I have officially started learning Greek since March (to make it a nice six month mission). Technically speaking, this is not exactly true because I have used a couple of days in February to begin learning some but I deliberately missed my first days in March so that evens it out. Anyway, I have now started learning it and I’ll tell you about the progress I have made and my general impressions on the Greek language in this post.

First of all, I have been lucky enough to get my hands on the Pimsleur Greek course. Pimsleur is an absolute beginner course of Greek consisting of 30 audio lessons of 30 minutes each. I will be doing it since I have the course already (generally, Pimsleur costs a lot of money if you buy it new so that is probably not the best idea) and since there is a clear lack of resources for starters (that’s a thing that this website has an ultimate goal of fixing). Disregarding the costs, I have mixed opinions about Pimsleur. On the negative side:

1. Some lessons are lacking in the amount of phrases because one focuses on learning a small amount of words or expressions (say 10 or less) per lesson and repeating them over and over. It doesn’t seem like it has a very efficient use of time and personally the repetition can bore the hell out of me at times.
2. It doesn’t go deep into the structure of the language and gives few grammatical explanations except those on the surface level.
3. I am also a bit worried about the content of the phrases themselves since they look a bit touristy to me instead of being more of the universal type of phrases.

I believe it could really do a better job in all of these areas. To look at the positives, there are at least two ways in which the Pimsleur courses seem to be working pretty well:

1. First, drilled or not, I tend to remember the phrases taught in the lessons very well. The words do indeed sink into the memory.
2. Second, it is extremely good in pronunciation. They have native pronunciation and break up words into parts so that you can see exactly how they are pronounced. It takes a lot of repetition, true, but the pronunciation part is pretty good.

As of today, I have done the first 10 of the 30 lessons which amounts to about 5 hours of listening. It doesn’t feel like I have learned very much yet but at least I have some idea of what the Greek words sound like. I still only hear them and haven’t seen them spelled so I will refrain from writing the Greek words at this time. However, I have been learning to say things such as: “mister”, “miss”, “missis”, “I would like”, “I want”, “to eat”, “to drink”, “wine”, “bear”, “hotel”, “not”, “know”, “street”, “boulevard”, “where is”, “here”, “there”, “what time is it”, “one”, “four”, “eight”, “nine”, “sorry”, “hello”, “how are you”, “at my place”, “at your place”, “at the restaurant”, “speak English”, “speak Greek” and the likes. It does not teach very much grammar except it has introduced that there are genders in Greek (apparently there is masculine, neuter with the article το (to) and feminine with the article ι (i)), some usage of words like “in”, present tense endings for “I” and “you” and perhaps also the words for “am”, “is”, “are”. I will carry on with the course and I will be able to tell you more soon. Since I have the opportunity, I can do it for the pronunciation alone.

Then the second thing is the Greek alphabet. I figured that since most resources of learning Greek are written in Greek (even this three lesson course on the labs), I would have to learn to read the alphabet fast. It turned out that learning the letters is easy but not enough. I have gathered some information over the alphabet and how to read Greek and I am learning this simultaneously. I will not speak much now because I will soon make another post about the Greek alphabet and explain you what’s the deal with it.

What about my first impressions of Greek? Well, no surprise, I really like it! There are three main reasons why I like Greek so far (transliteration might not be completely accurate… I’m writing from ear):

1. Cool sounding words. I know is ksero. Then you understand is katalavenete, mono is only I is ego, water is nero and so on. It has a lot of words that I found really cool and I guess the Greeks have an easy time picking themselves a nickname by just using some word of their language.
2. International Greek words. For example, a few that I have learned are that I buy is agorazo (in agoraphobia – fear of crowded spaces, agora – marketplace) or thing is pragma (think pragmatic), then word is lexi (as in lexicon) There are a lot lot more and I find that fascinating. I will probably eventually write a lot more about this as I come to learn them.
3. The alphabet. Seriously, characters like π (pi), δ (delta),ψ (psi) are awesome.

I am not sure if I like the sound of the language, though. It is really hard to describe my feelings about it. I often like the individual worlds but the language itself sometimes sounds a little bit messy to me. I don’t know why but it sometimes reminds me of Spanish (maybe because of the intonation) spoken in a strange way. I remember having similar feelings about Portuguese (it reminded me of Arabic and I almost got scared that it would be as foreign) until I started learning it and grew to love the sound of the language.

