A weekly lesson

This is another thing that I decided to do in Italy. Actually, I have been thinking about doing it for a long time, since other trips to Italy, but this time I have actually gotten started.

There are things that are great about knowing multiple languages, and there are things that are helpful about studying similar languages, but it can also be confusing. Sometimes I am just remembering the wrong word, and because of the similarities, it is harder to get around it.

Once a week now I am making up a worksheet or two, with pictures and vocabulary. Obviously I would put Italian, French, and Spanish, but I was thinking about doing more. My Lao is rusty, and while I was never fluent in Norwegian, I would like to get better at it, but they are so different, their inclusions might not actually be helpful. This led to two decisions.

One is that after I draw the sheets with the pictures (and yes, this whole thing is largely an excuse to draw also) I photocopy them, and I write the actual words on the copy. If at some point I decide to do sheets with Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, or Norwegian, German, and Dutch, or Norwegian, Laotian, and Turkish (which would be weird, but we'll see what comes up), I can.

The other decision was to add Portuguese. I have never studied Portuguese, but in various jobs, and now on Twitter, I see a fair amount, and I can get the gist, but there are words I don't know, and it's not automatic. Anyway, I was thinking I could add the Portuguese, and give some reinforcement there.

The thing is, you see patterns with it. Sometimes one vowel in one language is almost always a different vowel in a different language, and you get an idea for the how it evolved, which improves your understanding of new words. For example, if I remember correctly, "e" in Norwegian tends to become "a" in Danish, like "deg" and "dag".

Some things are completely different, but there are lessons in that too, like some food words in Portuguese I suspect came from the native words during the colonization of Brazil. Sometimes there were two words with similar meanings, but one become dominant in one culture, and one in the other. So with "to work", you have travailler, trabajar, and trabalhar (which seems to come from a torture device), but in Italian it's lavorare, which comes from the word for "to wash". They have equivalents in the other languages for washing specifically, but that's what they use for work in Italy. So some of that is linguistics, and studying Latin would help, but some of it is perhaps history and anthropology too.

I do have some concern about the Portuguese in that I don't really have any background knowledge to draw from, but I am not expecting fluency from this. I expect my linguistic understanding to be more well-rounded, and I expect to be able to comprehend some tweets faster. Honestly, I already usually understand Portuguese tweets more quickly than French ones now, because the French ones are usually "Putain" with some proper nouns, so I know that the named thing has irritated the tweeter in some way, but have no context.

I do not doubt that if I also studied Catalan, Provençal, and Romansh (actually, there are a ton of them) that my linguistic understanding would expand even more, but it would be much harder to track things down, with very little chance to apply, and I need to be somewhat practical. I will say, though, that even with Romanian being an Eastern, not a Western Romance language, I understand "Dragostea din tei" (the Numa Numa song) when I am singing it. I mean, I had not previously known any non-English words for "linden tree", but once I knew that word was in there, it was pretty obvious which one it was.

As it turns out, I can't fit that many pictures and words on a page, so this is not a fast process, and I am keeping it pretty simple. I have mainly done nouns, and I will do some adjectives and prepositions, but verbs and conjugation are a long way off. However, it reminds me of things. As I start drawing, I remember words I learned, and other things come back. I feel like it will be helpful; if not, it's still kind of fun.

Basically I am doing little drawings and geeking out over words. This is my thing.