Without warning, I suddenly saw it there among all the other secondhand books, records and CDs: a crisp near-pristine 1979 copy of Linguaphone’s (rare and long since discontinued) Polish Course!
How could I not buy it? Seriously, how was I supposed to just leave it there? I just couldn’t.
It turns out the cassettes are fine too - remastering to mp3 isn’t going to be a problem.
And the wonderfully gentle, slightly mysterious, East-European sound of Polish…ahhhh…no, there’s no point denying it, the bittersweet agony of language-wanderlust has once again mercilessly and brutally got ahold of me! :-0
Do other people suffer from this problem too? Do others want to learn more than they can realistically hope to achieve in one lifetime?
There is no way that I can (realistically) add Polish to my target list! Help!
Most serious language learners are afflicted (blessed?) with irresistible wander-lust. In order to avoid some serious damage, I made a rule for myself that I’d never stray too far away from any languages before I reach intermediate. I’ve been at Russian for about a year now, and I know that if I hadn’t fooled around with French and German and Latin and Italian all the while, I might have done a lot more.
I think listening to the radio and rapid speech is what drives me back to learning my target language and not dabbling in others. I realize how much I don’t understand and/or how much I understand more than when I first started. Both thoughts are motivation to keep me on track. I’m learning Mandarin but also want to learn Cantonese and Spanish…Spanish was my second language in high school, and I also passed proficiency in it in graduate school. There’s a pull in me to bring it along with Mandarin because sometimes I think they are different enough to do that but I’m steering clear of over-reaching. There is also the lingering fear that I consider Chinese to be very hard and I am subconsciously looking at ways of dumping it or just shelving by picking up Spanish again. I am quite sure I don’t want to do this, but this can be a function of wanderlust urge…the brain’s way of trying to get out of the continuing, existing struggle with a target language.
I think that it’s a problem if you want to make quick progress in a language. I have a friend that is a bit like that, and he speaks fluent Mandarin (after studying it at the University he spent a year in rural China teaching English) and intermediate level Spanish, and other than that he knows some expressions in Korean, French, Russian, German, Malaysian, Hindi, and Bengali, but he can’t have a single conversation in any of them, because every time he sees a new resource, he’ll buy it up, be motivated for 2-3 weeks, and then move on to another hobby.
Goal setting and a bit of restraint is a good way to make good long term progress, studying no more than 1 or 2 languages. I know Imy is doing a different approach, and I’m curious to see the results at the end of the 10 years. By the way Imy, when was the beginning of this ten year time period?
@djc: “…I have a friend that is a bit like that, and he speaks fluent Mandarin (after studying it at the University he spent a year in rural China teaching English) and intermediate level Spanish, and other than that he knows some expressions in Korean, French, Russian, German, Malaysian, Hindi, and Bengali, but he can’t have a single conversation in any of them…”
Yep, that’s pretty much exactly where I am. As a youngster I learned German and Italian in a disciplined and structured way, and I was motivated to stick with them for a long time, and to reach a high level, due to residence overseas. But in more recent years I’ve just flitted from one language to another, picking up odd bits and pieces but nothing really solid.
If only I could commit to something new for six months straight, I might actually make a major breakthrough in it…
@milestones: “…There is also the lingering fear that I consider Chinese to be very hard and I am subconsciously looking at ways of dumping it…”
Now that you mention it, I think I have experienced something a bit like this too. I would love to learn Chinese (either Cantonese or Mandarin) but there is a little demon of doubt in my mind which keeps telling me that I’d never be able to crack the written language.
Just flicking through it, it is clear that it follows the exact format and layout as the Linguaphone Serbocroat course. (This was, of course, also long ago discontinued - but I have an old scuffed edition of it somewhere; I’ve never seriously tried to use it, because the audio for it was pretty much shot to pieces, unfortunately.)
Anyway, this course (like Serbocroat) has 30 lessons, each subdivided into 3 parts. Each “part” is as long as (or maybe longer than) a single Assimil lesson - so you could argue that it really has 90 lessons. There is an illustrated textbook with the Polish text for each of these lessons.