Finally, this is just me getting started with learning Greek. It’s still all Greek to me and that’s why I am not giving you too many details. It’s only my first week and I’m not rushing the gun too much yet. Wait for more details in my future posts. I will also tell you my plans for the second week in the next post.

There are blogs such as Fluent in 3 months where Benny attempts to get fluent in languages in three months and Fluent every year where Randy tries to achieve the same goal in one year. Here’s the breaker: I will join them! I am going to be choosing a period in the midpoint of 3 months and one year – exactly 6 months, take on a language and get fluent in it as well. They learn the languages they didn’t know before that are distant to them and so will I. Moreover, I will have this as a side project on the blog and not even quit doing the rest of the stuff I am doing. If you want to know how I plan to do this and what language I will be learning, read on.

These two guys have their own ways. One does go to the country where the language is spoken and stays there for his whole period of 3 months. Another stays in his own country and finds ways to practice. I am going to go the middle way: I will spend the first three months at home and then the next three in the country where the language is spoken. One likes to learn by using the language and only sometimes referring to tutorials, books and resources online while the other one does seem to use them more often when learning. Well, again, I am going to do both. I will first study the language without getting much exposure from non-study related material and then try to put it into practice. Just like them, I am going to be transparent about the things I use and the lessons I learn and blog about them in the category fluent in 6 months on this site (you can get the RSS of this category or the RSS of this whole blog).

But what language am I going to be learning? Let’s look at the languages they are learning first. After all, Benny has learned Czech, Thai (both of which where unknown to him) and worked on improving his Portuguese while Randy has learned Russian in a year (which was also foreign to him) and now learns Italian (which he doesn’t know either). Both of them had to learn foreign alphabets as well (Russian and Thai). The language has to be distant enough, yet it does not have to be completely out-of-this-planet (neither Italian nor Portuguese is). It has to be challenging to learn in the period, yet possible. It also has to be fair: no previous knowledge. Also it must be the official language of some country (Italian, Russian, Thai, Portuguese, and Czech all are) and lastly, it must have an interesting culture behind it, so that one could not only learn the language but also get more into the culture where that language is spoken. This pertains to things like discovering the Brazilian lifestyle, getting to visit the sunny beaches in Thailand, learning to understand Italian songs and opera or opening up the immense archives of literature of Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and others.

Well, my language fits all of the above. It is a language I have never learned, never seriously considering learning, yet it was there all the time and, along with the culture where the language is spoken, made a big impact on a lot of other languages and cultures (very probably also yours and mine). The language shared its words with other European and often non-European languages and gave names to a lot of things that we still refer to today (and perhaps sometimes more often than ever). The language also has a great civilization behind it and a lot of cultural legacy. One could probably say that the Ancient civilization that used the Ancient version of this language were the cradle of Europe. Because… I will be learning Greek.

I will be learning modern Greek and not Ancient, mind you. However, they both use exactly the same alphabet and are still partly mutually-understandable (I will probably write about this more once I get to know the language better). As I have already stated, my learning of Greek with include a three month stay in Greece after the first three months of studying it at home. I will be there and hopefully will be able to practice it with the natives. What makes it even more difficult is that I will not do study my language full time and I will still continue learning other languages and working on this site, as well as doing my other duties, such as managing to pass my exams, learning interesting things, meeting people and doing whatever other stuff I do. I have already done something similar where I learned Portuguese in 5 months but then I did not blog about what I do. Moreover, at the first glance, Greek seems to be a lot more difficult than Portuguese! To make it worse… I will probably have less easy chances to practice the language than I did with Portuguese. I still think it is possible to do.

You will be able to see how I make progress, find out what things work for me (and thus could work for you!) and get a lot of tips coming from me for your own language learning! We will also be able to make a comparison of two different language learning strategies: learning at home and going to the country where the language is spoken. We will see which one renders better results and have ideas whether it is impossible or not to learn the language while at home. I have created a new category called Fluent in 6 Months on this site (get the RSS feed of this category here to be getting the updates) and I will soon explain my goals, methods, motivations, timing and talk about things related with the challenge. Stay tuned and keep checking for new updates to find out how I will be learning Modern Greek in 6 months!

