Renegade Yogi

I love learning languages, but how many have I learned?

I love learning languages. I’m good at it, it’s fun, it’s interesting. But how many have I learned?

• English – Primary language doesn’t count
• French – I went to French Immersion school, so it doesn’t count
• Spanish – I speak somewhat conversationally. I picked up a lot when I did a Summer program in Costa Rica. Very broken and lots of holes.
• Malinke – When I was in the Peace Corps. I spent almost 2 years in a full immersion environment, and my Malinke sucks. I didn’t work as hard as I would have liked.
• Italian – I took a college course in it, but I don’t speak very much.
• That’s it!

Ok, this post is a little regretful. I have been loving language learning since as far back as I can remember. But I haven’t done much about it, especially considering the opportunities I’ve had. And that sucks.

Languages are so fascinating. They are the key to understanding how people think. Languages contain beautiful metaphors to explain the world around us. They allow us to communicate with others, to share our experiences, to plan the future, to explain the past. Languages give us another dimension of experience. I love learning languages, and I regret not spending more time doing it.

So, I’m doing something now. I want to learn 10 languages by 2020. That’s one language per year. That’s not a lot. There’s plenty of time in the day to memorize vocab and practice speaking when I can. I’ve got some great ideas about learning languages–real weird, effective stuff that you won’t find anywhere else. I’m going to be testing them myself and building my own learning materials. I’ll be posting the results here on the blog.

If you’re interested in language learning, let me know.

Here is my tentative list of languages I’ll know by 2020:

1. English
2. French
3. Spanish
4. Italian
5. Mandarin
6. Arabic
7. Russian
8. Swahili
9. Bambara (similar to Malinke)
10. Japanese