A Summer Linguabinge!

I did not mean to abandon Pashto. I love Pashto. I merely put it on hold. More on that another time!

In preparation for my talk on language-learning products at Polyglot Conference Thessaloniki 2016, I am now giddily regarding my language shelves, plotting what to review and what new stuff to test. There are quite a few things there that I have meant to try but haven’t gotten around to yet. 

LearnWithOliver.com, a Polyglot Bargain

A binge has already begun.

In the last three days I have redone numerous old Pimsleur lessons previously studied over the past seven years — in Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Greek, Japanese, Russian, Polish, and Dutch. I’ve done a little Glossika Polish (super fun). I’ve done some VocabuLearn lessons for Polish, Greek, and Japanese (even though at the moment my vocabulary is too minimal for me to fully enjoy and benefit from the looooong VocabuLearn audio lists of vocabulary).

I’ve also used LearnWithOliver.com until the wee hours of the morning to work on Japanese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, and Korean. (The last two were especially disastrous, though one thing I have going for me in the language-learning realm is that I remain cheerfully undaunted despite all the linguistic wreckage bobbing along in my brain.)

Reviewing is crazy fun. It is perhaps even more fun than learning the first time around — though each has much to recommend it. I enjoy seeing what I remember. I am less pleased to see all that I have forgotten — but the thing is, things are so much easier round 2 or 3. Vocabulary, sounds, and grammar all come back faster, they feel more natural, there’s less frustration.

For polyglottishly inclined language lunatics, I still recommend LearnWithOliver.com as a remarkable deal. For $8 a month (or less if you get an annual subscription), you get access to all of their languages. It’s high-quality content with audio, tons of really useful content, and lots of settings to customize your experience. I jump from one language to the next. It’s complete linguistic hedonism.

I love linguistic hedonism.