I've always been a language addict.

I can't really explain my fascination. It's something that's been with me since childhood.

I took a language major for my first degree; I was a language teacher for a while; and I used languages pretty extensively in various professional capacities. My obsession often had to be put on ice, as other things monopolized my time, but it never entirely disappeared.

Since the beginning of this hell-hole period that polite speech identifies as the covid pandemic, language-study has been an important part of what keeps me semi-sane.

Not only have I tried to improve and reactivate various languages, gaining on the way masses of priceless cultural input, but I have also been finding out quite a lot about recent theories of language-learning.

So it's odd I've not written much about it, except where French, Italian, Russian, or Turkish formed part of last year's "shadow journeys". 


It took us a while to figure out it says "snow" and not "mons"...

"Language log" is therefore going to be the new thread on The Velvet Cushion. Its aim is to discuss the whole language-learning thing. (I did wonder about a separate blog, but three is surely enough to manage, and VC is, after all, supposed to be about "reading, looking, hearing, and searching", all of which activities are part of language-learning.)

This is what I wrote in my diary on the subject of languages in the early weeks of this year:

"I have a problem.

"I want to learn new languages (Chinese and Turkish -- well... they're not new exactly, as I've been fiddling round the edges with both for a few years, but I'm still at elementary level, although the Chinese self-assessment test I did the other week said I was 'Upper Beginner', and I 'may also want to try taking the Intermediate test', but I don't think I do want to do that...), and I want to revive/improve languages I learned a long time ago (Russian, Spanish, and Italian), and I want to not allow a language I started to play with a few years back to die completely (Portuguese), and I want to not forget languages I was once pretty damn good at (German and French), and I want to improve my Malay without completely fouling up my Indonesian (believe me, to non-native speakers, these two are substantially different...), and I want to carry on with other languages that I once put effort into learning for travel purposes (Thai, Korean) or cultural purposes (Maori, Manx, Hindi), and I want to do other things, like reading novels, keeping up with the news, researching interesting topics, writing about everything, listening to stories, and meditating (still in the 'I must do this' category), and I don't always want to, but still HAVE to, do yet more things like cooking, cleaning, walking, dancing, and exercising, and I also want to have time for my mind just to go walkabout, because that's good for us, and helps keep us sane, and helps keep us open to serendipitous delights (which I'm very into at the moment, on account of reading Ross Gay, who I think has also influenced my sentence structure). 

"And that's when I'm not even travelling..."



So the purpose of this initial post is to discuss what is actually feasible.

Opinions vary.

Daniel, the ever-helpful guy who runs Online Italian Club, as well as maintaining his Italian, is also learning French, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Total: five.

Lindie Botes learns tons of languages: "My home language is Afrikaans, and I’m currently focusing on Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese, Hungarian and Japanese while maintaining my French, Korean, and Vietnamese. On the side, I’m dabbling in Malay, Indonesian, Arabic, and Hindi." So... focusing on five, maintaining three, and dabbling in four, for a total of 12 (plus English must fit in there somewhere).

She recommends not beginning two new languages concurrently, though. It's best to get a language up to intermediate level, before taking on a new baby language. If you ARE tackling two at the same time, she suggests the 80/20 approach (spending 80 per cent of your time on the one you have designated as the main language, and 20 per cent on the other language), and ensuring they come from completely different language families. She also advocates "language-stacking", which means learning a language to a level where it's good enough to be used as the medium of instruction for another language (for example, you use your German to learn Chinese).

Maintaining a language you've already acquired to a reasonable extent involves a different set of considerations. Olly Richards, surely one of the web's most prolific polyglots, remarks: "I've never lost a language that I once spoke well... On the other hand, when I've learnt a language to a lower level... and then taken an extended break, it's since disappeared... In fact, with the languages I know well, maintaining them takes very little effort."

He puts the tipping-point somewhere around B2, or upper intermediate. (The letter-number designation, by the way, refers to the Common European Framework for Languages, CEFL, which classifies language proficiency on six levels, A1 to C2.)

