Updating Your Language OS

I am excited to announce that Becoming a Polyglot will be relaunched shortly!

What's to expect?

• Mind tricks to learn grammar
• Languages under the spotlight
• Language videos
• More to follow...

Part 3: What Easy New Language to Learn? Italian? Spanish? Think farther...

Welcome to the third and final instalment of "What Easy New Language to Learn..." of course 'easiness' is shaped by subjectiveness and personal influences, a language learned through pleasure in contrast to a language forced upon you, will be learned quicker, regardless of any innate 'difficulties' or 'easy' features that may be bound within the language itself.

The third and final language we will look at today... is a language that ranks equal in its primary country to another 10 languages... Afrikaans. Of course, Afrikaans is spoke also in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. It has 6.45 million native speakers, but up to 12-16 million people worldwide have some knowledge of the language.

Alike Norwegian, which featured in Part 1, Afrikaans is a West Germanic language and therefore a member of the Indo-European language family.

Essentially, Afrikaans is the African version of Dutch, in fact until the early 20th century, Afrikaans was still considered a dialect of Dutch. Despite similarity however, Afrikaans poses far fewer problems when trying to acquire proficiency. Hence, Afrikaans' approval and Dutch's disapproval as one of the the three languages contained in this series of posts.

What makes Afrikaans 'easy' to learn??


Afrikaans, unlike Dutch, and similarly to Norwegian has NO verb conjugation by person. 


Alike English, Afrikaans has NO grammatical gender. Words are neither female, male, neuter etc.


Afrikaans DON'T express the Perfect or Pluperfect tenses... 
In simple terms...


Ek het gebreek, can mean either 'I broke' or 'I have broken!'


To make an object plural, Afrikaans generally employs the ending -e or -s
ex. land (land) -> lande (lands)
artikel -> arikels


Afrikaans has a word order similar to Dutch, which isn't too far removed from English, but isn't that straightforward either. 


Potential Hurdles


The letter 'G' in Afrikaans, is pronounced with a strong guttural sound akin to the 'ch' found in the Scottish word 'Loch' or the fourth letter of the Welsh alphabet, found in words such as 'Chwarae' (to Play.)


Although learned fairly easily, this may pose problems for some with oral comprehension. 


Adjectives change a little before the noun... although this is found with many Indo-European languages. 


IT MAY BE HARDER TO FIND SPEAKERS' OF AFRIKAANS BY LISTENING IN,  IN A LANGUAGE THAT HAS 11 OFFICIAL LANGUAGES, THAN SAY TO FIND A NORWEGIAN SPEAKER IN NORWAY. 

Fancy learning 100 or more words a day??

Today, I will show YOU how one can learn, with enough creativity, ten's or hundred's of words a week!

I will outline to you many methods that have worked for many:

The sagacious Hungarian polyglot Kató Lomb was THE great advocator of context to deduce the meaning of words; the famous Lectoglot was thus named aptly "Kati Kontext" by her friends. Kató was a vociferous reader, and indulged in swallowing as many enjoyable works of foreign literature as she could to learn her languages.

In her book "Polyglot, How I Learn Languages" chapter 14, Kató suggests using First Language dictionaries to provide the meaning of the word, and an example of the word being used in a sentence. She suggests learning words that share the same root to draw connections and improve the connectivity and relationship of words, synonyms and antonyms can also be called upon. The autistic savant Daniel Tammet, speaker of over 10 languages, (having learnt Icelandic in a week), also advocates such "hyper-connectivity" highly when learning vocab. Her, is one such demonstration with French found in Kató's book:

abolition (manumission)

affected (maniéré)

begging (manche)

crank (manivelle)

cuff (manchette)

demonstration (manifestation)

demonstrator (manifestant)

to emancipate (émanciper)

handcuffs (menottes)

handle (manche)

to handle (manier)

handling (manutention)

horse training (manège)

to maintain (maintenir)

mandate (mandat)

manifesto (manifeste)

manipulation (manipulation)

manual (manuel)

manual labor/er (main-d’œuvre)

manufacture (manufacture)

manuscript (manuscrit)

muff (manchon)

now (maintenant)

one-armed man (manchot)

operator (manipulant)

Logic, thus far has been the tool used to build your vocabulary... Here comes the best bit... creativity!

The mind has a tendency to remember things better if say they are funny, scary or bizarre. In fact, any method that evokes the reaction of any or all of the senses proves to be worth while.

Have you ever suddenly when met by a smell been flooded with memories associated with your prior smelling of it?

This is where creativity rears its head.

Many people have over the years when revising for their exams, tried the technique of listening to a specific song when revising a certain subject matter. The theory being that when you are sitting your exam that all you'd have to do is recall the song, and along with it would be the connected facts. This, is an example that has proved useful for many... but we can do one better.

