Navajo

I am tired of hearing people evaluate languages as difficult or easy. It really doesn't matter. All it does is to scare people. :-(
So, no, I don't want to know that Navajo is one of the hardest languages to learn for an English speaker. I am not an English speaker. I'm a Finnish speaker. As far as I know, EVERY LANGUAGE (except Estonian and Sami) is "difficult" to learn for a Finnish speaker. I still get articles and prepositions wrong, and will continue doing so for the rest of my life, because... it's just something that has to be grown into. But, I learned more and more. When I die, I will be making fewer mistakes :-D

Anyway, Navajo.
I found the Wind Talkers story fascinating, so I want to learn Navajo.

Navajo language at Omniglot
It's a bit hard knowing that most non-European languages have been written by Europeans (whether they were born in Europe or several generations later somewhere else), with a European mindset, so they were forcing the language to fit their expectations of what language should be and how it should function, but they were ignoring small details because they didn't understand their importance... :-(
But... let's trust two things here. 1) languages are living things - the literature, grammar, and writing systems can change. 2) as long as people speak these languages as their mother tongue, these languages can survive the abuse from white people.

Navajo resources:
http://www.native-languages.org/navajo.htm
https://navajowotd.com/
Navajo at Forvo
Navajo at Wikipedia
Navajo language learners' community on Reddit
Let's Talk Navajo with some lessons
Navajo at Memrise
https://navajonow.com
Talking Navajo before you know it - booklet and course at Memrise
Some Navajo texts
Navajo language apps

Mastering the more difficult Navajo sounds

Language learning tips

 So... I was studying kanji, and thought about the Chinese word 白 bái. It has over 20 different meanings in English, and how screwed one would be if one learned all the different meanings by heart... and how screwed one would be if one didn't learn any of them, because "one cannot say one knows a language unless one knows all the different meanings of a word and how it is used in context, with other words etc. etc. etc." 
No, you don't need to know ALL the different forms and ways of every word. It is quite enough to learn "白 - snow, white". All the different meanings will come clear (白) in the future as you learn more. And in the future the meaning "白 anti-Communist" becomes clear 白 and obvious. I as a Finn know this already. ;-) We use the word "white" in the same sense.

So, go ahead and learn L2 words as direct translations of the L1 words. It won't harm you, limit you, make it harder to learn a language etc. etc. as all the nay-sayers and fear mongerers say.

30 Incredibly Effective Tips and Tricks to Learn a New Language
(I am posting the list here, because sometimes pages disappear. There is a lot more information on the site, so do follow the link.)

1. Choose a Word of the Day
2. Practice With Native Speakers.
3. Take Notes Whenever You Connect With The Language
(watching television, YouTube, internet surfing, reading, listening, on the bus etc. etc.)
4. Sink or Swim/All or Nothing
(move to a place where target language is spoken and refuse to speak any other language)
5. Learn Cognates
6. Use an App
7. Focus on What’s Relevant/Most Important To You
8. Set up a Routine
9. Find and Attend Local Events
10. Remember why you started
11. Track Your Progress
12. Learn the Phrase “How do you say X?”
13. Learn What You Need
14. Pace Yourself: One Step at a Time (5-15 minutes of intensive studies 10 times during a day is more worth than 3 hours block of studies).
15. Study smarter, not harder.
16. Be kind to yourself - it's OK to make mistakes, you are learning, not mastering
17. Watching, reading, listening, and talking about the news in your new language
18. Food - cooking and eating
19. Use your social intelligence, intuition and natural instincts to interpret social situations; works both in real life social interaction and tv series/movies/videos
20. Watch Movies (Remember, there's the right way and the wrong way of doing this, too. Or the effective, functional way and the ineffective way with little if any results.)
21. Believe in Yourself
22. recreational entertainment in new language
23. Enough.
You have enough, enough time, resources, intelligence, talents, memory, what ever is needed to learn a new language.
Also, five new words is enough. Five minutes is enough. You CAN learn 100 words in an hour, but you don't need to. It's enough to learn five new words every day. Or less. It's enough.
24. Be Kind to Yourself
It's OK to make mistakes.
Slow is good enough.
Focus on what you have achieved, what you do, not on what you might/could/should.
25. role play in your new language, alone or with friends
26. Flashcards
27. Storytelling
28. Learn with a friend
29. Learn Synonyms (Er... I'm not convinced. But try it out.)
30. Immersion - AJATT

Some other ideas:

31. Eavesdrop on Local’s Conversations
32. Re-read Your Favorite Children’s Books in Your New Language
33. Start With High Frequency Words and Phrases.
34. Passive listening
35. Study pronunciation
36. Use all ways of learning; auditory, visual, tactile, reading-writing...
37. Learn Esperanto
38. Set Specific, Measurable Goals. (Instead of "learn French", "Learn 50 French food vocabulary terms and how to use them when at restaurant and cooking")
39. Carry a pocket dictionary
40. Make It Fun - Produce language in a fun way; write songs, comic strips, play, podcast, poem, short story... what ever rocks your boat.

