(Somehow this post got omitted during the year. So I'm posting it now.)
I can greet you in Ojibwe ("Anin"), Swahili ("Habari"), or Rumanian ("Buna") If you like, I could say "hello" to you in Hindi, Inuktitut, and Serbian, too, and in fact, in 69 other languages. I could ask you your name in all those languages, and I could say goodbye to you. In other words, I have successfully met my granddaughter's 75-repetitions challenge: to learn how to say, "Hello," "What is your name?" and "Goodbye" in 75 languages.
I can greet you in Ojibwe ("Anin"), Swahili ("Habari"), or Rumanian ("Buna") If you like, I could say "hello" to you in Hindi, Inuktitut, and Serbian, too, and in fact, in 69 other languages. I could ask you your name in all those languages, and I could say goodbye to you. In other words, I have successfully met my granddaughter's 75-repetitions challenge: to learn how to say, "Hello," "What is your name?" and "Goodbye" in 75 languages.
I loved this project! I loved my granddaughter for giving it to me, challenging as it was. Learning these phrases took me all around the world, so I got a little geography lesson along with glimpses into the languages themselves, in all their varieties. Oh, wonderful, wonderful world.
I started on July 21 with languages that would be easy for me: Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. My method was to find five languages at a time with YouTube clips showing me how to pronounce them, then make a print-out of the three phrases in the five languages with my own pronunciation designations under the correct spellings. When I had memorized those, I made flash cards of them, which I took on my daily walk. The bulk of cards grew slowly. Sometimes I would get languages mixed up, but repetition did wonders. The earlier languages I learned that I had thought so difficult – Basque, Welsh, Estonian – were soon as comfortable on my tongue as French and German. Now Tamil is as easily said as Hebrew, and Tagalog as Korean.
Below is a list of the languages I learned.
Below is a list of the languages I learned.
“Hello,” “What’s your name?” “Good-by” in 75 languages
75x75 item suggested by Kairos Lamblin (my 10-year-old granddaughter)
American sign language Lithuanian
Arabic Luxembourgish
Azerbaijani Mam
Balinese Maori
Basque Marshallese
Belarussian Mongolian
Bengali Nepali
Bulgarian Norwegian
Burmese Ojibwe
Catalan Old English
Chinese Pashto
Chiwewa Polish
Croatian Portuguese
Czech Punjabi
Danish Rumanian
Dutch Russian
Dzongkha Samoan
Estonian Sanskrit
Farsi Serbian
Finnish Sinhala
French Somali
German Spanish
Greek Sumerian
Hawaiian Swahili
Hebrew Swedish
Hindi Tamil
Hungarian Telugu
Icelandic Thai
Inuktitut Togalog
Irish Turkish
Italian Urdu
Japanese Vietnamese
Khmer Welsh
Kinyarwanda Xhosa
Korean Yiddish
Kurmanji Yoruba
Latin Zulu
Latvian
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