Making Good use of Anki and Memrise !!

This is just a quick update about the fact that recently I just completed my very first course over at Memrise;P  It's in Finnish and goes by the name of Survival Finnish, a relatively short course to get one's feet wet in the language. I had used the facility on a trial basis about 6-7 months ago and I amassed some 450,000 points ( Memmoth Level) before it started becoming a bit boring plus I had to give the entire thing up 'cos I wasn't using a Smartphone rather just my Nexus and it gets hectic when there is not internet connection to use, I chose to buy only a WiFi enables Nexus rather than a more mainstream tablet so as to reduce the distractions which might tempt me.  Good decision !! And I was using a much older phone at the time, whose battery life was just soo awesome. So, it felt as if I am gonna drain the tablet too soon. That would have been a nightmare 'cos I rely so heavily on tablets for learning new things, there is an unbelievable amount of free and liberal, not to mention multilingual content on the internet.

But when I had a smartphone ( Xiaomi Note) I thought about using the Memrise and Anki combination again. Though don't go by the number of points over there, I never completed a single course last time.

I am happy to note that I am making good progress in a couple of languages using these tools and with all the podcasts in the background, I am always involved with one language or the other.

But Finnish, really?

Yes, Finnish !! I am not really sure whether it would come as a surprise to you, maybe it does but I think it would be crazy not to learn an agglutinative language, like - Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish or Swahili etc 'cos the entire system is quite different my "native" Indo-European background. Of course, it takes a while to focus more upon the endings rather than prepositions to make sense of many things but it's not something that can't be done.

Besides, I am madly, deeply and hopelessly in love with the North, so Finnish only takes it to a whole different level !!

Btw I have added another language to my list of Germanic languages - Dutch or to be more specific Nederlands. I figured, well it has harsh sounds, closer to German, awesome music and an interesting history - why not? So, I think I pretty much have covered all the major Germanic languages over the years. Of course, still fluent in none but it does feel quite awesome to be able to makes sense of what I hear and read all over the internet. It's an awesome feeling, I wonder if this is what junkies feel like. Well, if yes, then it's my favourite guilty pleasure;P

I really need to change the look of this blog.


Whenever I look at this blog, I feel the very real need to ramp it up, 'cos these basic theme are just not very appealing, right? I would hate to get any "professionals" involved, I love to tinker with things myself, the immense pleasure of finding things out, the sheer joy of discovering on your own what works and what doesn't; I just love that feeling. So, I am experimenting with the HTML5/CSS/JS on my own and I have started to make reasonable sense of it all though I am sure, that to improve the Look and the Feel of the blog I still have a long way to go. But I want to do it on my own, you know, 'cos it's a win-win situation and I am under no pressure or obligation to do it as per a particular way, I am free to experiment and learn loads of things while doing it. Works all right for me=)

A confession !!

I haven't had the time seriously invest in my other blog nutro-marka but I promise that as soon as I get some free time I will start building that one up as well. At the moment, that's my best chance of actually activating these languages in a way that I so thoroughly enjoy - Creative Writing !!

Regarding a banner for this blog, I do have one in mind. But I want to sketch it myself and in the process learn sketching as well. The image in my mind is so deeply inspired by the title of the blog, I think it's going to fit in quite well. Will take a lot of time though, I have nothing but time.

How long does it take to Really get Fluent in a language !!

The one important question which often scares people away from learning a different language is How long before they can be an adult in the target language. 

Sorry to break it down to you people, it won't happen in a day or two. No there are no exceptions, not even Daniel Tammet, well granted that if you have developed your memory well beyond the usual capacity [ Synesthesis], you might be able to learn a couple thousand words in a day, but doing the same with a language would be a different game altogether.

It's a proven fact that children use a higher percentage of their brain that adults and that is the reason why most people believe that the best age to learn a language is during one's childhood. Well, It's not entirely true! 

Learning a language is much more than just learning a thousand frequent words or even about memorising all the peculiarities of the language's grammar. It's a much more organic process, one needs to be a child again and who doesn't want to live one's childhood again? Think about it for minute, how quickly children pick up new words though we must remember the fact that, on an average, a child reaches full fluency in a language by the age of 9-10 years and after that it's question of slang and more vocabulary. But the adult human brain is much more adept at seeking out patterns and it is my firm belief that everything we do - arts, music, matte, movies anything; it's all a game of patterns. We just love it, humans have depended upon this supreme ability to survive hundreds of thousands of years. The human mind is the Greatest Pattern Recognition machine, which can ever be conceived, this is the crown jewel of evolution!!

Though we don't really know how to use it for constructive purposes and more often than not we end up using it destructively or upon trivial matters! But, those rare times that we do choose to use it properly, it's pretty amazing.

