Personal Quest to Learn Over 20 Languages

So since there is further interest in my language learning here's the thread about it!

So this is basically a goal I've set in my life that may or may not be accomplished but even if I just get to intermediate level in several of them I'll be happy with that. So beyond ASL I'm very much below an advanced level. That's not to say I don't have further things to learn in ASL but I know enough to follow random ASL vids I've seen on the internet. Generally I just need to pay attention to understand. Anyways here's a list of some of the languages I plan to learn.

Hebrew
German
Avestan
Russian
French
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Chinese Mandarin
Chinese Cantonese
Irish Gaelic
Welsh
Thai
Latin
Klingon
Elvish(well if there is an entire language to learn from that)
Portuguese (Brazilian and Portugal)
Greek
Esperanto
Turkish
Eskimo
Konkani
Sanskrit
Arabic
Multani
Persian
Manx
Uriya
Icelandic


As an aside I've also memorized the majority of Narn and some bits of Minbari in Babylon 5. Centauri and Vorlon is just random text so nothing worth memorizing there. But yeah something like "Neh" is "no" in Minbari. "Nefreek" is "mindwalker" or telepath in Narn. They're not complete languages but I tended to remember those terms nonetheless.

Oh yeah and I can recognize some of morse code too.

As for why I'm doing this? Well, I just want to is all. Though with Russian I have a separate motive. It annoys me that I don't fully understand Russian. I can read it now(mostly) but yeah my small vocab annoys me. Until that annoyance goes away I won't stop learning it.

So yeah thread made. Questions, comments?

Which languages do you know now and how well?

How are you going about learning them?

Once again, I applaud your ambition and your determination, and I humbly offer my help. Feel free to PM me.

Mrebo said:

Which languages do you know now and how well?

How are you going about learning them?

ASL?

I also admire your ambition and determination. It's great that you forge ahead anyway possible. Best way to accomplish anything. I keep falling off the wagon for Russian. When I've worked with people from Mexico and South America, I get passionate about learning their languages but then it's hard to keep with it. And I continue to regret not advancing and perfecting French. Maybe starting with bigger goals is a wise thing. And I like that I had to google several of those languages.

Mrebo said: And I continue to regret not advancing and perfecting French.

Leonardo said:Once again, I applaud your ambition and your determination, and I humbly offer my help. Feel free to PM me.

twister111 said:

 

Un poco è maggiore che niente.

A little bit is better than nothing.

Allow me to correct you on that:

"Un po' [un pochettino] è meglio di niente."

Leonardo said:

Once again, I applaud your ambition and your determination, and I humbly offer my help. Feel free to PM me.

 

Tì ringràzio! So I was thinking about what to PM you but I felt my question would benefit others here too. Do you know of any interesting Italian shows or movies I may not be aware of?

Ehhh.... Tv in Italy is comprised of 85-90% American (or British) shows dubbed in italian. What's produced locally is utter crap IMHO. Movies might be a good bet, but here's what I thought:

you've heard about the Rosetta Stone, the ancient piece of rock that had writing in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs, haven't you? Historians were able to understand the hieroglyphs because they had the Greek text as a reference. Now, I think this is a good method to learn another language: use something you already know, say like the Bible, as a reference to understand it.

Since we're on a Star Wars forum and all, I think it might be a good idea to use the Star Wars movies to learn a foreign language! What do you think? :)

As for what to PM me about, I was willing to make short youtube videos to demonstrate correct pronunciation, grammar and so on. In fact, I have an idea. Let me get my mic.

Leonardo said:

twister111 said:Un poco è maggiore che niente.

A little bit is better than nothing.

Allow me to correct you on that:

"Un po' [un pochettino] è meglio di niente." 

Leonardo said:

Once again, I applaud your ambition and your determination, and I humbly offer my help. Feel free to PM me.

Tì ringràzio! So I was thinking about what to PM you but I felt my question would benefit others here too. Do you know of any interesting Italian shows or movies I may not be aware of?

Ehhh.... Tv in Italy is comprised of 85-90% American (or British) shows dubbed in italian. What's produced locally is utter crap IMHO. Movies might be a good bet,

Leonardo said:

but here's what I thought:

you've heard about the Rosetta Stone, the ancient piece of rock that had writing in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs, haven't you? Historians were able to understand the hieroglyphs because they had the Greek text as a reference. Now, I think this is a good method to learn another language: use something you already know, say like the Bible, as a reference to understand it.

