Memrise Binge

My grand intentions in my last blog entry have not quite been realized, and for that I blame Memrise, which continues to entice me late at night to binge on all kinds of languages. The situation is a bit out of control.

New York’s Penn Station at Rush Hour Last Week: How Many Languages?

Memrise has also been a gateway drug to the Antosch & Lin collection of websites. The Antosch & Lin folks offer 12 different languages, as I have mentioned before, and I am running from one to another like a crazy lady.

What happens is that I stay up way too late trying to boost my Memrise points (they keep score over there) and just generally add to stores of vocabulary. When I stay up too late, I don’t get enough sleep. When I don’t sleep enough, I don’t want to run. When I don’t want to run, it messes with my Pimsleur Diet, launched earlier this month.

Speaking of which: I have modified my Pimsleur Diet. Though I love Pimsleur’s audio lessons, I can’t bear to do them without pursuing various written materials simultaneously, and I don’t really see fitting in a whole bunch of new languages right now with Pimsleur and grammar books—for Croatian and Lithuanian and Cantonese and so on—when I already have a dozen or so other languages I want to keep working on. So for a more relaxing version of the Pimsleur Diet, I am redoing old lessons.

Right now I am on Russian.

And here is the good news! It is much easier to do these lessons the second time around. Despite the passage of multiple years since my first go-arounds, my redoing of Hebrew lessons, and then Arabic, and now Russian, has gone much more smoothly than my original encounters. That means that amid the flood of multi-language input, and the constant forgetting, there is also some constant remembering, somewhere in the recesses of my mind. 

How delightful.