I once read a blog by a guy who wrote that at the start of his new job in his boss gave him a task to learn how hybrid security works in the stock market and give a lecture on that to a group of his co-workers. This blogger told that he really liked these tactics because he had to become really good at the subject in order to be able to talk about it and that pushed him to learn it.

It is no brain surgery that by explaining things you have to learn them better. There is even a joke here:

A university professor is talking to his colleague:
- Crap, my students are really dumb: I explained a subject to them once and then I asked whether they understood it to find out that they didn’t. Oh well. I explained the subject a second time and they still said they didn’t understand it. Then I explained it a third time. Rats, even I understood it myself that time and they still didn’t!

A joke it is, but there is definitely truth to it.

As you might have noticed, I have worked on a number of courses on the labs… Did I know all of the languages? Well, surely not very well (notice: I try to check things I am not sure about with native speakers,). However, I noticed I do remember most of the things I teach in those courses afterwards.

What teaching does it is not only helps you to remember the things you teach, it helps you find general patterns in things and make sense of them so that you could explain them.

This does not mean that you necessarily have to go on and start courses on the labs (which would be cool, though – or you could at least try it). Any kind of explaining helps. You want to learn Spanish? Why don’t you start explaining that friend of yours who always said they wanted to learn some Spanish how tenses work in Spanish? What if you started a blog posting some Spanish rules? Or what if you just started hanging around the forums explaining some things to newbies (even if you get it wrong sometimes, there are native speakers to correct you… plus – research well… getting corrected on your advice will want to make you want to do that too).

That would guarantee you improvement in the language you are learning and you might also get some good karma along the way.

To sustain growth of I Kinda Like Languages, there needs to be a constant influx of content (especially language courses) into the site. My original idea was that people would help me out with that but while that does happen to some extent, that extent of that is not anywhere near what would be sufficient for it to take off on itself. That’s why I have to guarantee that there will be new content so that the site can grow and perhaps reach the tipping point. I have come up with a plan how to do that.

Courses are needed. Making courses is fun at times but it still takes work and dedication and I realized that these things don’t come by themselves. I had some free time in February and I have made new blog posts, edited the design and made new courses (which is fine), however, I had planned to make up to ten new courses while I only managed to get four. I also write to this blog but sometimes with gaps in writing. That’s not a way which would get me writing good and sustainable content and that’s something that must also be changed.

I read about how persistence matters and that’s why I decided I will do the following starting today:

Expect at least one new introductory course and at least two blogposts per week from me on I kinda Like Languages every week starting now. Until I tell you I will stop, that is. I was thinking on raising that number to three but I guess two will give it a good start. One a week is also pretty good to keep it qualitative. It must either be a complete introductory course or a fair equivalent of it (an fair equivalent would be an alphabet course or at least 5 lessons of a basic course). This is only from me regardless of what other people post.

I also have a project which I believe would be really interesting to do and helpful to everybody but it requires quite a lot of time and thinking things through. I will probably postpone it still a bit and start worrying about it when we hit 20 courses in the labs (which will be another month if it’s only me who makes the courses).

Oh… and in case you were interested in my other endeavors apart from those of I Kinda Like Languages… Well, I will be learning Modern Greek starting March. I have already started looking into it and working on the alphabet. It will take more work than that. It’s a project which will likely take me six months and I will be glad to blog about it as well. That’s for the future, though. I have also been reading a book to learn some Latvian. It proved to be not difficult grammar-wise since I know Lithuanian but still challenging vocabulary-vise. I am still thinking whether I should continue that task and perhaps try setting reading a couple of articles in Latvian every week or finding some other way to practice the language as a long term project. It is tempting but it would distract me from the other stuff I do and I still plan to get to Latvian eventually so perhaps I will refrain. Or maybe not… I am still pretty sure I will be making posts about Greek, Latvian, languages in general and adding a lot of courses and other content.

If you have any experience with Modern Greek, Latvian or a suggestion or two about the way you would like to see updates in this site please write a comment and I’ll be glad to answer it! And stick with us for the fun to come. :)

I know Lithuanian. I have been learning some Latvian lately. If somebody asked me “Which one is easier: Lithuanian or Latvian?” I would now answer “Latvian”. Latvian is easier to learn for both English-speakers and speakers of other non-Baltic languages. Here’s why.

