Language goals
I want to be able to speak the following languages to a level of B1 (ish) while of course doing all the other things that matter in life.
French, Italian, Spanish.
My spoken ability varies depending on whether I have used a language recently. My passive understanding seems to remain unchanged.
Goals for 2024:
Improve my Spanish and Italian. This is easy enough as it mainly involves italki lessons and watching youtube vids that I watch anyway, and learning relevant vocabulary. I’ll maintain my French in the same way.
Goals for 2023:
I forgot to amend this page. Oops. And now in 2024, I can safely reveal that my goal was to improve my French, which I did 🙂 So well done me.
French, Italian, and Spanish
I have reached B1 in these although my French accent literally can (and has) made French speakers wince – c’est la vie;)
And Latin
I dabble in Latin – especially during the winter months, and continue to do so on a very ad hoc;) basis
Natch.
Besos, Baci & Pax.
MF
Hello. I just found your mobile app for Yiddish and I love it.
Thank you!
I have an idea for you to partner with two parties to increase your Yiddish content.
E-mail me if you’re interested.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I haven’t decided what I’m going to add to Surface languages this year, but if it is Yiddish I’ll drop you a mail.
MF
I realy like your courses! I have already installed Greek and Norwegian and it is amazing! But I have smething to say about language courses. Bosnian and Croatian are versions of SERBIAN, but I respect Bosnians’ and Croatians’ thinking. I saw that you don’t have Serbian course after all that. I just want to say that all people of Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia can understand theirselves perfectly but they don’t have one name for that language. Serbia and Montenegro were together just a few years ago and they all spoke Serbian. Now Montenegro has its own language.
Your courses are awesome, I like them, but, I don’t know for these courses. This was just a suggestion. Don’t take its bad side. I just want to say that it could be serbocroatian as it was called years before. (I must say it again these courses were the right thing I was searching for!)
Thanks for your comment. I realise that the languages or perhaps dialects are extremely similar, but I suppose that like you I respect Bosnians, Croatians and Serbians way of thinking about their language.
The only reason that I haven’t added Serbian (yet) is time and money (and finding someone to record the audio), and the same with Montenegrin, so one day I would like to add them both. It might be that I do this when (or if) I add sentences in these languages, which maybe might show the differences more than with common words. There is only one person running Surface Languages (me!), and it is a side-project/hobby, so I only have limited time etc.
Anyway, thanks for your comment, it seems pretty fair to me, and I’m glad you like the course.
MF
I’m happy to see that you haven’t understood my suggestion like a hater’s one. However you are doing a great thing: you make free language courses for all people and I am impressed. (Sorry for my english it is probably bad when I write it like that. ) It is good that anybody can learn anything. Of course it is hard to just one persone do all that.
Actually your English is extremely good.
MF
I mean the rest of courses like Greek
Hi! I have recently started learning Afrikaans and I am looking for people to interview for an Afrikaans language learning series that I am doing. I really like your site and would really love to do an informal interview/chat you via Skype, if you would be happy for me to do so. This will be very informal and relaxed, and a sharing of experiences and ideas, but at the same time please do not feel any pressure if you would rather not. Please do email me if you would like to.
Best Wishes and geniet jou dag!
Hi. I’m really pleased that you like my site. It is very encouraging to have positive feedback. Thanks for the interview/chat idea, but it really isn’t me. I think that there are lots of other people who as it were, are experts on the subject of language learning, and whose ideas are more relevant than mine.
I hope your Afrikaans learning continues! (And try reading …;).
Best,
MF
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Hi there,
I was wondering based on which criteria youve chosen the languages you decided to learn.
Ive always wanted to learn a new language but I always fail at which one I should pick up as my interests swing and I usually tend to give up at an early stage.
I tend to have the same problem. I tend to think that to continue with a language you need to have a reason of some sort. That has always been my problem with Polish. I like the language, but don’t have a compelling reason to learn it.
But to answer your question: Spanish originally for fun, then because I needed it and finally it became part of my life. Italian which I started on a whim, but continued with because of friends that I had made. Croatian which I started because of a holiday and then for no particular reason has become a bit of an obsession.
French is a bit of an outlier. It’s just been useful over the years, although my spoken French needs a bit of reviving at the moment.
I’ve used surface languages so many times, I love the site, thank you for all the free content, knowledge is key!!!
🙂