About Hubert

Dear Hubert,

I totally love that the first random fact about you is your faith in Christ. I recently left a well-paid corporate job to figure out what I wanted to be when I grow up. There is no job lined up and I have no idea what the future holds for me. It is my faith in Christ that keeps me steady to know that everything will turn out ok. Through him, I’m finding my life’s purpose, which always comes back to writing. It’s what I’ve known since I was twelve years old. However, along the way, I let myself be defined by other people’s standards. No worries though; I’m back on track! Your blog is truly an inspiration to what I can achieve.

It was only by chance I came across your site after I saw your job posting for a blogging position. What a dream job – traveling and writing! While my husband and I have not had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in another culture, we really want to experience more international travel. We recently returned from 10 days in Nicaragua and we are dreaming of returning and opening up a business there. My husband was previously a missionary in Northern Ireland and he really wants the opportunity to serve internationally again.

So, your site will serve two purposes for me – a resource for learning Spanish and an inspiration for my own dream of writing. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll be writing about my experience navigating the business world of a foreign country soon.

All the best,
Mindy

Hi Hubert,

Recently, I discovered your site when googling for Syrian/ Levantine Arabic resources. I am currently studying MSA and Syrian Colloquial (the latter through ITalki) I love your passion for the Arabic language and all of its variaties. Unfortunately, in my country people wanting to learn Arabic don't always get positive feedback. Keep up the great work! My native language is Dutch.

Hi Hubert,
I totally agree with Mindy above: wonderful that your first fact is your faith in Christ! I suspected as much as I read down the blog post - just the way you put things :-) We have been Christians for many years (hubby and myself) and find ourselves at a crossroads facing the "what next" phase of life after retirement and near-retirement. We want to serve the Lord somewhere, and sense a great need to move from where we have been the past 20 years. After a really devastating year emotionally, we are taking a trip to Latin America, where I once aspired to be a missionary. We would love to consider the possibility of me working with autistic children (English or Spanish speaking) somewhere in Latin America, and so I am renewing my goal to really learn this language, and try out my skill in a few weeks from now - I have forgotten just about everything I ever learned (which wasn't a lot in the first place) and am going to really try to get a lot of Spanish under my belt over the next few weeks. We are hoping and praying that perhaps, after all these years of wandering in the desert, that the time has come to leave Midian and set out under God's call - we don't want to waste our lives, or our retirement, as a certain pastor says. Thanks so much for the site - I look forward to exploring it further.

Hi Hubert,

While completing/procrastinating on my uni assignment, I looked for 'best way to learn arabic' and your site came up - thanks algorithm boffins at google! But more importantly, thank you, Hubert, for this website and sharing your story. It's been so helpful and informative, and I can't wait to read through it all. By learning and bringing attention to minority languages (amongst many others) you're also helping to preserve significant parts of human culture; this can only be a good thing! It's also interesting that you were monolingual till age 20 or so, that gives a lot of hope to adults learning new languages. So thanks for that too :-)

What brought me here was a number of reasons: advice for the times when my children sometimes struggle switching languages when they come home from school (between English and Hungarian). I'm also trying to reestablish the Italian they once knew from our time living there.
My wonderful partner (who's learnt French and German) would like to learn Hungarian and as a native speaker I'm concerned my help may be more hindrance so I'm looking for a better method with this difficult language (from what I've been told).

Lastly, I'm doing research on herbal medicines and many times I find Iran has the best science and medical evidence. I'd like to learn Arabic to travel there and conduct research myself, but I don't know where to start with Arabic or which one is suitable for that area (Iran, Syria and Afghanistan for travel in better times when the people have peace and stability).
I'm hoping there might be a starting point which opens the door to that area of the world. I notice you mention Georgia which would be great! though again a completely new and unique language. I wonder if learning Georgian was easier for you as you knew Russian?

Though the big question I'd like to ask you is: what do you think is the single most important factor in learning a language? is it openness, confidence, determination, a willingness to make mistakes, daily practise, 'an ear for languages', being very intelligent, or something else?

Thank you for your time and best of luck with your amazing travels and work abroad :-)
From a fellow Aussie and global citizen

Hi! College student with the idealistic view of wanting to change the world, to make it a little better. International relations is my major, but I am specializing in Non-profit organization. Planning on doing a study abroad within the next year, preferably working with Syrian Refugees. I'm always up for trying something new, and my main goal is to learn as much as I can so I am able help as many people as I can.

Your recommendation for the Arabic grammar was very good. Now I've looked at a lot of grammar but this filled all the holes those left so I don't know if it would have been as good without the prior work. Also I think they use a little s shaped diacritic for the double damma which took a little figuring out since its different elsewhere. I'm going to follow your other recommendations. I'm using Pimsleur for verbal which is pretty good as far as it goes

Hello!
I, like you, wish that I learned a language when I was younger. Because of my family's Spanish heritage, my mother wanted to teach me Spanish as a young child, but as little kids do, I refused. Then, when I was about nine or ten years old, I noticed that all my friends and their families spoke Spanish and suddenly I felt left out. I learned to speak a very rough Spanglish which was very helpful, but I didn't feel like I spoke Spanish. Then, I seriously started to learn the language when I was about 13 and fell in love. I was conversationally fluent a few years later.
Speaking two languages opened up a new world for me, so when I started university, I decided I wanted to learn Arabic. I grew up in Minneapolis, USA which had a large Somalian population. Because Arabic was one of Somalia's national languages and a very useful language as well, I thought why not. Columbia University has a very rigorous Arabic program and I was overwhelmed on the first day, but after using some of the resources on this site. Arabic became my favorite class. I decided to take two extra classes on the weekends with an Arabic tutoring program called NaTakallam, and I became a Middle Eastern Studies major.
My recommendation to anyone who wants to learn a language is that you should go big or go home! I spend three hours on Arabic every day, and I have made great strides in MSA and Levantine. Because I started learning Arabic at such a fast pace, I actually felt like the work I was doing was making a difference.
Thank you for this site and your reviews and recommendations! They have served me well, and I am now on my way to becoming trilingual because of this site!