Keeping such a simple thing in mind is of immense help as human nature is essentially the same, be it from a Chinese perspective or from an African perspective. Just that the way we choose to express it differs. Another thing, as Benny Lewis so unfailingly points out is that if one aspect of the language is difficult then the other aspect is bound to be simple.

Take Chinese for an example, the language has inspired countless idioms in different languages of the world which deal with the sheer incomprehensibility of a particular subject. But you can take a look for yourself and I am quite sure that you would be so utterly surprised that once you gloss over the Chinese pictograms and the tones, the basic structure of the language is one of the simplest that you can ever imagine.

When we talk about the grammar of the Chinese language (or any other  language for that matter), we don't consider the phonological aspects ( tones) or the writing systems but rather we consider questions like :-

How do the words of different kind fit together to form new words?

How do words group together to form sentences? 

And of course, there are many aspects of Linguistics which deal with the Semantics, the Contextual factors as well, to name just a couple. But the basic pattern of words is quite simple as compared to other languages. Ah, this reminds me to put up a post about different language families as well!

The Chinese language (languages, rather ) contains no cases, as in "he", "his" or "him" and the fun part is that once you understand a certain common vocabulary the new words would automatically start making sense. Think about the myriads of foreign words in English which don't make sense on their own, which is only natural given that by default a language creates new words from within it's existing body of words which in Linguistics is called Lexicon. But due to various arbitrary factors like Religion, Economics, Social Status etc a language takes on many many new words which are different from it's own lexicon. Apart from dead languages, I know of only one other language which does opts for intrinsic words rather than extrinsic words, which is Modern Icelandic;P

Now, don't let this lead you to a senseless debate concerning the purity of a language. It's a myth, no language is pure or isolated. It's always a big family of languages which share a certain feature and overtime all languages change, c'est la vie. Languages are alive and have a life of their own, they die, they live, they change over time; just like us.

So, back to the main topic of the post, the important point being that if you wish to learn a language be a child again, be imaginative, less inhibited, freer than you have been in a long loong time, full of energy and enthusiasm. I suggest that you figure out your priority before you dive in, ask yourself questions like

Do I wish to be able to speak the language, write it ?

Or would I be happy if I just understand my favourite songs in the language ?

Do I need to be really competitive in the language and use it daily ?

Or do I just need it to be able to navigate around the Tourist labyrinth on my trips abroad ?

Make sure that you aim right and make realistic targets and then use various Getting Things Done (GTD) techniques to get yourself there.

Btw if you do decide to learn a language, don't do it half heartedly. It's gonna change your life for the better, I guarantee, but if you are gonna just drift off mid way then you would only end up telling your "I too tried to learn..." story to someone else. You are better, you can do better than that !!

If you want to be better, be!! There is no secret to it, like everything else, your Mind is a Muscle and learning a language for the mind is what Gym is for your body. You don't think about lifting up 100 kg on the very first day, do you? Well, be smart and set achievable targets.

Above all, language learning is not a chore and the more you explore languages, the better you will get in picking up patterns and understand things better. There are tons of resources on the net for each and every language on the planet ( okay, for most ) so, stop being lazy!

The only real answer of How long does it take for you to learn a language, it depends completely on you, your passion and dedication. You can be fluent in 3 months or take a lifetime to learn a language. 

Working Smarter, not (only) Harder !

We get one life, it's enough if we do it right !
        Make every second count !!

Today's post is along these lines, working smarter and making every second count.

How can this be applied while learning a language ?

Suppose, you are learning a foreign language which is as exotic as it gets. The culture is wildly different, the sounds of the language is enough to jolt you out of your comfy English speaking and Dialect-Rich world and the the written form of the language is almost impenetrable ! B
                     
                But you find it to be inexplicably beautiful and it's "difficulty", only makes you feel all the more determined to understand it. You know, "There is magic in fighting battles, beyond endurance", or something like that;P

It doesn't matter whether you put in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian or Japanese and face an apparently insurmountable challenge of trying to understand that language. Work Smarter, Not Only Harder. Use the infinite resources you can access with just a Touch.

I have talked about leaning the other aspects of the language in the previous posts, so on this post I would like to focus more upon the Reading and Writing skills in a languages with the focus being the ways in which an Autodidactic learner can approach these two hurdles.

Well, not all languages have a writing system which is coherent with the way a word is pronounced i.e. the script might not be based on representing the Sound of the Language, rather it can also be based on the Idea of the word. The most famous example being Chinese script in which the way a word is pronounced can't be deduced from the script and as China has been the cultural powerhouse for many thousands of years in the Far East, the same feature has been assimilated by the scripts of neighbouring countries as well.

Yes, of course, there are Romanisations of various systems, the way French romanised the Vietnamese language and have rendered a language tougher than Chinese (!) into a form which seems somewhat more approachable from a learners point of view. Another reason for the romanisations of various languages has been the fact that the characters are easier to taught and thus quite an efficient way to tackle illiteracy.