DO NOT use the diglot weave technique. (replacing words in L1 with the same words in L2 - "Do you know where maito is? I need some for my kahvi." Don't mix languages, to support your brain to keep the different languages separate and to automate the language production. If you teach yourself to mix the languages, you will not be learning any new words, because your brain tells you the different language words are just synonyms. You will be talking Frenglish or Farsitalian or something. I know this, because I'm speaking triglot weave. I use the language I remember, be it Finnish, Swedish or English. Because most people I communicate with knows all three. (That is, my family. >:->) It makes it really hard to try to remember the correct word when speaking with monolinguals.)


Other things to think about: Why I Taught Myself 20 Languages by Timothy Doner
Just remember that when you start whining about knowing languages and fluency.

Aklo

"However this idea (of a fictional language) only really began to take proper shape as a literary motif in Gulliver’s Travels and the 1899 short story “The White People” in which the fictitious Aklo was introduced proving so popular, that it was subsequently borrowed by other novelists such as H.P Lovecraft in his two books “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Haunter of the Dark”. It also made a more contemporary appearance in Alan Moore’s “The Courtyard”.
- The Rise of Fictitious Languages by Anantha Anilkumar
in Olavian Duolingo Magazine Volume I Summer 2015

"I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs."
Mentioning of Aklo in The White People by Arthur Machen 

On the evening of September 2nd the last major barrier gave way, and Dr. Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley’s annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly shewing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.

    “Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth,” it ran, “which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins’ collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won’t. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can’t break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May-Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.”

Aklo in The Dunwich Horror by H.P.Lovecraft

"It was in June that Blake’s diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way through previous researches."

Mention of Aklo in The Haunter of the Dark by H. P. Lovecraft

Wikipedia article about Aklo

H.P.Lovecraft Wiki's article about Aklo

luis-gonza asked:
Hi David! What do you think about Aklo conlang? Do you know where I can learn it?

You know, I did a brief search, and I don’t think there’s one answer to this. For example, I thought you meant the Aklo language created by friend Britton Watkins for Marx Pyle’s Cthulhu series, but I don’t think it ever came into existence, so I don’t think there’s any info about the language on the web. So if it wasn’t that, I’m not sure what you could be after.
If you’re talking about the original stuff in the Cthulhu story, that’s just gibberish; not a conlang.
I’m sure there have been others who have tried to turn it into a conlang, though I haven’t heard of any projects other than Marx and Britton’s.

David J. Peterson's Tumblr

So... how ever intriguing this is, it doesn't exist, and I'm not accepting the idea of someone creating Aklo. There's bound to be people, but you will know they are lying. ;-)

P.S. "Upon discovering Finnish, Tolkien felt a sensation he described later as  "like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."
Yes. Exactly. That's the feeling. So go learn languages.

Is it worth it?

Someone asked a question "is learning ------ (language) worth it?"
The answer is "yes". It doesn't matter which language it is.
Now, there are some people who don't understand how languages work, who will tell you it's useless to study anything else than Power languages and come up with idiotic parallels, like "it's like physical exercise, learning an isolated language is like doing some petty little movement with your hand, and learning a big language is like doing whole body exercise, it's obvious you get more use of the whole body exercise". No. Languages are not like a physical exercise in that way. The effect on your brain is the same whether you learn a big, strong, living language or an extinct, tiny language with no relations to any modern language. You will still get all the benefits of the "physical exercise".

Learning languages as a shy introvert misanthrope

Learning Chinese as an introverted student

I don't chat with people, even in languages I know. I hate chatting. I hate talking in the phone. I won't Skype. I hate Skyping even with my family.
I don't do Meetups.
Sure, all these are really great suggestions for people who wish to learn to communicate in a foreign language, because there is bound to be at least a couple of people near you who speak the language you are learning, at least if it's a language with more than a million speakers.