Hubert,

I thoroughly enjoy your guide of resources for books on the Irish (Gaeilge) language. I want to learn the Ulster dialect but there's not as many resources for it with audio. I have been currently using Buntús Cainte (books 1 & 2) even though it's not in the Ulster dialect as well as a website called Easyirish.com (which is in the Ulster dialect) - that set up audio/pdf podcast lessons in a similar manner. I also like how they both have audio at a nice pace that I can comprehend. However, I wasn't sure which resource/s to use next. Would you recommend to go with a Ulster dialect only book like 'Irish on Your Own' or 'Enjoy Irish'? Or would it be better to go with a multi-dialect book like 'Gaeilge gan Stró' or 'A Ghaeilge Bheo' or other suggestions all together? I've also been listening to both traditional and non-traditional Gaeilge songs from TG Lurgan, TG4 and other individual artists, which helps too.

Hi there! I don't know what to say, but I'll just write some about me :)
My name is Jessica, I am from Indonesia and I'm 14. My first language is Indonesian of course, but I studied English at school and I can say I'm pretty good at it! I remember 8th grade was that miraculous time of my English's growth.

I remember that at the 4th grade I can't even remember the formulas of tenses but suddenly I don't have to remember them :/ I just remember example sentences, hehe.

I love languages, and I am currently learning Japanese at school, and study a little of it myself through a game in Japanese and talking with a Japanese (who doesn't know English so I had to ask him to not use kanji ;-;), and also I wanted to learn Vietnamese but lost motivation for it, and I also learn Norwegian! I'm happy I have 2 Norwegian friends and they love to help me too ^-^

Hi Hubert,

Absolutely love your site, language lover as I am, and very glad to have come across it. I enjoyed reading your reviews of many different language resources, and found it interesting that our experiences are very different. In stark contrast to your experiences, I've found a "heavy" grammar focus to be very helpful when learning new languages, and I also tend to find courses with lots of translation exercises far more efficient than other courses. I'm not claiming this as a general truth for all language learners, of course, but that's the approach that has worked best for me. Today, I speak fluent English, Swedish, French and Italian (able to write and publish academic research in these languages), I'm conversational in German, Irish Gaelic, Finnish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh (able to carry out normal conversations in these languages, though not at an academic level), and I get by in Russian, Croatian and Persian. It goes without saying that I didn't reach fluency in any language just through grammar and translations - but they did help me to get to the stage where I could start speaking on a daily basis, albeit with mistakes and an initially limited vocabulary. So while I'm sure many learners have different experiences, I do believe there is at least something to be said for grammar and translating :-)

Hi Hubert,

I just discovered your site, it's so well put together and hopefully will be a great resource for me going forward. As a language lover and aspiring translator, I see myself at the start of journey similar to yours at 20 years old. However my path is leading me to the Romance languages; I'm trying to learn French, Spanish (both of which I speak fluently), Portuguese, Italian and Catalan all at the same time. I'm currently on the year abroad of my undergraduate degree doing a translation internship in Seville for six months, and in March I'll move on to Paris for another six months. Though I would love to be a translator in the future as it's something I'm very passionate about and I think I definitely have a gift for it, I'm also fascinated by linguistics. I hope I can combine the two passions in a similar way that you've done, and I definitely take inspiration from your story. Helping to raise awareness and conserve endangered and dying languages would be a rewarding and challenging endeavour, and hopefully something that would be possible in Western Europe given the myriad of Romance dialects, some of which are on the verge of disappearance.
I also dream of bringing the wonders of Romance languages over to Australia and helping the Aussies love language just as much as I do. I was lucky enough to spend five months on a student exchange last year in Sydney and I totally fell head over heels in love with the place. I would love to return sooner rather than later and would hope my Eurocentric plans wouldn't prevent me from spending some time there too.
Just thought I'd say thanks for showing me that you can never be too ambitious when it comes to languages and linguistics. I really hope to make a difference somehow using my gift of language, but I don't know how just yet!

I already partly speak Hebrew and Yiddish, and I'm in the process of learning Russian. I do this as a hobby.

Hello Hubert,
I was doing some research on the web when I came across your webpage and read the information regards to your lifestyle and how you have achieved such a great living. I am from Australia Melbourne and I live in Turkey it has been a year and a half. My background is Turkish but I do speak English having been born in Australia. I speak fluent Turkish and have been trying to find something interesting that involves using both languages and I suggest becoming a translator\interpreter. I studied Italian in school since it was only language that was taught and I considered on learning more but never really got around to doing it since I've been improving my Turkish by speaking, writing and reading.
I recall that you learnt a little bit of Turkish and there are different dialects that are involved within the language. Turkish language is a fun language to learn.