Ah yes. Hoshi means star in Japanese doesn’t it? I should have remembered, stupid… though I didn’t know inoru meant wish. Guess you learn something new every day, huh? ^_^
Total immersion is usually good for learning just about anything, it’s how I learned English.
And OMG Ancient Egypt! I used to be absolutely in love with it! (I still love Ancient Egypt but it’s dampen down a bit)They were so fascinating especially their religion, I wanted to be able to go back in time and live there. I got so obsessed at one point I actually tried to learn Ancient Egyptian from this book I found (this was before I realized that I had no aptitude for languages). Well the basics of what we have deciphered, which isn’t much. I think I can still remember some of it.
You choose an interesting collection of languages they are all so different in origin and form. And the “dead” languages definitely count! I actually wanted to take Latin this year (cause studying it on my own from a dictionary wasn’t working out that well due laziness and having no one and nothing I could practice on).
Elvish? O_0 Well, if you want really weird sentences you could try to brain damage to a really specific but unidentified part of your brain. You’ll end up like that translator (I forgot from where) who knew 10 different languages. She got into a car? accident had some brain trauma and couldn’t sort out which word, sentence structure or grammar went with which language. She speaks in all the languages that she knows but interspersed with each other so the only people who can understand her was people who knew the same languages she did.
*nods* there is definitely something indescribably wonderful in figuring out what something means or putting meaning into something. Meaning is what gives things power and well... there is just something about communicating thought or feelings or emotions and they way its done.
Anyways, I think I’m going to stop myself here. I will definitely tell you more about the Linguistics course, that will probably a really long thing. I love it but have no one who also thinks it interesting. *pouts*