Learning NL - Intro
part of ~/projects/learning-nl
What is this project?
This is probably a never-ending project.
I’m fluent in Italian, Serbo-Croatian and English.
Each of those languages is part of a bigger group of languages: Romance languages, Slavic languages and Germanic languages.
After several trips across Europe, after reading articles, after doing some historical research and so on I observed some similarities among languages in those groups.
I also did an experiment with a dear friend from España where he was speaking Spanish and I was speaking Italian and we were able to have a conversation for 30min with 0-knowledge of each other’s language.
Thus I promised myself to extend my NL capabilities by creating my own method and by leveraging common patterns in different languages (e.g. Slavic languages share a wide range of their grammar).
I want to start and document my learning path in the following languages:
| Language | Linguistic group |
|---|---|
| Spanish | Romance |
| French | Romance |
| German | Germanic |
| Swedish* | Germanic |
| Ukrainian | Slavic |
| Russian | Slavic |
* In this period of my life I’m personally considering moving to Stockholm or Sweden in general. Visit Stockholm: it’s a wonderful city! But that doesn’t depend fully on me, so Swedish is conditional: it’s in if I end up living in Sweden.
What is NL?
NL stands for Natural Language, a language naturally spoken by humans.
But… Why?
We have Google Translate, several AI models, DeepL: why I or anyone else should bother learning a language? Here are some personal arguments; they might not be persuasive enough for you:
- Do it just for fun.
- Learning a language isn’t just a matter of language itself: it inevitably brings some of the culture of the corresponding country of origin. I don’t plan to dive deep into this aspect as people who learn languages in their studies but still some of it will emerge (e.g. take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polje).
- You have people at the end of the chain, not software: so far an AI agent won’t come to you and ask you “How are you doing?” or “Where’s the toilet?”, you can schedule it to do so but thankfully will not act autonomously.