Babelhut.com launched!
By thomas on Oct 5, 2007 in Site News
Howdy! My name is Thomas and I am happy to announce the launch of babelhut.com!
My co-author Peter and I have have discussed starting a language blog for a while now. We are both studying foreign tongues and we wanted a place where we could post about our progress and connect with other people sharing an interest in language. One of the toughest parts of learning a foreign language is keeping motivation levels high. A common cycle is this – we:
- Feel highly motivated to learn a language
- Dive eagerly into language learning materials
- Settle into a consistent daily routine of study
- Grow bored with the routine
- Lose motivation to study
- Stop studying altogether
- After a long time of cooling off, go back to step 1
The problem is that at the end of each cycle we:
- Lose our momentum
- Forget much of what we learned and hence have to relearn it
- Get discouraged, reinforcing any doubts we may have about our ability to attain fluency.
The key to winning is to keep our motivation level high while studying efficiently. One of the reasons Peter and I started this blog to help us and others do both of these. We feel that documenting our endeavors and having others follow our progress will motivate us to stay the course. We hope it will motivate you too! Please talk to us and keep us up-to-date on your progress.
In addition to providing updates on our personal language adventures, we will also blog on a variety of language-related topics.
From the about page:
Babelhut.com is a small space devoted to language and language learning. We, the authors, will write about our experiences on the path to fluency in our target languages and about other language-related topics that interest us. We hope you will share your experiences and knowledge with us too. Discussion is always welcome, and please don’t hesitate to subscribe to our RSS feed.
Stay tuned for author introductions and then a steady stream of posts. Welcome to babelhut!
Related posts:
- Author Introduction – David
- Multilingual Parenting
- Author Introduction – Thomas
- Finally Caught Up On Anki
- What A Forest Monk Can Teach You About Language Learning
Hi guys, thanks for emailing me about your new blog. I admire your enthusiasm!
As for staying motivated, I’ve found it helps to set specific goals of manageable size, such as translating a story or article. You feel like you’re really using the language and not just memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary.
Good luck with your language learning. I look forward to reading more about your adventures!
Language Geek | Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for the encouragement Language Geek!
Translating articles can be rewarding, you’re right. Here in Japan they have a wide selection of books aimed at foreigners that are just a collection of articles. Japan is also famous for its plethora of comic books, which can come in handy. Translation is a great way to pick up vocabulary in a context, but you also have to take great care to actually learn the words you are translating. I’ve found that it’s quite easy to use a dictionary to look up unknown words without really thinking about them. If you translate a lot of articles, you can actually fall into the hole of becoming quite skilled at this kind of “passive” translation.
The temptation is to just translate once through and be done with it, but we really have to make an effort to pay attention and make sure we are picking up the target language. This can be frustrating when reading a comic book, as you want to know what happens next in the story but you have to slow down in the interest of language learning.
Thanks for stopping by! I hope you’ll come back again in the future!
thomas | Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
Language Geek: Thanks for the comment and advice! For me with New Testament Greek I have a very specific book I can translate. =) And as a bonus I can compare my translations to several others.
With Spanish there’s a couple of free Spanish language newspapers in my area that I can pick up at any time, which I’m going to do now that you have brought it up!
peter | Oct 6, 2007 | Reply