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Subtitles in English and Hebrew.

Late last year, I decided to turn my ‘dabbling’ in Hebrew into a serious learning project.


Time flies, and it’s been a few months since I last spoke Hebrew on my channel. At the time, my level was still quite basic, so I relied on a script.
Within these few months, I’ve made myself busy with plenty of other things—the podcast, for one—so I haven’t spent a lot of time on learning.

Nevertheless, I am now at a level where I’m comfortable speaking freely to the camera. What did I do and how did I get here?

You also get a glimpse of my new home in this video!

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A brain with words inside.

Let’s just say you wanted to be fluent in a foreign language. Like, very fluent. Like, native speaker fluent. Capable of talking about any subject they can.

Obviously, that’s an ambitious goal. Native speakers, too, vary greatly in their ability to discuss various subjects. My recent conversation with Luke Truman revealed that he knows more scientific terms in Cantonese than I do. Meanwhile, I am probably capable of talking about music better than most English native speakers.

But there are things that most native speakers who’ve had an average education can talk about: mathematics, plants, common illnesses, political structures, history…cooking…

These aren’t things that language textbooks cover. Language course gets you from a complete beginner to a conversational level, where you can survive in the language. There is still a gap between that level and being able to read any newspaper with ease. You need things that native speakers learn in school.

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Subtitles available in English and Cantonese. German transcript below.

Ich bin heute auf eine deutsche Seite gestoßen, die versucht, die Beziehung zwischen Kantonesisch und Mandarin, oder dem Begriff Chinesisch, zu erklären. Spoiler Alert: diesen Artikel finde ich total Quatsch. Er behauptet, Kantonesisch sei ein Dialekt von Chinesisch, und Mandarin sei Hochchinesisch.Diese Art Kategorisierung ist ganz politisch motiviert, und von einem rein sprachwissenschaftlichen Standpunkt ist sie sehr problematisch.

In diesem Video werde ich versuchen, als ein Sprachenliebhaber, ein Amateursprachwissenschaftler und ein Sprecher von drei sinitischen bzw. chinesischen Sprachen, zu erklären, was ein Dialekt in diesem Zusammenhang wirklich bedeutet, und abgesehen von der Politik, was Kantonesisch eigentlich ist, und wie man überhaupt diese Sprachen betrachten soll.

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Only my closest, language-loving friends know this, but I’ve been dabbling quite a lot. Since my last project to learn Polish, it’s been sort of a bit of this and a bit of that…Kazakh was a bust (I admitted I was dabbling), and my serious Icelandic project lost steam because our plans for a family trip are ruined by coronavirus.

For the past month, I’ve been actively dabbling in Hebrew. I actually started a while ago, trying out the language on Duolingo, but I gave up because the sentences often had no audio. (Since Hebrew doesn’t write vowels, audio is very important.) Since I finally forked out for Glossika a month or two ago for Icelandic, I thought, why not give Hebrew a try again?

Around a month later, I took my first Hebrew lesson online.

And here I am, making it official. I’m properly studying Hebrew!

I’ll still be working on my other languages — I’m still very much in love with Polish, and I’m having fun learning Taiwanese Hokkien with my friends. But hey, it’s my focus.

But why?

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Hong Kong International Airport

When people and blogs talk about reasons to learn Cantonese, they talk about travelling to Hong Kong, or perhaps Macau and Gwongdung. They talk about the golden age movies and martial arts flicks from Hong Kong, and 90s Cantopop. Oh and there are almost as many native speakers as German.

If you are passionate about these things, you already have very good reasons to learn Cantonese. And you should absolutely go for it! But things have changed over the past decades, and Cantonese-language culture has grown and evolved, especially online.

And I am here to tell you that, whether you already have plans to learn it or have merely entertained the idea once or twice, now—mid 2020—is a better time to learn Cantonese than ever before. Now is the time to take action and make those dreams of understanding a completely new culture come true.

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Oops, I might have been too carried away by the project itself, as well as all the crazy travelling I’ve been doing this summer, and skipped the 2 month update! (Seriously, imagine being stranded by two typhoons over one weekend in a city that is served by only one airline. How glorious.) So what happened was I set aside all the studying around the latter half of last month, then went all-in to enjoy the music festival that I mentioned. It was great. I even got my music performed in a foreign country, which I’d never thought about. So feel free to give it a listen before I talk about my experience after the break!

So, how well did my final sprint and self-testing go?

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I can’t believe it’s been one month! The time really zoomed by. For a three-month challenge like this, I find it appropriate to give monthly updates, so here I am. Spoiler warning: the progress isn’t exactly ideal.

The Hurdle

I’m a music student, and this month was a month full of my friends’ graduation concerts, which, for me, entailed rehearsals and concerts every day and evening. I also had to finish a musical composition within the past month. It was really hard, but I’m not going to let this become an excuse to slack off. So as I so happened to have written before, despite my plans for intensive study, I reduced my learning activities, but made sure they were consistent. It’s more important to do something every single day than do a lot on one day.

So here’s a quick run-through of my project progress!

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Collage of scenes from Pavia. Photo from Wikipedia

Aaaaand so, I’m back. From the craziness of university. But more craziness is coming on.

I never liked these ‘three months’ challenges, especially how overused this particular length is. But it just happens so that I’m going to Italy, for the second time in my life, in (a bit less than) three months.

The Italian language was always on my radar: after all, it’s the one language that’s most closely associated with music. I read Italian words on a daily basis in my musical scores – which is why I often joke that I have a wide (if highly specialised) vocabulary base for someone who doesn’t speak the language at all.

And around a month ago, I was notified that I was accepted at an international festival for composers near Milan, and immediately decided this was an unmissable opportunity for the polyglot side of me as well. After all, I’ll be there for two weeks, unlike my last trip, which was shorter and more touristic. So off I go!

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