Here Comes the Cat: Indulging in Some Language Learning Fun

My history with learning languages has been scattered throughout my life. I’ve always loved languages, but never knew which one to focus on. As a child, I liked to create my own alphabets, which I scribbled in journals that are long gone. In high school, I took Spanish and Latin. In college, I took German and New Testament Greek, and even learned the “Our Father” in New Testament Greek by heart. After college, I started learning the language I want to learn more than any other, Russian, on my own. I bought Pimsleur courses and children’s books in Russian, and of all of the language learning I had up to this point, the one that stuck with me more than the rest was my Russian.

This is why I’ve decided to try languages again, but with more focus. This time, I’ve set out on a course of learning with a weekly schedule to follow, and I’m starting with what has worked in the past. I know that Pimsleur works for me because the words and phrases that I learned in Russian via Pimsleur over 25 years ago are still there in my memory, while much of the rest of my language education has escaped. And, there is one Russian children’s book that I remember enjoying reading back then, “Сюда идёт кот!”, “Here Comes the Cat!”

Children’s books are on my current foreign language level and I like much of the artwork in children’s books, so I’ve decided to treat myself to a foreign language children’s book now and then, starting with these two beautiful Spanish books, “Vámonos a Los Angeles” and “Celia,” both very vibrant in illustration and theme.

On my current schedule, I have 3½ years of Vietnamese, Japanese, and Spanish lessons to take before I allow myself to start on the other languages that I want to learn, which are Russian, French, Italian, and Chinese. Even though I know that focusing on one language at a time would probably be more sensible, learning three right now is more enjoyable for me, and who knows how far I’ll get, but it’s a labor of love, so I’m sticking with this plan.

Sometimes I have the urge to explore the other languages, so I’m letting myself do this as long as I’ve completed my regularly scheduled language lessons. Today, I’m going to indulge a little and explore a word in all of the languages that I want to learn, “cat.” When I was looking at Japanese Particles last week, I started thinking about how interesting it is how words crossover and change as they move through different languages, and wanted to look at one word in all of my wish-list languages. So for today, here comes the cat.

Language	Native Script	Pronunciation
English	cat	cat
Spanish	gata (fem)/gato (masc)	gah-tah/gah-toe
Italian	gatta (fem)/gatto (masc)	GAHT-tah/GAHT-toe
French	chatte (fem)/chat (masc)	shat/shah
Vietnamese	mèo	meh-oh, mid level to falling tone
Chinese	猫 (simp)/貓 (trad) (māo)	mow: like the English word “mow” with a high pitch
Japanese	猫/ねこ (neko)	neh-koh
Russian	кот	kot

I’ve started in English, and then moved to different languages in order of their relation to each other, to the best of my knowledge. We have English and then three romance languages (languages derived from Latin), Spanish, Italian, and French. Arguably, these are all similarly close to English because they are all romance languages, but I started with Spanish here because many Spanish words sound like English words, and in the Americas they are geographically close. After Spanish I have Italian because these two are so close to Latin, and then French, because from French I can make the leap to Vietnamese, whose alphabet has French roots. Then I moved geographically from Vietnamese to Chinese to Japanese to Russian.

I love how this word is close to the English word “cat” through all of the romance languages listed here, and then changes to words that sound similar to “meow” in Vietnamese and Chinese, which I find so endearing! Then Chinese and Japanese use the same kanji character, but the words sound different, and then goes back to something that sounds close to “cat” in Russian.

Looking at this word in different languages is very satisfying to me, and I enjoy seeing how they’re all related to each other in one way or another. One drawback of learning different languages at the same time is that you can confuse them with each other until you’ve really got a language down. But this exercise also shows an advantage: when you can find the commonalities between languages, you can strengthen the mental bridges between them.