An Introduction to Every Single Language
Taught by Jonathan Soma
Soma was born in the South, is what someone from the North would say. He co-founded the Brainery, is the sciencey half of Masters of Social Gastronomy, and plans on getting married to Waffle House. In his more droll moments he is a tragic sellout to higher ed as a professor of data journalism at Columbia University's journalism school.
See more @dangerscarf
This is not a language class where you are scared to talk out loud and have to memorize verb charts and irregularities and all of boring stuff.
This class is about learning the fundamentals of languages in general, setting you up to get straight A's in French or read Chinese restaurant menus† or decipher Latin inscriptions. Or just discover how easy it is to be fluent in all eighty thousand Romance languages!
We'll examine a different language or two each week, picking up things like noun agreement, conjugating verbs, structuring sentences, writing systems, and saying those hard-to-say sounds. Right now Latin, Japanese, French/Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Chinese are our language contestants, but we might need to throw in Arabic or Hebrew to flesh things out.
Basically this class will be crazy and fun.
Since you'll ask about me: I know a lot of languages but I know them really, really poorly. Knowing how languages work makes it really easy to do the linguistic equivalent of channel surfing.
† I mean this one 100%! I actually have a book all about reading Chinese retaurant menus.
(Class size: 10-15)
