Sup Y’all?

I couldn’t resist that snappy title, which is also and not coincidentally the name of the book that I am using to improve my Croatian.

The Italian part that is.

It always makes me giggle when I read ’99 ways to do whatever’, followed by the phrases repeated several times in the first paragraph. For the uninitiated, this is considered to be good for search engines like the Great Gangle. i.e You get more visitors to your blog/website/article.

This has spawned a whole style of writing skewed towards SEO (search engine optimisation) rather than the reader. My titles are, I like to think, unique, but then again few people read this blog, so maybe the ’99 ways to do whatever’ are the way forward.

After that scintillating digression, let’s cut to the chase, which is my plans (language related) for the year.

I’ve been improving and generally buffing up my Italian and Spanish over the last month or two. I’ve listened to and spoken a reasonable amount of both. Tick and metaphorical pat on the back.

I am now on the cusp of spending the rest of the year on Croatian.

And my secret language.

I don’t want to forget Italian entirely, and thought that I would periodically dip into the Corso Complete della Lingua Serbo-croata for interest. It was published in 1870 something so won’t be my primary reference;)

My primary refererence will be the Corso di Lingua Croata which was published recently.

As you might guess from the title, it is also in Italian.

Seemingly, or it might be that I haven’t found them, there’s a distinct lack of quality Croatian textbooks written in english.

Anyway, the Corso di Lingua Croata looks pretty good which I will be using in conjunction with iTalki lessons over the course of the year.

So my plan for the year is to focus on Croatian (maintaining my Italian through this) and my Secret Language. I use Spanish anyway so don’t worry about maintaining it particularly, and as for French …

I don’t imagine I will be speaking any French this year. I listen to it periodically, and read as and when so it’s still there along with my appalling accent.

And I almost forget, my aim with Croatian is to move from a low B1 to a high B1 over the course of the year.

In terms of time, I intend to spend half an hour on Croatian, and half an hour on my Secret Language six days a week.

I’ve maintained this over the past several months and it’s a good balance and reasonable amount of time for me.

Besos, baci et Paxeroo.

MoonFacE