Become a Linguist
To many, learning any language is a challenge. For some, it is an occupation. In recent time, many schools and universities have been offering language classes. If you are a historian, preparing for a novel, getting a job in the field, or learning a language for religious or school reasons, this is how to be good at them.
Steps
- Learn the kinds of Languages and the language tree:
- The Language tree is huge, it contains mostly of older languages that is still spoken today.
- The tree starts with Indo-European and Uralic. Uralic is the languages of Siberia and more. The tree has many branches. The next set of them are: Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, European, Slavic, Romance, Germanic, and again Uralic.
- If you are learning an Asian language other than Russian or any Aryan languages, go later into the post. If not, continue on.
- Most of the languages people learn come down to 3. Germanic, Romance, and Slavic(Russian,Mongolian,Ukraine and other countries).
- For Germanic languages, you can probably guess. These languages are based off of early German and Old Norse.
- For Romance languages, they come from Latin.
- Both of these language families mainly uses the latin alphabet.
- Learn A Base Language. Some Germanic languages are: English, Dutch(and its decendents such as Pennsylvanian Dutch), Swedish, Afrikaans and Flemish. If you want to learn any of these, start with German.
- The Base Language(s) for Romance Languages are mainly Latin and Greek.Some Romance languages are:French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,Romanian, and Lombard.
- Once you "mastered" or gained enough knowledge, it is time to dive into other languages. English is very similar to Dutch, so it will be a nice place to start. Experiment and find one that suits you.
- Asian languages(including the Middle East) are different. They come from another part of the tree. However they are not Germanic, Romance, Aryan and so on. Hebrew, Arabic(and its variation), Persian, Urdu is different in writing style is completely different. They also read and write Right to left. Languages like Chinese(and variations), Korean, and Japanese are different with each other too. Each using different writing styles. Korean has been known to be the easiest and Chinese the hardest.As a note, Vietnamese has Latin characters, but most have different accents and pronunciations.
- African languages are a bit different.Swahili and other native languages are seperate. However, they are more guttural. Afrikaans is germanic. North African/Egyptian Arabic will have French and Italian influences while the west coast of Africa has a main French influence.
- Native American languages are only spoken by small communities in the U.S. They have no relation to any other language family. And these languages are dying at a steady rate.
- Keep practicing! Use apps like Memrise and Duolingo to help you.(They are also websites, both are available on Ios and Android.) HelloTalk is a nice app to speak to natives of that language. These 3 apps are free.(However Memrise has offers to purchase V.I.P for hints and more. HelloTalk's in-app purchases allows to set multiple languages as the ones you are. The limit is 3. )
Tips
- Don't give up, find resources. Reddit has a selection to help.- https://reddit.com/r/languagelearning
- Go to a library for resources
- Once you are advanced enough( or want to help your learning) surround yourself with it. Add notecards to household things and say them when you pass. Another trick(with experienced learners) set your computer's OS(operating system) language into the one you are learning.
Warnings
- Some languages have the same word, but have different context. Be careful.
