My New Interests

Okay, every other day, I get into something different.  Oh well.  It’s Polyglot DREAMS, remember?  LOL

Anyways, I have somehow gotten myself interested in the Assimil programs.  I am working semi-actively on French and Spanish.  I have decided I want to work with Platiquemos for Spanish, and Assimil for French.  I am borrowing the Assimil French from the local library.  Platiquemos is compliments (or is it complements? – whatever) of my donkey friends.

Tonight, I did Platiquemos Unit 2.  (I’m planning to do a Unit a day, at least until I decide it’s too much.  My Spanish is relatively solid in alot of areas (and relatively weak in others).  I certainly don’t want to go to slow, or I will get bored and drop it.  (Like everything else I do!  LOL)   If I keep up with that schedule, I’ll be done in 7 weeks.  If it gets harder and becomes more of a challenge at some point, I’ll slow down to a comfortable pace.

I did the first four lessons of Assimil French today.  Passive.  I am going to follow the idea of the book, and work on the passive first, then add the active phase later.  I will do a few lessons a day until I start working on new material, at which point I will slow down.  I expect the first 20-30 lessons will go quickly after that, but then I will need to slow down.  We’ll see.

I have been throwing the idea of a Germanic language around for a long time, and German would be the obvious choice.  But for some reason, I have NO linguistic interest in German.  I’m not sure why, but I feel like it’s “necessary” if I want to be multi-lingual.  French, German, and Spanish – those are the ones I would have to do first.  But German holds little appeal for me.  I got ahold of the Assimil Dutch program (thanks again to my donkey friends), and I went through the first lesson of that tonight as well.

I doubt the Dutch thing will last, at least at the moment.  Maybe in the future, once I reach a decent level in Spanish and French, I can study it more seriously.  It’s kind of funny.  For the longest time, I had no interest in learning French.  Most French-speakers look down on Americans butchering their language, and I wanted NO part of that.  At the time, I was looking at resources for the Kazakh language, and a friend of mine has an audio/book program for it, but its in French.  So I decided to learn French.  Now, my reasons for learning French are much more than that, but I thought it was funny that’s where my original inspiration came from.

I am just ITCHING to learn Russian.  I got ahold of Harry Potter in Russian, both the books and the audiobooks, and I want to learn it so badly.  I am waiting to get ahold of the Assimil Russian – the OLD version, not the new.  I’ve got the audio, but I’m still looking for the book.   I’ve studied Russian a little in the past, so going into it won’t be as scary as if I’ve never looked at the language.

We’ll see.  Hopefully I can at least half-way keep up with my Spanish and French studies.  I have a load of eBay stuff to do, which I hope to have done this week, but after that I’m allowing myself at least 90 minutes a day to study.  (If my kids will go to bed by midnight, anyways!)