This fall I begin LING438 at PSU ~ Second Language Acquisition, or L2 in linguistic terms. The course details and maps out the progress people make in various methods as they learn a second language.

Language learning has always been a joy and mystery to me. I’ve only recently learned what I was doing when I was learning. I tried learning Japanese in high school, via gradeschool texts and ingenius use of flashcards by my teacher. I learned Pashto in Afghanistan really quickly, though I’ve since forgotten it, and now have about 1500 words at the tip of my tongue every time I see an Afghan, but only able to repeat the same initial conversation you have with an Afghan who knows you speak Pashto:

“Pashto khabari ke?”
“Wo. Ama zuh faghat lugh lugh Pukhto pohegum”
“wow! De cherta Pukhto zda kre?”
“Pu Khost ke zhwend kro.”
“Dera Pukhto heir khro :(

Basically saying I speak Pashto, but only a little. I lived in Khost, and I have forgotten most of it.

Also, while perusing WordPress blogs, I found a person under the name Bootslack.

They put this link down, which looks to be pretty helpful for language learning:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html