languages, again

~detritus

~bartender, hi, I brought my mug, I hope you have an infinite supply of coffee... and omeprazol.

I started writing this post elsewhere, hence some parts seem to refer to stuff that isn't here, but there is some etiquette over there not to use the site as one's own personal blog. I don't see no injunction here against that, so I'll just paste it here.

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Hi, it's your favorite language blogger, back with a report on the language learning progress!

Actually, I haven't been too busy with languages recently; I have other stuff in my mind, but languages are always there somewhere in the back of my mind, and I keep coming back to them, not in isolation, either, but as a useful addition to history, religion, and general worldwide acculturation.

Right now I have been focusing on Russian and Chinese (the enemies of Murrica 😈), but I also have a nagging interest in Ancient Greek as well (you may recognize my previous posts in this thread). There are others, too, but I'll focus on these for the time being.

I actually have a hard time dissecting my time and alloting it to each subject and setting aside some time for the study of languages, and thus taking that time from physical work as well as from my other studies, which on and off seem more relevant than language learning, given that (1) I do not get to speak with foreigners at all, and I don't use the internet much anymore these days* and (2) The other subjects are often practical skills or theory necessary to navigate the vagaries of modern life and current events.

Anyway, right now it's a struggle between, on the one hand, Chinese, which I have already spent the better part of 7 years learning, and Russian, which is a lot easier to understand when listening (at least for me). Despite learning Chinese for so long, I'm still grossly incompetent at it, on the other hand, I have a huge pile of books on Chinese history and culture full of tidbits that keep me coming back to the language. There is also the little fact that, despite being such a difficult language, it is also the language of the future, so it would indeed be a great benefit to at least understand it.

Chinese is difficult for me not because it's grammar is at all hard (it's almost trivial, in contrast with Russian grammar), or because the characters are difficult to learn (I do still have huge gaps in my basic literacy), but because the phonetics are soo alien from an IE perspective. Russian is a lot easier to understand when I hear it spoken, chinese still sounds like gibberish to me.

Russian learning books are not very good, either. I have a few I like but they dwell too much on grammar (and they always elaborate at length on basic issues such as cases and verbal aspect), and they offer very little by way of practice reading, in contrast to chinese learning books which are usually a text, it's glossary, and a section clarifying difficult bits, new ways of saying stuff, or whatever.

I also can't stop being interested in Ancient Greek. I keep coming back to it despite not having the time or the mental bandwidth to add yet another language to the list. And yet I keep fetching the books and giving them a skim. Then there is also sanskrit, which is a good addition to buddhist chinese... but I'll have to resist the temptation for a few years.

Right now I want to at least focus on these two languages and try to make a routine and a workflow so that I can keep progressing in both of them while also keep my interest alive. After a while of drilling vocabulary or practice reading rather uninteresting and lengthy texts, fatigue and boredom start to kick in and I start thinking: electricity is still more useful in my daily life, I should open that book instead.

tl;dr my brain is a mess.

~bartender, can I have some refill, please?

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* actually, I do use the internet a fair bit, mostly just youtube, which I should use a lot more to practice listening in my target languages.