But then again, there are other languages which are highly unlikely to make an official transition to the Roman script due to various reasons and, I believe, that it's not our job to judge anyone upon the difficulty of the writing script. I mean, think about it ! These systems developed over a course of thousands of years and are deeply a part of the cultural identity of the people. So, the first and foremost thing that a language learned is supposed to do is to embrace it, embrace the differences of the language and the culture.

Btw, I came across an acronym by the legendary Hyperpolyglot Kato Lomb, who would refer to the Average Language Learner as A.L.L , always ! It captured her beliefs that anyone can learn any language if one really applies oneself to it.

So, for A.L.L, the technology comes to the rescue. Let's say you are learning Persian and you want to be able to read the language in a few hours.

It's definitely possible to learn the writing system for most languages in a few hours. How ?

By using the Google keyboard or any other Native application, like Baidu for Chinese etc, for the writing system. It's that easy 'cos Human Mind works pretty much the same everywhere and it would be quite a torment to write out all the characters the way we do while actually writing using our hands. You know, each alphabet in the Arabic script has a different form depending upon where it occurs in the word!

So, instead of learning the numerous forms of each alphabet, just download the Keyboard and start typing the words which you study in some transliteration system using the Romanised script. And as you get proficient in typing out these words and figure out where each alphabet is located you can actually move on to check the spellings and how each word looks like in real life. And experience that exhilarating feeling of actually doing something each time you type in.

Same is true for the Asian languages like Japanese and Chinese et cetera. Though there might be no sound correlation with the word, which is especially true of the Chinese characters in all the Asian languages  apart from their own native forms which suit their own languages better. So, even if there is no such correlation, you can still learn to recognise them from the suggestions offered by the keyboard and still get to improve your vocabulary and know-how of the language.


 I actually recommend that you try out writing your language as soon as possible.

You know, Make Every Second Count=)

Listening to Random Material

The listening skills are one of the two most important skills that I focus upon when I get started with a language, the other being the Reading skills. I personally, don't really care much about the content of podcasts that I listen to, well at least not now anyway; unless the subject of the podcast is very specific as in Philosophy, Religion or some other specialised subject in case of Video lectures and podcasts from various Universities.

I used vto obsess about being able to understand every word that was being said, but as time went by and I became more Language aware I started to notice that apart from the specialised vocabulary oriented podcasts, I can get myself used to the most frequent words by just paying attention to what was being said, if I don't understand the meaning then I just focus upon the sound of the word and just keep a slight note in my mind regarding the sound I would like to understand.

Another thing that I noticed is that it helps a lot if we make the language an integral part of our life, for example if we listen to the a certain genre of music then we can easily look up artists within the same genre who sing in our target language. The important thing being not letting the process become a chore or a timed activity, if you are learning the language on your own that is. But even if you are learning a language in a course or something, even then a little effort to make the language a part of your lifestyle would go a long way in your journey as a language learner.

Besides, music the other thing that I find extremely intriguing and motivating is Comedy;P. 

I mean, why not ? We are such social and fun loving beings that it's all hard-wired into us, plus there are many comedy oriented podcasts available on any language all over the internet, on things like  iTunes or if you are so inclined you can directly visit the website of a radio show or some website which offers entertaining podcasts. As far as comedy is concerned, you know, the urge to understand what is being said is all the more fuelled by our basic human need to be a part of the community and our need to be a part of enjoyment. Say, when someone cracks a joke and everyone is laughing, you feel all the more motivated to be able to be a part of that joke, makes you listen everything more intently and pay more attention trying to follow that line of thought that leads to the punch line.

I recommend that you really try it out listening to Comedy podcasts with your target language;P

And if you are concerned about the few words which you might not understand at that moment, don't worry, gloss over and I promise when you would listen to the same thing after a certain time it would become all the more fun when you realize that you completely missed this or that, the last time. The trick to learning a language quickly is to be as humane as possible in the process.

I think that after a certain phrasebook, storybooks we can directly move on to the real world content. Of course, initially it would feel awkward or even frustrating but with time you will make visible progress, which is another factor which motivates us even more. And after a couple of months of our basic phrases, music and comedy podcasts we can move on to acquire the vocabulary of a particular field that intrigues us and continue to learn the language, but this time in a way that focuses more on the content that the grammar or peripheral consideration. In short, I find the transition to the real world content  to be the Most Vital aspect of learning a language while at the same time we get to have that feel-good factor due to our constant noticeable progress.

Stop being Lazy !

Ah, yeah, this is a confession that lately I haven't been writing posts on this blog as frequently as I should because whenever I write on the blog it most accurately reflects whether I have studied something useful that day or not.

CHINESE

At the moment, I am learning Chinese via Anki set named Spoonfed Chinese and Believe me, this set is just so amazing;P

You practically get to learn the most practical, everyday vocabulary which is essentially the key to language learning.