I live in Södertälje, which is a small town in Sweden. In Sweden there's a law that says all the children has to be able to study their native language, if it's
a) an official language in Sweden (Swedish, Finnish, Meänkieli (Torne valley Finnish), Sami, Romani and Yiddish)
b) Nordic language (Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic)
c) there is more than five children in the school district speaking the language as their mothertongue. The most common immigrant/refugee languages in Sweden are Finnish, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegran and Serbian), Kurdish, Polish, Spanish, Farsi, German, Danish and Norwegian. Now, they are currently seeking for Mothertongue teachers in Indonesian, Pashto, Mongolian, Somalian, Turkish and Neo-Aramaic.
If I wanted to, there's quite a lot of languages around me.

Language skills consist of four areas; listening, reading, writing and speaking.
Most shy introvert misanthropes aren't interested in learning languages to be able to communicate with other people, but to be able to collect information in that language - possible also to "collect languages", to learn a language just because they can, because it's there and "fuck you, that's why". Now, if this is your motivation to learn a language, speaking it is not interesting at all.
You won't EVER be traveling in a country where people speak this language, you won't EVER be interacting with real people, being polite and social, and using the spoken language to be understood.
So

THERE IS NO REASON WHAT SO EVER 

FOR A SHY INTROVERT MISANTHROPE 

TO LEARN TO SPEAK A LANGUAGE.

Fascinating, isn't it?
99% of language learning advice tells you to start speaking as soon as possible.
But think if you were to learn Latin or Biblical Hebrew. These are "dead languages". There have been no people alive speaking either of these languages as their native language, mother tongue, for some 2000 years. We don't know how to speak either of these languages.
For all practical reasons ANY pronunciation is as good a guess as any other.
Now, some of these pronunciations are PROBABLY better guesses than others, and there are people who use both of these languages regularly, so there is a generally accepted pronunciation. Nevertheless, no-one requires you can speak either language to be able to say you know either language. You just need to be able to read and write.
Now, I wouldn't say you know Finnish, if you can't speak it, but... if you may count Latin just by reading and writing, you should be able to count ANY language is you just read and write it.
(Or if the language doesn't have a writing system, THEN you should be able to speak it. It's a bit irrelevant for this topic, though. Most shy introvert misanthropes won't be learning some languages without written form.)

But - can you learn to SPEAK a language without EVER speaking with another person?
I say, yes. 
1) IPA - the phonetic alphabet actually IS good enough to give anyone good enough pronunciation of words written in phonetic alphabet.
2) You get the intonation right by listening and repeating after native speakers. There is a LOT of languages with at least some sentences spoken in the language. Omniglot has the "Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in quite a many language, both written and spoken. Record yourself and compare to the native speaker, and correct yourself until you can read the text together with the native speaker and you pronounce the words the same.
3) You can converse with yourself. Pretend to be a lot of people and speak for all of them. You can even replay scenes from movies or books.
No-one ever needs to hear you speak. No-one ever needs to correct your speech.

Aaaannd... it's over.

There's still some occasional flashes of fire, but basically the language rush of Spring 2018 is over.

Here's some interesting stuff: 20 slang Malaysians love to use

Made me interested in Malay

Camila Gallardo & Antonio José - No Es Real

Es difícil pensar
Que tu boca y la mía se puedan besar a diario
Que vivamos juntitos, enterito el calendario
Que me arropes de noche y me dibujes con tus manos
Me colorees con tus labios

It's hard to think

how your mouth and mine can kiss daily

how we live together, the whole calendar?

how you tuck me in at night and draw me with your hands,

color me with your lips

Es difícil pensar
Que mañana mi cama amanezca desordenada
Tu piel de desayuno y mil flores en la ventana
Con la tarde esperando en la puerta de nuestra casa
Por tu llegada

how in the morning my bed dawns messy,

your skin for breakfast and a thousand flowers in the window,

with the afternoon waiting at the door of our house for your arrival

Hoy no estarás, tampoco estarás mañana
Nos queremos enredar
Pero te quiero aquí, tú me quieres allá

Today you won't be, not tomorrow either,

we want to entangle

but I want you here, you want me there

Este amor es posible, pero no es real
En cualquier momento se nos va a acabar
Ay, mira como lamento
Quererte así, como te quiero

