The Pan-Asian Language Study Plan
What do Georgia (the country) and Japan have in common? Let us count the ways:
- Both countries have red-and-white, radially-symmetric flags.
- Both have ongoing territorial disputes with Russia.
- Both are… unexpectedly decent at rugby?
- Both are sort of in Asia. Georgia is mostly on the right side of the Caucasus mountains but considered “culturally European” — whatever that means — and well, Japan is on a bunch of islands and not on the continent per se, if we’re being nitpicky.
- Both Georgian and Japanese belong to isolate language families (Kartvelian and Japonic) with no clearly proven relation to other languages. (Though there are tons of theories for both.)
- And most importantly for the purpose of this blog: Georgian and Japanese are going to be two of the anchor languages for my next long-term language study plan.
And what is the plan? Well, for the next year, I’m going to “focus” almost exclusively on languages of Asia. Which I suppose isn’t much of a focus, really, since it’s an entire continent, and the one with the most languages in the world at that. I’m also stretching the definition of “Asian language” to the maximum extent, to include not only obvious things like Japanese, Indonesian or Hindi but also Russian, Hebrew, and Georgian.
In terms of both the “popularity — obscurity” dimension and the “eastern — western” dimension, Japanese and Georgian are basically at opposite ends of the spectrum of languages covered by this plan. I currently have about a dozen other languages that I plan to work on in some capacity this year — though I guess I have 2,300 to chose from if I get distracted.
As is usually the case with my language study ventures, this “plan” came together a bit randomly, with four or five different threads happening to come together at around the same time. And ultimately, it was one extra outside push that really sealed the deal — the announcement that next year’s Polyglot Conference™ will be held in Fukuoka, Japan!
Although I’ve been to plenty of (lower-case) polyglot conferences lately, I haven’t actually been able to make it to the Polyglot Conference™ ever since it was held in New York City in 2015. I missed it when it was in Thessaloniki in 2016, Reykjavik in 2017, and in Ljubljana last month, since I was just never able to work out the timing of a three-day trip to Europe in the fall.
With next year’s event being held in Japan, though, I can say with a high degree of certainty that I will be attending the Conference next year. I’m planning to be in China some time next fall, and a pit stop in Fukuoka during that time would be very reasonable, travel-wise. (I was actually back in China for two weeks recently — my second time this year— and the Fukuoka announcement happened to coincide with my first night in Shanghai.)
For one, this means that I finally have a strong reason to work on my Japanese again after years of dormancy. Furthermore, it seems appropriate to welcome the first Polyglot Conference™ in Asia by focusing on the languages of that (quite large) part of the world. (It helps that my language study plans were already trending in this direction, even prior to the announcement.)
Organizing my language studies around a geographical theme is something I do a lot — for example, I’ve also gone through phases of “languages of Austria-Hungary” (German/Hungarian/Serbo-Croatian) and “languages of the Indian Ocean rim” in the past— but this Pan-Asian Language Plan is one of the broadest in scope so far. What makes it a lot more manageable, though, are the following facts:
- Most of the languages involved are languages I’ve studied in the past, so it’ll be much more about consolidating and improving existing skills rather than trying to tackle a lot of brand new things.
- There will be rotation built into the plan, so I’m not actually studying a dozen languages in parallel at once — more like four or five.
- The pan-continental plan really consists of six sub-regional plans, which sort of developed independently at first and solidified at around the same time.
Specifically, the sub-regions are (roughly in geographic sequence from east to west): Island Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, West Asia and the Caucasus. (I might reconsider the naming of the first and last groupings.)
Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail:
Island Asia (Japanese and Indonesian/Malay)
(I’m lumping these languages together mostly because no other East or Southeast Asian languages are currently in my plans, but also because, well, they’re both spoken on archipelagos!)
This was the last part of the plan to come together, since the Fukuoka announcement was what finally convinced me to give Japanese another shot.
Japanese was actually one the very first foreign languages I tried to learn back in middle school (along with Spanish and French), and over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge about the language without really being able to speak it. The last time I worked on Japanese intensively was 2014, when I travelled to Japan for a week. I did not speak it well.
Japanese is a very interesting and layered language, so I’ve always wanted to learn to speak it better. But at the same time, the effort necessary to take my Japanese to the next level never seemed quite worth it. Now that I have another trip to Japan to look forward to, the calculus has shifted and I’ve been going all in with my Japanese studies for the past several weeks.
I started studying Indonesian (and Malay) around 2014 as well, though my progress was slow and sporadic for the first few years. The 30-day language challenge I did last December really helped improve my Indonesian a lot, though I de-prioritized it again early this year, partially just because I was running out of study materials.
After Indonesian, I considered diversifying out into other Southeast Asian languages such as Burmese, Tagalog or Vietnamese, or other Austronesian languages like Samoan. At the end of the day, though, I’ve decided I might be better off consolidating Indonesian for another year or so before trying to branch off further.
Both of these languages will be non-rotating: I’m not planning to take any breaks from either over the year. My level in both languages is also high enough that I can consume a wide range of content in both and understand a good amount — from news to music to movies — so I’m less likely to get tired of either.
South Asia (Indo-Iranian languages)
Persian (a.k.a. Dari/Tajik) poses an interesting problem for classification. I’m grouping it with north Indian languages here for study purposes, but it could reasonably have gone into the Central Asia or West Asia group as well — and it’s even had a good amount of influence on the languages of the Caucasus .
