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?

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.

It’s called Fruchtsuppe (Fruit soup) or Kaltschale (Cold bowl) and it’s quite easy to make and easy to vary.

You need:
* 250g of fresh strawberries
* 1 nectarine or peach
* 1 apple
* some other fruit, I used blueberries today
* 100ml of refrigerated milk
* 100ml of refrigerated orange-mango juice (plain orange juice also works)
* 6-8 tablespoons of fruit sorbet (ice-cream also works)
* some ice

1. Clean and cut up all fruit.
2. Blend half the strawberries with an equal volume of nectarine/peach pieces and an equal volume of any other fruit except apples, plus all of the juice. Pour the blend into a pot.
3. Add the milk, fruit sorbet and ice to cool down the mix.
4. You may want to add some vanilla, sugar, lemon juice or cinnamon at this point; I didn’t today. If the taste of the soup base is too strong, add milk.
5. Add the rest of the cut-up strawberries, nectarine/peach and other fruit, especially the apple pieces, which will be a nice refreshing ingredient in the soup. If you have tasty blueberries, I find that those are good in the blend but not so good as pieces in the soup.
6. Serve it cold, as soon as all the ice / sorbet is molten. If you have more time, you can also refrigerate this. On a hot day, eating this soup at an almost-freezing temperature is heaven.

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.

Chinese: 16 hours!!! This was totally not my plan, considering Chinese is not a focus language. However, I’m not complaining, because I was enjoying myself. I’m using a different Anki deck now, a huge, well-designed one kindly provided by forum member irrationale. I suspended a lot of easy words of course and I’m prioritizing or adding words to the deck based on my Boya Chinese lessons and the Skype classes. In this time I’ve studied 1636 new words in that deck (and 232 leftover ones in my old HSK words deck, which I’m abandoning).

French: 6 hours. Not good, but I DID write one of my essays completely in French.

Greek: 11 hours, mostly reading. Only 2 new Assimil Greek lessons, so I’m now on Assimil lesson 79.

Swahili: 1 hour. Really awful. Only 1 new Assimil Swahili lesson, so I’m on Assimil lesson 52 now. I found that Assimil really isn’t very useful if you’re not using the recordings.

I’m now debating what to do after June, as normally I should be switching focus languages then. I might do Swahili intensively if Assimil can be done intensively. Arabic would also be an alternative, since for Arabic I’m not planning to use Assimil. I’m also interested in doing a Listening-Reading experiment with Russian, but only for two weeks or so.

Chinese: 3 hours; learned 212 new HSK words in Anki. On the bright side, I now have Anki on my boyfriend’s iPhone, so that reviewing while lounging on the couch or while commuting is an awesome prospect. I’m tempted to get an iPhone or iPod Touch for myself just because of this.

French: 3 hours.

Greek: 10 hours; 4 new lessons, so now on Assimil lesson 77. My Myngle flat rate for Greek lessons is over, so I will be able to focus more on other materials, but I’m afraid of my conversation skill deteriorating too quickly.

Swahili: 4 hours; 5 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 51. Active wave, yay!

Esperanto and Spanish: Almost nothing, since that trip to Argentina is not looking so likely now.

I grew up in a small town and I never thought that I could like a big city. The noise, the hectic, miles upon miles of concrete… I’m a fan of quiet and beauty and I have enough stress that I don’t need others radiating theirs onto me. Planning the future, I never saw myself winding up in a big city.

Well, then I met Chuck and Chuck, having lived in NYC, can’t be happy in a small town. We were still debating whether to move to Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Köln [Cologne] or another city when we got a job offer for the both of us in Berlin, and after a short visit the decision was made. The job turned out badly after 6 months, but I never regret having come here, I’d go as far as to say that it was the best decision of my life.

Berlin is an awesome city, as anyone who visited us can tell you – 75% of our guests spontaneously decide to try to move to Berlin. The climate is very pleasant, there are lots of things to do, lots of historic sites and lots of art and beauty. Berliners are an open people, sometimes said to be too frank, but welcoming people of all nationalities, all religions and all sexual orientations. The mayor of Berlin is openly homosexual and coined two famous phrases: “I’m gay… and that’s all right, too” (the latter now title of his autobiography) and “Berlin – poor but sexy”. He has a point. Berlin is comparatively poor as European metropoles go due to absorbing commie East Berlin, and Berliners are unwilling to be impressed by Armani suits or fancy cars… but the city is sexy. Not glamorous or posh, but unique, with its own character, and always innovating. It’s a mecca for IT start-ups and artists. Nowhere else is it so cheap to put something out there and see how it fares in a world city, among tourists, expats and locals.

