Livemocha Reboot

Over a year ago, I found this awesome language site called Livemocha and signed up to take Italian and Japanese. Since then I've continued on and off (although more off than on) and have picked it up again this weekend.

I've now signed myself up for French and Swedish in addition to Italian and Japanese. Originally I thought French might be good to learn since I'd be able to practice with my friend Lan, who took it in college. However, after completing the first lesson I realize that it might just be too hard to do. I don't think my mouth and tongue can do what the French language is asking them to do. I mean, just how do you get those sounds to work at the back of your throat? I'll keep trying but at this point it's pretty hopeless.

I came upon Swedish kind of by accident. I was talking about Livemocha to a fellow JCCH volunteer yesterday and she said I should try a Germanic-based language like German, Swedish, Norwegian, etc. because this is what English is based on. I don't know if she's right or wrong about this, but I signed up for Swedish and am liking it so far. The sentence structure is similar to English (unlike Japanese). Plus the melodic way the words are pronounced sound kind of cool.

I don't know how much use I'll get out of learning Swedish as compared with something like French or Spanish (which I thought about taking as well). But I figure I'll probably get as much use out of Japanese as Swedish since both seem to be isolated to their own countries.

For now, I'll try to keep up with all four new languages and see how they go. At least I don't need to learn new alphabets for three out of the four of them. On the other hand, at least you pronounce all the sounds in Japanese. The other languages seem to use all these crazy diacritical marks that change the vowel sounds I'm familiar with into something totally different. Ack!