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  • Speak, WorldIn the Interim of the Unknown
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    Day 95

    Three and a Half Months and Counting

    June 17, 2020 in the United States ⋅ 🌙 16 °C

    I hope that this “postcard” finds all you doing well under these extraordinary circumstances. I think of you, and know that I’m way overdue in sending you a blog. I apologize for the delay.

    Although I’m sure that my story of sheltering in place and lockdown is mostly the same as all of you, I have been working hard at being my usual eccentric self. I am still with my sister and brother-in-law in Altadena, California, but in the time of my daily life, I have been living in——

    Thailand, France, Mexico, Japan, Chile, and Italy! My 3-month multi-language challenge, AKA “Fluent in Three Months Polyglot Challenge” is just ending. It has been a remarkably cheerful and exhilarating experience. My original purpose was to resurrect a few of my “better” long-lost languages, i.e., those that I spoke fairly well in the past. As you can imagine, “serial monogamy” doesn’t work well for languages, and continually leaving one language for another over a forty-year period left a string of nine abandoned and forgotten loves.

    Enter POLYGLOTISM! I took Thai, my newest language, and introduced three others: Italian, Japanese, and French for the Challenge. What I had to do was straightforward: prepare a video each week in the language(s) of my choice, and discover how to improve. As an independent learner, I had the moral support of other challengers, but only a few hints regarding what to do.

    I found tutors for Japanese, French, and Italian, kept my group of Thai teachers and language exchange partners, and studied all of these languages every day—50% of my time to Thai, 20% to Japanese and Italian, and 10% to French, which was the “easiest.”

    So , after reading horrific reports about COVID-19 in the newspapers every morning, I went into my study, and for the rest of the day, lived in The World. There’s really too much to tell, but if you’re interested, here are links to what I think are my “most interesting” videos. There are also a few photos below those links which are unrelated to language learning.

    Love to you all! (And if you leave a comment, please be sure to sign your first name.)

    LINKS to Polyglot Videos—which all have SUBTITLES in English!
    1. Day Zero Video: Thai plus Three Abandoned Loves: In Thai, Italian, French and Japanese
    https://youtu.be/NLJB-ytxZEw

    2. Week 8: What I learned from Japan and Thailand —50 years apart: In Japanese and Thai
    https://youtu.be/DKNa7qYXYjs

    3. Week 9:Gardening (in Thai) and a horrible experience in French usage (in French)
    https://youtu.be/8NUBz3KVpHk

    4.Week 10: Speaking 5 languages, switching every 30 seconds, telling my life history in 4 minutes!
    https://youtu.be/DKNa7qYXYjs

    5. Day 90 Videos—15+ minutes conversations with native speakers
    Thai—about our parents’ professions (secrets revealed herein):
    https://youtu.be/D-0_6wEvkAA

    Japanese—did my life and my teacher’s run parallel? (More secrets revealed):
    https://youtu.be/D-0_6wEvkAA

    Italian—what professions did we choose? https://youtu.be/2Gv1OwntKcE

    French—our lives as readers: https://youtu.be/hh5fGtYEA68    Read more