The Italian Gameplan

So I just finished finals and it's officially summer vacation. That means I've got about 3 months before I have any real solid day to day schedule and I plan to take advantage of that. This summer I will become fluent in Italian, or at least that's the goal.

If you go on duolingo.com and sign up to learn Italian there are 66 individual sections to learn before they consider you done with the course. Since some of the last sections have to do with politics and business I'm making the educated guess that finishing the course will result in reaching an intermediate level in Italian. 

The short term goal here is to finish every one of those 66 sections before my college classes start up again in August. Since I don't know how long they'll take me I'm going to set the pace at a section a day until I'm done. I believe that would have me done on the 18th of July. The reason I'm pushing the sections so close together has to do with needing a base of knowledge to be able to start conversing with others. Without enough words to choose from all you're left able to say is hello and goodbye with a couple how are you doings thrown into the mix. As such I'll work on getting the vocabulary base quickly and then spending the last month working on writing short essays and speaking.

Now I've been dabbling with learning to speak new languages for a couple years but I've never really had the self discipline to keep it up for long. I'd learn a few phrases and then move on to something newer and shinier. I never set solid goals with deadlines so I'm betting that'll make a big difference in how much I stick with it. 

As a result of that dabbling I'm actually a couple days ahead of schedule to start with because I have 3 sections already done. Hopefully that'll give me some breathing room for days that take longer to finish as well as days where I don't have anytime.

On top of doing a section a day from duolingo.com I'm also planning on going to an Italian conversation group that meets once a week on Thursday evenings and a different group that meets every other Sunday morning. Unfortunately all these conversation groups are in California where I'm staying for the first part of the summer. Sometime around the 4th of July I'll be heading back to my apartment in Iowa where I attend college and they don't have any Italian conversation groups close by.

But don't lose faith quite yet! Once I get it figured out, I also plan on using italki.com to converse with italian natives and practice my writing skills. Hopefully that'll make up for the lack of local conversation partners.

On top of the crazy amount of vocabulary that I'm going to be learning this summer I might also take a programming class online since I have next to no idea how to implement any of the ideas I have for how to organize and run this blog.

Wish me luck!

The Hyperpolyglot Project

To start with I'd like to explain exactly what this project is and where the idea for it came from.

I was surfing the internet a few weeks ago, looking for something to distract me from studying for finals , when I came across a blog called Fluent In Three Months. Since I have nothing planned for the summer (today till mid-August) I thought I would challenge myself with the start of what I'm calling the Hyperpolyglot Project.

According to wikipedia (and yes I do know it's not the most reliable of sources) Richard Hudson, professor emeritus of linguistics at University College London, first coined the term "hyperpolyglot" for a person who can speak twelve or more languages fluently.

So the goal of The Hyperpolyglot  Project is to become fluent in at least 12 languages. Now, without some kind of a deadline I think the project would be too easy so I'm making the due date my 30th birthday. To give you some perspective, I'm coming up on my 24th birthday within the month which gives me just over 6 years to finish.

As of today the only language I speak fully fluently is English. However, in the first few years of life I lived in Germany and as such am conversationally fluent in German. What I mean by that is that I don't really have an accent so I'm very easy to understand, but my vocabulary never really grew past that of a 5 year old. So while I can hold a conversation with anyone over average everyday things, I get lost when any sort of technical vocabulary comes into play.

For the purpose of this blog fluent will mean being able to talk about business in that language. Whenever possible I'm going to to use standardized tests to mark my progress, in particular the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). I'm a big fan of Europe in general so a good number of the languages I'll be learning will come from there but I'll also learn a couple from Asia.

The current tentative list of languages I plan to speak fluently in six years is:

1. English
2. German
3. French
4. Italian
5. Spanish
6. Mandarin Chinese
7. Japanese
8. Arabic
9. Russian
10. Cantonese Chinese
11. Irish Gaelic
12. Danish

Of course since the list is tentative I might change my mind about a couple of the languages but I'm also not going to follow the order listed above or stick to mastering one language at a time. Since life has a tendency of getting in the way of the internet I can't promise daily updates but I'll do my best to post something every week to keep everyone out there following along aware of what I'm working on and how it's going.

Wish me luck!