Linglot

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. I’ve been pretty occupied lately, working on school plus doing other things. Also, 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.

I’m an aspiring medical student, and this semester I’m taking Anatomy and Physiology II. Last semester I took A & P I, but this semester’s class has a lot of terminology to learn. Something I’ve found interesting is that a huge number of the medical terms I’m learning are scarily similar to Spanish words I’ve learned.

That would make sense, though, because most medical terms are either Latin or Greek, and Spanish is derived from Latin, so the two languages are pretty similar. I’m glad I have a background in Spanish, because this class is so much easier with it.

This is why I think public schools should enforce more foreign language education. Learning a foreign language has so many benefits, and they all don’t have to do with the speaking part.

Eleena over at Voices en Español has written an interesting post about the difference between the terms Hispanic and Latino. Here in the United States, most people use the terms interchangeably for people of Latin American descent, but the terms are actually very different. I used to be one of those people who use the term interchangeably, until I read this post.

Kudos to Eleena at Voices en Español for another interesting post!

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.