Language Learning Plan

As I have written on this blog a few times earlier, I have a great interest in learning foreign languages. The problem is in fitting study time into my daily schedule. I’ve decided to employ two different strategies to accomplish this.

My first strategy in learning languages is to daily get on the Internet and intently listen to news broadcasts in the languages I’m interested in for about three minutes per language (Spanish, French, German, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese). Sites such as Radio Japan, the Voice of America, and Polskie Radio Online are at present my chief sources (I also get a lot of Spanish from my Univision TV channel).

My second strategy is to study a book about a particular language, one language at a time, for a “season”. The language I’ve chosen to begin with is Vietnamese, which I had actually built up a pretty good working vocabulary with during the early 1980s. The book that I’m using is Vietnamese: A Rough Guide, compiled by Lexus (Penguin Books, 2000). It is perfect for my purposes right now, containing a simple grammar, vocabulary list, and phrase section. I’ve also ordered an inexpensive elementary Vietnamese text, Beginner’s Vietnamese by Robert Quinn (Hippocrene, 1995). My intention is to “master” this book before I go on to the next foreign language project. And to come back and review it from time to time. The only sticking point to this is that, while in the early 1980s, I had several Vietnamese speakers to practice with, that is no longer the case. So, it will be interesting to see how I tackle that problem. Anyway, I’m adding another “eights” to my blog. This version will be “Language Learning on the Eights”, and the next entry, with a report on my progress, will be eight weeks from today. I remember having written thoughts along these lines in an earlier entry a few weeks ago, but I never could seem to get “on track” with my studying. But now it’s official! I’m studying!

I don’t know how far I’ll be able to progress in learning the aforementioned languages, but then again, I don’t know how long I’m going to live either (who does?). The point is that this is one of those types of endeavors that I foresee as open-ended, with something always new on the horizon!