Since we're on a Star Wars forum and all, I think it might be a good idea to use the Star Wars movies to learn a foreign language! What do you think? :)

Leonardo said:

As for what to PM me about, I was willing to make short youtube videos to demonstrate correct pronunciation, grammar and so on. In fact, I have an idea. Let me get my mic.

twister111 said:

Leonardo said:

twister111 said:Un poco è maggiore che niente.

A little bit is better than nothing.

Allow me to correct you on that:

"Un po' [un pochettino] è meglio di niente." 

Grazie mille!

Leonardo said:

Once again, I applaud your ambition and your determination, and I humbly offer my help. Feel free to PM me.

Tì ringràzio! So I was thinking about what to PM you but I felt my question would benefit others here too. Do you know of any interesting Italian shows or movies I may not be aware of?

Ehhh.... Tv in Italy is comprised of 85-90% American (or British) shows dubbed in italian. What's produced locally is utter crap IMHO. Movies might be a good bet,

Ah, I was afraid of that. Got the same opinion on twitter. The movie I got recommended was "la vita è bella". I watched it once after that.

Ugh, I haven't seen that movie in years, mainly because after that, my opinion towards Roberto Benigni radically changed. I now think he's an annoying, pretentious prat (based on what I hear him say on tv).
I can still watch, and find funny, some of his earlier films, like "Johnny Stecchino", "The Monster", and "Nothing Left to Do But Cry".

It's something that I've been doing with other languages and other shows/movies already. Though none of my DVDs/Blu-rays have Italian as an option for the audio/subs. Curiously though a couple of them have it as an option for the menus. Recently though I have found a site with Italian subs on tv shows. I'm going to go watch Arrow like that.

Yeah, if you mean DVDs bought in the USA, I'll bet it will be next to impossible finding language tracks other than English and Spanish on them. Either look for torrents with the "ITA" tag (though with most movies you'll have to look for the translated title), or just look for regular DVDs on Amazon.it or similar sites.

Had no idea you were going to do that. Ironically I'm not sure what to say other than thank you!

Non c'è di che. Hai un PM.

Come stai di oggi?

The correct form would be:

Come stai oggi?

or

Come state oggi? (in case you meant 2nd person plural).

Leonardo said:Ugh, I haven't seen that movie in years, mainly because after that, my opinion towards Roberto Benigni radically changed. I now think he's an annoying, pretentious prat (based on what I hear him say on tv).
I can still watch, and find funny, some of his earlier films, like "Johnny Stecchino", "The Monster", and "Nothing Left to Do But Cry".

Leonardo said:Yeah, if you mean DVDs bought in the USA, I'll bet it will be next to impossible finding language tracks other than English and Spanish on them. Either look for torrents with the "ITA" tag (though with most movies you'll have to look for the translated title), or just look for regular DVDs on Amazon.it or similar sites. 

Leonardo said:

<span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, 'sans serif'; color: #ffffff;"><span style="line-height: 17.25px;">Come stai di oggi?</span></span>

<span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, 'sans serif'; color: #ffffff;"><span style="line-height: 17.25px;">The correct form would be:</span></span>

<span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, 'sans serif'; color: #ffffff;"><span style="line-height: 17.25px;">Come stai oggi?</span></span>

<span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, 'sans serif'; color: #ffffff;"><span style="line-height: 17.25px;">or</span></span>

<span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, 'sans serif'; color: #ffffff;"><span style="line-height: 17.25px;">Come state oggi? (in case you meant 2nd person plural).</span></span>

Leonardo said:

Had no idea you were going to do that. Ironically I'm not sure what to say other than thank you!

Non c'è di che. Hai un PM. 

twister111 said:

 

 

Leonardo said

 

I can still watch, and find funny, some of his earlier films, like "Johnny Stecchino", "The Monster", and "Nothing Left to Do But Cry".

I'll see what I can do about seeing those other films then. :-)

I would recommend those films if I could vouch for the validity of their respective subtitles. I wouldn't recommend "Johnny Stecchino" at all, though, it contains mostly sicilian, and wouldn't be of much help to you in learning italian.

I'll be going over the movies I know and see what I can recommend. It's all down to the availability of decent subtitles. Most I've seen are sketchy and sometimes inaccurate.

Hell, before I started this quest, I've probably only been exposed to maybe 9 sentences of Italian. Maybe 9. Probably less. Well that is if you don't count the tweets I had on my twitter feed, which I mainly glanced over until I decided to pay more attention.

9 ? Blimey, you've come a long way since then.

