Fortheo wrote:Thanks for visiting Lilly. I was actually just reading your log and for a while I thought it was strange how we seem to be interested in the same languages—German, French, Russian, and Spanish—then I saw that you're interested in Japanese as well, which is a language that I actually spent a solid year and a half studying when I was about 18 and I'd love to get into it one day. It's just interesting that we're drawn to the same languages . If you mention that you're also interested in Norwegian, then I'll be convinced that you're some kind of alternate me from an alternate time line.
It's indeed interesting that we seem to like the same languages! That said, I come with German built in, so I didn't really have a choice there. It is a really beautiful and complex language for writing though, so I'm not complaining Learning English was definitely much easier than learning German would have been! Spoken German, not such a big fan, especially these days, but I still read German, especially literature from the beginning of the 20th century.
I'm not interested in Norwegian, *but* I have always been fascinated by Icelandic which is essentially very very old Norwegian. So, even there we have some overlap! Icelandic is not a particularly useful language to learn though, so I've not really done much with it apart from staring at grammar tables. I usually only learn languages that are in some way useful to me, so unless I wanted to move to one of the Scandinavian countries I probably wouldn't learn any languages from that group. And moving there is really highly unlikely because I don't like cold weather. Swedish perhaps - I grew up with a lot of Swedish literature -, but essentially I don't have a good enough reason. The only temptation is that by learning Swedish you can read Danish and Norwegian too. Essentially learn 1 get 2 for free. If it had more overlap with Icelandic I'd be tempted to learn Norwegian, but actually Icelandic grammar is much more complex, because it hasn't changed much in the last 500 years.
Xmmm wrote:I'm eighteen months into Russian and have read 6000 pages, but when I pick up The Head of Professor Dowell, LingQ tells me that roughly 15% of the words are words I've never seen before. This makes it 'easy' reading for me, because when I pick up Azazel by Boris Akunin, LingQ tells me that 25% of the words are words I've never seen before. Russian has a lot of words!
Oh dear, I thought it was bad, but I didn't think it was that bad! How many known word forms do you have in your LingQ so far? For comparison sake: I have roughly 28,000 known word forms in my LWT for French and can read without a dictionary with good precision. I stopped using LWT after 5000 pages. I've seen all sorts of estimates for Russian, between 35,000 and 60,000. I'm optimistic/deluded and still hope for 35,000