While connecting with people across cultures through space and time is exciting, language acquisition requires a significant investment of both time and effort. In many cases, it is the size of this investment that deters people from even attempting to learn a language. For instance, in college, I knew classics majors who only tolerated their Latin and ancient Greek courses because they were required for the major, and I knew computer science majors who, despite being proficient in several machine languages, were terrified of taking on a world language. Why is this? I think this is a bad question for me to raise because everyone is different, and there are plenty of reasons why language learning can quickly become frustrating. Languages build on themselves overtime, and having a shaky understanding of a grammar concept in the early stages of learning will make the later stages painful. In short, the process demands a relentless attention to detail.
Also, there is always a feeling of incompletion while learning a language which can be, figuratively speaking, a hard pill to swallow. I studied Spanish in high school, latin in college because I was a medievalist, as well as some French and ancient Greek on the side. I am currently learning Farsi. I feel like I am in different places with each of the languages, and this in itself is unsettling to me. Despite all of this uncertainty, there is something about this process appeals to me.
A reader (I say “a reader” because saying “the reader” might imply that someone will actually read this one day) might deduce from the list of languages that I have studied that I have spent most of my time with Indo-European languages. They would be correct, and my sincerest apologies to anyone hoping to gain insight into the acquisition of languages outside of this family. However, my goal with this project is not to teach any one particular language; rather, I hope to use comparisons between the languages I have learned, illustrations, personal anecdotes, as well as simple web applications to illustrate some of the aspects of language acquisition that I found most difficult.