New Language Challenge – B2 in Danish in 6 months!

How many of you have heard of Benny Lewis? That famous Irish polyglot who starts a new language mission almost every 3 months and, in that time, he tries to learn a new language from scratch to a pretty good/fluent level. He often states at the beginning of his mission that he would like to acquire at least C1 in the language in those 3 months. I do follow Benny’s blog and fancy his style of learning. But I’ve asked myself more than once, is it really possible to learn a totally new language up to C1 in just 3 months? I am always an optimist. But I am also a realist. Language learning is not something that should be taken for granted. It’s not just the process of learning new words and ways to communicate with other people. It’s also the process of getting to know an entirely different culture in great detail. Are 3 months really sufficient to do this? Or does it take more? Yesterday, I got a pretty good idea about how to find out the answer.

My notes for Chinese, Arabic and Greek back from the time I was learning them

I have been learning foreign languages for a long time. But never have I tried to challenge myself to see how quickly I can actually learn it only if I try hard enough. Okay, I did challenge myself once with Dutch but that lasted for just 2 weeks so it doesn’t really qualify as a successfully done challenge. This time, though, it was action time! I decided to learn a new language for 6 months and by the end of these 6 months, I have to have at least B2 level in it (which is advanced conversational fluency). The decision has been made! Now I only needed a language to learn. I didn’t really want to dabble with something too easy but I also didn’t want to spend the first month learning the new script or the tone system. I was looking for a language that was going to be challenging, although not impenetrable in 6 months. I thought for a while. Then, I opened up my internet browser and navigated to Duolingo, a website designed to help you learn a new language with ease. It’s been some time since I last visited it so I wanted to see if they had any new languages in stack. It turned out they did! In fact, they had a couple of new ones. Skimming through them, my glance fell immidiately onto the perfect solution to my problem – the exact thing I had been looking for! It was time to announce the winner. It was DANISH!

A book in Danish

Danish isn’t a rather popular language for many. It is spoken primarily in Denmark, a Scandinavian country with the population of approximately 5,5 million people. What makes it so appealing (to me) is its pronunciation. Much like other Scandinavian languages, Danish has quite a mellifluous tone to its pronunciation. Deemed funny by some, I find it to be special and that’s exactly what I wanted from the language I had been looking for.

So what’s the plan? The plan is to learn Danish in 6 months to a level of advanced conversational fluency (B2), which is a level at which one is able to talk and read about virtually any subject without much difficulty. At that level, you know enough vocabulary to express your thoughts about almost everything you want.

Okay, so that’s the plan. But how exactly do I plan to do it? What resources do I plan to use? And how much time do I plan to dedicate to it every day? To put it simple, I don’t know (yet). The thing is, whenever I start to learn a new language, I don’t immidiately think about all the things I will ever use for it. Because I’ve found that the best resources are always discovered along the way. I will start by doing the Duolingo course, which will, hopefully, provide me with a lot of vocabulary to use. Besides Duolingo, I will also use, as a grammar reference, Colloquial Danish and Teach Yourself Danish.

My progress so far with Duolingo’s Danish course

To keep track of my progress, I will write a new post every Monday (I know today is Tuesday but, unfortunately, I didn’t have much time yesterday) in which I will explain everything I’ve done, everything I plan to do next and describe how much of the language I have learnt already. After some point when I reach a good-enough level, I might also post video updates so that you can also see how well I speak, as well as interviews in Danish if I manage to find a Dane willing to help me with it.

If you know anyone who would be willing to talk to me in Danish and help me practise it, I would be very grateful if you could leave me their contact either in the comments below or by a private message on italki (http://www.italki.com/teacher/1552143). Here we go! Wish me luck!

