Other than hopefully English, my language skills are less than stellar. However, I do love learning them in theory and so I have gone through with Yale’s L5 Spanish and L4 Egyptian Hieroglyphics; an overview course on Maya Glyphs; and some online courses in Mandarin. My favorite language resources for each are below.

Partially for their beauty and partially for how interesting they are epigraphically, I love learning semasiographic scripts; between Egyptian*, Mayan, and Chinese, I cover 3 of the known independent origins of writing! Next on my list is Nahuatl, and then I’ll eventually look to learn some basic cuneiform (not a language, I know, but I have it on good authority that the script is relatively easy and it was the script du jour for international relations in the Bronze Age).

* A note on Egyptian: while it has often been claimed that Egyptian wasn’t a unique origin of writing, recent evidence (some of it from the venerable Egyptologist who helped teach me at Yale) pushes the timeline back and suggests that it is. Writing within Mesopotamia owes its origin to the city of Sumer, which is the fourth prominent origin of writing, although there are surely others whose civilizations passed unnoticed by Europeans.