• Easier stress – the stress is always on the first syllable in Latvian while it is pretty chaotic in Lithuanian; this is a huge thing because in Lithuanian you also have to learn the stress of each word separately and that alone could be enough for the comparison to be over with a clear verdict.
• Less conjugation – the past tense is simpler (often just “ja” added, it is harder than that in Lithuanian) and Latvian doesn’t have the past iterative tense (Lithuanian: I did – aš dariau, I used to do – aš darydavau) although it is not very difficult. The conditional tense has only one ending u in Latvian (the same for all persons) while Lithuanian has 7 (čiau, tum, ų, ume, umėme, ute, utėte), the conjugation system in general is simpler. Latvian has 6 participles while Lithuanian has 13.
• Less inflection – there just is less need to change the endings in Latvian. Lithuanian has five declensions of nouns with 12 inflectional types; Latvian has six declensions with eight inflectional types. Then Lithuanian adjectives have three declensions and three Latvian ones have only one. In general, though, the two languages are pretty similar in the amount of inflection to be done so this could not be a deciding factor.
• Simpler gender identification- while they have the same genders, I believe it is easier to tell the gender apart in Latvian because masculine is always -s or -is and feminine is always -a or -e. The same applies to Lithuanian (masculine being being -as and feminine a and ė) but you have “-is” endings in Lithuanian that you have to pretty much learn by rote (įrankis (tool) is masculine while šaknis (root) is feminine).
• Simpler preposition usage – propositions always require the genitive case from plural nouns unlike in Lithuanian. For example, Latvian uz pilsētu, uz pilsētam, Lithuanian į miestą, į miestus, English to town, to towns while Latvian no pilsētas, no pilsētam, Lithuanian iš miesto, iš miestų, English from town, froms towns. There is more change in Lithuanian.
• More links to Russian – Latvian seems to have more links to Russian in its vocabulary than Lithuanian does. For example, domāt (to think) remind of Russian думать (also the same meaning), while Lithuanian for to think is galvoti. A week in Latvian is nedēļa while Russian неделя (Lithuanian is savaitė). Lithuanian has some “Russian-like” words too but where Lithuanian has it, Latvian usually has it too, while the opposite is not always true. This is not that useful if you do not have a Slavic background.

I have not found parts where Lithuanian would be easier than Latvian except maybe that Latvian uses “jā” (although it is extremely simple) or “ot” for the “supposedly” tense (tas skrien – it is running, tas skrienot – it supposedly is running). These are not hard to learn at all, though. On the other hand, I hate to be biased but I’d say that Lithuanian is easier to practice in Lithuania because Latvia has more foreign language penetration and thus easier to find people to practice it with. Also, there are more speakers of Lithuanian (at least 3 million in Lithuania alone to give a a ball park number) and only about 1.5 million Latvian speakers in Latvia. Thus Lithuanian is easier to learn in that way.

On a totally unrelated side not, there are quite a lot of interesting faux-amis in both languages. Here’s a couple of them: (lt) atlikt(i)”perform” – (lv) atlikt “postpone”, (lt) apdraust(i) “insure” – (lv) apdraudēt “endanger”, (lt) ėst(i) “devour” – (lv) ēst “eat”, (lt) gulėt(i) “to lie” – (lv) gulēt “to sleep”, (lt) nacis – “Nazi” – (lv) nazis “knife”, (lt) gribams – “for mushrooms” – (lv) gribams “we want”, (lt) neatliekamas “non-garbage” – (lv) neatliekams “urgent”.

A Renaissance person is somebody with a wide-range of interests, talents, skills and knowledge. Alternative terms are a polymath, a Renaissance man/woman or informally a jack of all trades. Let’s discuss what you should know to become one!

