Hello everyone, I've been reading threads on this forum for a few days and decided to join. I'm 38 years old (I'll turn 39 next month) and I live in Washington state in the USA. I guess I could claim that my love for languages started when I took a Spanish class in 7th grade, I didn't really get into language learning until I was 31 years old. In 2006 I was curious about South African history and decided I would learn either Afrikaans or Zulu to get another point of view. I settled on Afrikaans when I couldn't find any resources for learning Zulu. At first I made very little progress because I did not know how to teach myself a language and I had a totally unrealistic idea of trying to learn Afrikaans and Dutch together (since they're closely related) to fluency in 3 to 6 months. This crazy idea lasted for a few months when I noticed 4 things: I wasn't learning to read, write or say anything in either language. I was getting very confused. I didn't have a clear definition for fluency so I would never know if I had achieved it If I ever did find a clear definition of fluency* I doubted I could reach it in 3 to 6 months**. So, I decided to focus on Afrikaans for a while. I still didn't really know what I was doing but focusing one language for a while helped me actually learn a little bit. I discovered the HTLAL forum by accident in 2008 while doing homework for a philosophy course in college and was very impressed by almost everything I read there. After reading, and sometimes writing, a bunch of posts at HTLAL and allowing myself to be distracted far too many times by what I call language wanderlust, I've finally decided to focus on Finnish (and maybe a little Spanish) . I decided to join this forum because I really like reading about BigDog's language learning method and I'm a little worried about how long the HTLAL website will last, though I am still a member there. I figure I will visit and contribute to both forums. Mick *I still don't have a clear definition of fluency, but I have decided that the word is too vague to be very useful without relying on something like the CEFR scale as a more accurate description. **I've discovered that I can either learn a language well or I can learn a language quickly, but I can't do both and I prefer to learn things well. EDIT: I've edited some typos. Maybe someday I will learn not to
Welcome Mick. What an excellent post to start out with! Totally agree. I avoid the word these days, preferring to say either "fluidly" when I mean speaking smoothly without unnecessary pauses, or I state the CEFR level if I'm talking about proficiency.
No shame in that -- there's 26 letters in the alphabet, and Z's the last one. (Well, you did start with Afrikaans...!)
LOL. I hadn't thought of it that way. Besides that, I think it would depend on which alphabet I'm using. Seriously though, not only did I have virtually no success finding resources for learning Zulu in 2006 (a problem I wouldn't have now) but my Zulu pronunciation was terrible because I could not make the click sounds at all.
With Dutch and Afrikaans, I think that you haven't to learn both because if you learn Dutch you can understand Afrikaans written, maybe spoken is more difficult. Afrikaans sound more like Flemish in my opinion, but different. the grammar is very simple, it's very funny that they say ek is or something like this hahahahahahaa LOL.
