Speak or talk a new language - just five minutes a day

Jet Lag

When you travel you tend to suffer from jet lag. travelling from the UK to Singapore, I lose a week with sleeping all day and up all night.

At least if I get up at 5 am or 6 am, I can do something useful with my time. What can I clear out of my day in order to do something more useful at 9 am.

Early Rising - To Bad News?

If I get up early I try to do something useful. I often read the news first and check mail and Facebook. The news is depressing, crime, and international conflict between countries.

I have been considering not starting with the news, because it is easy to get sidetracked into reading for hours about other people's lives, not getting on with your own.

You need to know what is going on if you are travelling and might encounter delays. The prime example of this was on 9/11. Delays at Changi airport in Singapore. A good time to pack a book and some spare food and water.

A Stress-Free Emotionally Neutral Start To The Day

Today I limited my news reading to five minutes. I could feel myself getting depressed. I quickly turned off the news and started doing my daily dose of free language learning online, using Duolingo.

It is good to feel you have accomplished something, learned a new skill, first thing in the morning.

In theory I like to learn the languages of the countries I plan to visit during the year. But I have made slow progress with mandarin, Malay, Korean and Cyrillic (Russian alphabet is nearly the same - ready for a trip to Bulgaria.

Esperanto flag

Esperanto

After telling people I meet about Esperanto, and giving talks on Esperanto, in London and Singapore, I decided to follow my own advice. If you can't learn any other language, at least learn Esperanto. it is the recognised second language in Hungary. You can use it in countries whose languages are not widely spoken and learned. You can even stay with Esperanto speakers.

Having started with one language, Esperanto, it is easier to go onto another language based on latin and European language roots, such as Spanish.

Esperanto is probably not as useful to travellers as Spanish, but learning a language, getting used to checking nouns and verbs and past and future tenses, gets you attuned to learning languages online. It also gives you insights into the English language.

So, I am currently learning the easy made up language, Esperanto*.

The English Words Speak and Talk

I came across a forum discussing the answer to a question about speech. The answer was the past tense which is translated into English as: 'They spoke too much'.

Somebody replied: 'It means they talked too much.'

Somebody else replied, 'Not the same'.

I discussed with my family the difference between speak and talk. To me 'talk' implies conversation. 'We talked.'

'We spoke' implies a brief conversation.

However, a talk is a long one-way conversation.

The verb to speak becomes the noun a speech.

However, 'they said too much,' has a different implication. It means that the people speaking revealed too much.

Where Duolingo you can do five minutes to one hour a day and have a working knowledge of a language by the end of the year. If you switch languages every year, after ten years, you will know ten languages.

Learning a language is a great way to fill in time whilst waiting for buses and trains and planes, or during the journey.

Useful Websites

duolingo.com

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.