Here are the skills and subjects that I believe a Renaissance person should have or be knowledgable in:

• Languages: I have once written a post discussing what languages you should know to travel the word freely. I would say you would have to know all of these languages mentioned there at least up to a communicational level because these are the biggest languages of the world and to know enough about the world, you should also know them. Moreover, at least basic knowledge of Greek (especially Ancient) and Latin would also be welcome since a lot of terms come from these languages. I would also say that the person should be familiar with the basic structure and the common roots of the vocabulary of the biggest language groups in the world (such as Indoeuropean, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetic, Japonic and others). The main focus in all of these languages should be on speaking (since speaking is the core of the language) but literacy would also be required.
• Physics – Physics is probably the most fundamental science of nature and great emphasis should be put on it. A Renaissance person should absolutely be knowledgeable in Classical Physics. They should know both the concepts and how to do calculations. Moreover, this person should also have some active understanding in Special Relativity, at least a passive understanding of General Relativity, an understanding of Particle Physics (learning about the Standard Model would probably be sufficient) and also they should know the basic concepts of Quantum Mechanics (such the particle-wave duality, quantum tunelling, the impossibility of having locality+hidden variables, etc.). Then a huge subfield of this would be Astronomy. A knowledge of both our current best theories of cosmology (big bang) and evolution of the universe (galaxy and star creation, processes in the stars, supernovae, planet formation, etc.) and of the phenomena present in the universe (black holes, quasars, neutron stars, etc.) would be necessary. Knowing not only the ideas but how they came about would be preferable.
• Philosophy – a Renaissance person should be familiar with all the prominent theories of Philosophy and the development of Philosophical thought (the Greek philosophers… everything in the middle, all the modern schools, etc. there are just too many to list). A study of comparative religion would also be welcome.
• Mathematics – a Renaissance person should have a fair understanding of Mathematics since Mathematics provides the rules that our world seems to follow. They would need to know pure mathematics and its application to some biggest fields. Knowledge of mathematical branches such as the number theory, geometry (Euclidean and basic non-Euclidean), calculus, and those such as combinatorics or trigonometry would be required. A history of Mathematics would also be needed to understand how these ideas developed.
• History – I would say that the person should have a knowledge of both Big History and History as we usually understand it. The History of human migration, Ancient civilizations (such as Greece and Rome), middle ages and new ages should be well-known and well-understood by a Renaissance person. They should know the most important events of at least the last 5 millenia in all major continents of the Earth and should be able to follow the development of all biggest civilizations (the Western civilization, Asian civilizations, etc.). and point out the most important dates (at least relative dating), events and people in human history.
• Music – a Renaissance person should know the basics of music (how it works, how it is played, what are the principles under which different musical instruments work).
• Arts – this person should know the history of arts, should be able to understand common techniques of drawing, sculpture and similar arts and be able to at least replicate the most simple of them to some extent.
• Biology – a good understanding of the classification and evolution of most life-forms would be needed. Moreover, the deep underlying principles of Biology such as DNA chains, cells, etc. would also be required. Specifically, this person should understand pretty well the anatomy of human beings and be able to give first aid or treat humans from the most common illnesses or wounds.
• Cultures – A Renaissance person should not also know a lot of things about the cultural anthropology, the formation of cultures and their relations to each other, etc. but they should also be well-traveled and have visited most of the current broad regions of the world (such as North America, East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe, Southern Europe, etc.).
• Sports – knowing at least the rules of all basic sports (basketball, football, ice hockey, baseball) and some skill in playing at least some of them would be needed
• Economics – this person should know economical theory and its development. This includes the works and ideas of Adam Smith, Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, Alfred Marshall, Milton Freedman, John Meynard Keynes and the likes. The knowledge should include an understanding of how markets work in different systems.
• Psychology – although a social lore, a Renaissance person should know it too. The knowledge of psychology should include understanding of basic schools of psychology (such as Freudians, behaviorists or cognitivists), basics of neuropsichology and so forth.
• Chemistry- it goes without saying that knowing chemistry would be a must for a Renaissance person. The periodic table and the principles under which these elements are classified would indeed need to be well understood. Basic chemical reactions as well.
• Literature – this person must be well-read as well. I couldn’t possibly do any justice to it by trying to list all the authors that should be read here (perhaps this could be a topic of another post) but briefly all the classical and most prominent modern literature would be in the list.

What else? Well, I have left out a lot of things which would also be needed. These could be things such as skills in dancing, fighting or knowledge of politics (both in theory and in practice), Law, programming, teaching and a lot of other fields! Perhaps someday I will add to this list and refine it (or make a second post). Whatever the case, I am sure I have missed a lot of things.

