It’s back! Friday Linkfest actually got a bit of attention the last time I did it, and I think it’s an excellent idea because, as I stated before, it gives you, the reader, a short little list of interesting language-learning stuff to look at that you may not have seen plus linking out to them acknowledges and rewards people who put good stuff out there and really ought to get credit for it. Let’s see what we’ve got for this week…
Aidan addresses the ever-popular topic among language-nerds of The Easiest Language and his perspective is, honestly, the closest to mine that I’ve read yet. Motivation does matter, but pretending that there’s no difference between languages in terms of difficulty is simply naively denying what reality actually is. Difficulty depends, more than anything, on what your native language is and what languages you already know–Icelandic is generally considered one of the hardest languages in the world, but being a Nordic language it almost certainly would be far easier for a native speaker of Norwegian or Swedish than it would be for anyone else.
Simon over at Omniglot tells us the story of Humboldt’s Parrot, a parrot that belonged to a recently slaughtered Amazonian tribe, the Maypure, and whose language would have been completely lost had it not been for the fact that their parrots learned a large portion of their language and those parrots were subsequently acquired by one Alexander von Humboldt who then did his best to transcribe the Maypure language based on what the parrots said. Very cool 🙂
Vincent does a great job of showing us how easy and fun it can be to learn a language and find native speakers of it, especially in a large city, by describing the Spanish and Mandarin-speaking communities in Philadelphia.
Steve addresses a very common problem (among many) with language teaching as it’s normally done in schools in the United States, specifically that the teachers tend to be far too controlling of how their students learn, the material they’re allowed to learn from and are exposed to, etc. I’ve honestly never had a positive experience with any language class I’ve taken, so I’m not surprised to hear that this sort of attitude is common.
And Randy makes it on the list two weeks in a row by nailing a personal pet peeve of mine, namely the myth that children have some sort of strangely magical ability to acquire languages that gives them an immense advantage over adults but really only gives adults a bullshit excuse to use for being lazy and not learning a language properly.
Now, I’m actually going to send you to a blog post from several years ago because it’s one that I think every language-learner should read and I’ve referred people to it so many times I’ve lost count. It’s by Tim Ferriss and is about how he learned Japanese in 3 months in Japan simply by indulging his passion in Judo. It’s a fantastic read that I cannot recommend highly enough. Any blogger out there that writes something about how to learn a language by involving it in something that you already like or are passionate about like a hobby should read this first and be sure to refer to it in their post (I’ve read about a dozen such posts, by the way, seems as though everyone comes up with that one and, worse, thinks they’re the first one to ever think of it).
That’s it, I hope you found something interesting here and if you’ve got any additional suggestions please please please put them in the comments, anything at all interesting you’ve come across recently you’d like to share that you think someone might find useful is more than welcome! Also…if you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.
I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too
I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).
It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:
Cheers,
Andrew