And I constantly keep listening to all the wonderful podcasts I came across on iTunes, this is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to being in touch with the language or even getting used to the a language is being used in everyday life, amongst friends mostly but sometimes podcasters invite famous personalities so this way we get to consider that various social aspects of the language as well.

JAPANESE

Man, I should really be studying Japanese more often, though I have podcasts in Japanese too but for some reason they don't spark my interest as much as I would like. I love the language and especially the culture, mind you, but I think I am gonna experiment with the content that apple as to me, things like Goban and Zen Buddhism.

And of course, Anime. I remember watching various Japanese anime during my childhood, shows like - Inu Yasha, Pokemon, Captain Tsubasa, Hungry Heart, Ghost Detective, Dragon Ball Z and a couple more. So, as I initially did with the European languages, which was, starting out with content that I was already quite familiar with, like Harry Potter books, Disney and other such animated movies, and then slowly move deeper into the culture of the country.

So, I am gonna watch these things, Yeah like a kid again, and then move in to new content like Detective Conan, Zen, Goban and then to the Real things like Japanese history and literature.

There is is gap between the Eastern world and the Western, which is of course by no means the same as it was a couple of centuries ago; but still getting myself used to the characters takes a while. I am using Anki again for this as well.

Btw I have added Dutch to the list of my to do languages;P

Wondering why ?

At this point, well I don't really know nor do I really care. It's quite similar to German and I just live the "harsh" sound of the language plus Dutch is another Germanic language and I just love anything that's Up North, you know. Germanic languages are my thing;P

And due to the similarity within these languages, it should take long for me to get used to the different quirks and similarities that Dutch offers.

HEBREW

Apart from listening to the podcasts in Hebrew, I have improved quite a lot with the Hebrew character but it has these different character for the same sound, which gets quite confusing at times. But hey, being able yo read from right to left is something quite cool, no !!

PERSIAN

Ah, haven't made any real progress in the language though I am getting used to the beautiful script of the language. Of course, I don't write it down just that, I use technology and focus upon the Google Keyboards to figure out various characters and what form they are supposed to take in different positions in a word.

Farsi is another Indo-European language, being somewhat tougher than Dutch wrt familiarity that it offers but the fact that j come from Hindi background with a huge appreciation for the Urdu words, many words are already quite familiar to me. So, once I get past the script hurdle, the language wouldn't really present anymore speeding brakes.

Then, I can of course enjoy the brilliant poetry of the Farsi language in the original.

POLISH

Podcasts only at the moment but I am making out quite a lot of sense in what is being said in the podcasts and I feel that it is only improving with time as the Polish language is my second Slavic language, the other being Russian so I am somewhat familiar with the various forms a word takes as per the context and function within the sentence.

TURKISH

Well, to be honest I haven't made any progress in Turkish what so ever, unless you would count the brief skimming I did on the YouTube for popular Turkish sings. But apart from that, I haven't made any real progress in the language.

Maybe, I will take Turkish up after my vacations get over, which essentially means that it would be
about a couple of months more when I really get into Turkish.

Actually, the language has a perfectly phonetic script, such a blessing it is you know, but the grammar is completely alien to me and anything that comes close to the nature of Turkish grammar is Esperanto;P

Who knew that investing such small time should pay off this much. Esperanto rocks !!

I will update in my progress more frequently now, I just need the peer pressure a lot if I am to make any meaningful progress in my languages.

Stay Tuned=)

Back to the Future;)

Hey, we are finally moving towards the present and you will see for yourself how much easier it becomes with each successive language that you can't  help but move on to the more "difficult" ones.

Now after the "usual" ones like French, German, Esperanto and Russian; I just wanted to explore another language which was unique in ways that these languages are not i.e. these have changed with time whereas apart from a select few languages which are "alive" and the ones which are "dead", all languages change with time. So, I began to look around and I previously had Sanskrit at school so that was out of option since it was still a fresh nightmare from the school life. Then, I just came across Icelandic, remember I had a World map in my room. I noticed this tiny little Island in the middle of the Atlantic, I looked things up and the language sounded pretty cool to me, not to mention the breathtaking beauty of Iceland ! Plus, with this language there is a certain "being different" factor, you see only about 350,000 people speak the language and for such a small native speaking population, the literature  that it produced in the middle-ages is wonderfully different and almost feels almost nostalgic of the way things were in the past. Not to mention that we are talking about the Viking past;P

Of course, there are very few resources which are to be found for the language but if you look them up in a smarter way, you will find literally tons of resources. You can still read the Sagas, which were written a thousand years back, that's how little the language has changed with time. You gotta respect the persistence of Icelanders, with which they just keep their language "pure" or in other words, the clear preference for the language is to coin new words from within the traditional vocabulary as opposed to the borrowed terms. Well, I respect this persistence.

