Learning Languages The Easier And More Interesting Way

When I was in high school, I had the interest of learning different languages. Since my childhood dream was to travel the world with 3 weeks max in each country (country-hopping), naturally, I would not want to be left out when it comes to knowing what they are talking about and be a victim of ignorance and scam. Every time I go to a bookstore, I would be scanning the dictionary and language section. I was able to buy about 20 dictionaries, I think. I have some of them still, which I handed over to my kids. The others, I donated to my parents' library. Since I was online since 1994, most of the information I get now is available at the movement of my fingers.

More than anything, I'd like to learn the Chinese characters. Within the Chinese community there are several languages that when spoken, they cannot understand each other, but when written, they understand each other. In fact, I tried to learn Kanji in 1992. I learned that it is a simple cross between Japanese and Chinese writing, so both Japanese and Chinese can understand it. More birds with one stone, eh? One more thing interesting with Kanji, or the same could be true with Japanese or Chinese characters, is that a simple character can be a part of a complex character--or a complex character's meaning can be decoded if you know the simple characters within. For example, a tree looks like a tree and when you put 3 of them in a triangle position (one on top of two more), you get the complex character of a forest. So, knowing what they mean makes it easier to memorize.

Here are some interesting sites to learn languages:

For Chinese, Spanish, or German...

- Progressing slow or fast, depending on how fast you learn
- Example sentence for many words
- Most frequent words are taught first
- Basic membership is free