26 February 2007

Language Goals

My languages

Native language
English of the Western US (California)

Languages I've studied formally
Spanish (2 years in high school)
Japanese (5 semesters at university)

Languages I am actively studying on my own
Spanish
Japanese
Italian
Hebrew

Languages I have dabbled with
These are langauges that I like to try to learn every now and then, but get pushed out of the way by time constraints especially because of the above languages.
Arabic
Chinese -- Mandarin
German
Hindi
Swahili
Tamil
Piedmontese
Norwegian
Russian
French

Languages I want to study (in addition to the above)
Portuguese
Catalan
Greek
Korean
Afrikaans
Hungarian
Farsi
Yiddish
Aramaic
Hawaiian
Tibetan
Icelandic
Tswana
Serbian
Czech
Irish
Basque
Ukranian
Belorussian
Romanian
Navajo
Dutch
Danish
Swedish
Marathi
Finnish
Gujarati
Pali
Turkish

Language Goals
I want to achieve fluency in Japanese, Spanish and Italian. I would love to be totally fluent other languages, but I doubt I could seriously do it for all of them.

I go through my stages of liking one language or another at any time depending on the phase of the moon and the positions of grains of sands on the beach. Needless to say, I am highly distracable when it comes to languages. There are simply too many. However, I have some overriding patterns which cause me to shift focus at times.

Primary Languages
Spanish, Japanese
I tend to consider these two langauges to most consistantly be ones in which I want to achieve real fluency.

Western Hemisphere
French, Spanish, Portugese
I sometimes think about how cool it would be to be fluent in the three other languages of the Americas. I would be able to speak to nearly every native born person from north to south within the American continents.

Familial
Italian, Hebrew, Russian, Irish, Piemontese
These are languages which have some connection to be through my family tree.

Language Family
Spanish, German, Irish, Swahili, Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, Hindi, Greek, Japanese, Hawaiian, Navajo, Tamil, Tukish
I have thought it would be cool to have the ability to hold a conversation in at least one language in many of the major language families. I am sure I am missing some in this list of course, but really, just how many languages can someone become conversational in at the same time and be able to maintain that ability?

So in the end what are my real goals? I suppose simply to learn as much as I can and be able to talk to as many people on the planet as possible (oddly, something I actually find very difficult in real life). Languages are a hobby of mine and I want to collect them like others collect stamps, but I definately need more discipline to sit down and actually spend time each day practicing.