The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. So I thought I would post it for all to view for the fun of it….Keep a look out for the new language being announced at midnight of New Years Day, US mountain time.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 12 years to get that many views.
Filed under Progress
Over the last few months I’ve had a new poll going about the languages I was going to learn. As the day has gotten closer, more and more languages have fallen off the list. So I thought you might find it interesting to go through the previous polls and see how the voting ended up:
Filed under Progress
Ups and downs of Language learning
Crazy, crazy, busy week. I’ve been doing projects at work and almost all my time has been devoted to them. I love the projects, but it has meant a lot of things have been put to lower levels, including this blog. I’ve missed it a lot. There is so much good that comes out of this blog. I truly do hope that I can help others learn languages. I don’t try to give false expectations on what it does and doesn’t take as a language learner, but I hope to give small advice and encouragement.
All that said, this blog helps me more than I think I help others. It helps me organize my thoughts, set a game plan and be accountable for what I say I am going to do. I’m not always successful, but I hope this blog helps keep me going even when things get the hardest.
Since it has been almost a week since I have been able to be on to write, I thought I would give a little summary of the ups and downs of my week. Despite not being able to write, I have had many an opportunity to feel good and bad. So here they are.
Despite my business, I have kept a solid learning routine. Continue reading
Filed under How to learn, Progress
Normally, I would be announcing which language fell off my list languages in this post. Typically I not only announce which language came off, but why it was even on my list of languages to learn in the first place. Over the last few months, the reasons became more and more personal, until there was only two left: ASL and Samoan.
This post, since it is the last post of these before I announce the final language, I decided to dedicate to just the why’s. I am going to write about why these two languages are the most personal to me to learn and have a strong command of. Both are very important to me, as you will see, and choosing between the two was really difficult.
English: “American Sign Language” in SignWriting. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I, like many toddlers who watched sesame street, Continue reading
Filed under Progress
Image from Wikimedia.org
Lately, I’ve had to make some decisions. Not really complicated ones, but decisions were necessary none the less. These decision would have an impact on this blog so I thought I would share them with you now.
This is about the question I posed a few days ago about bringing Esperanto back. Continue reading
Filed under Progress
Esperanto Demonstration (Photo credit: Lennon Ying-Dah Wong)
I have a confession to make. I haven’t been completely honest with everyone. It wasn’t an out right lie, more like an omission. It’s not something I omitted with the intention to mislead. In fact, it was never supposed to be apart of the blog. Then the blog evolved into more than I thought it ever would be and this omission has stuck out, for me at least, like a sore thumb. I could have continued on and non would be the wiser, but I just don’t work that way. So I am opening up and being honest. What is this huge omission? Spanish is not the first language I have tried to learn since learning Thai, Esperanto is.
I found Esperanto on the internet Continue reading
Filed under Progress
Salt Lake City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have learned 2 languages, not counting English, in 2 very different situations. I learned Thai as a 19-20 year old missionary for my church in Thailand. I HAD to learn and my ability to be a missionary would have been very limited without being able to speak Thai.
On the other hand, I chose Spanish because it’s something I have always wanted to learn. I don’t NEED to know it. In fact, it’s hard for my to find a normal opportunity to converse with someone in Spanish even though I live in a semi-Spanish speaking country. I am also learning it as a full-time working father of 4 kids. To say that the two experiences are not the same would be the understatement of the year.
The biggest difference for me has been how I handle finding a native speaker Continue reading
Filed under Progress
English: Flag of Portuguese language of Portugal-Brazil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s the end of the month and time to get rid of another language. Each language I drop gets harder and harder to remove, but it’s not like I can effectively learn 8 or 9 languages at once! It’s not like I am saying goodbye forever, I will be coming back to these languages eventually. It’s still hard to say that this language or that didn’t make it to the end. Okay, no more stalling:
Portuguese! Yeah I know I have just gotten rid of all the romance languages now. Continue reading
Filed under Progress
It’s been another month and therefore its time to remove two more languages from my list. The shorter the list, the harder it gets to remove more languages, but remove them I must. I can’t learn all the languages I want to learn all at once. To do that would be a large waste of time. I’ll just have to keep them on my list until another day.
Last month, French and German seemed to have very little in common. This month, the languages have even less. The only thing the same about them is that respective languages are found in only one country and those two countries are in the same hemisphere. I know, that means very little as far as how common they are. The two languages that didn’t make it this month are Italian and Japanese.
I have mentioned before, I want to learn all 4 romantic languages. I am learning Spanish right now, so that’s one check for that. I grew up in a musical family and was very active in music through out my teenage life. I received the Louise Armstrong Jazz award for outstanding Jazz musician my senior year of High school. Italian is the language of Music, literally. If you pull out sheet music, the directions on if one should play loud/soft/fast/slow all are in Italian. Plus who wouldn’t want to learn the native tongue of my favorite Video game character, Mario.
Japanese, oddly enough, was first introduced to me in Thailand. Several instances of people, who had studied it or were half Japanese themselves, showed me interesting things about the languages. For example, the writing system of Japan didn’t exist until the country began to trade with China(many many many years ago). This forced them to learn their writing system, which eventual was adapted to Japanese. Before that, they had no writing system. Sounds like the Japanese, they create and perfect other people’s inventions to suit their purposes. I was also told it has a word order, unlike any I have tried so far.
Similar to last month. Those reasons are enough to entice me to put them on my wish lists of languages, but not strong enough to beat out the other languages as top contenders. For me to choose the language, it needs to have the extra little “uhmph” that makes me want to learn it and learn it now. These just don’t have that “uhmph” or at least not enough of it.
So now we are down to 4 languages left. I have a poll up on the right about which of these remaining languages do you want to learn. I would really love to know as well. Please leave a comment here and tell me which of these last remaining languages you want to learn and why. Thanks for sharing.
Filed under Progress
I am going to be away camping with my family for a couple of days, but before I left, I was able to make a video. Sorry I ran out of time to make the CC work, but I will try to fix that as soon as possible. So sit back and relax and enjoy the show (don’t forget to vote on the language you would like me to learn the least ->):
Filed under Progress, spanish, Spanish Friday, Thai, Thai Monday