Berlin rents are grotesque – it’s cheaper to live in the center city of Berlin than it is to live in the center city of Wroclaw, Poland; and in Munich or Düsseldorf you’ll easily pay several times as much. Yet Berlin is and always has been international in a way that you won’t easily find in Europe. After 1945, the city was divided between the USA, the UK, France and the USSR, with many soldiers and civilians from those countries taking up residence here. Nowadays however, you can literally find any nationality in Berlin (and we’re about to celebrate that fact with the Karneval der Kulturen). Within 10 minutes walking distance of my apartment I can literally reach about 10 different Indian restaurants, 10 Vietnamese restaurants, 9 Japanese restaurants, 5 Turkish ones, 4 Thai ones, a few Middle Eastern ones, and even a Cuban and a Singaporean restaurant! (Also German ones of course.) Also, getting foreign groceries or books in a foreign language is absolutely no problem.

This is one of the reasons we chose to live in the Scheunenviertel in Berlin-Mitte. There’s also the convenience of being able to reach almost everything on foot, including the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie and Alexanderplatz. Other things, such as Berlin’s English-language cinema or the main train station, are just a few light-rail stops away. I don’t need to take the light-rail to reach the river Spree, which I love to walk along:
(took the photo myself)

The climate is mostly pleasant, with little precipitation all year round, not too hot in summer (you may miss air conditioning one or two of the days) and generally not going far beyond the freezing point in winter.

How to move here

Now for the actual point of my post. Recently several people asked me for advice on how to find an apartment here, so I want to summarize this for everyone.

The best place to find apartments for rent (including a smaller selection of furnished apartments for holidays) is ImmobilienScout24.de. If you’re specifically looking for a short-term thing, you may also find something at Zwischenmiete.de, or look for uncomplicated deals on the black boards of Berlin’s three major universities. Those aren’t online, but you could try posting a message on
this forum dedicated to Berlin’s university students. All of these sites are in German.

If your German is not good enough yet, GermanPod101 published a bunch of lessons specifically about saying what you need in an apartment, reading apartment ads, talking to landlords and understanding rental contracts.

Some things in general to look out for:
- Every landlord will have you pay a “Kaution” (deposit), that’s normal and you’ll get the money back when you move out.
- A “Provision” (referral fee) however is something you won’t get back, and in Berlin it’s easy to avoid the apartments that charge this
- In your position, I would definitely look for the three letters EBK (= “Einbauküche”, built-in kitchen), because otherwise you only get a stove and a sink and you have to spend a lot of money on cabinets and fridge.

With the reunification a lot of East Germans fled to the West as soon as they could, so a lot of apartments and houses are vacant in the East, sometimes up to a third of a city. East Berlin didn’t suffer from this as much as East Germany did, but still one good thing to come out of it is that there’s never a housing shortage in Berlin. This development is probably also the cause of low rents here.

Both East and West Berlin had an excellent public transport system, so public transport in Berlin will get you everywhere at all hours of the day or night; driving is not recommended because of congestion in the center and the old streets, which are too narrow to support many lanes. Berlin is a very spread-out city though, due to the lack of skyscrapers, so distances can be large. If you think you’ll be going out a lot, I’d choose an apartment that’s within 2 kilometers from either Kurfürstendamm or Unter den Linden (the two focal points) – but obviously not on those streets, because they’re expensive.

In terms of boroughs, Neukölln is the only unsafe one, in any of the others you should be fine walking around alone at night; Berlin is generally a very safe place – except on May 1st (Labor Day in Europe) for the annual battle between leftists and police in Kreuzberg. The borough Kreuzberg is popular with anarchists, leftists, those of an alternative lifestyle and Turkish immigrants, but it has gentrified enough not to be unsafe. The borough Prenzlauer Berg is sometimes recommended because of its nightlife, but on the other hand it’s like a catwalk during the day and women may not be comfortable if they don’t dress like that; the other boroughs are more relaxed.

My boyfriend and I live in the Scheunenviertel in the borough “Mitte”, which is the oldest part of Berlin and the center city of former East Berlin but very close to West Berlin; there’s a line on the street marking where the Wall used to be about 300 metres from here. In this part every fifth house is an art gallery (I’m not exaggerating!). We’re very happy here.

Anyway, if you’re moving to Berlin, or even just visiting, I’m happy for you and I hope you’ll enjoy your stay!

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)

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