Lingotopia

Today, the 14th of June 2018 marks the start of the Soccer World Cup in Russia. I'm looking forward to exciting matches, I love learning languages, I'm interested in other cultures and I enjoy taking part in challenges. So, why not combine all of that and take up a World Cup challenge? Starting from today I want to post every day a couple of sentences in the languages of the participating countries, some fun facts about them and of course links to music and resources in those languages. I know it's a tad crazy but I won't write whole essays but keep the blog posts rather short. And a lot of countries share the same official languages so I can group them together. My knowledge in the following languages goes from tiny little bit (Serbian), basic (Arabic, Portuguese) over intermediate (French, Spanish) to advanced (English). Spanish : Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, Panama, Peru, Uruguay. Arabic : Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia French : B...

On the Facebook page for this blog, I use this little pic with abbreviations of nine languages as avatar. Somehow it didn't feel completely right since I didn't learn Russian so far. But I am fixing that and two weeks ago I started to study Russian actively. With this, I am also somehow completing a language collection: the UN collection. ;-)  The UN has six official working languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. I'm advanced in Chinese and English, intermediate in French and Spanish and now have basic knowledge in Arabic and Russian. I guess that Arabic will always stay the weakest language in my collection since it is the most challenging one for me. But I'm trying to get Russian on a similar level like Spanish. A year ago, I started studying Spanish, first just writing a couple of notebook entries on italki. After four months starting to take one hour of one-on-one online class weekly. Now I'm roughly at B2. Without much effort and...