This is my first log on the forum. I’ve been postponing it for a long time. My goals are to improve my writing English skills and have my language-related adventures documented. I recently took part in the 6WC and I was amazed by the amount of the hours spent learning a language. I had subscribed for Greek by the way. Therefore I’d like to track my progress using this log.
Well, I’ve been learning languages since I was 8-9 years old. I don’t remember exactly. Back then I started learning Spanish. This was in the pre-internet era, in the mid 80’s. For those who lived or have lived in Brazil at the time might know a very popular audio course – Curso de Idiomas Globo. They provided language courses for Spanish, Italian, German, French and also English. The English course was completely different from the other ones. There were 72 lessons split in six sessions each. I was very fond of the course format (and I still am). Years later I used it to learn French, Italian and German, but I didn’t finish it the German one.
As I said I’ve been studying languages since my childhood. So far I have studied seriously English, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek, German, Russian and now in 2018 I’m learning Polish. Polish will be my main language in 2018. Of course I’ve dabbled in many others.
I consider that I've achieved a B2 level in English, French, Italian and Spanish; B1 Russian and Romanian; A1-A2 Greek, German and now Polish. These scales are fairly approximate, only considering my listening and reading skills. I practically don’t speak and write.
That’s all for now. I don’t want to write so much in this first entry. I’ll be regularly updating my log.
... but I really do not know if I should continue with it. I have to decide by Saturday.
.... I am enjoying the Polish language, loving it, but many things have been crossing my mind. I miss the language, the cyrillic alphabet, the reading fluency I have achieved. Well, I was really reaping the benefits and I am afraid I might loose them. But reading in Polish is an easier task, not because of the alphabet. One of the things that bothered me a lot when I was studying Russian was the word stress, mainly for nouns, because for adjectives and verbs were easier to guess. In Polish one won't find this problem, the word stress falls on the penultimate syllable, that is, on the second last syllable. In Russian every noun I had to check in the dictionary to be certain of the stress, because it is virtually impossible to guess.