There was no chance to actually speak or consolidate anything we went over we just bounded at speed through the material. I wish I’d had this to show him back then.

Right now I’m learning Korean, as of last week (I’ll be getting there in February), and I’m hoping (and from pictures I’ve seen, thinking) that the font they actually use isn’t too different from what I’ve found in my book.

Thanks

Anyway, I’m still not fluent at all in any of the last 3 languages and that’s mainly because of shyness and perfectionism. The fear of being judged/ridiculed by native speakers is too big. I think if you study a language for more than a year and still aren’t able to hold a conversation then you have to overthink the reasons (mostly fears) that hold you back. 

 One question: You list 8 languages that you can speak fluently but you managed to do a lot of challenges in various other languages – how do you keep these new languages “fresh”? You couldn’t be practicing all your freshly learned languages every day, could you?

You’re doing a great job! I’m looking forward to your new challenge! ^_^ 
Greeting from Switzerland ~ 

To compensate for the alphabet, Hebrew has very regular verbs with only past, present, future, and imperative.

Unlike in many countries, Israelis start rolling their eyes when you start speaking Hebrew, and they switch to English (which most natives speak, plus many native English speakers live there). I have found  cab drivers, for some reason, are happy to converse in Hebrew with you and are very helpful. Also get out of the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem urban belt; especially up north fewer Israelis speak English.

A bonus is that after you learn modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew is easy and you can read the Old Testament in the original. (You also have a leg up on Aramaic, if you can find anyone who still speaks it. And you have a good gateway to Arabic, although Arabic is more complicated.)

To compensate for the alphabet, Hebrew has very regular verbs with only past, present, future, and imperative.

Unlike in many countries, Israelis start rolling their eyes when you start speaking Hebrew, and they switch to English (which most natives speak, plus many native English speakers live there). I have found  cab drivers, for some reason, are happy to converse in Hebrew with you and are very helpful. Also get out of the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem urban belt; especially up north fewer Israelis speak English.

A bonus is that after you learn modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew is easy and you can read the Old Testament in the original. (You also have a leg up on Aramaic, if you can find anyone who still speaks it. And you have a good gateway to Arabic, although Arabic is more complicated.)

To compensate for the alphabet, Hebrew has very regular verbs with only past, present, future, and imperative.

Unlike in many countries, Israelis start rolling their eyes when you start speaking Hebrew, and they switch to English (which most natives speak, plus many native English speakers live there). I have found  cab drivers, for some reason, are happy to converse in Hebrew with you and are very helpful. Also get out of the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem urban belt; especially up north fewer Israelis speak English.

A bonus is that after you learn modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew is easy and you can read the Old Testament in the original. (You also have a leg up on Aramaic, if you can find anyone who still speaks it. And you have a good gateway to Arabic, although Arabic is more complicated.)

I couldn’t help but notice that you not only learn the alphabets, but you also learn how to type them…  I’m curious how you manage that?  Certainly in a local internet cafe it wouldn’t be too difficult to write in that language, but (assuming you were answering these comments while in Thailand) you also managed to write in English and Portuguese at the same time.  What keyboard encoding do you use – or more generally – what methods do you use to learn how to type?

When I was in Mexico, the local cafe didn’t have the @ symbol, and I didn’t know how to ask where it was.  (What is the Spanish word for @? Still don’t know)  Apparently they are used to using an alt-code – have you noticed this difficultly elsewhere, and how to you overcome it?

But what about the names of the letters, i.e. consonant names like “ก ไก่” and “ข ไข่” and vowel names like “–า” and “–ำ” – how would remember these through association?

Thanks,
Mads

You can see posts about Hungarian, a recent one about Colombian Spanish, an entire book about German, a post about the Carioca accent in Portuguese etc. I will write about these when the time is right for each language

I don’t remember when and why I learned the Thai script, but being the writing system nerd that I am, it must’ve been back in my school days, maybe 8th or 9th grade. Back than I only remembered the consonants and vowels I needed to write German words in Thai script, and I ignored the tone signs as being mystical altogether.

Now I’m really getting into this and remembered (without relearning them thoroughly in one shot) all the consonants and all the vowel signs, but some di- and triphthongs I’m still a bit unfamiliar with. That will come over time…

About vocabulary: I have a different attempt than you, and it works really well (too). Being familiar with the IPA and being able to read and write this phonetic script fluently, I use ANKI (I guess you must know that vocabulary learning program) to learn Thai words in IPA. It only asks me English→Thai(IPA), on purpose. That way I learn the correct pronunciation quickly, so I can start to have simple conversations with my Thai friends here in a dormitory in Kunming. I asked my friends for the words that I deemed necessary and important (speak, see, hear, go, come, pronouns, today, tomorrow, yesterday, good, bad, book, university, boy, girl, person, dog, and, or, when, why, where etc.) and while saying something and lack a word, I say it in Chinese, waiting for them to tell me the correct Thai word. I only use the dictionary to confirm the tones (which are still sometimes difficult to hear for me).

Now that I use a textbook to actually systematically learning the tone rules as well, I only now begin to know how the words I already know should be written, and vice versa, how the words I sometimes read are pronounced WITH tones.

In my opinion, this is quite a useful way of getting into Thai, when focussing on speaking (as I do), and not on writing so much (because there’s not so much written Thai here in China). As I am planning to spend one or two weeks in Thailand (Kamphaeng Phet and maybe Chonburi) in January ’11, I guess, my Thai will improve quickly and I will have more visual input as well.

BTW, I’d love to read more insightful blog posts about the particular languages you’re learning. It personally interests me more than general suggestions about learning languages.

Greetings from Kunming, China (14°C, sun’s shining)
- André