When people don’t update a blog like this for a long time, I generally assume they have lost interest in the topic rather than just the blog. This is not one of those cases, or not entirely. I have stopped studying Turkish, partly because I was only interested in finding out how difficult it was, and partly because, well, Turkey kind of actively went out of its way to encourage us Europeans to revert to the practice that served us well during the late Middle Ages: If people are speaking Turkish, run for your life and hide behind a sturdy wall. At least I know enough Turkish now to know when it is being spoken, more or less.
I have tried my hand – or brain – at Hebrew a little. Not that this is a language that increases the life expectancy of people who practice it carelessly, either. (My upstairs neighbors are Muslims. I should probably not practice singing the Israeli national anthem, just in case.) Anyway, before trying Hebrew, I thought Turkish was difficult. Sorry, Turkish! I was wrong. Hebrew is difficult. While Turkish has a few extra letters, Hebrew has its own alphabet that is not used for any other language. Just remembering the keyboard layout is a major undertaking. It is also written from right to left. Oh, and while the language now has written vowels, you still need to remember which vowel from context, it seems: The letter א seems to mean “some vowel” and changes from word to word, at best. That’s things I have observed from the first ten words or so. Is this a language or an IQ test? I can kind of see why so many Jews become Nobel Prize winners. Evidently literacy has been a big deal in Jewish society for a couple thousand years now, so people of normal intelligence may have failed to get married in the first place. (Those who survived, but that is another story.)
Now French … French is super easy. Well, except for the accents, but for the most parts they don’t turn complimenting someone’s food into insulting their parents. But I have gotten into the habit of doing one repetition exercise each day and one new vocabulary exercise. It gives me my daily 20 points streak, and I generally only fail 1-3 sentences on my repetition when using the smartphone. (A bit more on the PC.) That is an acceptable failure rate. I have read that you should repeat stuff when you remember 90% of it, although one source said 80%. As things are going, it seems like I can just coast along and eventually I will be able to read French the way I read English. (English is my third language, after the two Norwegian languages.) Not sure why I would do that, but “because I can” seems to be a socially acceptable answer in my circles.