Do you have something else that you believe would be necessary for a Renaissance person to know? Do you disagree with something I said? Could you make any of the points I mentioned more specific?

Do you have personal skills in any of these? How far have you gotten in terms of becoming a Renaissance person?

Share that with everybody in the comments!

One thing that I have learned by making courses for a lot of different languages was that I can learn them all (a bit). So can you.

When I was little, I thought I would speak several languages as a grown up. I never remember dreaming exactly about knowing a lot of them but I can remember that I was thinking I would later speak Lithuanian, English, German, Russian, French, Spanish… and that would be good to go. At that time I already knew Lithuanian since it was my native language so I already had one down. I didn’t ever think when I would learn it or how, I would just think that I would do it later.

Then later didn’t come. I think that for most people later never comes.

I grew into adolescence and I didn’t know any of these languages (save for some English). Then I started learning Esperanto and it kind of developed itself from there.

At this point I still couldn’t say I know these languages well. However, if needed, I can communicate in all of them. I know some extra languages now too (like Portuguese). Then, I was making courses in different languages like Estonian, Basque or Afrikaans and I realized that there is no language that I could not learn. Of course, it would be extremely hard for me to learn those languages fluently, however, since language knowledge is acquired with diminishing returns (it takes you little time to learn the first most-used 20% of the language while it takes you a couple times that to learn the next 20%: just like in most other subjects), I could at least get acquainted to all these languages. Sure, I would not be able to become fluent in them or speak them (I could if I wanted to but it would take me too much time to do it for all of them) but I could pick some things up here and there or perhaps even have a “where are you from?” type of conversation with the natives. I could have a feel for what those languages are like and more importantly, if I ever were to need to learn any of those languages, I would have a nice head start as compared to other people. I also try to learn other things apart from languages and I have already told you how.

Look at it this way: you only have one life. Have you ever wanted to learn something, see something, experience something? Well, this is it. This is the only chance you have got. You can just sit around thinking that you cannot do it or you can go and do it.

I had already come to this conclusion when I was reading one topic on reddit called something along the lines of “what is a quote that has changed your life?” where one guy shared a quote from a big book that he had found otherwise boring and uninformative. The quote was something like this:

Be glad when you find something that you do not understand in a book because that is the only opportunity you have to learn something new.

The guy said that from that point on he began looking into seemingly difficult things like Physics or technical sciences in a different light.

Time isn’t an issue either. You have 24 hours a day. Are you reading this? Fine then, you could be learning Swahili instead! In the worst case scenario, you can sleep less (however if that’s really how you spend your time ask yourself if you really want to be spending it like this?)

Both skill and time are here for you. If somebody else has comprehended it so can you. If somebody else can find the time so can you.

That is a really important. Ask yourself: if you lived a perfect life, do you think you would need to have introduced yourself to most of the sciences (and a big number of the languages) in the world?

Well, you might or might not live a perfect life but there is nothing stopping you from still doing it…

In this post I am going to prove to you that it is a better to learn a bit of many different languages than to learn one or a few languages until fluency if you care about understanding what words are being said in the world in general. There is a lot of statistics written about it but it’s just common sense. Let me illustrate it for you in a way to that you can make sure of it by yourself.

Imagine a universe where all communication is done by using 8 simple words. Let’s say they are:

• run
• fight
• eat
• sex
• pee
• sleep
• hide
• wash

Well, that seems like something that most life forms on Earth do most of the time anyway.

Let’s just suppose that whenever one individual wants to do one of those things he just conveys this information by saying this word. Saying it could get you something (for example, food) and even if you don’t need something to do it, it is necessary to get the approval of the community to do all of these things thus you need to say it anyhow.

