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2012

The Lomb Method

In a previous post I made some recommendations from among the established commercial language learning methods such as Berlitz, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and a few course books. Over the past year I have branched out to experiment with the methods of various on-line linguaphile gurus, the likes of Piotr Wozniak, Tim Ferris, Mike Campbell, Prof Arguelles, and Katzumoto --- all of whom are worth checking out. But just today I stumbled across the method of polyglot and simultaneous interpreter Kató Lomb, as explained in her book How I Learn Languages. I found Lomb's book absolutely captivating. She makes a number of excellent points. Although her book is by no means a one-stop-shop for polyglottery, it is definitely worth a read for those aspiring to learn one or a few L2s.

A Meta-Etymological Dict

Aspiring polyglots face the huge challenge of massive vocabulary acquisition. Even in closely related languages, it is easy to miss cognates because of sound changes and different orthographies. I have found that using etymological information from dictionary look-ups has boosted my recall for learning from a single language -- but I conjecture that this boost will carry over to other languages of interest if the dictionary would provide related words in every language of interest when they exist. However, in present form, this procedure requires searching through possibly 12 different books! I believe an electronic version would be a huge boon to the modern polyglot community.

Adding Accents to Romanized Japanese

While working through Japanese the Spoken Language (JSL), I feel the need to make Anki cards for the spoken words that I'm having trouble recalling the meanings of. Now, I haven't yet decided exactly what card format is best, but I was dreading having to type in accents on the romanized words. (See the introduction to JSL to see what these accents are.) So, I wrote a quick program to allow easy input of accented words.