740

 Why is it that all but two of the 96 Maori books in the Internet Archive are unavailable? There's only the Bible, and George Grey's  Poems, Traditions and Chaunts of the Maories (sic) published way back in 1853.

I wonder too about the pathway of children (and others) who have been bought along the road of te reo by children's books, only to discover that it ends (at a reading age of about 12). What happens then? Where are they supposed to go?

Unless you are surrounded by a rich and vibrant community, sporadic and superficial mini-conversations are not going to be enough to help you maintain your level, much less progress. That's how it appears to me, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

164

Visiting a recycling store that I haven’t yet been to, I walk away with 8 foreign-language books in Bulgarian, Hungarian, Thai, Norwegian, German, Japanese, and Czech. Some might say that this is overdoing it. 

No doubt I’d make faster progress if I concentrated on fewer. But is that so important?

I maintain my motivation by remaining interested. I love to dabble. To have dozens of books about keeps me keen. And besides, I’m more interested in developing my language-learning method than in learning languages as such.

It’s a question of balancing my drive to collect with my urge to invent.