This love is possible, but it's not real,

at any moment it's going to end

Oh, see how sad

to love you like I love you

Si te digo que no
Que no quiero tenerte tan lejos de mis camelias
Que las flores del jardín se marchitaron sin tu presencia
Ahora busco tu perfume entre la gente con tanta urgencia
Con locura y demencia

If I tell you no

that I don't want you that far away from my camellias

that the flowers in the garden wither without your presence

now I search your perfume among the people with urgency

with madness 

Sé que no estarás
Y también sé que no estarás mañana
Nos queremos engañar
Pero te quiero aquí, tú me quieres allá

I know that you won't be

and I also know that you won't be tomorrow

we want to cheat

but I want you here, you want me there

Este amor no es real
Tarde o temprano se nos va a acabar
Ay, mira como lamento
Quererte así, como te quiero

This love is not real,

sooner or later it is going to end

Oh, see how sad

to love you like I love you

Este amor no es real
Tarde o temprano nos va a lastimar
Ay, mira como lamento
Quererte así, como te quiero

This love is not real,

at any moment it's going to hurt

Oh, see how sad

to love you like I love you

(I don't get this... Is it that they want each other but for some reason can't be together? Why?)

Procrastinating :-)

I have now been procrastinating studying Spanish for two hours - and continue doing it by writing about it. :-D
I'm really clever... I procrastinate by READING about STUDYING LANGUAGES, so I'm kind of still doing what I'm supposed to be doing, aren't I :-D

This was very interesting:
https://www.mezzoguild.com/language-learning-plateau/
Started watching the Arnold video, which is unnecessary, because the guy explains it in the article, but, hey, it was interesting, and... er... *blush*

Then I read this one: http://www.lindsaydoeslanguages.com/guest-post-9-reasons-to-learn-greek-the-best-resources-to-learn-it/

And also wound up thinking about the usefulness of word frequency lists.

Yes, I think they are useful, because they give you the frame to read extensively, and reduce the amount of words one needs to figure out, and considering that a lot of words in most languages are loans which sound similar enough, it won't be too hard.

Also, the point with frequency lists is that it's the BEGINNING, it's a STEP, it's not an end goal. You learn the 1000 most common words to be able to quickly start reading extensively, and WHEN YOU READ EXTENSIVELY, YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW AND UNDERSTAND EVERY WORD YOU READ. You ARE just supposed to get an idea of what is going on. Get used to reading the language. Get used to the shape of the language. Get used to the correct grammar.

I mean... I have been watching El ministerio del tiempo, and I really don't know much Spanish. But I understand enough of what is going on to be interested and want to see more. I have a general understanding of what the show is about and who the characters are.
I am reading Le secret de Ji in French and I understand what is going on. I'm 100% sure that when reading the books in English, I get even more and perhaps find out things that are going to surprise me, but I don't think there will be many surprises.
I was watching this Turkish series, and now I found the first episode texted in English, and I had understood most of it in just Turkish. Enough to feel confident to watch the rest of it in Turkish without subtitles.

So - now I have managed to procrastinate for 3 hours :-D
Another good way of procrastinating is having a Sunday breakfast with your beloved spouse :-D

Thoughts about Chinese... and some other languages.

Chinese... I have learned the about 50 characters I have encountered so far.
But I just know the characters. I don't know their names and the names mean nothing to me. I mean... xiao? I suppose it means something. I have heard it. I don't know what it means. Or zai. Or ba. I think that might be eight. It might be something else, also. And it's possible it's not just ba, but bai or something else. And don't ask me about the tone. I wouldn't know. Could be third. Or not. (It is ba and the tone is first, which is what I meant, which means that I don't even know what "third tone" is... *sigh* Not good. :-D)
But I like Chinese. I want to learn it. I want to be able to read it and speak it and understand it.

Now, Arabic I don't like. I think it sounds ugly and the writing is stupid - and ugly - most people making notes in Arabic write like 3rd graders just learning to write cursive. Crude and ugly and uneven. My father had the world's most beautiful handwriting, and he is my ideal. I want to be able to write Arabic as my father would have written it, had he known how to write Arabic.
Now, I want to learn Arabic though. Because of two reasons. 1) I started learning it when I was about 15, and I would like to finish what I started, especially when it comes to languages and 2) I have serious problems with the Arabic part of Maltese, and it's easier to learn Arabic than Maltese. I seriously hope it will help me learn Maltese. If not, I'm going to be pretty angry and feel cheated.

