Team Wanderlust - TAC 2016

[tangleweeds]

Welcome to Team Wanderlust., a home for those who want to stray without guilt. Do you have languages you've been suppressing the urge to explore? Or do you simply have trouble making up your mind? Whyever you may wander, you're welcome here.

Once you sign up in the TAC signup thread, I'll add you to the team roster below. Then post here to share your log, and let us know some of your language history, and where you want to wander -- though of course that's free to change according to your moods, whims, and fancy.

We are:
tangleweeds
Iversen
unpredictabloke
Via Diva
jeff_lindqvist
Sooniye
Zireael
reddit lurker
JohannaNYC
gallo1801

[tangleweeds]

{this post reserved for team resources and and other useful stuff I haven't thought up yet. Maybe information about simultaneous multilingual study? Helpful suggestion welcome! I'm new at this...}

[tangleweeds]

My log is tangleweeds garden path log. It starts out all Irish all the time, but by the end of page two I have strayed into French and Russian.

My language history is that I started studying French in 6th grade, and Latin in 7th, and studied them through high school. I won school and state awards in languages, but I was frustrated instead of pleased, because my true loves at that point were creative writing and higher math. So I didn't follow up on my languages studies at college. Many years later I went back to university to study computational linguistics, and the language I focused on as a linguistics student was Japanese, because my brother had married a Japanese woman and lived there.

I started self-study in Irish in early 2015 because of Duolingo and my Irish heritage, and resumed a little French when my incompetence at Irish got frustrating. Just this winter, I added Russian to the mix, because I love doing very tiny, complicated, lacy needlework, especially knit and crochet, and Russian needleworkers and publications are light-years beyond US-style "quick & easy" projects. So I have all these amazing needlework magazines where I can kind of follow the charts, but the ability to read the text would be a great help!

The languages I'm now wanderlusting for are Norwegian, because it sounds so musical, and all my Norwegian friends have been so incredibly sane (though no boring at all), which is very refreshing, living here in the crazy US of A (plus Norway has those scenic fjords!). Finally, when Russian graduated from pure wanderlust to actual beginner-ness, Czech crept in to replace it, because of the beautiful architectural photos and general great impressions of a friend who travelled there.

So that's the story of my linguistic wanderings and wanderlust. What's yours?

[Iversen]

I have been watching a lot of TAC teams over the years and been loosely associated with a couple of them, but a TAC team for inveterate and incurable wanderlusters is probably the closest thing to the character of my language learning. The problem is that the teams generally set themselves tasks, and since I left the university in 1982 I haven't really done any language related task except those defined by myself. So I'll probably just stay around to see what happens.

And OK, I have written about my language learning history in a profile thread at HTLAL, but that was long ago, and this is a different forum. I am writing my linguistic biography at this moment, but is is getting fairly long so I'll put it in my Multiconfused log no. 2 when it is finished.

[tangleweeds]

I'd say welcome to Wanderlust, Iversen, but you were here way ahead of us, weren't you? I enjoyed reading your language bio.

I celebrated my Wanderlust Eve by collecting Japanese kana PDF worksheets on the web, and browsing Amazon for courses with audio but minimal (if any) use of romaji (recommendations very welcome). I would have sworn my knowledge of hiragana was long gone, but with repetition they swim back up toward familiarity, like carp surfacing in a murky pond.

[unpredictabloke]

Hi tangleweeds, I'd like to join team wanderlust for this year!

I am a third year uni student, who is studying in the STEM field. I have interviews to potentially work in Germany and/or Switzerland, so my wanderlust language will be German, French, and Swiss German. I'm taking a linguistics module in uni this term, so I'm excited to see how that will affect my studies. I was looking over the IPA for the languages, and I promptly got a sore throat trying to pronounce some of these sounds.

This is the link to my blog: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1817

[tangleweeds]

unpredictabloke, you're on the list!

Links to blogs to come.

[Via Diva]

When HTLAL came crushing down and nothing was clear I did the biggest step out of my usual way and began studying Czech, as you can read in my log here. It was completely not planned, and the reasoning behind it was so ridiculous, I think that this was the first indicator of the fact that my language learning turned into a mess. From all the languages I list I don't study a single one at the moment, actively (too actively?) use English and sometimes German, but not as much.
Now I got more crazy reasons for other languages (well, for Finnish, as of now), quite possible I might try to revive Greek or Czech, but I think that being a part of this team gives me carte blanche for these kinda things :)

Also here's the best and quite representative attempt of mine to describe my language learning history.

[jeff_lindqvist]

The Wanderlust bug bit me a long time ago. In The Way of the Lazy Fist, I mentioned how I some 20 years ago studied one language per day. That seven language project only lasted a couple of months. I lost my motivation, but before that I had FUN. And I don't know anyone else who did the same thing at the time (at least not in my area).

During the last months of 2015 I spent ~1 month on Finnish (one hour a day) and the same amount on Romanian. The result? I don't speak either language (are you surprised?), but I know more now than before, and I've had fun during the process.

My plans for 2016 is to dip my toes in a couple of new languages (the list is long, and I have enough physical resources to keep me busy for a long time), and improve some I have started (and really should be able to use, considering the hours). I'll keep you posted, here or elsewhere.

[tangleweeds]

I love the new forum's ability to save drafts. Except when I think I posted them, but merely saved before toddling off to bed.

Via Diva, your log has convinced me that I need get Russian straight in my head before trying Czech! But I'll browse around and pick up tidbits about Czech's quirks. I've been at a similar stage with Norwegian, absorbing what I can about it in particular and Scandinavian languages in general, but via the forum and Wikipedia overviews, not actively studying it in any meaningful way.

Jeff, that language a day idea had insane greatness. I look forward to your updates, wherever they appear.

Unpredictabloke, are you with us? I thought I saw you post a log, but maybe for a different team?
(Edit: Doh! Apologies unpredictabloke, your log is already linked. It's reddit lurker who I was wondering about.)

Is anyone else out there hovering on the edge of wanderlust? I invite you to join in, delurk, or just drive-by post with tales of past excesses of wanderlust.

I have been continuing down the Japanese path by reviewing hiragana, but in true wanderlist fashion have gotten sucked down a rabbithole of old-school penmanship training and beginning brush calligraphy training books at Amazon.co.jp.

This is maybe a litttle less random than it sounds, as I attempted sumi-e brush painting when I was young (my first big lesson in "it's a lot harder than it looks"), and also done various forms of European/English/American calligraphy and penmanship training over the years (usually triggered by panic over the deterioration of my own handwriting )