November 22nd, 2007 Posted in Languages | No Comments »
Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) is one of history’s most accomplished polyglots. He spoke more than forty languages fluently, all of which he learned while never leaving his home country Italy.
1. Introduction
I consider myself very lucky to having grown up in a somewhat multicultural environment. At home, my father used to speak to us in French and my mother in Arabic. Additionally, English was used everywhere and there was no escape from being confronted to it: TV, Computer games, Books and magazines, cartoons and movies. Being quite an addict with the latter definitely helped with learning English by passive means.
It’s actually only a few years ago that I started to learn a new foreign language, Spanish at first and then German. Weirdly enough, my passion and motivation for language learning only grew stronger from that point on. I’ve now reached an intermediate to advanced level in Spanish and I can speak simple sentences in German.
I’m going to develop in this post everything that might be helpful to a language learner. I hope this will benefit the one who’s just starting his language learning adventure as well as the one who’s already acquired a good learning methodology.
The article will talk about global methods and not those specific to a particular language. I will try writing about other languages afterwards, each in a separate thread. I hope in time that many will share their respective experiences with language learning.
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