Before going to Romania, I decided I’d try to learn a bit of Romanian. By almost any measure it’s sort of a pointless language to learn, but I figured I’d get a kick out of pretending to my I didn’t speak any for a couple days, and then all of a sudden surprising my friends by speaking it.
My friend Brian did me a huge favor by going to the library, checking out the Pimsleur Romanian I series, ripping it, and then sending me the MP3s. After finishing the first lesson, I was struck by just how much I enjoyed doing it. I’ve used Pimsleur tapes to learn Chinese, Japanese, and French (which I never finished and consequently don’t remember), but it had been six years since I’d started one.
The returns on learning the first bit of a language are huge. While I don’t have nearly enough vocabulary to have an actual conversation in Romanian, doing one half-hour tape every day for a month left me with enough to be able to ask directions, order things at a restaurant, exchange pleasantries with strangers, and buy things. I think I successfully made a joke in Romanian, too.
So after all that, I decided that I’m just going to learn every language. Pimsleur has a list of over fifty that they support. I’m going to start with the ones I’m most interested in that have ninety tapes instead of the thirty that they had for Romanian. I did the full ninety in Japanese, and it got me to the point that I could have actual, if a bit kludgy, conversations.
I probably won’t actually do every single language Pimsleur has. Swiss German and Lithuanian, for example, may get passes. But, looking at the list, I count over ten that I’m really interested in, and maybe twenty that I’d probably do. Assuming that half are 30 day and half are 90 day courses, I can get twenty languages down at a “survival” level in under three years.
I also think that there will be a lot of synergy between the languages and that I’ll get better at the skill of learning languages. There have got to be some universal language pathways in the brain that will be strengthened just by learning language after language.
There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Pimsleur. It teaches the formal versions of langauge (usted vs. tu, in Spanish) and is way too focused on business. What it has going for it, though, is that it always works. You just do one tape per day, it takes exactly thirty minutes, and in one month you can get by, and in three months you can have little conversations. You don’t have to make flashcards or study or anything like that– you just hit play and learn. I clean my RV while listening, so the actual impact on my time is almost nothing.
I don’t have any trips planned for the next six months to countries I haven’t been to, so I’m going to do German and Italian for the next six months. Then I think I may do Korean and Arabic after that. Also high on the list are French and Portuguese to cover all of the Romance languages, Thai because I love Thailand, and maybe Russian so that I can sound like a spy. That’s two years, since all of those courses are three month ones.
Will I actually learn eight languages in the next year? Nu ştiu, dar sper ca da!
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Photo is me and Lucia with Yasmin, a girl we met on the train. She tried to talk to me in Romanian, and when I was finally able to understand and respond to something, she said, “He’s smart!”. Of course… that had to be translated to me.
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