Lingotopia

A new year has started and many language learners are setting their goals of which language to learn in 2018. My goal is actually to not add another language in 2018, but this resolution already went out the window on the second day of this year. In the book “Teach Yourself - To Learn A Language” by P. J. T. Glendening from 1965 I found an interesting paragraph about the so-called Linguamania that means “becoming so taken with the idea of learning languages that you are unable to devote more than a few days to a new language before you leave it (“temporarily”) to take up another one. The usual result is a vague smattering of a few languages, absolutely no knowledge of others and a good knowledge of none.” (p. 277) This is so true, and I’m already stuck deep in the linguamania abyss. But what’s the solution? Is there a cure? First of all, let me set some things straight because sometimes I get asked, if I’ve written all articles on this blog myself. Yes, this is just my own li...

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...

As a teacher myself, I'm a difficult student. I have my own ideas and methods for language learning and I'm not easily convinced by the ways others teach and learn. The easiest way to scare me off is using a boring textbook. Yes, textbooks are important in language learning.They cover the most important topics of daily life and also all the basic grammar. But the problem is, that I only learn well when the topic is relevant to me. When going by car on holiday to another country, knowing how to talk to a doctor or a car repair shop, is very relevant to me, so I make sure that I learn about this topics right before the trip, but in my daily life in Germany, I don't need to know, how to call a tow service in any other language than German. That's why I prefer to learn vocabulary and expressions when they are relevant to me and not when I happen to reach lesson 8 in a textbook... Also, I don't like to learn grammar structures in a certain order, just because that...

That was the beautiful view from our terrasse at Lake Garda. We stayed for two weeks in August at a holiday apartment in a small town up a mountain and all our neighbours were Italian. Prior to travelling there, I asked on italki, if it would be possible to communicate in French or Spanish in Italy. I have tried that already when I once went to Bologna many years ago and couldn't find help when asking for the way in English. So I asked in French and with my knowledge of Latin, I somehow deciphered the reply in Italian. But some (non-Italian) italki users told me that it would be extremely rude to ask the way in another language than the local one. A user asked me if I wouldn't find it rude if someone asked me the way in Dutch instead of German. No, I wouldn't feel offended at all. I don't expect tourists to learn German. But since I don't want to be rude, I started to familiarise myself with the Italian basics two weeks before the holiday and took two online clas...

One of my preferred methods of learning multiple languages at the same time, is reading something in one language and then writing about it in another language. So, this month, I take part in the Chinese reading challenge by Hacking Chinese and decided to read an anthology by Yu Qiuyu  ( 余秋雨读本 ), one of the most famous and influential contemporary writers in China. I want to use what I read as an inspiration for writing texts in other languages. So, yesterday I wrote a short text in Italian about a topic inspired by this book. Let me first explain the topic a bit. The first essay in the anthology is about paifang , traditional Chinese arches. When I stumbled upon the word zhenjie paifang (贞节牌坊), which means chastity arch , I remembered that I've been to a village called Tangyue (堂樾) in Anhui Province 14 years ago. The village is famous for their seven memorial archways built by the Bao family during the course of several centuries. The first archway can be traced back to...

I studied Chinese at university as a minor, lived and worked in China for six years and have a Chinese husband. So, I should be pretty fluent in Chinese, right? Sadly 还差很多 (= I'm still far from it). Chinese is, next to Japanese, one of my strongest target languages but in the last six years, I haven't really done anything to both maintain and improve my Chinese level. I only took two years of Chinese classes, the first year at university and also the first year  So, in order to push myself to do something for Chinese, I signed up for this months "Hacking Chinese Reading Challenge" . The goal is to focus on extensive reading. I will try to read a book for a change instead of always staring at the computer or smartphone screen. Hacking Chinese by Olle Linge is my favourite website with tips for learning Chinese. It offers methods, ideas and links to resources not only for beginners and intermediate students but also for advanced students. On the picture you c...

Recently I've been too busy, to actually write something for my blog but I did some language learning nevertheless. Almost three weeks ago, I did a small Serbian writing challenge and after looking a bit into the Serbian grammar and pronunciation, I have to say that it is indeed a very intriguing language. It can be written both with Cyrillic and Roman letters, it has seven cases, it uses different verbs depending on the aspect and it has a pitch accent. I thought that the accent shouldn't be a problem with my knowledge of Chinese. But diacritics for the accents are only used in linguistic literature and the accents have to be learned individually for every word since there aren't many rules regarding the accents. Also, the diacritics are different to the ones used for Chinese. "è" marks a short rising tone in Serbian, but a high falling tone in Chinese. "ȇ" is a long vowel with falling tone in Serbian, while "ě" is a low falling-rising to...