As of early this morning, I have been given full disclosure of the details of the Hebrew experiment. I can't spill the beans just yet because I do need to wait for the other two participants to get up to speed. I can, however, say that they'll soon be posting their own introductions here, so look out for information about them. Back to that in a second.
What I can say, for now, is that, as some may have supposed, the project does involve a linguistic endeavor. Those of you that know me personally know that I've always got a linguistic project in the works, no matter how serious. This one will be unique, though. The other participants are vaguely aware of the nature of the project now, and it's obviously been established that we're talking about modern Hebrew.
Back to the participants. They'll be on shortly, but I'll jump in with a little information about myself (the relevant parts, anyway). I didn't take any foreign language classes until the 8th grade. I was placed in a Latin class that fed into Latin 1 my freshman year. My junior high Latin teacher was well intentioned, but not spectacular. In high school, however, I loved it. Took it for four years and it became the basis for my interest in foreign language.
After high school, I started studying things on my own, beginning with Russian. I studied it passive/aggressively for quite a while, but only in a vacuum; I never had a chance to use it much. After that came cursory studies (to varying degrees) of things like German and Turkish, and out of necessity, stretches of a few weeks to a few months studying other languages, which I've managed mostly to forget. I was encountering lots of foreigners at the time and able to make use of these opportunities to study everything from Turkish to Swahili to Persian, Urdu, Albanian, Romanian, Hungarian, Azerbaijani and Telugu. I've managed (unfortunately) to forget most of it since it was for such temporary use and such sporadic study, but some of it stays with you, mostly being the general across-the-board concepts present in so many (even unrelated) languages, along with a desire to learn more.
I've never taken any classes or had any formal training in anything I (claim to) speak. I've studied Chinese now for almost three years, and currently live in Taipei, Taiwan. I speak Mandarin with little problem, and it's given me opportunity to study and attain varying degrees of ability in Cantonese and Taiwanese as well. I was also studying Thai very rigorously last year, and plan to pick that back up in a few weeks. I'm currently trying to learn Italian within the month I have left before I arrive in Rome. After that I have a few weeks before I'm back in Bangkok and hopefully able to communicate comfortably.
In any case, I always have some kind of linguistic iron in the fire (be that good or bad), and really do enjoy those kinds of pursuits.
Aside from Chinese, though, saying I've studied or spent time with a language is by no means to say I claim fluency. I haven't such delusions of grandeur, but even a cursory study isn't fruitless. I might be able to decipher or understand written text or fight to keep my head above water in a spoken conversation. In any case, that's kind of the starting point for language.
The other two participants should be posting shortly, and we'll be talking more as we get off the ground with this. All information will hopefully be out by the end of next week or beginning of the following week.
Other participants, your turn!
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