The Buffet

Food is a sensory experience, and so it should be of course, yet when we approach a food buffet, it appears that our senses are strangely reduced to the sense of sight alone. What about the smells, you say? Well, all the cooking and buzzling, and cleaning, and cluttering, certainly make for some odorous mix, that ideally reflects the general style of food present on display, but you probably will agree that you can hardly notice the individual smell of the dishes you might consider trying. The strongest smells will dominate the display anytime.

We obviously cannot stick our noses too close to any of the dishes and we certainly cannot taste or feel them. We pick the dishes based on looks and the promise of endless choice and availability makes up for what our senses might have missed.

Oh yes the choices! They are what brought us to this food buffet in the first place. Everyone can pick the best selection of dishes and assemble their personal favorite meal, but what is the ‘best’ food? Is there such a thing as one best food? Of course not, you will say. And yet, we seem to be on the eternal quest for the best. The best can be best in quality, in price, in flavor, in appearance, it can be the healthiest choice, or the most versatile, it can be the most valuable item on display, or the rarest find. You may try to assemble a balanced meal, or just enjoy something that you have not eaten in a while, maybe even try something new. Maybe you are just hungry and try to woof something down on your way to the next destination. Our motivations may vary, and so the premise of endless choice is exactly what makes the concept work. (assuming you don’t have a pandemic to deal with, of course, but then just a year ago, it would have never occurred to me to add this parenthesis in the first place, so here we are)

But why am I telling you all this? There is a different kind of buffet I have on my mind, and we are all eating from it. It is the buffet of language learning materials and tools. There are the meat-and-potato textbooks that have served the language learning community in the past and still do today, there are side dishes that are commonly combined with any language learning effort, like flashcard decks, or Anki, or Memrise, there are side dishes that are a bit more exotic, like Glossika or Busuu or many others that we never had a chance to try. Some of us are overwhelmed with all the choices. We all are looking for the best language learning method and are debating about it among ourselves, and yet, our goals, our preferences, our backgrounds, our present situation are all different. Maybe there is a best method for each one of us, but even that seems questionable in my opinion.

Most of us are searching for a combination of products that will support our needs, and I personally have spent much time in the endless quest for a best method and got distracted by the availability of choices. I tended to pick out too many things, seek out variety based on the looks of things, and yet I drown in the mentally scattered experience that too much material selection and not enough careful material consumption results in. It could always be, that the next language app teaches me Spanish so much better than the old material would, and so off to the buffet I head.

As you, my reader, have joined me at this buffet, and as I am introducing myself here today, let me tell you a bit about my language learning journey and what I am looking for today. My native language is German, but as you hopefully can see, I am reasonably comfortable at the English part of the buffet too. When I come here, it is to practice my essay writing skills, it is to finetune my style, to rid myself of those persistent errors in word order, tenses, vocabulary, etc, that stay with you forever, and yes, it is also to tell a story, start a discussion, or generally have an interesting exchange while at it.

When I join the Russian part of the buffet, you will see my hapless efforts to string together beginner sentences, but my overall goal is to eventually lift my language skills to an intermediate level, and I think that writing sentences about my daily life will help me along the way.

In German, I will probably mostly help others or join a discussion with a comment, but not write there myself for now. And the French and Afrikaans buffet are presently not frequented, as I really want to focus on Russian for now. Maybe I’ll read a few entries here and there, but mostly, you will find me a the English or Russian buffet. Looking forward to seeing you there. Bye for now.

Carol

(yes that is my name, the name Till is for a different story, some other day, when I am ready for that, it will be a while)