Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Speed-learning a Language

Here's a process for learning a language in one hour. It won't help much with languages far removed from your native language(s), but it will for similar ones; and there are good ideas in here generally.
Tags: linguistics
Subscribe

  • A Little Slice of Terramagne: YardMap

    Sadly the main program is dormant, but the YardMap concept is awesome, and many of its informative articles remain. YardMap was a citizen science…

  • Winterfest in July Bingo Card 7-1-21

    Here is my card for the Winterfest in July Bingo fest. It runs from July 1-30. Celebrate all the holidays and traditions of winter! ( See all my…

  • Goldenrod Gall Contents

    Apparently all kinds of things go on inside goldenrod galls, beyond the caterpillars who make them. Fascinating. I've seen the galls but haven't…

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    switch
    default userpic

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    When you submit the form an invisible reCAPTCHA check will be performed.
    You must follow the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of use.
    Help
  • 1 comment
padparadscha

padparadscha

March 26 2008, 00:22:00 UTC 13 years ago

Very interesting! I've been doing something like that rather informally since I started learning all those natural languages and constructing artificial ones--I've even got a similar set of sentences featuring a bird (The Language Bird) that give a flavor of the language. I can usually get the main rules of a conlang down on one piece of notebook paper; it's adding in all the extra little weirdnesses, as well as the vocabulary, that's hard.

The Teach Yourself series seems to follow this principle, which I've heard complaints about, but which also is my favorite way to study. Give me the core rules, and as I learn new vocabulary I will be understandable. MY hangup is, like he says, with the writing system. I was doing all right with Japanese until we started doing the logographic alphabet, and then things fell apart. (I really LIKE the idea that a writing system would have lexically significant logograms PLUS a syllabary for the syntactic information--like those old kids' writing programs where you could insert pictures in the place of nouns, verbs, or adjectives--but it's DAMN HARD to master.)