Language Learning Strategy

Back on July 25, I wrote an entry hinting of future foreign language entries on this blog. And that’s still my intention. However, I’ve recently gone through some of my old material, and I’ve found that I’m a bit rustier in them than I had thought! So, what I’m going to do, at least for the immediate future, is set up a study schedule in the languages I’m learning. Then, every eight weeks, I’ll report my progress in them on this blog. At some point, I’ll begin to write entries in some of them, with an open invitation for any readers fluent in them to correct mistakes in grammar or usage. In the meantime, I can also figure out how to use the fonts supplied by my Windows software on my computer that correspond to the languages I want to write in. But, like I said, that’s a bit off in the future. For now, I’m going to plod along with my studies and report on what I’m doing and the progress I’m making. The languages, once again, are Spanish, French, German, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese. I’m also adding Latin to the list because my daughter has it for a class at school. There is some study material I need to obtain, particularly with Vietnamese, but with the great bookselling companies on the Web, that shouldn’t be a problem. What I’m really uncertain about is the best audio study method around (for the price, that is). I’ve heard Rosetta Stone is good, but expensive (especially if you’re talking about multiple languages). However, I believe that once a language student gets a good sense of how a language is spoken and sounds (and I already do with the languages I’m studying), then the real daunting task is to build up a good working vocabulary of thousands of words in each of them. And, of course, the details of grammar as well, especially when I’m writing articles in them!