Polish - 18 April

I've been doing Polish since January. I've accumulated between 700 and 800 short sentences, together with their English translations. And all from the one Jack Reacher novel: Jednym strzalem. But the thing is, I'm hardly gaining any traction, I feel. It's those damned consonant clusters!

So I'll try to make use of Neri Rook pictured above. I trust that it will help me get a stronger grip.

Neri Rook has a series of books, compiled with the aid of word frequency software. He has books in dozens of languages for sale online. He feeds in authentic texts and scans sentences to determine their average frequency score, obtained from ranked word frequency lists. It appears to be a quick way to get a grounding in almost any language.

The weird thing, though, is that English - as a language- is not included.

Applauding Polish

I've a friend in Japan who strives to keep his family's Polish heritage alive. I applaud that. And so, since I mean to travel back and forth to Japan regularly, I would enjoy being a part of that project.

In fact, a while ago I made a start. I worked my way through a novel. I began by making a collection of short words, and then short sentences. Polish has several letters that we don't have in English - or at least letters modified by diacritics. I started to gain a sense of their pronunciation.

From that 4% mark, my plan is to take up from where I left off.

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.