I’ve spent the past 18 years studying Somali and French. Language learning never ends. I move forward, forget a ton, fall back, jump ahead, forget it all again, get it tangled up together. There are always new proverbs, new jokes, new idioms. It is daunting and hard and so deeply rewarding.
I’m also a language nerd. I have a degree in Linguistics and spent my high school chemistry class making words out of the Periodic Table. Still, language learning is valuable, even if it isn’t fun for everyone.
Learning language is about much more than words and accents. It is culture and history, folk tales and legends and old wives tales. Learn it all.
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My Articles
- What I Learned When I Failed to Learn Somali, in the Smart Set
- 11 Ways Running is Like Learning a Foreign Language
- The Aim of Language Learning
- Language Learning Methods: Whatever It Takes
- How to Learn Somali
- Speak Somali Without Saying a Word
- To Kiss or Not to Kiss, EthnoTraveler
Resources
- The Growing Participator Approach This is a great method and a really hard to use, bulky website. Still, I recommend it especially for places or languages where you might not have a school to attend.
- How to Learn a Foreign Language, by Paul Pimsleur PhD
- Learn Any Language Fast! By Dagny Taggart
- Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It, by Gabriel Wyner
- Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language, by Steven Pinker
- Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill