I had a little debate with myself about whether to wait for my other two study partners, seeing as I'm twelve hours ahead of them. In the long run, it doesn't make much difference, that twelve hours, but we've (at least I have) been alternately chomping at the bit or rather apprehensive to start.
When I looked at both my calendar and my timer I'd set on my computer for May 1, 2010 and they were both down not to days, not to hours or minutes, but seconds (clock just ticked 11:59), I kinda made up my mind: I'm starting NOW.
Over on my personal blog, I've been keeping a steady (but lately more and more hefty-seeming) pace with learning Thai without slacking off. One Pimsleur lesson a day is what I've got planned.
Yes, plans... how do we go about this, you ask? Let's discuss our plans of attack.
Wikipedia (and maybe Omniglot, etc) do a great job of giving me some very useful little bits of information about a language, especially a new one; it's like a cold read on a language. How is it constructed grammatically? How do they treat their verbs? Nouns? What about genders? How many cases? Sentence structure? This is all a good argument for how knowing other languages helps you learn new ones. On the one hand, I can relate to SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) word order from languages like Russian or German; English is SVO. There. I get that (mostly). After a brief overview, I want to learn two of the most commonly irregular verbs in any language: to be and to have. Then there's to know. Then I want most general rules for how to treat verbs. Can I change a present tense verb to the past (or future) tense with a simple particle or conjugation? What's the root form? The infinitive, etc.
Those are pretty much the two big ones. Pimsleur will help me with the most basic of sentence structure and the other most necessary vocabulary. After that, knowing how verbs work and strengthening my grasp of sentence structure, I should be able to start filling in blanks with other nouns as I need. That's my approach.
Oh, and also to learn to read as soon as possible.
I'm not so much excited about learning HEBREW, per se, as much as I am about starting a language from scratch, especially the way we're doing it.
Gals, what are your gameplans?
I'm starting with you. I have Pimsleur I and II and a blank exercise book I'll use to write down the dialogues and new vocabulary. I already know how to write and read (slowly) and have gone through a few of these lessons before but not really in a structured way.
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear it, unsigned! Looks from your blog posts that you've tinkered with some Hebrew before. We're definitely focusing on Pimsleur as a linguistic panacea, but that there's a lot one can do to supplement that study to become comfortable with a language in a short period of time, with some diligent study and practical application. Look forward to hearing how it goes with you! Thanks for the heads up!
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