Then there is a handbook containing the following for each lesson: (1.) a fairly literal English translation of the Polish text in each lesson; (2.) a list of vocabulary and idioms for the text of each lesson; (3.) grammatical notes for each lesson.
At the end of the handbook there is a reasonably concise reference grammar with all the big declension tables, etc. (Grammar-phobes would feel their knees turning to jelly at the sight of these - but it gives me a huge buzz! :-D)
There is also a book of written exercise-drills for each lesson with answers at the back. However, unlike some Linguaphone courses of this era (such as French or Spanish) it does NOT also have a set of audio exercise-drills for each lesson.
All in all it looks pretty darned good. Apart from the fact that it doesn’t have the audio exercise-drills, the content looks somewhat more wide-ranging than their Russian course from the same era, in my opinion.
BTW
Which Linguaphone courses do you have, Imyirtseshem?
Jay_B, I really understand your point, that’s a problem I also have. I wish I could focus in at most two or three foreign languages but I just can’t, it is like a curse, it seems I’m doomed to remain a “jack of all trades, master of none” unless I do something about it.
Right now I’m trying to “eradicate” some languages but with no much success; on the contrary, about three months ago I just resumed my studies on the Yucatec Maya language Anyway, I think I’d better enjoy the journey and let’s see what happens.
Greetings.
I experienced this problem a year ago. Language learning was a new passion for me and I wanted to learn another language, one more exotic than English. I knew the very basics of Arabic so I thought about learning this one. I gave up, not really convinced. Then I went on to Chinese, Russian, German. I learned a few things in these languages, and I don’t think it was worthless, but each time I gave up after a few weeks of not very intensive learning. Finally, I gave Portuguese a try, quite disappointed after my failure to take up an exotic language. I’ve learned to like Portuguese with time, and now love it, but I can’t say I was enthusiastic about learning it at first. I just needed another language to learn.
For me this “language wander-lust” problem was due to the fact that I wasn’t really interested in one of the aforementioned languages. They all had a little something that held me back.
Now that I’ve set myself a five-languages-in-five-years challenge, I don’t have this problem anymore. I’d love to give Turkish, Persian or Mandarin a go (another one in the case of Mandarin) but I try to be patient. Sometimes it’s hard…
@A13: “…I wish I could focus in at most two or three foreign languages”
I reckon two would be a realistic maximum for me. (There are some folks who can do more - but that seems amazing to me.)
@Jorgis: “…I learned a few things in these languages, and I don’t think it was worthless…”
You know, I think this is an important point. Several years ago I played around a little with the Assimil and Linguaphone courses in Arabic. I didn’t get very far, mainly because I was so massively daunted by the Arabic script.
However, when I got these out and looked at them again more recently, I found that it didn’t seem as bad as it had the first time! Maybe I still wasn’t quite ready to jump right in at the deep end - but I had the feeling that it would be considerably easier now.
So maybe it can actually be helpful to dabble in a language, and then spend some time away from it? (But at some point we need to commit a lot of time to the task, of course.)
@djc: “Goal setting and a bit of restraint is a good way to make good long term progress, studying no more than 1 or 2 languages.”
Wow thanks I will keep that in mind.
I think you’re right. Whenever I hear some Russian or German (it doesn’t work for Chinese however) I can recognize a few words. And even when I understand nothing, it’s not totally unfamiliar. I mean the sounds of the language, the structure.
Dabbling in a language and then let it settle down in the mind might be the solution. Especially for those who are not seasoned language learners or have no experience in learning a completely new language.
Interesting that you mention Arabic, because I’ve resumed my studies of this language a month ago and so far so good. I’m using the FSI MWA Course, which is fine as I merely want to be able to understand the news, spoken or written. I don’t know if it’s a good course but my motivation is so strong that I could learn with anything. I just wish days were longer, because I can only find time to study during the week-end…
In my case Chinese with its homophones + its one-syllabe words + its characters seems like an impossible equation to solve. Actually I think the characters would be the “easiest” thing to learn for me (and by far the most enjoyable).
Anyway, I think I’d better enjoy the journey and let’s see what happens.