The Challenge

In the month of July I am going to see how much Catalan I can learn by studying for 1 dedicated hour each day.

Catalan is a daughter of Latin and a sister of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, all of which I already know rather well.  Thus, even without having studied Catalan, I feel like I get the gist of it when I see it or hear it, but I cannot long follow the thread of a narrative or grasp important details, and I am currently utterly incapable of articulating a single thought in it.  However, I believe that with my general experience in language learning, my background in Romance languages in particular, and my own method of internalizing languages, within 31 hours I should be able to make considerable progress in my ability to think in and speak Catalan as well as to read its literature with pleasure and understanding.

People are always asking, “how do polyglots learn languages?” Thus, I thought it might be interesting and instructive to document my procedure as I go from zero proficiency to conversational literacy in 31 hours.  Therefore, I will live stream the entire process from 3 to 4 PM each day, Chicago Time, showing my books and using think-aloud protocol as in my last few videos to explain what I am doing each time I switch activities.  Many participants in my Academy are planning to do this alongside of me, and I invite you and challenge you also to study along with me for these 31 hours.

Think of it: in July, I will come out of retirement as a language learner. If you are familiar with my biography, you will know that I consciously abjured learning new languages so as to focus on the ones I knew already. This is the first new language I am attempting to add to my repertoire in over 30 years. Join me to see if I can do it, and, if so, how. If you like my overall approach to polyglottery and polyliteracy, then I think I can show or demonstrate to you far more than I can ever explain with words.

Thus, I would like to offer you the opportunity to learn by watching me learn.

The Plan

My specific goal is to internalize the content of two generations of Assimil Catalan manuals: El Catlalán sin Esfuerzo (70 lessons, 1979 edition), and Le Catalan (100 lessons, 2009 edition), a total of 700 pages of bilingual text plus approximately 4 hours of audio with silence truncated.

I view learning Catalan not as learning a “new” language, but as filling in a missing gap in my overall understanding of the Romance language family. And if coming out of retirement in such as fashion as a language learner proves helpful to others, I will be willing to do similar demonstrations of how I learn more exotic languages as well.

Why not consider to studying alongside me for these 31 hours of live streaming? Your goals, and what you might achieve, could include one or a combination from the following:

1. If you can read both French and Spanish, then you could simply follow alongside of me for the duration. I will probably go too swiftly for you to “keep up,” but if you forget about trying to do that and just get what you can, I believe you will get a lot more than you imagine. If you subsequently watch the videos again, then you should also really be able to learn the language.
   
   
2. Alternatively, you could take this as a challenge to actually learn Catalan in 31 hours. Can you keep pace with me?
   
   
3. If you can watch videos of my study habits and imitate them, then you can see what I am doing with Catalan, i.e., observe how I learn, and apply a similar procedure to a study of another language of your own choice.
   
   
4. You could just use the synergy of the fact that others are striving for the same goal at the same time and in the same way every day as you are in order to break through the loneliness of autodidactic language study so as to develop the discipline of a systematic study habit at a fixed hour.
   
   
5. As an aspiring polyglot or an applied linguist, you can observe how I go about adding members to those in my active repertoire of a language family.
   
   
   

I challenge you to study a language every single day, at the same time of day, for 1 hour a day, for 1 month, in order to “win” this challenge.  Can you do it?