I'm trying to get back to attempting to learn Farsi. My school supposedly has a copy of Rosetta Stone for it, but according to the online catalogue it's lost. I need to go in person and ask about that, though, because maybe the entry just hasn't been updated. I also have access to another service through my local library which has at least the first few lessons I need. They also have Dari (I think? I can't remember now) and the school has the Dari Rosetta Stone. I figure since they're mutually intelligible and have just a ton of similarities I may as well learn them both at once. There's also Tajik, which is another dialect, but I can't find resources to learn that anywhere, which is weird to me because I found a few others I didn't expect to find. Thankfully from my minimal studies I do remember that the Farsi writing system isn't terribly hard. When I read that aren't characters for vowels I was initially like 'oh no' but there are symbols for vowels, SO. I remember I did need a really nice pen to write in Farsi. Or at least a very fine-tipped one so that the script is correct and not just 'here's what it would look like if it was written by an incredibly shaky American hand'. Long term goal is also (still) to learn Mandarin. I know that'll be a huge undertaking, and it might not even be possible, but I figure I may as well try anyway and just keep my expectations low. And hey, if it turns out I can have a conversation one day, great! If not, I kind of expected that, so oh well. I've been trying to think of any other languages I want to learn. Maybe German? I just... I don't have a strong interest in most European languages. I'm absolutely not trying to insult speakers of European/Romance languages, I think that's so cool, but in terms of my own studies, I feel like maybe something doesn't click in terms of my intense interest. I would also like to learn Welsh sometime, but that's going to be another HUGE undertaking, probably years and years of practicing since I have that flat midwestern American speech.
Currently I'm taking the coursera classes Basic Physical Chemistry (because I remember roughly 0% of high school chemistry)(wait that's a lie, maybe like 13%), The Evolving Universe (because recently I have been All About Space), and Mechanics: Motion, Forces, Energy, and Gravity, from Particles to Planets (because I remember even less of physics and I might as well start somewhere). It's becoming increasingly clear that I need to go over all my old math notes, though, and it's super embarrassing that I've gotten so rusty on one of my favorite subjects(tm). Fortunately I've kept all my notes, but I'm probably going to watch youtube videos or something to see stuff explained again. I'm super impressed that you're learning all those languages! I want to devote some time to languages, but I keep doing the thing where I try to do everything at once and end up doing nothing, so I'm making the executive decision to slow it down a little bit.
Ooh, chemistry is super fun! And thank you! Yeah, it's easy to burn out on language studies. It's so tempting to take on too much.
An idea: a bunch of us who are interested all start taking an online clas of our individual choice, and we meet here to talk about it/keep each other accountable. I for one am so interested in so many things, but have a hard time completing the courses when I don't have outside interaction about it.
Oh, I REALLY like this idea! I have a bunch of languages I wanna learn (namely Japanese, Latin, and Spanish), and I would probably benefit from some science courses tbh because I never actually took chemistry? Humanities stuff is super fun, imo—history and literature and all that good stuff—but idk how much shared interest there’d be there.
@Acey it looks like it might be just us, at least for now, so- do you want to take the same class together, it two concurrent classes?
So my vote wrt websites is coursera. What topic do you want to address first? We can do more if the first one goes well; I don't want to get ahead of myself (my usual mo and fatal weakness tbh). I'll put in for linguistics, because linguistics is cool. But I'm interested in most things, so it's cool if you want to go with something else.
