I am genuinely interested in many, many things.  I can go from gardening, to marketing concepts, to photography, to home coffee roasting, to playing the harmonica, to card tricks — all in a few minutes.  When I begin to have an interest in something, I usually learn enough about whatever it is to converse intelligently or to even do it.  The one area of interest that comes to mind where I haven’t done this is languages.

Though I took Spanish in high school and college, and I can understand a little of it, I would neither consider that a language I know, nor is it one I am particularly interested in.  In fact, the first language that interested me was a modern created language: Esperanto.  I taught myself some Esperanto, though I have long since forgotten all of that.  In fact, it was at that time I decided I just don’t have a mind to learn languages.

The desire to learn languages has only grown since then though, but for different reasons.  For example, I really want to learn Hebrew, the original language of most of the Old Testament.  I also really want to learn Aramaic, which I believe is the original language of much of the New Testament (yes, I know many of you will disagree — that is a post for later).  Because of the heart I have for the Choctaw people, I want to learn Choctaw.  Did you know that English is a second language to most Choctaw adults?  I think it would be nice to converse with them in their language.  Finally, I want to learn Chickasaw because it is the tongue of my ancestors.

I am not sure what order I would like to learn these in, but part of my thinking is this:  Choctaw and Chickasaw are closely related, and if I learn one, the other should be easy to pick up.  I can probably kill two birds with one stone.  Hebrew would probably be the most useful.  Aramaic is a real interest, but honestly, it doesn’t really compare in importance to me as the other three.

I have found free courses for Choctaw online, and I already have some Hebrew learning resources, so what I am thinking of doing is attempting to learn two languages at once: Choctaw and Hebrew.  That may sound like total craziness, but we learn two things at once throughout our lives, don’t we?