Did you know there’s really no limit to the number of languages you can learn? The average person can get to a respectable level in a language in about two years of study and practice. That means you could learn 10 languages in 20 years. So that’s what I’m doing. Remember, if you get to 10 languages you can officially call yourself a polyglot!
So far I’ve worked on Spanish, Vietnamese, and a little Japanese. In studying those languages, I found out the two most important things for learning a language: vocabulary and practice. You need words because they are the building blocks of language. You can’t communicate at all if you don’t have them. Especially in the beginning, you need to make an effort to do a little homework and learn as many new words on your own as possible. You need a strong vocabulary foundation so that you can start the other vital part…practicing. With practice everything else (grammar, pronunciation, spelling) will fall into place.
You all know I love lists, so it should be no surprise that I love grids too. What if, I thought, I could make a giant spreadsheet translating the most important words in English into the various languages I wanted to learn? This plan became known as The Polyglot Project. Then I found out there was already a Polyglot Project. So it became the Polyglot Vocab Project.
With the creation of Interopia, it became obvious that crowd-sourcing would be the best way to accomplish this. I’ve already done a lot of the work by creating an approximate list of about 3000 most common words in English. Some words, like about, for instance, will be difficult to translate into other languages, but we will do our best. Other words, like cat, should be pretty straightforward translations. I’ve set up the project for 13 languages besides English: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean, Hindi, and Swahili. I narrowed down the languages to these for population, geographic, cultural, and personal reasons. So, the number of words times the number of languages means about 45000 total words that need to be entered.
I have no idea how much interest people will have in helping me complete the project. Even if just one person helps me, it would be appreciated. Just e-mail the site if you would like editing privileges. I’ll be working on it myself even if no one else helps, so you can tune in to see my progress. Whether it takes a month or twenty years remains to be seen. The Google Docs Spreadsheet is available here.
interopia 