Language study tracker

I started getting back into Arabic last summer, after the Polyglot Conference in Poland where I got to practice a ton of Arabic both with other learners and with native speakers. I realized that Arabic was the Middle Eastern language that I was the most fluent in, and decided it would make sense to focus on it even more instead of spreading myself too thin.

I finished re-reading a solid series of Palestinian Arabic textbooks last year, and since then my "study" has largely consisted of Lebanese podcasts on Youtube (many of which are subtitled in English), Levantine music, and Syrian-dubbed Turkish TV shows on Netflix. When I have doubts about something new I hear, I have a trusty dictionary and reference grammar to help me out when Google isn't enough.

This is one I've been chipping away at on and off for a while now. I finally got a solid grasp on the Ge'ez/Amharic script and the overall contours of the grammatical system last year, so the main challenge is building vocabulary.

But in any case, there's one additional factor to make sure I keep working on Amharic for at least the next few months: I'll be doing a presentation on it at the Polyglot Gathering, with a focus on it's similarities and differences with Arabic and Hebrew.

For the most part I'm currently using Wolf Leslau's Amharic Textbook, which despite being a bit older is still the best, most systematic textbook I've been able to find. (Leslau also wrote a great Reference Grammar that look at from time to time.)

Having lived in Glendale, CA for the past two years (the world's most Armenian city after Yerevan, the capital of Armenia), I've been mildly interested in learning some Armenian for a while now, although my interest has come and gone in a few waves.

I'm currently once again in a phase of high interest in Armenian, in part thanks to discovering a few new textbooks, as well as the realization that my grasp of the Armenian script is now solid enough that textbooks I used to struggle with are no longer so hard to use.

Speaking of the Polyglot Conference in Malta, I'm also currently making plans to travel around Italy a bit as part of the same trip.

I seem to have more or less reached the end of the line in terms of Levantine Arabic textbooks, so the other thing I'm doing is working on my fuṣḥā as well, both as another way to expand my vocabulary and to actually be able properly understand journalistic Arabic without guessing and getting confused half the time.

I've found a whole bunch of intermediate-to-advanced level textbooks that I plan to work my way through, with Upper Intermediate Arabic through Discussion being my main focus right now. For long term goal, I recently realized that NYU's Library of Arabic Literature is a treasure trove of classical Arabic texts with parallel translations, and I'd like to try reading some of them soon (although I suppose most of it wouldn't be Modern Standard Arabic*, really).

Besides Arabic, the other Middle Eastern language that I enjoyed speaking a lot last year was Hebrew, so I'd been meaning to brush up on this one for a while too. At the moment, the textbook I'm using is Brandeis Modern Hebrew, Intermediate to Advanced. (I promise I was already working on both my Arabic and Hebrew before the recent events in the region.)

Okay, this one is kind of random. On my latest trip back to Asia, I dropped by Penang, Malaysia for the Language Event being held there. But instead of brushing up on my Malay, I accidentally got sidetracked by a random urge to finally learn the Thai script properly. Once the script finally "clicked" for me, I couldn't get enough of the language and blazed through several textbooks. I've lowered the priority of Thai at the moment (I guess I have to, when you look at everything above it in the list), though I'm still slowly chipping away at this cool Thai reading textbook on UW Madison's website.

This was my main project during the height of the pandemic, and the last language I got from zero to B2-ish in. I'm not doing much study or reading in Korean these days, but I attend a Korean conversation group here in LA on a semi-regular basis, so I'm keeping it up.

Have you heard? This year's Polyglot Gathering is going to be in Prague! As a bit of a Slavic language connoisseur myself, of course I have to work on my Czech a bit.

I've been studying a lot of it through Russian, since it helps highlight the differences between the languages. I recently started on Chcete ještě lépe mluvit česky? (Do you want to speak Czech even better?) after finishing the first book in the series. As the date of the Gathering approaches, I'll also want to start looking more seriously for other sources of comprehensible input.

The other big Polyglot event of 2024 will be the Polyglot Conference in Malta this fall. Maltese is, at it's core, an Arabic dialect with heavy Sicilian/Italian influence, so it should be to difficult to get a hang of the basics, especially since I'm already studying a lot of Arabic these days. (In fact, I already read through a Maltese textbook last for no particular reason.)

In addition to revisiting the textbook I used last year, I've also gotten hold of a variety of grammatical/linguistic studies on Maltese and followed a dozen of Maltese accounts on Facebook. Once I've brushed up a bit, I'm also hoping to start watching Maltese TV online regularly to see how much I can understand.

After getting my C1 certificate in German, it's time for me to get back to the other European languages I'd been neglecting in recent years.

I hit a significant milestone in German with my C1 test last year, but I'm certainly not about to drop the language entirely right now. For now, I'm just keeping it up by reading a few books.