Very exciting day today-

The first part of my language/travel package arrived from Amazon.  Because we're planning to travel to so many countries, and because we have 3 years of waiting around and saving before we can feasibly go anywhere, I decided to use up the rewards points from my credit card and buy a whole bunch of language sets and a couple of travel books.  In the end, I paid less than half the marked price for each item, so I'm feeling rather justified in my purchases.

The language sets I purchased included:

Complete Living Language:  Arabic

Complete Living Language:  Korean

Complete Living Language:  Japanese

Complete Hindi (Teach yourself)


In addition to these, I am also going to attempt to review French.  This is obviously going to be a long term project, but I am hoping to gain intermediate proficiency in at least three of these before we start traveling.  Ideally, I'd like to reach intermediate level with Arabic and Hindi since Japanese and French will be review... but it's still a monumental task, regardless, so I'm just going to do my best and see how far I can get.

Because I am one of those people that strongly believe in communication, I can't imagine traveling without knowing at least a basic level of language for the regions we'll be traveling through.  Thanks to the large influx of Mainland Chinese tourists throughout the region, Chinese is now spoken throughout East and Southeast Asia almost as prolifically as English is in Europe *almost.*  For us, that means we have a head start in terms of communicability, but as we travel West, we'll need to start adapting our language skills to local demands.  Hopefully, we'll have at least a basic idea of all of these languages- at least to do basic touring and eating- but my personal goal is to learn up to at least the intermediate level before we go!  Wish me luck!

As I go through the sets, I'll be posting reviews both here and on Amazon, so stay tuned to see what it's like to work with and through a complete language edition; I'm sure there will be plenty of stories of success and duress in the months to come!