My Foreign Language Study Update: 8/23

Although I haven’t studied as much as I had wanted, I still passed a milestone of sorts with my foreign languages. On July 22, I made small posts on this blog in Russian and Chinese. I was able to find some websites that I could use to write with Cyrillic and Chinese scripts. The Chinese was considerably slower to write because the characters were arranged according to which radicals they belonged to. I’ve grown used to using the Chinese Romanized pinyin spelling to reference different characters, so this is something that’s going to take a little practice on my part. I also found a site that would enable me to write in other exotic scripts, as well as in Romanized scripts tailored for specific languages (such as French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Vietnamese with each language's special diacritic marks).

I have all of the resources I need to make great progress in the foreign languages I want to become proficient in, but I need to just put in the time and effort. Hopefully, with future blog postings in different languages, I’ll get some responses and be able to interact with others on the Web.

I think the only way I’m going to take the needed time and effort to successfully learn these languages is to commit to regularly posting articles in them (or in something resembling them). So don’t be surprised if you’re looking at this blog and suddenly encounter some weird gibberish. It’s probably just one of my exercises in another language (or possibly just weird gibberish).

On a side note, I think it’s great that Google has an instant language translator. It’s useful for me in that I can translate words and simple, short phrases from a language into English and vice versa. But the process can break down badly when translating full texts and even single sentences. This service is useful, though, within its limitations. And Google does seem to be dedicated to making this service progressively better. Naturally, though, other than its use as a dictionary of sorts, I avoid the Google translation tool, the whole point of my writing in a foreign language being to practice thinking and writing in it.