Let’s then look into an average individual. We would give him a name but that would mean having an extra word so we can’t. Unless we were to name him something like pee but that would add some confusion to the language. A day wouldn’t be a good time scale so we will be using a week. Let’s just say that he does these things:

• he has to run somewhere once a day and that is 7 times a week
• he has to fight someone about 1 time per week (pretty peaceful isn’t it?)
• he does eat three times a day that would be three times seven or 21 times a week
• he has sex say 2 times a week (nature still has to somehow trick those individuals into reproduction but doing it too often would leave less time for finding food or running from predators)
• he does pee two times a day and that is two times seven or 14 times per week
• he does sleep once a day so that is 7 times per week
• he has to hide from predators 3 times a week
• he has to wash himself almost every day but not quite so it comes out as 5 times per week

Let’s now add all of those together. Let’s see how many things he does and thus how many words he says per week. I’ll be completely transparent about my math: 7 + 1 + 21 + 2 + 14 + 7 + 3 + 5 = 60

Let’s now arrange our things in the order of frequency and count what percent of the whole words said every week they make:

1. eat: 21 (21/60 * 100% = 35%)
2. pee: 14 (14/60 * 100% ≈ 23.3%)
3. sleep: 7 (7/60 * 100% ≈ 11.7%)
4. run: 7 (7/60 * 100% ≈ 11.7%)
5. wash 5 (5/60 * 100% ≈ 8.3%)
6. hide 3 (3/60 * 100% = 5%)
7. sex 2 (2/60 * 100% ≈ 3.3%)
8. fight 1 (1/60 * 100% ≈ 1.7%)

If that’s true then we say the word eat 35% of the time while we say the word fight only approximately 1.7% of the time. Thus out of every hundred words any average individual says, thirty-five of them are eat and roughly two are fight.

Now imagine we would like to learn this language by learning one word at a time. Also imagine that you are lucky enough to have this data and you are smart enough to look at this data before learning the words so you learn them in order from the most used to the least used. Here I have graphed how much of the total vocabulary you know after having learned each individual word.

Look at it. The red line shows how much of the vocabulary you have learnt by its frequency and the blue line shows the number of the vocabulary learned by its count. The green bar shows the difference.

If you know the words eat and pee you know over 58.3% that is over a half of the total vocabulary used in the language (while you only know 2/8 * 100% = 25% that is only one fourth of the total vocabulary)! The more words a language has, the slower the green line grows while that is not necessarily true for the red line.

Another interesting thing is that this graph refutes the 80/20 rule. Do you know the rule that suggests that you are reaping 80% of the benefits from only 20% of the work. Well, it is not quite true in this graph: here it should be the 80/50 rule instead. However, it is true that you achieve the highest efficiency at around 20 percent (25% actually) so perhaps the rule does do some good.

Here is another chart with the difference between the two percentages:

Here you can see the same thing but more clearly: the graph goes up in the beginning, then peaks at the second word and then goes down fast. It is conceivable that most human languages do not peak as early because there are a lot of words in these languages and the differences in the frequency of their usage is not as drastic as shown here. Here is the last graph to illustrate the changing returns directly to you:

You can again seen how you get a big edge by learning the first word because it is used 35% of the time yet it constitutes only 12.5% of the vocabulary (35% – 12.5% = 22.5%) and you still keep that positive with the second word because it is used 23.3% of the time and still counts for another 12.5% of the time (23.3% – 12.5% = 10.8%), yet you suddenly get negative returns from the third word because it is used 11.7% of the time and still takes up 12.5% of the vocabulary. Thus you ccan increase your edge (although not as drastically) with the second word and then you begin decreasing it with the third word. Ideally if you were very worried about efficiency you would only be learning the first two words of this imaginary language.

This all means that it only takes you to learn 12.5% of the vocabulary to move from understanding nothing to understanding the first 38.5% (that is roughly 40%) of the spoken language while it takes you to learn another 37.5% of the vocabulary to understand 81.7% (that is roughly 80%) of the spoken language and then it takes you to learn the remaining 50% of the vocabulary to understand the last 18.7% (roughly 20%) of the spoken language.

What is the conclusion? The conclusion is that it takes you a lot less effort to learn to understand some certain percent of any language you are learning and it gets harder and harder after that.

Thus, take this hypothetical situation that there are four different tribes living in the world with 4 different languages spoken and completely different words for each of these 8 things. Suppose that you have time to learn 8 words in total. Let’s compare two strategies you could take here. You could choose to learn all 8 words of the same language. If you do that, you would be able to understand 100% / 4 = 25% of the words said in the world (assuming that all four tribes are of the same size and speak with the same frequency…). Another strategy you could take would be to learn two words of each language. If you chose this strategy you would then be able to understand 58% * 4 / 4 = 58% of the worlds said in the world. In the first case, you would be able to understand only one fourth of what the whole population of the world says and in the second case you would get more than a half.