Leonardo said:

I would recommend those films if I could vouch for the validity of their respective subtitles. I wouldn't recommend "Johnny Stecchino" at all, though, it contains mostly sicilian, and wouldn't be of much help to you in learning italian.

I'll be going over the movies I know and see what I can recommend. It's all down to the availability of decent subtitles. Most I've seen are sketchy and sometimes inaccurate. 

Leonardo said:

Hell, before I started this quest, I've probably only been exposed to maybe 9 sentences of Italian. Maybe 9. Probably less. Well that is if you don't count the tweets I had on my twitter feed, which I mainly glanced over until I decided to pay more attention.

9 ? Blimey, you've come a long way since then.

So recently I've gotten sick. Consequently I don't feel too much like talking so it makes my quest harder. When I say some of the words aloud it seems to stick better than just repeating it in my head. So yeah at the moment it's more difficult. What also makes my quest harder is that whatever deal Google books had to display a lot of the language books I was using expired. There's still plenty of books there but some of them are no longer available for free viewing. Lesson learned now I'm focusing on downloading what I can from there and then sorting out which ones to use afterwards. It sucks because I was going to put a plan into action to accelerate my language learning. Now I have to refocus on acquiring resources again. But whatever the quest simply got harder is all. That's okay.

Ho non preoccuparsi. Io sto continuare con mi ricerca.
I don't care. I'm still continuing with my quest.

twister111 said:

I don't care. I'm still continuing with my quest.

"Non mi importa. Continuo ancora con la mia missione."

twister111 said:

Mrebo said: And I continue to regret not advancing and perfecting French.

It seems like you've fallen into a trap of thinking one can "perfect" a language. Frankly languages aren't "perfect" by any means. Hell the word "perfect" has lost it's initial meaning used superfluously to get across a meaning of "really good". I see it all the damn time on Tumblr.

*actor speaks a couple of lines in another language in an interview*

Random Tumblr person: "OMG! You are so perf!"

"Nobody's perf-"

*pic of someone or something implying they are perfect. I've seen this done with a pic of pizza*

Oh, no, I just mean improving, attaining fluency. The dedication is important. Most impressive when you don't have people to speak all these languages with :)

Mrebo said:

Oh, no, I just mean improving, attaining fluency. The dedication is important. Most impressive when you don't have people to speak all these languages with :)

Leonardo said:

twister111 said:
I don't care. I'm still continuing with my quest.

"Non mi importa. Continuo ancora con la mia missione."

So,..... the past two days I didn't do much on accomplishing my quest. I was just too tired and was caught up in other stuff so I only spent 10 - 15 minutes on it. Not really enough but it's at least something. Anyways can only move forward now. I just wanted to write this here because I know you guys are interested in this.

So yeah, forward march with my quest!

twister111 said:

Leonardo said:

twister111 said:
I don't care. I'm still continuing with my quest.

"Non mi importa. Continuo ancora con la mia missione."

La ringrazio! 

 

That was good, but allow me to introduce you to the wonderful world of: 

http://www.locuta.com/eforme.html

Careful, QuickTime might initialize several audio clips all at once.

This portal what I just found might just be up your alley. :)

Home page: http://www.locuta.com/eclass.html

So... I had this plan going, I was going to read over 300 pages a day. I was going to generate at least 200 sentences in the various languages I want to learn. Plan went to trash when I ended up getting exhausted. So today I'm going to put together a more efficient plan to get all the languages I want into my head.

As an aside I looked more into Elvish... There's three dialects of it. I don't know if I want to learn all three of them or not.

Darth Solo said:

But for some reason i can also swear in French, Polish, German and American.

Darth Solo said:

I get confused just with the two voices in my head. Hats off to you tittytwister in your quest!

Leonardo said:

That was good, but allow me to introduce you to the wonderful world of:


Formal and Informal Forms of Speech

What, no Albanian?

How are you going to eavesdrop on C3PX and me now?

So because I'm not making the kind of progress I want on this quest I'm going to try to focus on it more. In order to do that I'll be taking a three week break from posting on threads here. As explained here I'll still be open for communication via PM I just won't be posting/browsing the threads. I'll be checking my PM inbox every other day. So if you got something to ask me do it via PM and I'll get to it in a day or two.

From this moment I'm giving myself about 30 minutes left to post a few more posts. I had intended to post more between my announcement that I was taking a break and now. I just didn't do it because of several factors. So I'm sorry for that. My fault and I'll try to post a lot more when I return.