My language learning wish-list

Hey Innovative Language Learning, thanks for the six new languages. I’m especially happy about the addition of Hindi, but Hebrew turned out a pleasant surprise. I’ve never really thought about learning Hebrew before, but listening to a few episodes quickly changed my mind. Hungarian is a challenge, but I’m not giving up. Dutch is another language I had never thought about learning, but which I’m beginning to enjoy.

Now, since I’ve given you all this praise, maybe you would care to listen to a few humble requests from a simple language learner. It really pleases me that you are giving space to “less popular” languages as well. I have a few languages that are on my learning list, and would like you to consider them for the future.

First of all, Maltese. Languages that are spoken at junction points between different cultures have always interested me, since they tend to be heavily influenced by several surrounding languages. Maltese is no exception, with influences from Semitic as well as Latin (or Romance) languages, as you can read here.

Speaking of Latin languages, wouldn’t Latin itself be a good idea? Dead, I hear you say? Dead? I think not. You can listen to the news in Latin and if you get tired of facebook or Google+, you could try another social network. And even if it were dead, it is a part of our history, especially for those of us who come from the part of the world that speaks a language derived (at least in part) from Latin.

Another language that is rich in history is Turkish. I am sure that you are already getting a lot of requests about this extremely interesting language. I’d like to add my name to that list: +1 for Turkish.

The next is not a language or even a language group, but the languages from a whole continent. What about African languages? Isn’t it time that Africa, African culture and languages gets properly integrated into the world? I say yes. Actually, it already is happening, since there are translations being done of several open source applications into various African languages.

The obvious African language candidates are big ones like Swahili and Hausa, but there are so many interesting languages spoken on this content. I have a personal favorite in Ga, which is a language spoken in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. Ga is what you might want to call an endangered language because it has relatively few speakers and the number is in decline. However, Ga (as every other languages), is a part of our shared human tradition, and we should not let it disappear. With every language that dies, a piece of humanity dies along with it.

Staying on the topic of neglected languages, what about the languages of the (Native American) Indians? Since childhood the mere word “Cherokee” has fascinated me, and I think the Cherokee language would be a nice candidate.

Seeing that Swedish has been added to your list of language learning sites, there are two other Nordic languages I was wondering if you could possibly consider: Icelandic and Finnish. Both seem to be near-impossible to learn. But both interest me, nonetheless. By the way, is it true that Finnish is related to Hungarian?

This is getting long, I know, but let me just end of with one other language I’m interested in: Anglo-Saxon. English is a really interesting language because of it’s history and Anglo-Saxon is a part of that history. I think it would be really neat if you guys would one day offer anglosaxonpod101.com!

Well, I better stop short here. I haven’t even had a chance to touch on so many other languages I’d love to learn, such as Irish (or Irish Gaelic), classical Greek, Yiddish, Ainu, Persian and others. I know my list is long, and I obviously know that I can’t have all of the above (and even if you were to provide them, I don’t know where I’ll be able to find the time to learn them all), but I’d be most grateful if at some point, even in the distant future, you would take at least one or two of them into consideration.

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