Esperanto flag.
Time Target
I am continuing with my daily dose of Esperanto. I had initially opted for a target of five minutes a day. I thought that was easily reachable. If I missed a day or two, not too hard to catch up.
Now I have changed to a target of twenty minutes a day. Most of my train journeys allow for at least ten minutes in either direction.
I have only finished one course of the twelve I have started. That was German.
So many of the others, like Korean and Chinese (Mandarin) and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet were not making fast progress. So I opted for Esperanto. Pretty easy. The answers to the multiple choice questions are mostly obvious or you can work them out by a process of elimination.
I looked at when I could finish the course. I had more than 40 sections to finish. Each took about twenty minutes. I could either finish in about forty days, two months time, or get to the end of the year and still not have finished.
Short Courses
I like quick results. You can either learn a language one hour a week and complete a course in a year. Or do an intense holiday course (or at home), with several hours a day for three weeks and finish a new language in less than a month. Obviously, being sent overseas as a spy or a diplomat or head of a company, or just taking a new job, you might be forced, or choose to do the short intense course.
If you are young and single you might do an intensive course, especially if your workplace is funding it.
For the retired, fulfilling a lifelong ambition to learn another language, or two or three, language learning is possible. Unlike singing, painting, or playing the guitar, writing a best selling novel, you can simple devote a certain number of minutes or hours a day to learning a language and you get certain results.
Useful Websites
duolingo.com
Author
Angela Lansbury, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages.
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