Friday 12 September 2014

Ah, the joy of learning.

I am trying it again. Even though the last two tries did not last for very long, or were very successful, this time I have an event to work toward which is far enough in the future to actually be realistic.

If you are wondering what I am talking about - the next NESAT conference will be in Liberec, in the Czech republic, and since the last one was in 2014, it will be in 2017. (NESAT is, sadly, only every three years.)

I do not, yet, speak Czech, nor do I understand spoken Czech. That is true for a lot of languages, though - quite important for reading archaeological stuff - I can read a lot more languages than I can speak. I cannot even read basic Czech, though. That is something that I would like to remedy, and having a NESAT in two and a half years should give me enough time to learn some. Add to this the motivational tidbit extra - the most patient of all husbands and myself have a challenge going to do a ten minute foreign language improval stint every weekday - and it might just work. So yesterday I invested in a computer language learning programme. We'll see where it goes from here.

Did you ever, successfully or unsuccessfully, learn a language using a computer lesson packet? Or some other alternative way? I'd love to know. Life interaction would surely be better than just the 'puter, but Czech lessons hereabouts are hard to find, and I can deal better, time-wise, with ten minutes a day than with longer lessons with larger gaps inbetween.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I made some progress in HIndi using Pimsleur, but started too late (4 months) to get fluent. With your amount of time, you should do well.

Reading Czech is harder than speaking it, I'll bet...not sure what's a good program for that.

Kucki68 said...

I just started learning Spanish (the n-th go at the first lesson) and found this website very interesting: http://www.fluentin3months.com/

Not a course, but some resources and ideas.

standgale said...

If you don't know it, try memrise for learning vocab, you can learn a huge amount of words if you just do a little bit a day, and it is so easy. Then you can spend your brain power on the harder stuff :)