I was one of the lot of people who tryied to send you a message, through questions,. The message came back, and I tryied Feedback, as I don’t know if you received the message, I’m , sorry, posting it again through this ‘wrong’ way:Dear Simon,
Since I was child, I had a great dream in learning languages, but besides English and Spanish, which I learnt during my teen’s days, I only could begin to realize my dream in 2000, since then I learnt Esperanto, French, Italian and Swedish. I have been trying to learn also Chinese, German, Irish, Russian and some others.
During some year, I wrote a letter, which I sent for companies in and out Brazil asking for books, grammars and dictionaries in the languages I would like to learn, of course I wasn’t successful, so I began to get material through the web, which unfortunately, with some rare exceptions, You can’t learn really a language at Internet.
I have been visiting your page and blog. I like it. Today I saw the article, which you said that sometimes you have a lot of comments and others not. So I decided to write you this message, and include a part of the letter I used to send to companies. This way you, maybe, will have a subject, as people around the world who really want to learn a language and can’t because don’t have sufficient money, or in their cities doesn’t have good bookstores, or any other reason. BE ATTENTION I’M NOT ASKING YOU BOOKS, I am only giving a suggestion of future comment. Congratulations for your web page.

Santa Maria, November, 2006

ENGLISH VERSION

Open letter to anyone around the world

Renato B. Figueiredo
Avenida Primeira 700
Jardim Berleze Santa Maria
RS Brazil ZIPCODE 97060-482
Phone (055)32193858
E-mail: chacaracc@bol.com.br , rb.figueiredo@ibestvip.com.br

My name is Renato Brandão de Figueiredo, I am 44 years old, and before anything, I would like to say that this is not a stupid joke.
Since I was a young child I had a dream in learning the maximum number of foreign languages during my life. I remember that I loved to see books with world countries flags, and I told to myself: “one day I will learn the language of that country”, even not knowing where the country was and which language their people spoke.
During my teenager’s days, my parents with too much sacrifice could pay to me an English course, after being graduated in journalism school_ worked 10 years in newspaper_ and studied 2 years of philosophy, I could learn by myself Esperanto, French, Italian, and Spanish. But this for me was not all, because my dream was, and still is, to learn more.
I really believe that I am able to learn around 60 (sixty) languages and I wish anxiously to do it, but I always had an enormous problem. The lack of money and I never could buy all the text books, dictionaries and grammars I really need.
For this reason I decided to send this letter to anyone who is interested in helping me, sending the books. I believe will teach me those languages. Nowadays, I already try to learn, with some book-photocopies, and alone, Chinese, Danish, German, Hebrew, Irish, Latin, Polish, Russian, Swedish and Ukrainian. This is not easy because I don’t have bilingual dictionaries, grammars and other books in these languages.

THE LANGUAGES
I really want to learn are: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Basque, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kazakh, Cambodian, Kyrgyz, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, South-Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Tagalog, Tibetan, Thai, Turkish, Turkmenian, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Yoruba.
I really believe that if I can have help in receiving books in the languages above, I will be able to realize my greatest dream, because I believe in myself.

STUDY PLANS
Everyday (Monday to Saturday), using 1 hour for each language, I can study 10 languages by time.

SUGGESTION OF BOOKS, GRAMMARS AND DICTIONARIES
Audio Forum, Routledge, NTC Publishing (Teach yourself books), Hippocrene.

THANKS
From now on I would like to thank everyone who will read this letter, which I continuous saying it is not a stupid joke, but a real dream.