Re: Omar Sharif

Up to now, I've been rotating my languages in an order that, though it is not rigidly fixed, tends to cycle. But this morning, walking, I started thinking. I reviewed what I'd been doing. 

If I did one language per day, one cycle would take me a month. Four a day, a week. Six days for five languages; five days for six languages. I would revisit languages every 3 days, if I did 10. It would require me to do 15 languages if I wanted to do them every other day.

And then I came to an op shop. It was the first time for me to enter one since the lockdown started 5 or 6 weeks ago. I bought a book: Monsieur Ibrahim und die Blumen des Koran. It's in German, translated from the French.

It was only at home, when I searched for an image, that I realized I knew the story. There had been a movie with Omar Sharif. I think I watched it with my father. Omar was once one of the best bridge players in the world. I got the book he wrote about it for Dad, but I doubt he ever read it. In his late 80s, all he did was watch TV.

So anyway, I'm going to read Dutch, German and Japanese at will. And I'll freely change the order of the rest. It's time to mix it up a little! (Maybe even include a little TV.)

German - 21 April

I'm streamlining German. A few days ago I moved German up. I'll read without pausing to collect sentences, or at least not as many as before. No more than one sentence per paragraph, is my current goal. I have boxes of books in German. Why wait to enjoy them?

Spanish via German

I few weeks into the programme, I'm finding that Spanish is not so manageable as I thought. I feel the need to prepare by reminding myself of the story (Harry Potter #1). But instead of pre-reading the English text, why not do it in German? That, after all, is how a German following my system would go about acquiring Spanish.

My German is at the level where this works. In fact, as I improve in them and reach a certain level of familiarity, I ought to be able to use any language to leapfrog up to the next. That way I practice double the number.

[By March, I'm able to dispense with the 'leapfrog' as far as Spanish is concerned.]

German by the book

I'll deal with German second, even though it's my 3rd-best language (after English and Japanese).

In third place, German is right on up there - say 50%. That's mainly because of my knowledge of Dutch. The two languages are similar. I'm therefore able to take a look at any page of German and make a reasonable stab at the meaning.

The no-brainer now, is to see whether my just-read-a-book approach will work for German too. Because if it does, then that simplifies things. Why re-invent the wheel?

I check my Kindle reader. I took it along to Japan this trip to have plenty to read. And I loaded it up before I left. It has about 150 books on it. They are mainly in English, but there's also a book or two each of German, Polish, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish and even Arabic.

In German, I have the entire set of Harry Potter (Die Gesamtausgabe), for instance.

Now, within the past year I've already done some German. As a family, we listened to J K Rowling's books in English and in Japanese. At that time, I tried following along by reading German while we listened to the English or Japanese. And I could manage to some extent.

I've read first Harry Potter book, and some of the second, in German. Why not continue? Why fix something that ain't broke?

As long as I'm familiar with the stories, and as long as they are geared toward younger readers, I'm confident that I can tackle German 'by the book'.

The ABCs of multi-lingual-ism

It happens to be the start of 2020 as I put pen to paper (well, it was). The time feels right to start a new blog. It's time for a New Year's resolution. It's time for a challenge. A language acquisition challenge.

Initially, I thought of setting a 365-day goal. But I feel that would be too gimmicky - it doesn't feel authentic. Plus, I have life that I'd like to live alongside of this project. Life-work balance and all that.

So I'll take it fairly easy. I've no problem with that - I've already opted to work only part time (0.6). And in a couple of years I'll be eligible to retire. All in all, I'm not going to turn this into a big deal. I wish to spend no more than a couple of hours per day on this exercise. In terms of language-learning, therefore, I'll see how I fare with just a few languages, not too many. I'll settle for an even dozen.

I've selected them according to the alphabet. They each start with a different letter, so that'll make it easier to name and keep track of them.

• A is for Arabic
• C is for Chinese
• D is for Dutch
• E is for English (which I don't count as one of the 12)
• F is for French
• G is for German
• H is for Hindi
• J is for Japanese
• M is for Maori
• N is for Norwegian
• P is for Polish
• R is for Russian
• and S will be for Spanish

I think that's a fair swag.