Hei Hei Hei

It’s been a while since my last “I’m learning” post.

Let’s see. There’s been:

So what’s the latest language I can add to the “learned and have forgotten everything” list? Buryat? Karelian? Maybe even Mi’kmaq?

The most important factor in learning a language is motivation, so while I’m sure those three languages are great fun to learn, I’m not going to be using them to speak to anyone in the forseeable future. If I was going to learn a totally useless languages, it would have to match Toki Pona’s 120-root word vocabulary, and the to-the-pointedness of lesson two’s “mi wile unpa e ona”.

I’m off to Finland later this year. The Finn’s mostly speak great English, but, in spite of the fact that after my two months of Finnish, I’ll be saying “hei hei hei” (hei is hello) and smiling maniacally, and anyone who hangs around will immediately switch to English, learning Finnish still sounds fun.

The Defense Language Institute has four levels of language difficulty for English-speakers. Category one, the easiest to learn, consists of other European languages with a shared vocabulary, such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as linguistically simple languages such as Swahili. Category two includes languages such as German, Hindi and Urdu. Finnish is in level three, up there with Russian, Vietnamese and Amharic. So, not easy. Category four is the shortest list, containing the most challenging languages for English speakers, such as Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic.

So how am I learning Finnish?

The most well-known language sites online, such as Busuu, Babbel and Duolingo don’t list Finnish. LiveMocha does, but it’s friendly “We don’t work in Linux” web app doesn’t inspire much hope.

So, my strategy so far has been:

1) Surface Languages – the standard sort of course, ranging from “hello” to, er, whatever comes next

2) Memrise – a learning tool I think has great potential, but which I’ve never had reason to try until now. Memrise was founded by Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, and Greg Detre, a Princeton neuroscientist specializing in the science of memory and forgetting. A “Grand Master of Memory” is an award given to people who have achieved three feats. Memorise 1000 random digits in an hour. Memorise the order of 10 decks of cards in an hour. Memorise the order of one deck of cards in under two minutes. There are 196 million grand masters of memory in the world at the moment. No. No there’re not. There are 131 in the world as of the end of 2012, including two South Africans.

Memrise uses memory association in quite an innovative way, and spaced repetition, so seems to make great sense as a tool.

3) Finally, most fun of all, Youtube. I don’t mean people at their webcam counting to 1 million. So far I’ve watched Joki, a very good film, and An Unfinished Movie. This is probably the equivalent of watching Trainspotting to learn English, but I’m having fun.

Ask me in September how it went.

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