Whew, it's been several weeks since I last posted an update! Time to get back into the game.
Following the majority of your personal language blogs with great interest, I've become inspired to reformat my own blog. I give a lot of credit to Saim and his blog in particular.
I forced myself to focus too much on a particular one or two languages during the first half of this year. However, my linguistic priorities have not been that static, as opportunities have come and gone for me, and I've found it hard to devote an extended amount of time to one language in light of the desire to revisit languages in which I'm out of practice.
Without further ado, here is
Week 24 Update. The languages are listed in order of importance, or relevance, from most to least.
I've had a lot of fun learning the basics of Azerbaijani—or Iranian Turkish as I like to call it, as it better reflects the language's role in history—but I didn't maintain a consistent rate of study from my workbook, or at the least, I'm 2-3 months behind the original schedule. However, I do feel satiated enough with the progress that I have made in the textbook so far, having reached
p. 239/311, the latter part of
Unit 9/12. Thus, I now feel confident enough to take a break with written, textbook study and start exposing myself to contemporary Azerbaijani media.
I decided to revisit Greek a little over two months ago in March. I've cast Greek aside for the last 3 years in order to focus on Spanish and Polish, since my skills in those two languages had become rusty to varying degrees, but then I unexpectedly ended up getting into Persian for the majority of that period of time. Nevertheless, Greek used to be my best foreign language in terms of proficiency, more so even than Spanish and Portuguese, and I aim to restore that level of knowledge, improve on it and find more opportunities to put it into practice.
In order to keep things novel and fresh, I've started using the 1976 edition of the Cortina Method
Conversational Modern Greek to brush up on my command of basic Greek. What I like about this book is that, since it was published only 6 years before polytonic orthography was banned by official decree, the language taught in the book leans almost entirely to the growing Demotic usage of the time, but sprinkled with a lot of antiquated words that a student of Greek must watch out for and take care to acknowledge.
I may export my Anki deck to Memrise if I encounter enough interest from [potential] students of Modern Greek in learning about the language as it was used between the 1960's and 1982, being sure to mark antiquated words, pronunciations or usages.
[flag=]sq[/flag] I've become very curious about Albanian these last few weeks. I've been frequenting a hair salon mostly manned by Albanians for the last 8 years or so, and their language intrigues me. I'm dabbling in a little bit of Albanian grammar and phrases for the moment, until I can purchase a good Albanian workbook on Amazon. Meanwhile, I've been using what I can find on the Internet.