Then again, being a modern and highly developed economy there are just so so many podcasts in the language that you can listen and there is this free course on the net by the name Íslenska fyrir alla, which is really fun to go through, once you get going.

After all, who isn't fascinated by the Nordic Gods; Thor, Odin, Freya or Loki etc !!

I kept studying it on and off, though never regularly but I found that whenever I returned back to the language most of the words came right back as well. So, this eased my anxiety about "losing" the language. I think, one can only lose the active aspects of the language, not the passive ones. This was the beginning of my general interest and fascination with the North and the Nordic.

At the beginning of the 4th semester, say about last August. I decided to explore the "mainstream" Nordic languages and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it's a common saying that you get 3 languages instead of just 1. Though that is certainly true, there are subtle differences between Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Initially, I went on with the Swedish language as it makes it's presence felt even in Wikipedia, has more than million pages over there. This is just an indication of the presence of a language on the internet and I find that this correlates with the number of people who speak the language a the mother tongue. Of all the Scandinavian countries, Sweden has the highest number of native speakers. 

But this time, I wanted to study the language a bit differently, to test a new technique which had been forming itself at the back of my mind. I went right on with the a book and having a background in German and Icelandic, most of the words were just so similar that I was happy I was able to understand about 80 percent of what I opted to read. Needless to say that there is no dearth of resources for the language on the Internet, think about it, this is after all, the language of the Nobel Prize;)

I can honestly, tell you that the entire process was becoming easier and was losing much of the initial "difficulty" that had inspired me to take this on in the first place. Plus, from My studies [ I read far wide, sometimes deep;P ], I was gravitating towards the beauty of the Dialectic and was learning to respect and understand Differences in a ways which had never occurred to me before. Things like, perhaps differences exist only so we may gain more of an individuality, both at the individual as well as at a larger community level. Why not look at these differences differently and appreciate them more, but instead of obsessing on them why not focus on the similarities. How this realization came about in practice is the reason why I decided to learn Norwegian, Polish and Spanish as well.

You know, after a while the entire process becomes automated, more efficient and more natural for that reason. The main and the biggest hurdle is just deciding to get started, once you do, it's a snowball. It builds on itself, gets bigger and bigger with time and moves faster and faster. I did the same thing the last three languages that I did with Swedish, I went right on to a book, read it through and then just started to make the language a part of my life through podcast, through music, through movies, blogs anything at all.

Then I time came that I yearned for a challenge , being perfectly aware at the same time that I am not really "fluent" in any of these, but well, it depends mostly on need. None of the languages that I did was out of a dire necessity to talk, but rather just to explore and widen my horizon. I did ! And when the time comes, probably towards the beginning of next year, I will focus exclusively upon a select few of these languages which suit my needs and my interests best at the time and just speak them through, be really fluent in them. Of course, it's gonna be difficult, No one said it's gonna be easy; that's how it's supposed to be. All Good Things come about with Hard Work. Period.

Now, in the next post I am gonna talk more about the way I kept motivating myself, for it did get monotonous at times and there were moments in which I just felt like shelving the whole thing up for a while and just doing something else. I always found myself, immersed in these languages in one way or another, these have become an intrinsic part of my life, of my Weltanschauung, of how I express myself, even to myself. It's a change, an irreversible change, like evolution. You should do it, I promise you won't regret it, ever !!

The Language Odyssey. Act 3

So, we left off at French and Esperanto.

Actually, I was quite worried at the fact that would trying to learn many languages at the same time end up in cancelling each other,  I was anxious that if I don't study one language for a certain time would it be completely wiped off  from my memory and, to put it simply, would I need to put in all that much effort again just to reactivate it again. Turns out, that this is not really the case.

You can give it a try, if you have the time and the desire that is, to study multiple languages at once and I am sure that you would be surprised by the immense flexibility of your mind to recall and remember things which have been encoded well. We have awesome Visual memories so use this fact to that utmost, you will almost always recognize a word which you have read sometime before. Guaranteed !

However, if you plan to be fluent in 3 months in all of them, well that requires a bit more dedication for you would actually need to get your ears comfortable with the a different language coming out from your mouth. I don't think that while we are learning to speak, it's more about what others think about our accent or our pronunciation but rather it's about what we think about our accent, the way we hear ourselves speaking. It's more about being self conscious, which is at the same time a good feedback mechanism for encouragement or discouragement; depending on your attitude.

It takes a while to make the transition from being a Judgemental Mindset to a Learner/ Growth Mindset, but don't freak out. It's not something that you don't know, you have been to that place and just that you started exploring a bit and forgot how to get back. It was during your childhood;P

Do you ever hear a child saying sorry for pronouncing things wrong, it's not as if they are judged any less; just that children don't really take themselves that seriously, they enjoy what they do. This is essential for the Growth Oriented Mindset.

