Lingotopia

Picture by madsmith33 on Pixabay Picture description: Photograph of an obstacle race. A woman is climbing a dirty wall. Two men are helping her by pulling her up by her hands while a third man watches. On the right edge of the picture there are two men pulling another man up the wall. (The following text is written in Spanish and English. It isn't an exact translation.) Sabéis que me gusta muchíssimo participar a desafíos para aprender idiomas. Cuando alguien me dice que está organizando un desafío, soy la primera persona que grita: "¡Desafío aceptado!" A veces me desafio y escribo un texto corto en un idioma que todavía no he aprendido. Cuando el idioma es bastante facil, solo necesito 30 minutos para hacerlo, pero cuando el idiomas tiene caracteres que no conosco, gasto hasta dos horas para escribir algunas frases. Ya he mencionado algunas desafíos que me gustan como el LanguageJam, Language Diary Challenge y 30 Days Speaking Challenge. If you followed me h...

Photo by  Austin Chan  on  Unsplash Hace 10 meses que no escribí una entrada por  aquí. ¡Increíble!   ¿Qué estaba haciendo? Estaba muy, muy ocupada con mi trabajo, pero al mismo tiempo participé a algunos desafíos, por ejemplo Language Diary Challenge, 90 Days with Drops, My Language Challenge y el Language Jam. Ya describí mi experiencia con aprender griego moderno con el Language Jam ( https://lingotopia.blogspot.com/2018/09/jamming-in-greek.html ), pero hoy quiero contaros de los tres siguentes veces que participé a este desafío. Además quiero reflexionar sobre la pregunta, si aprender un idioma al azar tiene sentido. Oh my gosh, it's been 10 months already since my last entry here. What I've been up to? I've been very busy at work but at the same time I also participated in several language challenges like the Language Diary Challenge, 90 Days with Drops, My Language Challenge and the Language Jam. I already wrote about my experience with learnin...

Photo by  bruce mars  on  Unsplash Decidí a escribir mi blog a partir de ahora en español también. Quizás a veces voy a escribir en otros idiomas también, pero en este momento español todavía es mi lengua meta favorita. Estoy segura de que voy a cometer muchos errores en este processo, pero aprendemos idiomas a través de errores, ¿no? I decided to write my blog from now on in Spanish as well. I may write in other languages from time to time as well but Spanish is currently still my favourite target language. I'm sure that I'll make a lot of mistakes but we learn through making mistakes, right? Recientemente me gusta usar Instagram para aprender idiomas y allí encontré el hashtag #languagefavefive de  @bec_irregular.endings . El objetivo es explicar sus cinco más favoritos recoursos o estrategias del aprendizaje de idiomas. Leí los fave five de unos estudiantes y fue muy interesante que cada uno prefiere otros métodos. De todos modos, si...

Photo by  Aleyna Rentz  on  Unsplash I'm back to the Western social media after I spent one month in China without a VPN and therefore no access to Facebook, Youtube, Google, Wordpress based web pages and also my own blog. I was stuck with Baidu, Bing and Duolingo. Shortly before I left, I took part in a fun language challenge called Language Jam: http://languagejam.net/  by Lingudendron . It took only place for a weekend. Participants could choose if they want to learn a completely new language for one, two or three days. They could also choose if they wanted only a language with Latin script, only with non-Latin scripts or if they were open to every kind of writing system. I listed in the application all languages I have at least some basic knowledge and chose to learn a language with a non-Latin script for three days. Then the organiser of the challenge drew languages for all participants, the day before the challenge started. I didn't list Latin and Ancient ...

Photo by  Baher Khairy  on  Unsplash  (Graffiti in Cairo) So, yesterday (16.06.2018) was the second day of the World Cup 2018. The matches were Egypt vs. Uruguay (0:1), Morocco vs. Iran (0:1) and Portugal vs. Spain (2:3). Egypt (Arabic) vs. Uruguay (Spanish)  Of all the countries participating in the World Cup I know the least about Uruguay. The only things that come to my mind are Montevideo, Luis Suarez and José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica. Mujica has a video column on DW world: Conciencia Sur . He speaks slowly and there are Spanish subtitles, so it's perfect for learners. I know a little bit more about Egypt but of course, the usual pictures come first to my mind: pyramides, the sphinx, hieroglyphes and the pharaohs. Just clichés but not much about life in modern Egypt (apart from political developments in recent years of course).  I tried to find something to connect Egypt and Uruguay and stumbled upon tango. Tango originat...

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...

Sometimes people ask me how I manage to find so much time for language learning. Honestly, I don't. I have a job and a family, am always busy and always tired. So, it's a constant struggle to make some time for language learning, especially because  I'm trying to learn several languages at the same time. But how to do that, if one has no time whatsoever? I can't give a definite answer to this because I'm still looking for an answer myself but I'd like to share some of my ideas and steps for getting more structure in my language learning. 1. Get your priorities straight There are so many things I'd like to learn but as my time budget is limited, I have to think about what's really important for me, right here and right now. So, the languages, I really want to make progress are Spanish, Arabic and Russian. I'm intermediate in Spanish and this is my focus language. I take classes, do a language exchange, record videos of me speaking Spanish, corre...