Now, most of the reasons people give to why others should learn Arabic are uninteresting to me. I am not Muslim nor will I ever be. I am not planning on living or traveling in Arabic speaking countries. Now, I live in an area with predominantly Syriacs or Assyrians, who speak mostly Arabic or Aramaic (Syryoyo), and understanding them would be really nice... because I'm pretty sure they are saying nasty things about non-Syriacs, including me. It would be nice to be proven wrong about that.
That there is a lot of idioms in Arabic - there's a lot of idioms in every language. Duh.
That the grammar is easy and everything builds on core words, sure. Nice. But that's not a reason to learn a language.

Now, Korean I find very interesting. The writing is simple, easy, logical and looks nice. It sounds... odd. Unfamiliar. The sounds, the way of speaking, the language itself, is unfamiliar, and intriguing. I find it difficult to learn because I can't find a handle... I suppose it's just to parrot sentences until they start making sense, and that doesn't feel good to me.

But, but... too much procrastinating here, already. My 15 minutes pause has long passed :-D Back to studying.

Solresol

I am really in love with this language :-) It makes me so happy!

A Reprise for a 19th-Century Language Based on Music

Sidosi - the official home page for promotion of this language

Mithridates, Master of Languages

"Mithridates VI of Pontus could speak the languages of all the twenty-two nations he governed"
Now… does that mean he could speak 22 languages? And what were these languages? It's a pity Pliny didn't tell. :-D


Mithridates, Master of Languages

There are several speculations about the list of languages, but here’s my suggestion :-D

Probably Latin
Greek
Lycaonian, possibly a Greek dialect
Cappadocian and Phrygian. Possibly related to Greek
Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, Pisidian; Anatolian languages
Mysian, Pamphylian, Isaurian and Paphlagonian (Palaic) – unknown, possibly related to Anatolian languages or Greek
Galatian (Celtic)
Urartian
Thynian and Bithynian (Thracian)
Armenian
Scythian
Median, Gurani, Zaza, Parthian (North-Western Iranian languages)
Persian
Georgian, Meshketian, Mingrelian, Svan, Zan (Kartvelian languages)
Abkhaz
and
Aramaic

10,000 Flashcards in One Month (Guest Post)

April 29, 2017 / by Author Matthew Hawkins
reposted here because the Matthew Hawkins' blog where I first encountered this isn't there any more

And why you shouldn’t do 10,000 flashcards in one month

So I just finished absorbing over 10,000 German flashcards and you know what? It wasn’t too terrible, wasn’t life-changing either. To attempt it you’d have to be insane, desperate or just plain bored out of your verdammt Gehirn! In this fabulous region of this sporadic and, at times, inspirational blog I’ll be talking about my beginner steps to German language acquisition, how successful it’s been and of course, the big 10k.

Of course I’ve been following the fantastiche AJATT/Krashen input-above-all method and have been for 2 months prior to blitzing the cards, which might be the reason for any success at all. For some important background, the deck I used was not of my own creation and has been very popular on the Anki shared decks page for a good year or so. (It is not there anymore)

Now those of you that have any idea of how successful language acquisition works will know that just pulling in other people’s work is much less effective than making it yourself, for clear reasons I will now explain:

    Little to no context to you. A picture of a dog could mean so many things to different people, for example.

    No love or passion went into the cards, therefore you won’t enjoy reviewing them.

    Half of the learning comes from making the cards, by exporting that essential process you lose half the gain.

These are obvious looking back, hindsight is 20/20, but from the view of a language noob (i.e. me before the 10k) having the effort to compose 10 thousand cards placed upon someone else is a dream come true. After all, why should I waste time and energy when I could be enjoying myself playing games or watching movies in my target language?

    Nobody can teach you as well as you can teach yourself 

– Principle #1 of Adam Robinson’s What Smart Students Know.

These wise words of wisdom ring true in all aspects of learning. In my attempt to be efficient and in a way, cheat the system, I had been doing the opposite. Learning has to be an engaging activity in a way that appeals to your interests and personality, using a shared deck is as cold and uninteresting as a textbook.

So it was a complete failure?!

No, but it wasn’t a success either. I attribute the 70% German I acquired over this period of time to films, games and audio content. The remaining 30% could have been thanks to the deck? Perhaps? Maybe? It’s hard to tell. As I breeze through the deck now, I understand the majority with ease and it was like that from the very beginning. This could have been down to previous input, or more likely, the cards are just too simple.

