I’ve just added the initial parts of two new language courses to Surface Languages. These are Italian for beginners and Polish for beginners.

The courses are simple,  consisting of short sentences, made up  of a few words only and for absolute beginners.

The reason for this was partly based on my experience of starting to learn Polish, which was that I found the language overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start, and couldn’t see how to progress. This problem is particularly acute when you are looking at a language which is completely unrelated to any others you know.

I wanted artificially simple sentences so that I could build up a very basic idea of how the language functions, before moving onto more complicated materials.

I then looked around at other language resources on the internet, and discovered that although there is a vast quantity of information, a lot of it is too complicated for the initial stages of learning. Obviously, the length of time spent on these initial stages depends on the intensity of learning and how many hours you are putting in a day or week.

I then thought it would be useful to add courses which could be used as a starting point in language studies, before beginning to use more complicated materials.

This should speed up initial progress. At some point, I would like to learn Russian, but before I do, I will add Russian to SL, and eat (as it were) my own dog food.

This is a very long term project and I will add these additional languages, and extend the  existing language courses as and when I can. Time permitting.

I am in the process (although that doesn’t come with a particular time-scale) of adding the initial parts to both French and Romanian language courses.

Peace,

MF