The main reason I’m grouping Persian with Indian languages here is that Persian’s influence on Hindi a.k.a. Urdu a.k.a. Hindustani is one of my favorite things about the language. The same goes for Punjabi and Bengali. (For more of my thoughts on these three languages, all of which are in the Top-Ten Most-Spoken Worldwide, you can check out my earlier post on the topic.)
For study purposes, this is going to be a rotating group — I’m only going to be actively studying one of these at any point in time. The overlap between the languages is strong enough that I think they will all end up being mutually enforcing.
This rotation has already been going on for a while: I finished reading an intermediate Hindi textbook over the summer, got through a few Bengali books in the fall (including one specifically on Dhaka dialect, which is quite different), and started on a Tajik book (written in Russian) a month ago. And I already have a Punjabi book lined up to go next.
I may also throw a few other Indo-Aryan languages in the mix (Gujarati? Marathi? Haryanvi? Braj Bhasha?) as time allows.
Central Asia (Turkic languages)
The same ex-USSR phase that led me to start learning Georgian over the summer also renewed my interest in the various Turkic languages of Central Asia. Furthermore, before my recent trip to China I decided to brush up on my Uyghur again (though I didn’t get to use it 😕).
Like the South Asia group, I’m planning to approach these languages on a rotating basis.
While I was in Shanghai a few weeks ago, I finished a college-level Uyghur textbook (written in Chinese) as well as an introductory Kazakh textbook (written in Russian). Doing those two together helped me get a better sense of how the Turkic languages differ from each other grammatically and phonetically.
Currently I’m working my way through a graded reader for Uyghur (with English commentary), and I’ve got books for Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Azeri lined up for future use (mostly written in Russian, with a few in Chinese). I might stick Turkey-Turkish in there at some point as well, and I’m probably not going to do any Turkmen, but who knows.
West Asia (Arabic and Hebrew)
I started working on both of these again early in the summer, ostensibly for work-related reasons (Middle Eastern investment in New York real estate is huge), and that’s been going smoothly, if a bit slowly, so far. My Arabic studies are focused on Modern Standard at the moment, and I’m debating whether to add a dialect to the mix.
While I was in Shanghai earlier this month, I happened to run into the creator of the Streetwise Hebrew podcast at language exchange event — so I now have one more resource to study Hebrew with. I’ve listened to a few episodes and they were pretty good.
Currently I’m working on both of these in parallel, but if I get busy I might need to switch to a rotating schedule here as well.
Caucasus (Georgian and… I’ll put Russian here too)
The story of how I got into Georgian can be found in my previous blog post (it’s not a particularly gripping story). Somewhat surprisingly, I still haven’t gotten bored of it, and in any case there’s still a good number of grammatical features I haven’t studied yet. I’ve finished a couple of the Georgian textbooks I have, though I’ll probably reread them at some point because of how dense they are.
I’m also still working on my Russian, as always, mainly just by reading lots of books and news in the language, though I do have a few grammar and vocabulary books that I’m slowly working my way through on the side.
Finally, a few of my friends are potentially planning a trip to Georgia and Armenia next year, and if I end up joining them, I’ll have a reason to brush up on basic Armenian again too. (That’s a big “if”.)
Also, of course: Chinese
I’m not sure how accurate it is to say I’m “studying” Chinese, since it is a native language of mine, but I’ve definitely been increasing the amount of Chinese reading and listening I do on a regular basis lately, including news, books and podcasts. So I guess this fits the theme as well.
I took a break from Chinese dialects — mainly Hokkien and Cantonese — a few months ago, though I might try to get back into them at some point. While I was in Shanghai I once saw a show on TV that was mostly in Suzhou dialect, which seemed really interesting (and mutually intelligible with Shanghainese) but I haven’t been able to find any books on the subject. Maybe that’s for the best 😛.
The Gaps
For a language study plan that I’m calling “Pan-Asian,” I realize there are some big holes here, the biggest of which are, in no particular order: Korean, mainland Southeast Asia, and the Dravidian languages of South India. My background in all of these languages is much weaker or non-existent, and I just don’t have time to start on more brand-new languages at the moment.
But who knows, maybe at some point I’ll get tired of Georgian and that’ll free up an extra language study slot for Korean or Thai or Tamil. 🤔
The Disqualified
The most obvious effect of this plan is that I’ll be de-emphasizing the study of European languages (except Russian) for a while. I certainly still plan to speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and German regularly when the opportunity arises (and less common European languages as well, when possible), and I’ll skim the news or listen to some radio or music in these languages once in while, but I’m not going to be doing any book study for them for a long time.
For the most part, my basis in these languages is solid enough that I’m not too concerned about attrition. (One exception: if I do decide to go to the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava again next year, I’ll probably cram German, Hungarian and Serbian for a couple weeks before the event.)
One non-Asian language I’m a bit more hesitant to drop right now is Swahili, which I had been brushing up on for a few months recently, and for which a year-long break could be a momentum-killer. I suppose I could make a stretch and put Swahili in the West Asia group with Arabic and Hebrew, based on historical connections between the Swahili Coast and Arabia (as well as India!)… although at that point I might as well call my plan the One Belt One Road Plan instead 😂.
So there you have it. Things might change, of course, but this is the general plan that I’ll be organizing my language study time by for the next eleven months or so. In my next few posts (whenever I get around to writing them…) I’ll delve a bit deeper into each of these languages and my experience and thoughts about learning them — most likely starting with Japanese, Georgian, and Uyghur. Stay tuned!
