I början...

A short explanation about me, this blog and what it's about.

I'm an American gap year student currently in Brazil with a fascination for languages and linguistics which I've held since age eleven or twelve. However, I was also an appallingly lazy child (still am, really)...so I had, previously, had a bad habit of trying to self-study a language, then dropping it after a couple weeks. The result is that, at the age of seventeen, I'm now a half-master of French (from school) and Portuguese (from living in Brazil), and a jack of about half a dozen other languages: Finnish, Welsh, Catalan...

This blog, in essence, is a way to advertise to the world: no longer. I can become a polyglot.

It's a product, I think, of my gap year experience, which took me first to Finland (which, through no fault of my own, I was forced to leave) and then to Brazil. It's a truism, but one repeated for a reason: learning a language because you're immersed in it is a completely different experience from learning it in school.

It's not just the language that you learn, but how to learn it, as well. If you go through the experience of struggling to get words out in their native contexts (rather than parroting trivialities in a classroom), it suddenly becomes obvious what you need; you can suddenly write down a list of fifty verbs you need to know, or conversational situations you need to be proficient in, because the gaps are suddenly obvious. 

And then, you can turn around and say "Now that I've been through the wringer with X, I can now apply the same thing and start on Y..." And that's the purpose of this blog. It's a language learning log, above all, and although it may garner some appreciation from language geeks or polyglots I have little hope or desire for fame. It's really just a self-serving way to keep me on track and momentarily amuse passersby.

So what language are you learning, and how long are you taking?

I'll hopefully go through a couple of languages at least before I retire this blog, but at the moment, the project of choice is Swedish, mainly because it's easy, and I'd like to finish an easier language before I try and apply the same thing to a more difficult one.

As to time scale: I highly recommend, if just to poke around, Benny the Irish Polyglot's blog Fluent in Three Months (linked on the sidebar). He's the sort of polyglot to aspire to: he speaks English, Irish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Mandarin, Esperanto, and ASL, and is working on Egyptian Arabic. And, to top it all off, he learned each of these languages in just three months each.

Now, he claims that he's not actually anything special- that anyone else with enough motivation could do exactly what he's doing. Doubtless, it's true that anyone with enough motivation can learn that many languages with sheer willpower and effort...but I have my doubts about the timescale. I think he's right that you can learn any language with any halfway decent method if you put your mind and your time to it. I've got my doubts about how long he takes, though...even allowing that he's in the country where each language is spoken, three months seems an awfully short time. And, I'd argue, the time's variable by language (which he steadfastly denies). He's cheated on Egyptian Arabic by studying before going to Egypt, and, well, nobody's really going to deny that French or German have lots of cognates that speed the process up. He also argues that no language is harder than any other...which is true for babies, sure, but I'd like to see him tackle Navajo or Aleut or Basque before he makes a blanket statement. (But this is the statement of a language geek with a masochistic love for languages with really baroque and alien morphosyntactic systems. I'd actually put my money on him pulling it off).

If all that sounded a bit negative towards the man, I'd like to reiterate that I really do admire him and think he's exactly the sort of person to emulate; but I think he's also pulling shortcuts that he may not entirely recognize.

So, could I get to fluency in Swedish in three months? It's possible- even probable- I'd say. If I were suddenly stranded in Stockholm, I could probably do it (as I suspect I'll be fluent in Portuguese here in Brazil by late March). But in a country where Swedish isn't spoken, with another language to work on as well...three months seems a little overambitious.

As a result, I'm shooting for six and a half months- the time span from now until I leave Brazil. I'll shoot for fluency, but unless I can pull a lot of Skype dates with Swedes out of thin air between now and then, it's doubtful I'll be able to claim real spoken fluency. The real goal I have to shoot for is as good a Swedish as I can get in six and a half months. This is of course completely nebulous, but, well, so is "fluency". (Best benchmark I can provide: have at least as good a Swedish as I need to read a short, not overly complex novel.)

And today, I started on that...

What's your method?

I don't have a name-brand one, if that's what you're asking.

I've learned enough Portuguese and, before that, Finnish to know what I need to be able to say when starting a language. I'm therefore sort of making it up as I go, trying to be relatively rigorous, and testing myself at intervals.

I have an outline of topics for the next month, which also includes a couple of days off and such self-set "exams" as writing a letter to a friend and spending five minutes talking about my life to a tree (passersby be damned.) I'll post about the first day of learning later tonight. 

After the month is up, I'll see where I'm at. I'm kind of hindered by not having a decent dictionary at my disposal, although I'm working on getting one; but Wiktionary will do for the first couple of weeks.

I'll try to post every day I study, although that might not happen. This being a blog about language studying, you might be able to gleam some interesting bits here and there, but mostly it will be here's-what-I-learned-to-say-today. There's nothing wrong with it, I don't think; if nothing else, it keeps me working. 

Aren't you also studying Portuguese?

Yes...but that's what I'm using in everyday life, and it's coming along extremely rapidly, so I don't worry about losing Portuguese time to Swedish. (Nor do I fear mixing the two up).

How much do you already know?

A smattering. 

Can I get in touch with you?

I've set up an independent e-mail address for this blog: scalingbabel@gmail.com. Shoot me a question, and I might answer it here!

If you're a speaker of Swedish, or whatever other language I'm studying when you find this blog in The Future, I'm always looking for people to chat with on Skype...

What will you study after Swedish?

I'm not sure, but relearning Finnish, or a new Romance language (probably Italian or Catalan) both seem like possibilities.