Now, French offered a unique opportunity. It needed only a little bit of effort learning how to make sense of the written word for the English language ( or German or Russian or even Esperanto ) borrow heavily and liberally form the French language. Which makes quite sense as most of the early enlightenment and the most awesome literature of the early modern period were from the French language. But English has a special relationship with the language as after the Norman Invasion there was a huge influx of French words and French ways in the language and the lifestyle of people. According to estimates, about 60% of our newspaper vocabulary is from French ! How about that when learning a language;)

You know, Alexander Dumas is reputed to have exclaimed "But English is all French; badly pronounced" !! So, that's that. If you want to explore an utterly influential cultural powerhouse and language in the modern times, French is a must.

And then of course, Esperanto words resemble the French ones to a great extent though the way we can combine words together is more liberal. If you plan to learn multiple languages you might want to begin with Esperanto. You know, plant the seeds of Curiosity and Fascination. I guarantee that once you have experienced the ability to make new words and to be able to express yourself in a different language, you will get really hooked. Being able to make new words, is Magical;P

Another thing that I should probably mention is that, while I was running the background check I focused on the language( rather countries ) which have won the most number of Nobel prizes or the Fields medal. Logic being that this would represent the countries which have a vibrant scientific and literati communities. Good books in Maths, Physics, Computers meant that I would already have a context to learn these languages and to start using the "Available in other languages" option on websites.

Of course, my thinking was inaccurate, for there are few Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals which went to China, but China can still boast of a vibrant community in science and literature. Though the tones and the pictograms make the language quite impenetrable and even scary to begin with whereas the structure of the language is as if it follows the aesthetic principle of minimalism. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" fits perfectly well to the Chinese language.

And as far as the literature is concerned, needless to say that if Kafka wrote "Siddhartha" in Urdu, Kazakh, Zulu or Swahili, the story would not have gone on to achieve as much fame as it actually did. Just for the simple reason that it was written in the German language and it involves so many other factors like being in a literature valuing, educated society as opposed to societies which value oral tradition more. So, my analysis was, in retrospect, superficial but I would take the same path again if it's all a great circle. You listening, Nietzsche;P

Confidence and Attitude matter a good deal more than "Genius" and "Talent", though being Disciplined only helps as well. I think that this is pretty much true for everything that we do, more on this thought-thread in later posts.

On top of all this I had this never ending streams of boring exams being thrown at me. End-sems, Mid-sems, good God ! To be honest, it pretty much did the 2nd year syllabus in Algorithms and all even before the First year began but once it did. These very things became revolting, because I was being "told" to study a certain way, do certain question for the "Exams" !!

Now, that I am a bit free and this year is like a breath of fresh air, I am gonna take them up again, do them properly this time and of course get rid of the re-examinations backlog. And I would do it all the same way again, take that again, Nietzsche;P

Then after these slow and dorky progress in Russian, I switched over to German and Esperanto while exploring French on the side and for some reason German just felt like something Natural. And by now you should really have realized that it wasn't really natural for me per se, rather it was like the winds were taking me towards the Island all along)

I definitely stuck with these languages for about 6 months or so, but you know there comes a time when your progress is not as visible as it was initially, which is only natural as I only focused upon the functional knowledge and not upon a specialized vocabulary, though I did (still do !) keep exploring the various Mathematics, Physics or Programming oriented texts.

And it is one of the greatest gifts of my life that I live in this age, in this time. Yes, there is a lot more artificiality, pollution, all too many of us, bad history now but I truly believe that this is the age of Learners. Awesome universities like MIT, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford  have released their course content for every and any one to see.  The age of podcasting, videocasting, movies, cartoons and so on and so forth, are readily available to me. I can reap the fruits of the Free Software Culture, provided that I am willing to explore enough and willing to put in some extra work to figure things out.  You know, the future is gonna look back at this time with wonder !!

What's all the more fun about it, you can multiply all this fun, all these materials with the number of languages that you speak.

Want free audiobooks, look up sites like Librivox !

Want free ebooks, look up sites like Gutenberg !

Want free education, the internet is there for you to search for video lectures, ppt's and pdf's, all of which have been uploaded by people for the community and for free ! That's Good Will at it's best.

Want to get used to the language the way it is used in real life; for the written word and the spoken words are two different things, trust me on this one;P
                   
                      You can look up various movies, tv series, boring news (!), awesome documentaries;), cartoons and above all the most interesting are the podcasts which people and various radio-stations have come up with.

It's an Awesome world, provided we learn to take care of it and take responsibility for what we do !

In the next post I am gonna talk about how Swedish and other languages came about.

Auf Wiederschreiben Och Vi ses snart;P

The Language Odyssey. Act 2

This is the continuation of the last post)

So, I would have gone into programming and stuffy but then again, as I mentioned before, the way they teach it rather command us to do. It makes even the things that I love, utterly repelled. The second semester in, I went to my another bhaiya (ah, yes ! we have big families over here;P ) and I told him about the boring University life etc. I so vividly remember the face-palm he did, stressing again that this university is a good for me and he went on to, you know, gently move me back to the stay-at-the-university zone.

