nothing? anything?

a university? ;^)

Hey, Paul. I didn't think about that. Thank you. Mmmmm....let's see. Just one problem. I just came from Balliol College & Ruskin School - University of Oxford, and Yale. So I don't want to pack again.

But thank you.

sorry for bing such a jackdonkey, but that's how i learned what russian i know and the little spanish i have command of.

For Russian and Arabic, you can probably find decent books like this one in the Teach Yourself series. I have the Polish and Hindi books from this series, but haven't been that diligent in studying them. But they seem to take a good approach. I dunno where to start for Hebrew, Latin & Greek , though. I'm sure there are some good books out there for those ones too, but I couldn't make any recommendations.

hope that's of some help at least!

oh, and nothing helped my russian more than living in St. Petersburg for 3 months, but if you don't wanna pack yer bags i guess that's outta the question.

For non-Latin type design, take a look at this book: Language Culture Type.

I don't know much about resources for learning those specific languages, but one piece of general advice I can give is that sound is where it is. Unless you're only going to use a language to read stuff (which is valid for Latin though) lean more towards hearing and speaking, rather than learning rules. Trust your brain to sort things out over time, "naturally". For one thing, that will help your accent a lot. So after you lay a basic foundation (like getting familiar with the elemental sounds of the language, and understanding some basic words and phrases) jump right in: find a local community who speaks the language (restaurants are always a good starting point) and strike up conversations. Don't be self-conscious, people generally love it when you want to learn their language, especially when you do it with gusto, as opposed to using a "clinical" approach.

For history, culture and art though, books and websites can be much more helpful.

For type, lettering and calligraphy, the LCT book is a must, and then there's these specific works:

Arabic: "Arabic Script" by G M Khan.

Hebrew: "The Book of Hebrew Script" by A Yardeni.

Greek: Nothing like the two above that I know of, but "Greek Letters: from tablets to pixels" is chock-full of great insight.

Russian: I don't know of any, but I suspect there must be something decent. Adam Twardoch once pointed out a great 4-part web resource about Cyrillic type design, but I forget where it is. It was in Russian however - although an automatic online translation managed to make it 90% intelligible to me... and 100% entertaining!

Latin: I don't think there are any. ;->

hhp

Thank you guys.

Hrant - by history, culture, art i mean:

I found Adam's golden post:
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/4100/12232.html
See: Saturday, July 19, 2003 - 8:04 am

And here's a landmark book on Arabic type that I somehow managed to forget:
"Arabic typography: a comprehensive sourcebook" by Huda Smitshuijzen Abifares.

hhp

Thank you. I'm going to print that thread. And to find the books.