Saturday 17 May 2014

Time For A Language Project?

My dear friends, I have been thinking (miracles do happen from time to time). My fingers are itching for a new language project, but I do not know where to start. One thing is sure, I will not start a new language as I have more than one language that I could improve - I don't think that I need to know more languages.

Quality over quantity is the keyword this time. I do not need to impress anyone with the quantity of languages that I speak - I prefer to be able to show that I speak them well. 

So. Where do we stand at the moment? (obviously at some crazy place as I'm speaking of myself in the plural). Swedish, Finnish and English are OK. Of course they could be improved. I don't think that an effort put into mother tongues or advanced languages is ever wasted. But they are OK. Spanish, Russian, Polish. I know them well, but have forgotten a lot. They need to be improved. Hungarian, Slovak: need to be improved even more. And then there's French and Germany, languages that I learnt at school and would like to be able to read in. Or at least order coffee :)

So, now I need tips. 

How would you organize a project for improving your skills in 5-7 languages? There is no need to worry too much about grammar, so it is mainly the vocabulary that needs improvement.  

1 comment:

Natalie said...

I'd recommend lots of reading in order to learn vocabulary. I use a program called Anki to organize my sentences and words that I learn and I think it works out pretty well. I also do a lot of extensive reading--as in, I don't try to understand every single word, but the sentence as a whole, which helps me learn new words in context.