Language Blog

I haven’t managed to finish the last few posts that I’ve started here. Moving on to translate whole sentences, in my state of advanced ignorance in Hindi and Punjabi, has taken a bit more time and effort than expected. I might have to break down and buy a “how to speak Hindi” book to augment the online reading I do. The sites that I use for learning Hindi are nice, but I have a tendency to “overeat” and open five, six, seven of them at once and get lost in the information. Sometimes it’s nice to have a book, something pulpy to hold and read, one single source on which to focus.

For the most part, this blog is similar to my Twitter feed, which is me talking into the void. Yesterday, the void talked back. Ben, from Lexiophiles, added me to his list of top 100 language blogs at #97. Hmmm. That’s unexpected. Thanks for the acknowledgement, guys. But I hope no one gets the wrong impression that I have any idea what I’m doing here. This blog is my effort to learn; all teaching is incidental

Anyway: I’ll be away from home and — hopefully — away from a computer until next week. No language learning until then. I will have several hours in airports and planes to think about which direction to go next with this blog. It’s time to develop a plan.

I’ve managed to go fairly steady for the past two weeks, which is a good start. Now, it’s time to sift through the what’s been done and see how it can be done better.

The first two weeks have followed a simple pattern: find new words, look up the meanings in a dictionary. All I want to do now is to build a base, both of vocabulary (in all three languages) and of the Gurmukhi and Devanagari alphabets. I have always had success remembering things that I have written and read, which is why I employ this method.

So, the first and easiest goal has been met: getting started.

Second goal: archiving the information I learn so that I can use it regularly.

Third goal: share my knowledge with others so that they can use it.

The second goal — essentially: data archival — will mainly involve how I use this blog. WordPress uses both tags and categories to organize posts. Categories denote the focus language of each post. Tags denote groups of words (months, days, etc.) as well as groups of words from the list of most common Hindi words, i.e., a tag for the top 100 words, then a tag for numbers 101 to 200, etc.

Another aspect to the second goal, specific only to Hindi for the moment, is to use the spreadsheet of most commonly used words to capture definitions, pronunciations, parts of speech, and map them to the posts in which they appear. Also, a proper citation for the spreadsheet source is needed.

I want to expand the spreadsheet to include most common words in Punjabi and Spanish. Finding a list of most common Spanish words is easy. I have no idea where to find this for Punjabi, and I won’t invest too much time in finding one yet since this is the number three focus language for me.

One other point on the second goal is to create a page for each language that I’m learning, e.g., a /hindi page for Hindi. That would be an excellent place to include the information I most frequently return to, such as the spreadsheet itself and the alphabet.

The third goal — sharing — will take a little more creativity. I have no intention of turning this blog into a teaching blog. I don’t have enough knowledge in any of the three target languages to be able to teach. This is a learning blog, documenting my trail as I go. In other words, I’m not going to foist the fumbling material here on others and call that sharing.

Instead, I would like to find others that are already creating and assist them, provided they want the assistance. This will likely be limited to Hindi, at least initially, since (1) there are tons of Spanish-English sites out there and (2) there are few, if any, collaborative sites for learning Punjabi that I’ve seen. Three sites seem best suited so far:

1. Wiktionary. Wiktionary is the Wikimedia Foundation open dictionary project. (This is the group that maintains Wikipedia, and also Wikibooks and other projects.) What I especially want to do on Wiktionary is provide links for words between the various languages. For example, if you look up cloud in the English Wiktionary, there should be a link in the translations that takes you to बादल in the Hindi Wiktionary. But that link doesn’t exist yet. I can also keep an eye on the Punjabi and Spanish variants of the Wiktionary to do the same type of work.
2. Wikibooks: Hindi. Wikibooks is a collection of educational texts put together by anyone that wants to help. The Hindi textbook doesn’t appear to have had any significant work done on it in about two years. Here there is an opportunity to arrange the existing content, convert some of the Romanized Hindi to Devanagari (e.g., some of the translations on this page are missing the Devanagari text), maybe even push it forward with what I know. I don’t have the knowledge to take it all the way to being a featured book, but maybe if others see that it is a living project they may wish to help.
3. I Speak Hindi, especially the I Speak Hindi wiki. Nathan from the I Speak Hindi site emailed me recently, apparently after seeing the trackback from my blog to his after I linked to it. If he’d be willing to take help — I’ll have to ask him, and I wouldn’t be offended if he was uninterested — I could help him organize some of the content on his wiki. Again, I’m supremely unqualified to create content for them, but I’m quite good at organizing. We’ll see.

In a nutshell, the drive to learn ten new vocabulary words a day, posting them here, will continue as before. First, I’ll augment this by (1) organizing a page for each language and (2) managing the most common words spreadsheet. Second, I’ll check each word on Wiktionary and see if I can do any language interlinking. Third, I’ll look at the other two sites, Wikibooks and I Speak Hindi, to see what I can do to help.

Also, after writing this post, I think I will schedule an assessment every two weeks, to evaluate how things are going. (However, the next one wouldn’t happen until three weeks from now, since I will be offline during the week following this upcoming week.) I think it’s an unintentionally good idea.

Step by step: I’ll learn how to speak these languages proficiently some day.