Language learnt: Danish
Start date: November 3rd, 2014
End date: May 1st, 2015

Polyglot Conference – Novi Sad, Serbia 2014

Polyglot conference. Two words that made me smile as if it had been Christmas as soon as I saw them. The reason for this… It was going to be held in Serbia, a country next to mine. “No way I’m missing out on this one!” I said to myself after having realised how lucky I actually was. The first official polyglot conference had already been held in Budapest a year earlier but unfortunately, due to some issues regarding the trip’s organisation, I couldn’t attend. This time, however, it was going to be different. I was finally going to meet all those people I had been admiring for ages.

The conference was organised by the Cultural Centre of Novi Sad in a beautiful historic city in northern Serbia. It started on Friday, October 10th and ended on Sunday, October 12th. Despite having been very short, it provided me with so much inspiration that I probably won’t have to look anywhere elsewhere for it ever again. I was accompanied on my trip by my great friend Grgo who is, much like me, a polyglot and an incredibly passionate language lover.

We arrived on Thursday in the afternoon. In spite of being exhausted from an 8-hour-long bus ride from Zagreb to Novi Sad, we left the hotel maybe 15 minutes after having arrived and headed for the city centre in hope of meeting someone who was also already there.

We finally made it to the main square but then we realised we had forgotten to think about one small detail that had seemed so irrelevant before. How were we going to find and recognise a participant of the conference in a city with the population of 300,000? We thought a bit about this and came up with a solution. We went to McDonald’s, ordered a large amount of food because we hadn’t eaten anything all day and wrote a post in the official Facebook group of the conference saying where we were in case anybody wanted to join us. 15 minutes later, we were approached by a guy, a bit older than us, asking if we were here for the conference. We excitedly nodded and that’s how we made our first polyglot friend. The party continued an hour and a half later when we met a dozen or so other polyglots in a restaurant nearby. There, I met Brian Kwong, the creator of  add1 challenge for polyglots and a guy I have been admiring for a very long time.

That night was already so amazing and I came back to my hotel room so content that I couldn’t believe it. And the conference hadn’t even begun yet. It was going to be 5 incredible days. I just knew it.

Friday is when it all started. Grgo and I came to the Cultural centre, the place where the conference was being held, at about 11 am. There was still a whole hour left until the official beginning but so many people had already been there. I couldn’t stand the feeling at first, I had to get used to it.. It was as if I had been high or something. Dozens of languages spoken all around you wherever you go. I tried to meet as many people as I could, not even thinking about the fact that the conference was going to last for 3 more days, but there were just to many of them. One person I met, though, is Anna from Czech Republic. A girl to whom I had been talking on Facebook for quite some time and who had become a really good and close friend of mine. I didn’t notice her at first but when she came up to me and said Hi, I hugged her right away because I just felt so awesome at that moment.

There weren’t any lectures planned for that first day. We just had a couple of people, including the mayor of Novi Sad, hyperpolyglot Richard Simcott and the representative of the Cultural centre Aleksandra Stajić, say a few introductory words and then we all went for a guided tour of the city, followed by a very nice dinner in a restaurant that just happened to be 2 minutes away from the hotel I was staying at. The atmosphere at the restaurant was absolutely amazing! I don’t know how else to describe it. We were eating, drinking and dancing all night, doing absolutely everything in several different languages. At about 1 am we had to go but, luckily, the continuation of the conference was just a couple of hours away.

The following two days were absolutely amazing. Even more so than the first one. I met so many new people that I often had to ask some of them what their name was about 5 times because it was just THAT impossible to remember them all. On Saturday we had two sessions, each containing different lectures. My lecture started at 11:15 am and I was really surprised to see how many people actually came to listen to it. As far as I’m concerned, it went really great. People seemed to be interested in it and they proved it with the amount of questions they had at the end.

If you ask me what the best part of the day was (any day), I’d probably say the evening. We all met up and went clubbing (every night)! The thing is, people seemed to be a lot more relaxed so it was even easier to talk to them (as if it hadn’t been before). When Monday came, I felt so sad and depressed. Me, who had never been sad in his entire life. It was time to go home. But, luckily, the party will continue in Berlin in May the next year. So, if you’re able to come, don’t miss it for the world! Believe me, you will be very sorry afterwards!