Omniglot Blog

Reverse engineering languages

Recently I read an interesting book by Barbara Sher called Refuse to Choose!, which suggests ways in which people with many interests, who the author calls scanners, can find time to persue all those interests. I thought some of the suggestions might be relevant to people interested like learning many languages, like me.

One idea is thinking about what you want to achieve, then working backwards thinking about all the steps you need to take to achieve your goal. If you did this for language, you might start picturing the level of competence you want to reach in a language, then work out all the steps needed to reach that level, working backwards.

Have you tried anything like this?