Linglot

Linglot.com is now dofollow, meaning whenever someone posts a comment here with a link to their website, Google and other search engines will follow that link and calculate it into their scoring system. By default, Wordpress is nofollow, to reduce spam, and any links left by commenters are not followed by search engines.

People with quality language-learning sites and blogs who leave quality comments should have a dofollow link back to their site. I think it helps to grow the language-learning community and to build a powerful network of quality sites.

So, please comment away with good quality comments and you shall be rewarded. Spammers, however, shall receive no mercy and will meet the pointy end of a very sharp stick.

I think it’s fun to read about people who have made significant achievements in the language-learning world. It’s inspiring to know that learning two, three, four, or even more languages is definitely possible, and is something that people today are accomplishing. You may have heard of Cardinal Mezzofanti, who was a priest that mastered a huge number of languages. In fact, during his time and earlier, it was pretty common for most people in Europe to speak a handful of languages.

But nowadays, the art of language-learning has decreased dramatically, with most people being able to speak only one or two. Americans especially are “crippled” in this area, and the majority of us can only speak our native language–English.

Ryan over at The Linguist Blogger has compiled a list of modern people who have learned how to speak multiple languages fluently. A good number of Americans are in that list, and it’s cool to read about them. Hopefully they can act as role models for us to get in gear and start learning some languages.

My sister married a Hispanic man who was born and raised here in the US, and who grew up in a bilingual home. So far they have had two kids, and he has made no effort to teach them Spanish. Just about the only Spanish they’ve learned they have gotten from their grandmother, myself, and by watching Dora the Explorer. Why doesn’t my brother-in-law teach them?

I mean, at this stage in their lives their minds are like sponges–they absorb EVERYTHING. Why not take the chance to soak up some Spanish with that sponge? So far they’ve learned how to count up to about twelve I think, and say other miscellaneous words they learned from watching TV. How hard is it to teach them a phrase or two here and there? When I asked him why he wasn’t teaching his kids Spanish, he just sort of shrugged it off.

Now, I know that a lot of bilingual people do raise bilingual children. I also know that there are a lot who don’t even bother–people like my brother-in-law. When I have kids, I’ll be sure to teach them what I learned. I wish I had someone to teach me another language or two when I was little; it is so much easier at that stage.

Hello everyone,

As you know, it’s been about 3 months now since this blog was updated last. There’s a good reason for that. The past 3 months have been a bit rough for me, and I haven’t had the time or ability to be able to update this blog, unfortunately. In February I was in a car accident and was put out of action for a while. Fortunately I wasn’t hurt but I did have to worry about getting the cars involved repaired and whatnot. Curse this state and its evil icy weather!

Anyways, with that and having to get caught back up with school and other things I just haven’t had the time to write for this blog and work on my language-learning . But now, things are much better and I plan to continue with working on language instruction, especially with college letting out in a couple weeks. I’m getting a little rusty already and I’ll need to review some stuff I’m afraid.

On another note, I’m thinking about taking some language classes at my local university this fall. They offer a number of courses, including Arabic, Chinese, German, and Spanish. Arabic might be a fun choice, but I don’t know if it would be worth the time/money to take such a class, and according to reviews on RateMyProfessors.com the instructor for the class is less-than-ideal.

Plus, I’ve been doing pretty well (in my opinion) so far without having taken any language “classes”, so maybe it would be more worthwhile to invest in more learning material instead of paying for the tuition of what could turn out to be a mediocre-quality class. I dunno, we’ll see.

I came across this somewhere on the wide world of the Internet–I don’t remember where–and I thought it was interesting. I like things like this, maps and charts and whatnot about languages.

A while back I posted a map of the languages in Europe. This one is an Indo-European language “family tree.” Looks kinda neat don’t you think? It’s interesting how this group of languages is just a tiny branch in the huge tree of language.