Of course, is is true that this only counts if you care about understanding in general. If you live in one of those communities and you have to be able to communicate to get approval to do each of those things then your best bet is to learn all of the words of this community because otherwise you will not be able to, for example, get approval to sleep or whatnot. However, if you do not happen to live there and you just want to get to know them all a bit then the second strategy is clearly superior.

Thus if you are interested in understanding what the world is talking about in general it is a better strategy to learn a bit of a lot of different languages than to learn one or a few languages to fluency.

Finally, let’s answer one last question: does this apply to real languages spoken in the world as oppose to imaginary languages in imaginary universes? Well, the whole hypothesis is based on the notion that different words are not spoken with the same frequency. If this presupposition is true then following logics the conclusion must be true at least to some extent (the extent of this being true depending on word frequency). Now if you believe that the word have and the word syzygy are used with a different frequency then you believe that our presupposition is true and that this conclusion also holds for the languages of the world! I rest my case.

There has been a bunch of changes to IKindaLikeLanguages. Here’s what I have done:

1. Main page redesign and restructrurization:
   • centered the text layer
   • made the top menu narrower
   • added underlining for current pages in the menu
   • removed the feedback link from the menu
   • added an about page
   • replaced the main page with the courses list
   • added a new logo
   • added a favicon
   • improved the readability
2. Minor changes in the courses page:
   • rewritten the broad descriptions
   • added a course count to every broad description
3. Labs design and functioning:
   • made the menu narrower and less crowded
   • improved the courses page
   • added a toolbox on the right to access all functions:
      
      
   • edited the about page
   • fixed some page titles
   • improved the login page
   • added course comments
      
   • edited the user account options page

Before that, I have also made a 3 question survey to try to attempt to find out ways to improve the content on this site. Please do it if you still haven’t. 

Finally, these are just the beginning. I will be having some free time this month and I intend to change a lot. I still need to work on the design, I would also like to change the blog theme but I wasn’t able to find one that would look nice enough and have the main colors of the site (blue, white). I will still need to make pages more accessible, add extra functionality and so on.

Also I don’t want to give too much away but… expect new introductory courses!

Alright, if I have mentioned it… here are three introductory language courses that I am planning to make:

. Afrikaans!

.. Latvian!!

… Basque!!!

…

That’s far from the end…

Thank you for sticking with I Kinda Like Languages. :)

“What lies behind it?” is one of the main questions that I constantly find myself asking when it comes to learning new things. I think everybody should be asking it too.

This boils down to a whole philosophy there but let’s apply it to languages and specifically to vocabulary learning. Whenever I learn new words, I always want to find out what exactly they mean. Take the Lithuanian word for thanks which is labas. You say it without thinking about it because it simply means hi. However, the same word used to mean good in Lithuanian and it was probably a part of some longer greeting before. Do you know the word crocodile? Well, it comes from Greek krokē ‘pebble’ + drilos ‘worm’ and it could be translated as a warm of the stones. I bet most people don’t know that when they say the word, do they? This is more interest than important but it could and does actually help language learning.

Take another example. French for today is aujourdhui. That’s what it is and that’s what it gets taught as. However, there is a reason why it is that… Take a look at the Spanish word hoy which means today. The French word could be similar to hoy and it would come out as something like hui but if pronounced in French, that would probably sound very similar to the French word oui which means yes. So, to avoid the confusion, the French indeed took the word hui but added more words and say: au jour d’hui (on the day of today), made it into one word and here you go, you have aujourdhui, and you have no confusion with oui. If you are a learner, you also have an easier time remembering it and you know how to spell it. Isn’t that nice?

Polish for thanks is dziękuję. Almost everybody knows that. However, not that many learners of Polish, when learning the word, learn that this word actually means I thank and it could be extended to other forms. There are many other examples.

Too often, in courses, I just find out those words taught in the beginning and just put there to memorize. I don’t think that’s a good way to learn. I think that a way better way to learn something is to understand why it is as it is and that’s why you have to ask the question “what lies behind it?”.