#polyglottery

I started to fall for the idea of being a polyglot back around the summer break of 2014 - which was when I decided to really go for Arabic. I read the polyglot project about all these awesome people and their experiences with language learning, checked out their Youtube videos etc. I came across Moses aka Laoshu50500, which I consider the greatest polyglot of all time. That guy is an absolute beast when it comes to languages, and his videos are highly inspiring.  So soon I went from Arabic to include some Esperanto, then some Chinese, then some Tamil (because I have a bunch of Tamil friends, and BTW their reactions were amazing), then to Bosnian... I think I got around to learning something in at least 10 languages at different levels (nothing impressive for most) within the next couple of summer holidays - just for the love of learning languages. I was also, and still am, very fascinated about languages in general. I couldn’t really focus on them during the semester, so I went hard during the summer holidays. The most important language of all these has been Arabic though, since it has been a lifelong ambition to learn it at some point. 

Now it is 5 summers later, and looking back i definitely did learn A LOT, however I’m not sure this is where I wanted to be 5 years later. I wanted to be fluent in Arabic by now, and although I can understand most of the basics the fluency lies far ahead. I am still struggling with understanding a lot of the context in children cartoons in Arabic. I am still quite slow when it comes to understanding and especially speaking. Back then, I also wanted to be conversational in most of the other languages by now - most importantly Chinese. 

I have recently come across articles and quotes such as “ Life Doesn't Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do” and “To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.” — Dr. Stephen Covey, which led me to reflect on my language skills and why I haven’t progressed as much as I would like. It sort of reminds me of many of the questions from my friends had, when I told them about a language that I was learning - usually these were like “but, what are you going to use it for”. I honestly just loved the idea of learning them, and thought I might just use them one day. I realized that most people only learn stuff they HAD to learn, and not just because they like learning and knowing about it. Usually when it comes to languages it is for a job, travelling or for relationships. Many of the people speaking different languages have also had some travel experiences. 

I think that learning all these languages have been fun, but I have also forgot a lot of what I used to know, and now when I think about using some of it... it is unfortunately packed far away in a forgotten corner of my mind. I think it is because I didn’t have a practical purpose to use what I learned. What Laoshu50500 does, is to go out and use all the senteses he has learned with a person who speaks that language, comes home and reviews it, and then goes back out again. The point of language learning is communication, and the best way to learn is through practice with others. I had some practical experience during my Chinese course, where there was a teacher and other student, and I can honestly say I improved faster, than I would from studying by myself and not using what I learned. My few encounters with people who are natives to the language I was using, have also been the most challenging yet important to get the phrases to stick in my mind. Prioritizing apps like HelloTalk more than hours and hours on apps like Memrise, Cram etc. would probably be better in retrospect. I used to think I was not ready enough for interactions, and although it might have been true to some extend, since the studying part is important to have a good conversation, I think I missed out on a lot of learning possibilities. Regardless, nobody says they have now finished learning a language, there is always more to learn, so might as well go and use the little you know in practice anyways while studying. 

“Mam Grammar”. If you’re coming from English, Spanish, or almost any other European language, it’s definitely a strange thing. But if you don’t let the differences scare you off, you’ll discover it’s really quite simple.

(Or something like that): “I’m learning to speak the Mam language!”

Or rather, I’ve already been learning this fascinating member of the Mayan language family for the past three months or so, as I’ve been staying with my grandparents in a small town in the pacific northwest with a large (primarily Mam-speaking) Guatemalan population.

I’m back home now, which means my continued progress in Mam may be a bit hampered for the time being, but I want to share some of what I know so far with you guys.

Like most Mayan languages, Mam is characterised by a colourful consonant inventory, lightly agglutinative morphology, ergative-absolutive alignment, and verb-initial clause structure. Mam is unique, though, in its development of retroflex sibilants, its reörganisation of the Mayan verbal system, and its use of intransitive verbs of motion as auxiliary “directionals”.

I’ll be posting in more detail about Mam’s phonology, morphology, and syntax soon, but for now I’ll leave you with its phoneme inventory and modern orthography: