this part of German culture with those who are interested in a cultural exchange by translating the subtitles to Esperanto and then making them available in the Verda Filmejo. I don’t really have a goal for Esperanto this year except to keep enjoying it.

As part of that, I have created the Lingvoforumo, where we can discuss languages and language-learning in Esperanto. It is actually meant to be like HTLAL minus the Esperanto-bashing and of course giving people the chance to practice a language other than English (boring!) while talking about this interesting subject.

Well, that was a long update, the next ones will probably be shorter. Do you think my goals are realistic? Do you have a plan to study languages yourself? If so, what languages are you studying and what is your goal with them?

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?