A well known component of the Krashen method is learning at an i+1 level, this basically means that if your competence is at level i then you should be consuming/absorbing/devouring content +1 level higher. The deck I was using had the progression of an African land snail and the slope of Flatland.

But you were rushing it!

Yes, the pace I took was also to blame and why the hell was I doing it that fast anyway?! Well for the little gain I was receiving from these basic cards, I wasn’t getting that feel-good confidence boost that keeps the persistence on. I decided to rush more and more cards each day until inevitably I did the math and found I could do all 10k within a month.

“Sure!” I thought, “That would give me more time for other things and I can be super great at German faster than any man before”. How naive I was, alas my dream of mastering German quickly was crushed when I reached the last card in the deck and thought “Is that all?”.

If you applied the brakes and took your time with a shared deck like this, you might have a chance at picking up more, depending on your proficiency and the quality of the deck, but for me it was all mostly for naught.

Top 5 Tips for getting good the proper way:

    INPUT – Fill your head like a database of random, interesting, natural language and eventually when you need to say something, that smart noggin of yours will find it.

    MNEMONICS – Use the memory techniques proven to work, flashcards are especially known to be effective in language learning and even more so if you do them properly. For a really good read on being successful here, check out Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever.

    FUN – If you aren’t having fun or gaining anything, don’t do it! Find something that is and you will learn a gajillion times faster.

    MAKE IT HABITUAL – Habits are the best way to keep pushing towards success, this ties in with fun. Getting addicted to things in your target language ensures you’re making progress.

    IT TAKES TIME – Don’t be impatient like me, if you want to get good, you have to put in the time.

And that’s all for this absolutely 100% accurate and indisputable post.

Viel Spaß!

B.R.

10.000 sentences... in one month?

10.000 Flashcards In One Month - and why you shouldn't do it

10.000 sentences... Let's say every sentence is five words long. Some are longer, some are shorter, but the average length of English sentences is five words. That's 50.000 words. That's a NaNoWriMo novel... :-D But, an average page in a book has some 300 words. 10.000 sentences give a book with 167 pages. Here's a list of 20 Best Books Under 200 Pages.
I wonder if I picked one of these books and read it every day in the language I'm trying to learn, how much would I remember at the end of the month? And how much language would I learn?

One could take The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, though that's a bit too short...

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing
Boxing the Compass by Sandy Florian
The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
Sula by Toni Morrison
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Wide Sargasso Sea by  Jean Rhys
The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Wilful Disregard by Lena Andersson
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

A lot of children's books have about 200 pages. I think Eva Ibbotson's children's books have about 250 pages each. Quick, short and - IMHO - enjoyable reading. Something I could reread every day for 30 days :-D

En español

Lave los platos.
Dejé caer la tapa del plato de mantequilla en mi dedo pequeño. Duele. Mucho.
Luego agudé el cuchillo. Soy bueno en afilar cuchillos. Estoy orgulloso de esa.

Ahora volvamos a estudiar. Mi dedo pequeño duele. :-(

Thoughts about the 6 weeks' challenge

I have a plan on how to use the six weeks the most effective way. There is though a small problem there. How to learn to read a language is VERY DIFFERENT from how to learn to speak a language. And I want both... :-(

Here's something about how to learn to speak a language

One important difference is that if you want to learn to read fiction, you will get very sufficient with past tense in third person singular. When you speak, you use mostly first person singular in present tense.
The vocabulary is very different from every day speech to literacy. When you speak you use very simple language, ignore grammar, don't give a crap about such things like artistic expression and style, the word frequency lists are your friend and you can manage with phrase  book samples and replacing words in sentences. When you read, you are trying to understand the language of someone who is very adequate in using it, who cares a lot about grammar (or whose editor does), the style, impression and expression are important, the words are much more variable and difficult, and you don't get to ask for clarification, explain anything, or even speak.
So... when people are learning a language, they should actually be getting into hacking the language.
And, I... I just want to read and receive information. And there... there really are no shortcuts. I wish there was some sort of upload pack. :-( I don't do much with phrases and frequency lists...
But... 90% of free language courses are created for people who want to learn to speak the language... that is, not for me.

But, but... my 6 weeks challenge plan is based on all this, and it will make me able to use the language in all possible ways. It just causes some problems, because I have to change my attitude. I have attitude problems :-D