My new project for the summer: learning to count to 10 in (at least) 10 languages. I’m up to 5 so far.
- English
- Spanish
- German
- French
- American Sign Language
I thought it would be cool, if not useful, to be able to speak even a little bit in more than one or two languages. I took six (seis) years of Spanish in school, so that one was a no-brainer. My cousin and his wife have been teaching their infant son sign language to help him communicate while he’s still preverbal, so that inspired me to add that language.
There are some good YouTube tutorials I found that helped me with pronunciation as well as seeing the word written and transliterated. Hearing the word spoken aloud definitely helps.
I haven’t yet decided which ones to tackle next. Italian, Chinese (which dialect?), Japanese, Russian, Icelandic, Danish, Portuguese? I’m giving myself a week or two between new ones, since when I started on French a few days after German, I found myself getting it mixed up with German. So, more space between them might give my head more time to sort it out better.
So far, my favorite number is five in German: “fünf”.