I think he's absolutely right: from beginner to intermediate, you're definitely still learning; from upper-intermediate onwards, you can, to all intents and purposes, stop studying the language, and simply maintain it (by using it in your daily life on a regular basis).

Olly, by the way, speaks seven impressively diverse languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Cantonese, and Thai), and has studied another two (German and Italian).

The CEFL I just mentioned is also useful for figuring out your goals for your languages. There's no way it's realistic to take multiple languages up to C2 across the whole spectrum of skills -- but that's really not what most of us want or need to do.



Based on all that, I did a little bit of an audit, in the first quarter of 2021, of what I wanted to achieve this year and next.

Of course, because it's totally impossible to plan any travel at the moment, we're flying blind in terms of what languages might be required for practical purposes. When -- if... -- things open up, I'm likely to be throwing all this up in the air, and putting my energy where it's most concretely and immediately needed.

But at the moment, considered in purely abstract, intellectual terms, it goes like this:

I'm focusing on three languages: Spanish; Russian; and Chinese.

For Spanish, my aim is simple: to advance it to that B2 level, and into maintenance territory.

Russian is more problematic. In none of the different periods when I was learning Russian did I succeed in taking it to a level where I could comfortably read a book -- unlike German, French, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, and even Portuguese (although in that language I've only read one book so far). So that's one of my aims for 2021-22: to be able to read an Agatha Christie (always my first choice in a new language) in Russian. My other aim for Russian is to be able to manage comfortably in a tourist context -- so that I'm a bit more ready for the time when it will be possible to go there (or to Central Asia or the Caucasus).



It's really difficult to set realistic goals for Chinese. It's a tough language, and I'm not giving it anything like the attention it really requires, because there are other things I want to do. If I could get to A2 in reading, speaking, and listening, I'd be happy (I'm not interested in writing except with a keyboard app); if I could start pushing towards B1, I'd be ecstatic. Even A2 would mean I'd be able to manage tourist situations a little more confidently than last time, when -- though we got by -- I always felt I was flying by the seat of my pants. I'm never going to be able to read a novel in Chinese, but it would be nice to feel I could manage the first level of a graded reader.  



Meanwhile, I'm maintaining -- in the broad sense of trying not to lose ground in -- four languages: French, German, Indonesian, and Italian.

French and German are easy. They're way up at that B2-or-more level, and so they can very effectively and enjoyably be maintained by reading books, hunting up articles on things I'm interested in anyway, watching movies, listening to songs, etc.

Indonesian I never spoke anything like as well as French or German, but I could get around pretty efficiently, and my reading skills were good enough to do research very comfortably. My spoken Italian was never as good as my Indonesian, but I read well enough to be able to tackle novels, albeit not overly literary ones, and at a fairly slow pace.

I'd like to maintain that level for both Indonesian and Italian, but at the moment I have no plans to put any extra effort into pushing my skills forward.



And finally, I'm dabbling in two languages: Portuguese and Turkish.

Spanish gives me a head start in reading Portuguese, but I'm rubbish at speaking it, partly because I've learnt the Brazilian variant, which I've not been able to try out in situ, and which really doesn't work that well in Portugal... I'm not planning to focus any attention on improving speaking at the moment, but by the end of the year I want to have read at least one more novel in Portuguese.

I do just enough Turkish to not forget everything, but I'm not prioritizing it at this point.





So we're talking nine languages, but in most of them, I have very limited goals.

I'll talk in another post about the materials I use to serve the different objectives I have in these different languages. And if you're wondering why "Indonesian" and not "Malay" -- well, that discussion is for later too.

Parked (for the moment) are five languages I've put varying degrees of effort into in years gone by (Maori, Thai, Korean, Manx, and Hindi). But I will gladly resurrect these if/when the opportunity and/or necessity arises.

Definitely laid to rest are the historical languages I had fairly brief dealings with at different points in my life: Latin, New Testament Greek, and Biblical Hebrew. I have no plans whatsoever to disinter those.

Any other languages are just not going to happen... That's it. The door is shut. Greek? Japanese? Arabic? Javanese? Would be wonderful, but NO.