Ellen Jovin Latest - 20 May 2018

Ellen is a grammar freak, a former freelance writer, and a
founder and principal of Syntaxis, a communication skills
training firm based in New York City. She has a B.A. in German
from Harvard and an M.A. in comparative literature from UCLA.
Ellen lives with her husband, Brandt Johnson, in a wildly
polylingual apartment building on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, and can often be found walking or running around the
city listening to language lessons.


I had studied German, Spanish, and French in school, but I wanted
to go more global this time and add other language families. The
initial plan of a year soon became two years, which eventually
became three years, then four, then five, and which now stands at
nearly eight years. The schedule has so far included 21 different
languages involving a total of nine different alphabets and
writing systems. No end in sight.


Through my blog here, I have chronicled linguistic adventures,
some misadventures, and the mental and physical fallout of
spending a lot of time outside one’s own alphabet and grammar. In
2013, I added a directory of learning-resource reviews for other
people seeking to learn a new language or reinforce old skills. I
continue to add to that.


Mostly now I wish to pay tribute to the joys of language
learning, and to the extraordinary linguistic riches of my
beloved adopted city and makeshift language-learning lab: New
York.


I am often asked how I remember all these languages. I don’t! I
forget tons. I study, forget, restudy, relearn, reforget, and so
on. Doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t fun for
me: I am a language hedonist! With each new language, my sense of
the world, linguistic and otherwise, feels, well, larger. I
treasure that.


I would love to see more Americans in particular, but also people
around the world, enjoy the study of languages they did not grow
up speaking.


A new language is a hand held out to one’s neighbor, an opener of
doors, a new way to see, a mental tickle, a road to unmediated
communication with strangers in other lands, access to the
world’s news, a gesture of peace — really, language study can
be anything you want to make of it.