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
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
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