Jan 29 2008

Choosing a Language

Published by Zach at 5:02 pm under Language

This can be a tough decision for people. There are so many awesome languages out there, and the decision-making process can be overwhelming. I guess that a good thing to do if you’re starting out is to choose a language fairly close to your own, and one that would be useful for your job or future. For example, if you live in the United States, Spanish could be a starting point.

Spanish is so similar to English it’s crazy. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of words that are the exact same in Spanish, if it weren’t for a letter or accent character. Since English is derived partially from Latin, it shares a common history with Spanish and the other Romance languages. Although, I think Spanish is the closest to English than say, French.

And of course, there’s no reason why you can’t learn more than one language at a time. If you could set aside 1 hour a day, for example, and dedicate 20 minutes to each language, you could study three languages at a time. I do this, currently studying Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Arabic.

I tend to spend more time on the other two, though, because I’m at the advanced level in Spanish and am running out lessons and things to study. I often have Spanish radio or TV (Univisión) running in the background during the day, so I guess that could be considered study time.

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2 Responses to “Choosing a Language”

  1. Bilingual Bloggeron 02 Feb 2008 at 2:34 pm

    Zach,
    How are you finding Arabic? An ex-boyfriend of mine was from Lebanon and he tried to teach me a few words and phrases in Arabic but I had difficulty wrapping my tongue around it. Arabic (along with Japanese and Chinese) strike me as incredibly difficult languages for English-speakers to learn because they are languages so dramatically different from English and Romance languages.

  2. Zachon 05 Feb 2008 at 3:24 pm

    Yup, Arabic is very tough. I’m doing alright with the speaking part, but the writing system just throws me off. It’s so complex, plus there’s the reading/writing right-to-left thing. I haven’t been spending a lot of time on it lately, and have been focusing more on Romance languages–Brazilian Portuguese mostly.

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