This post is an unexpected one. Regardless, I’m not going to draft it and save it until I’m sure it’s ready, I’m going to be brave and throw it out there today and hopefully that will encourage me to really do it! Sometimes you just have to throw the blogging schedule out of the window. But not literally throw it out of the window. It’s November. You don’t want to let the chill in.

So yesterday I got my results back for my final French exam and my overall grade for that particular university course. Turns out I got a grade 3 pass. Grade 3?! I may as well not have turned up! I nailed the oral exam, but, as predicted it was the writing that let me down. I don’t want to rant on about it but I am of course annoyed, frustrated and just argh.

The worst thing about it is that next year I have to do the same level course in Spanish. So it’s not over. Darn you academia and the world’s desire for your piece of paper showing I can (or can’t as the case may be) do stuff.

So this got me thinking: how can I enjoy languages next year and not get swamped in the academic mush of Spanish, a language I love and don’t want to be ruined by dissertations? Now, here’s the deal, I’m really loving Japanese right now, but I get distracted. I’m a language dabbler. I just can’t help my alphabet promiscuity.

ALPHABETS. What a great starting point! That’s when it came to me – I’ll set myself an alphabet, rather than language, target for 2015. This way I can focus my efforts on the necessary Spanish whilst still getting my language fix through writing systems. A contender for the geekiest sentence ever? I think so. I’m never going to be able to learn as much new language as I want to next year with Spanish taking over my life from February to October – but a cheeky little alphabet never hurt anyone did it?

Today, I put together a list with the help of Wikipedia, Omniglot and Memrise of 30 alphabets/scripts/writing systems that I’m going to do my darnedest to learn in 2015. What’s that? You want the list? Ok, go on then.

Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
ASL (American Sign Language)
Bengali
BSL (British Sign Language)
Burmese
Cherokee
Cree
Cyrillic (Russian, Macedonian, Bulgarian etc)
Devanagari (Hindi, Nepali and others)
Georgian
Greek
Gujarati
Gurmukhi (Punjabi)
Hebrew
Inuktitut
Kannada
Khmer
Korean
Malayalam
Phonetic (IPA)
Semaphore
Sinhala
Tamil
Telugu
Thaana
Thai
Tibetan
Tifinagh

Phew. You may be thinking “But where’s my language?!” if you speak Urdu, or Bulgarian, or Lao. Well, this isn’t a definitive list. I’ve chosen languages based on a few things…

1) Is there a Memrise course for it?
2) Is it different to other scripts?
3) Is the language is current use?

So, I’m only going to focus on the Standard Arabic script that, hopefully, in the future would give me a foundation to work with if I wanted to learn Persian or Urdu for example. The same goes for Cyrillic and a couple of others. Also, I purposefully haven’t included Chinese on the list because using characters for each word means it’d take a little longer than the rest. I’m sure you can understand this.

You may also be thinking “Why the heck-a-roo are you learning Tifinagh?!”. The answer is because there’s a Memrise course for it and I’d never heard of it before! It’s that simple. After all, you never know when it might come in handy! Seriously though, this project – which I’m expecting to last all year by the way – is just for fun, blogging, and to cure my curiosity. You may have heard me say before how I love to be able to read stuff around me, even if I can’t understand what it says. Well this project is exactly that! I’m not planning on being able to write everything, just to be able to recognise the writing systems.

I will, of course, be posting regular updates and sharing lots of interesting things I find out along the way.

What are you doing with languages in 2015? I’d love to know! If you’re stuck for ideas, you’re more than welcome to join me with my Language Scripts Challenge! Do you think this is achievable? Share your thoughts in the comments!