MNEMONICS & IMAGINATION

HOMES : Maybe you have seen this mnemonic phrase before, if not, HOMES, an easy to remember acronym... is a common example of how mnemonics can speed up memorisation.

Huron Ontario Michigan Eerie and Superior. Or, the 5 great lakes.

Here is another example:

This time using an entire sentence, to memorise the order of the colours' of the rainbow.

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain :

RED ORANGE YELLOW GREEN BLUE INDIGO VIOLET

Another such example is the use of RHYMES & CATCH PHRASES:

I before E, except after C...

Or when sounded like 'A' as in Neighbour and Weigh

Now, here is when it gets creative, sure it'll take effort and about 15 mins to create such a mnemonic, but, that same effort will make it stick in your mind.

Here is Stuart Jay Raj's creation from an interview in Tomisimo.

Minggu – You’re mingling in church on Sunday.
Senin – And then on Monday after church you go back to ’sinnin’.
Selasa – Then like an Italian waving his hands in the air, you exclaim ‘Selasa’ (at last) Monday is over!
Rabu – Then you call the ‘rabi’ to come and cleanse your sins.
Kamis – The rabi ‘comes’ (Kamis).
Jumat – The rabi performs a weird ritual by ‘jumping on the mat’ (Jumat) to cleanse the sins from Monday.
Sabtu – And then it’s the Sabbath… ready to go and mingle again the next day on Sunday (Minggu).

The above are only examples... the rest is in your hands... remember think full of emotion, humour or logic (if you prefer)... such methods... will get you learning many, many words daily. Reading alone sometimes allows you to learn many by context.

How to set the gears in motion...

Many of you have come to this blog salivating over the thought in becoming proficient in another tongue, however how can one achieve such a formidable feat?

The list is long of those who have achieved great success in learning several, or many languages. But how does one approach such a task.

Firstly, having gone through the process of learning foreign languages myself I can suggest a few methods that will keep you all in good stead when embarking on your first mission to acquire a new language.

One of the foremost problems I have come across when learning a foreign language is the uncertainty and doubt that runs through the eager pupils' minds when faced with such an apparently insurmountable task.

To leverage oneself I would suggest calmness, good material, patience and desire.

Firstly, I would suggest that the pupil should delve into bookstores or browse online to acquire a quality course book... this course book will be used as your main crutch, outlining the course of your learning process. I would personally suggest finding a copy of the Assimil foreign language learning books, along with others such as... the Teach Yourself or Colloquial series. (For a detailed outline of each courses' strengths and weakness, please refer to polyglot Professor Arguelles' site for thorough video reviews on self instructional material, in addition to a wealth of other interesting musings.) Another seasoned language instructor, whose audio-only course I would highly recommend, is the late Michel Thomas, whose personal brand covers languages from French to Arabic, Russian and Mandarin. Michel Thomas' famous formula for language learning can be seen in action in a BBC documentary. Another major benefit of Thomas' method is that he gets you talking instantly, boosts your confidence incredibly and calmly and collectedly walks you through grammar without any burdensome technical vocabulary.

Indeed, language success can be described by a simple formula written by the famous Hungarian polyglot Kató Lomb in her magnificent book, "Polyglot, How I Learn Languages", which can be found in PDF form here.

Invested time + Motivation

--------------------------------- = Result

Inhibition

Kató like I myself am, was a great advocator of reading to improve foreign language proficiency. She warned of the dangers of the novel/magazine etc. becoming boring, and advised to only look up words if they could not be deduced from context. She stated... "What is important will sooner or later emerge again and will explain itself if necessary... It's much more of a problem if the book becomes flavourless in our hands due to the many interruptions than not learning if the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn."

I, myself usually begin with LingQ, a marvellous website by Steve Kaufman that provides a huge cache of articles/stories/interviews all with accompanying audio and highlighted words, that when hovered over, reveal their definitions... this I have found invaluable, deleting any need of a dictionary.

I simultaneously follow my LingQ endeavours devouring any of the target language material I can find, Wikipedia is useful for access to material in both your native language and acquiring language. Blogs and Facebook prove to be valuable assets allowing you to see naturally used, daily dialogue.

Like the Greats of the past, Cardinal Mezzofanti and alike, I find that translation using a bilingual text is an excellent way to acquire a new language. The YouTube sensation Luca, whom provides constant hope, also is a great advocator of this approach and it has kept him in good stead through 10 or so languages. I highly suggest you read his outline and watch his multilingual videos.

An ample and timeless children's book has been employed many a time, as it is fairly simple, enjoyable, illustrated (to provide some meta-linguistic context) and easily found in many foreign languages for comparison. The novel "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is consequently one of the most purchased books ever... Fortunately, it is easily found in many languages online in PDF format by a simple Google search... to save time, here are copies in French, Spanish, English and Esperanto.