I realized that this is not gonna work this way, I would be driven crazy. I had to find something else !!

As my second semester in the University was about to begin, way back in early 2013, I thought things over and somehow gravitated towards languages. This seemed long enough and tough enough so as to keep me busy and yet not disappoint me. Though I had Sanskrit at school and, believe me, it was an utter waste of my time. Who uses that language these days, so I used to think ?

I did a lot of research on how to learn a language and two of the most prominent influences on me have been by Steve Kaufman and Benny Lewis. Both are awesome language learners and the fact that they encourage others to get over the language barrier and are such great motivators, makes me all the more thankful to them;P

Though their approaches differ quite a lot and there might be a slight friction between the two, I learn a lot from both of them. I like differences and this way I can experiment a lot and come up with something which is somewhere in the middle and helps me to really find out what works for me and what doesn't. I'll elaborate on this point in the coming posts;)

BTW when I named these posts The Language Odyssey, for it just seemed right, Felt right you know and then I remembered that Steve Kaufman had also graced his ebook with the same name. I read his book during my Research period and only now did it surface back up. Wonderful, isn't it, how we internalise things and events.


So, I focused upon the language whose culture fascinated me and two languages came up. Russian and German;P

     Russian for the simple reason being that, well, there used to be a map over at the room where I had started staying as a paying guest. You just can't ignore Russia, I mean, look at the world map and you will see what I mean. It's just so big !! And then again, I like long novels and the trail follows to Russia, I mean there is something different about the the kind of Literature that came down from Russia. Yes, it's sad most times, focuses on ironies of life but it penetrates so deep within our emotions, it makes you involved with itself, draws you in a labyrinth you would never wish to leave. Trust me, if you are not planning on Russian literature you really should think it over. You would be missing out pearls. As for the sound of the language, it just sounds so poetic and rhythmical and another beautiful aspect of the language being the fact that the essence of the language sounds harsh, raw, well manly when spoken by a man and so elegantly feminine when spoken by a female. Of course, I know that these generalizations are only romantic representation of my own perceptions but there just is something mysterious about the language, perhaps it's Nutro [ нутро ] or perhaps it's the mysterious Russian soul (  Русская душа )...ah, well. I can talk about these languages all day long, you know. Let's just get on with the narration for the moment.

As for German, well, in hindsight my life always seemed to be leading towards the language ( in foresight, perhaps still is;P ). From the brilliant contribution to sciences and unfortunate involvement in the World Wars, from Völkerwanderung ( Germanic Migrations ) to Gutenberg's printing press. And how can one overlook the bright insignia of the German Genius on Music, Science, Arts and, of course, Literature ( Brothers Grimm, Goethe...). They say the language sounds harsh, then you really should stop obsessing on Hitler speeches or some such !!

The language sounds so precise, so natural to me, and then there are the unique sounds of the German language which give it such a different flavour from every other language that I know. The way the language forms new words is just so intuitive, though that might because of the English background that I was raised in. But the fact remains, that you hear a new word in the German language and you can pretty much guess it's straightforward meaning. Isn't that beautiful;P

Plus, German Rap, Hard rock is as if the entire genre was made just for this one language, who can ignore Rammstein ?

So, as time went by I realized that language that both these languages have so many French ( Latin derived words) and as I was already had English as my Nanny-tongue, if not my mother tongue, I already was aware of quite a lot of French words. And thus French was added to the list.

I heard a lot about Esperanto from Benny so I decided to explore the language as well, as I was frustrated with my snail-slow progress in Russian [ my first priority at the time] and learning a simple language, gaining confidence in a language first made a lot of sense. I have really come to believe that it's really about the first foreign language barrier that confronts us with such a challenge, once we get the ball rolling it's like a snowball.

Well, this series might take a while, it might probably span over a few more posts if I am to be accurate with the descriptions. In the mean-time I look out for the coming project on the Nutro-Marka blog. The Vikings are coming;P

The Language Odyssey. Act 1

Wondering, What are the reasons that I became a happy traveler in this Linguistic journey ?

Ah, yes ! This being a blog about languages and to be more precise, about how it all really happened. I mean, I am gonna try and make sense of why, when, what and how I ended up being drawn into and even hopelessly in love with the world of languages.

To be honest, the process was ( and still is !) really quite chaotic when it comes to languages  and to try to present it as something more ordered, something that was really planned would just be wrong and would mean that I had some sort of a skill or something involved in the entire process. Nothing can be farther from the Truth !! Although, I do like to think that whatever planning I was doing at the time was the reason that I fell in love, but that doesn't really seem to be true anymore.

