11-11-11

Is this day magical? Not more or less than any other. After all, those numbers are just... numbers.

I haven't been "studying" languages today. I have been translating some English (My NaNoWriMo project this year is to translate a kids' book to Finnish, and I am translating a chapter every day.) But that doesn't count. It's work, not studying ;-)

I'm still horribly frustrated with the slow advancement in French. I've been putting some extra effort on it for the last 11 days, and... uh. Frankly, that's about 3-4 hours every day, and as there are two days with practically nothing done (don't know about you, but I don't study languages with migraine) so, it makes about 5 hours a day so far... I should be able to put in a couple of hours more, so I suppose I need to take myself on my neck (Swedish idiom?) and structure my work better and actually work.

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Anyway, I've been reading the Polyglot Project, and I was thinking about fluency. No amount of studying and passive usage of language (reading/listening) has made me fluent. It has given me a strong base, but the only way to get fluent is by actively using the language. (writing/speaking).
Now, I can understand why people don't go out and speak with people, even though that would be the best way of building a functional language, because I suffer from bad agoraphobia, and I won't go out. I won't even chat with people, even though that might be the answer to some people, for example those who are bedbound. I have Asperger's as well, and I never know what to say.

Of course it would be better to argue using the language, because then your motivation to speak is the highest, and you'd be surprised to find out how much you actually know, when you MUST find the words... we have a huge passive vocabulary, which is just waiting, like Sleeping Beauty, to be kissed (or kicked) awake and taken into use.

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I found the book, "Languages of Asia and the Pacific - A Travellers' Phrasebook" by Charles Hamblin. He mentions Archibald Lyall's "Languages of Europe" as one of the predecessors and "role models" of his 25 languages quick overlook...

I wanted to write a book like this about the European languages (all 200-300 of them) and then I thought that I might separate them into four groups:
Northern Europe and British Isles
Central and Eastern Europe
South-Western Europe
and Southern Europe and Mediterranea

I wonder if I can find 25 languages for the first book, or limit the languages in South-Western Europe part. :-D