learn more languages

Looks like My Happy Planet could be a good bet for me improving and practicing languages… I might be interested in dabbling in Mandarin and Arabic, as well as the obvious choice (for me) of French. Just gotta wait for it to come out of it’s closed beta state to actually try the thing out!

I’ve decided this is my goal: to be a communicator. So if I make it back to school for any length of time (either filling in some time, or to actually do a 2nd undergrad degree) I’ll be picking up French again and hopefully learning Spanish. I think those two tongues make as much sense as anything at this point. If I stay in Canada, the French is helpful. If I move to the US, the Spanish will certainly be helpful.

I want to be able to reach people. Having multiple tools to do this can only be helpful, right?

I’ve been finding lots of online resources for learning/improving languages. Most recently a number of French ones, since I’m focussing primarily on French for now.

Here’s a place to start for a number of languages and has general information on languages across Europe. I hope this helps somebody!

BBC – Languages (opens in a new window)

Originally I chose a few languages to add to my 43 things list, then I realised that I would like to know a lot about a lot of languages! So why limit myself?

I already have studied French (in what appears to be a past life) and am trying to spend time with it regularly… being fluent in French is a separate goal.

It seems I just want to be able to communicate any way that I can! I now wish that I had taken all the language courses I could in high school, and hadn’t avoided them totally in university. (Stupid shyness!)

Well, I know little pieces (tiny, tiny ones) of Polish and even smaller fragments of Swedish. My limited Italian comes from growing up in what was once an Italian neighbourhood, and also from musical terms and opera texts. It’s a beautiful language, and that alone makes me want to speak it. Spanish is widely spoken around the world, as is German. Then there are languages of the Bible like Greek and Hebrew. And languages of increasing world importance like Arabic. And all of that is just the tip of the linguistic iceberg.

So much to learn, so little time. sigh