 Actually, my decision to learn languages was motivated by three factors.


> I had always wondered that Why is it that all the names that I came across in Science and Mathematics were Europeans. the seeds of curiosity. And then later on I realized that most of the important books in Mathematics and Physics were written in Latin, not in the colloquial languages but in Latin !

And obviously most of the names that one comes across in modern physics in the High School syllabus are so overwhelmingly German ! I noticed this and it was a pretty useful mental note. Though the effects of this observation were to be felt only later.

>> The second reason was, Me being bored the hell out of my mind in the University.

Yup, I study in  reputedly one of the "best" Universities in the country which offers the most reputed courses in the Engineering fields. And trust me I worked my ass off to get in this one. I even "dropped" to prepare for this University and I would prepare myself for the exam while studying even at a different university in a different state. I wasn't here in the first place because of some weird mis-fortune, question paper was leaked or something and I was one of that minute fraction which had sit for the exam again on a different date. In my mind, it wasn't a defeat, I wasn't defeated fair and square and I was burning with the thought that I deserve better. The next year, I got through;)

 Plus there is this Reservation System in the country and it is apparently a tailor-made and highly discriminatory solution that government seems to love baiting people with.

But, back to the topic;P,  once I got in and saw how screwed up the university really is, as a place of learning. I was just so depressed !! Seriously, I won't even mention the name of the University here, I find the place to be so blatantly pathetic. Though, I acknowledge that for all extra-curricular activities, the beauty of the campus and for the much desired exposure this place is pretty awesome. The place really is alive because of the students but as far as one's intellectual development is concerned, this is Auschwitz !!

And I don't mean to disrespect the memory of that horror just that, for those of us who seek more knowledge and to be guided by inspired teachers this place is not really different from Auschwitz. 

The place is a classic example of darned bureaucracy, incompetency, primitive animal hierarchy, faking intelligence, do-nothing-look-busy philosophy and a superb ability to justify the usage of public funds for a demeaning and dehumanizing treatment of  students. Most, but not all, teachers take a perverse delight in this particular aspect ! The Education system just sucks over here !!

>>> Third one being, there seems to be an affinity for the German language in my family. And it's a family legend one of my relatives actually holds a record for completing the Ph.D. at the youngest age in the country and he did it in the German language. Later, he went to Germany and made Germany his home.

But that's not the end of the story and his influence. As it happened, I was admitted in a hospital and my elder cousin [ for some reason, Cousin sounds impersonal somehow, so hereafter I use Bhaiya=) ] stayed at the hospital to look after me. He was at the final year of his University degree and I was nearing the end of my High School so there was this fascination-with-the-elder-brother as well. Actually, it still is, somehow all my siblings continue to inspire me in many ways.

But, back to the story. he mentioned something about German language being difficult because of all the vowels and the sounds of the language and I was like "What ? Why would you learn a human language". Of course, I was impressed at some level and I think it was then that the real seeds of fascination were planted in my mind.

So, as soon as I had realized that to survive and to even get by in the University and to make it more bearable; I need something that wide enough and deep enough that it doesn't get boring soon enough.

Actually, I had only realized and recognized my love for the "Perfectly Logical " and as it goes I actually love Mathematics, Physics and of course Computers, though not Chemistry. There just are too many exceptions for my taste.

To be honest, I am predisposed to a certain stubbornness and even pigheadedness at times;P ! Though I am learning to control the pigheadedness, to use the emotion more creatively, To me, stubbornness is more along the line of persevering whereas the latter one is more along the lines of being a pain-in-the-arse. So, I have realized that it is nothing but counter-productive, it's a part of the problem and not the solution, see, it's a work in progress;P

Little did I realize at the time that Perseverance is my greatest asset;P

To be perfectly honest, I must tell you more about the my Strengths and Weaknesses. So, self-indulgence alert !!

I hate being told what to do and the more people force me to do things their way, the more likelier I am, to do the exact opposite. You know, there just are soo soo many ways to doing something and I question a lot, I think a lot and mindless execution of some such and such command by such and such authority is just beyond me. I find that kind of behavior loathful and repulsive to my very core. I know that I get on people's nerves sometimes but that's just the way I am. I ask, I wonder and I observe keenly and enthusiastically;P . Which might be the reason that I love the "Perfectly Logical"

Remind me to write another post about becoming comfortable with "Irrationality", learning to appreciate the irrational aspect of life more, to be more acceptable to what people do and, you know, just taking things in just as they are, being comfortable being uncomfortable. I find this particular skill to be one of the most valuable skills that I have learned during this journey. Recognize the differences and accommodate them, which means that you have to be less judgmental-mindset and more of a learner-mindset at all times. And this is only going to make us more or ourselves, this is only going to free us. This habit, this mindset only leads to freedom, embrace it.

As I was writing this post, I realized that I better put it up in parts so the story is to be continued...