Month: February 2020

Remember when I said I was chained to German no matter what?

Well…

Wait, wait — Don’t look at me like that. I’ve not broken my promise. I just moved German two spots over due to a new, fascinating realization about hyperpolyglotism. I’m totally reliable still, it’s just that I couldn’t study German because I got really sick, my house was condemned, and my sister got a 10 pound cancerous tumor removed, so I have good excuses. (The really funny part is that I’m not even joking about any of these things. Life is hard.)

Long story short, I want to learn way more languages than a reasonable person would. But it’s all possible, of course. More possible now that I’ve considered a new strategy: Basically, by stepping through the linguistic family tree in an outward fashion. This isn’t because of novelty (alright, maybe a little), but efficiency.

Rather than learning in order of who-the-heck-knows, I’ll be learning in order of lexical similarity to the languages I’ve learned previously. This way, I’ll learn in order of relative ease, and possibly shave off months or years of time, if not just due to reduced friction or stress alone.

Take a look at this map of European languages and their lexical distances:

This is also my computer’s wallpaper. :^)

For reference, a quick rundown of the languages I care to learn, in no specific order (updated to my most recent, perhaps fleeting preferences): Icelandic, Norwegian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, Croatian, Russian, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin… and some more.

I’m also learning in pairs because I can afford to now. It also allows for more novelty. And to avoid burnout, I’ll be doing a lot of reading and listening for one language and just a lot of listening for the second. Must less back pain at a desk you know?

English is the origin point. The closest languages that I care to learn are Norwegian (49), Icelandic (50), and German (49) here. Given my previous experience with both Swedish and German, either one would work here. For the sake of life and social relevance however, I choose to start with Norwegian. Even more relevant though is Japanese, so this forms the first pair that I’ll learn by the end of this first half of 2020: NO-JP.

Following Norwegian, and in the realm of little circumstantial relevance from here on, Icelandic is the clear pick for the first language of 2020 half 2. For the second language, you would think German — but that’d violate one rule that I believe to be somewhat helpful for both sustaining interest and not mixing up my linguistic muscle memory: No two languages of the same family at the same time. So, the second language you would think to be French then, the next best pick and the first language of the Romance tree as we jump the gap due to historical fanboyism by the English that gave us lots of French vocab. No, the second language will branch off of Japanese: Kanji. The reasons for me considering it a language unto itself will be detailed later, so just roll with it for now.

So far I’ve got:
2020-H1: Norwegian-Japanese
2020-H2: Icelandic-Kanji

Following that, I have options that will likely depend on life circumstances once again. Maybe Korean will become relevant enough and I’ll take advantage of its similarities to Japanese, or maybe I’ll just explore European languages first.

Just as an example, here’s my projection going the European-first route:
2020-H1: Norwegian-Japanese
2020-H2: Icelandic-Kanji
2021-H1: German-French
2021-H2: Polish-Italian
2022-H1: Russian-Portuguese
2022-H2: Croatian-Spanish
2023-H1: Bulgarian-Korean
2023-H2: Finnish-Mandarin

Luckily I managed to find another couple of images online concerning the jungle of Slavic language similarity (shown below), which finally gave me the information needed to realize the proper order stemming from Polish: Polish-Russian-Croatian-Bulgarian.

Credit to latebit’s post on LiveJournal.

Can I really learn 4 languages per year? Yeah, concievably. Over an hour a day for each of pure input, for 180 days? I’ve got confidence in it. Previous experiments went pretty far in as little as 2.5 months, so 6 sounds just fine especially with my greater learning skills and understanding of the theory of language acquisition.

Good luck, me!