So I decided to take out some time. . .get my hands dirty with some XML/HTML and change up the layout of this blog.

As you could guess I have taken my own advice from the previous post and changed my career direction a bit. I'm currently working my ass off trying to build a strong foundation for a future career working in Asia with CJK businesses and organizations. So I've had to limit my time spent doing language study a little. Right now, mainly to prepare for some standardized testing [GRE!!] coming up.

I think one of the most important things anyone with any type of interest/hobby always has to ask themselves at some point is, how serious do they want to get with that interest?
Is it just something playful they want to dabble in once in a while, something that they want to take up as a consistent hobby, or something that they want to do full-time [and all other shades along this spectrum].

For anyone who is on the further, more serious side, a number of other questions pop-up. How can I incorporate it into my life full-time? Can it be a profession or aid me in a profession? Can I be competitive and successful? Will this really even help me? or am I just being foolishly quixotic??

As you can guess, this has been a question on my mind for some time now. How can I use the languages I love to learn to support me the most?

Everyone agrees that a new language can be one of the most useful skills to have. But considering that a new language opens your interaction possibilities to millions of new people and resources, its never clear how a language learner should take advantage of their skill.

This can, in part, be answered by ones' purpose for learning a language in the first place. Unfortunately, a weak purpose like just “wanting to watch dramas and movies in that language” is, to me, not strong enough to set anyone up for long-term success in the language [noted that many also start off with a weak purpose that grows strong over time].

In my opinion, in order to get to the highest heights of language success we must make the language inveterate in our lives.

This can happen a number of different ways but the most powerful seem to consistently be:

Notice how although any one of these alone would do well to root you in the language, they tend to interrelate/overlap and frequently occur one after the other, making the language an all the more common presence in your life. On the other hand, if you are not within any of these four, or are not working towards them, then its going to take a lot more brute force dedication to achieve long-term success.

For me personally, #4 [along with a strong purpose and lots of studying] has been the primary reason I have been able to come as far as I have with my language ability. But slowly over the past few years I have come to the realization that including numbers 1 and 2 in your life [excluding 3 because I'm too scared to be wed] not only increase your language proficiency but also allows the language to become a high speed lubricant for your success.

Creating or seeking out a career that in some way necessitates the language in your life produces a vicious cycle where your work makes you want to get better in the language and increased language ability makes you better at your work.

But what work should you do? Anything! That's the beauty of language, almost any career you want to pursue can work, you just have to make sure that it is done in the context of the language. For any career that exists, there is a way to make it fit in the language context to mutually support your language development as well as your career.

So that's really it, if you make the language entrenched in your life, you almost have no choice but to become awesome at it.

We only have just this one world we live in, so why not go out there and make it happen?

So i was planning on making a pretty long write up on here about my thoughts about the new Google Wave, which created quite a buzz a little over a week ago when the vid from the Google I/O keynote went on youtube. If you missed it here it is:

Must say I am a little disappointed in myself right now. . . Not only have I not updated this blog in nearly 2 months now. . .but also I took a serious hit in my studies over the past ~2 months.

Of course, I continue to study daily, but the amount I have been doing recently compared to what I was doing say in February or April is disheartening. Particularly in regards to my goal of getting the 3,000汉字 (Hanzi) the 2,000 or so 漢字 (kanji) in my head.
I started out strong after I made my last posting saying that I would go "all out" on the CJK, but somewhere along the line I lost too many opportunities to sit down and really work on those characters. Maybe since it is the ending of the academic year here; I went out a few too many times, lost my study weekends to travel a few too many times, was sidetracked or mentally not there a few too many times, and was just downright busy with life. . .a few too many times~

I guess with that in mind, I should be happy I finished organizing my CJK podcasts (stored as part of a gi-normous 500GB ‘language learning material’ external hard drive I bought) and made a huge dent in the number of the pods I want to go through, from KoreanClass101.com, JapanesePod101.com, and ChinesePod.com. I did pretty well with my SRS’ing as well (just keeping up with the Korean stuff), but regardless, I need to be constantly moving forward if I ever want to get these languages functionally useful for me anytime soon and right now that means sitting my ass down and getting the characters down.

Now, I want to talk about a clash of language learning giants, Praxis Language and Innovative Language, whose podcast websites are doing very well and are extremely useful language learning materials.


It seems like a new website, under Innovative Languages, with chinese language podcasts just launched today with the name “ChineseClass101.com”. As you can see with the '101' suffix attached, it’s a part of the koreanclass101 and japanesepod101 podcast family (Innovative Languages), both of which I use extensively.

Now the reason I bring this up is because if you have read my previous posts and look at my links on the right you know I am also a huge fan of ChinesePod.com (run by Praxis Languages). ChinesePod creates great quality material, have wonderful hosts, and a plethora of lessons that have almost single handedly taken my Chinese from nothing to a hearty elementary. In addition to the strong infrastructure (blogs, services, etc.) they have, you can really tell that they are a good company and can feel assured that your subscription money has been well spent [as long as you listen to the lessons and study]. I won’t lie, I am most definitely a fan boy of ChinesePod, so you can guess how torn I felt when I found out Innovative languages (the people behind the '101' sites) was coming out with their own Chinese podcasts.

On one hand, I like the structure and length of the ChinesePod lessons more than I do that of the '101' sites. I also feel that they have a tad bit better focus and quality than that of the '101' sites, so the extra charge [$9 at Praxis for basic 1mnth subscription and $8 at Innovative but they usually have some type of discount] is no bother to me in the least. On the other hand, Innovative languages has supplied me with two very good sites focusing on 2/3rds of the CJK, Japanese and Korean [which is my favorite language], so of course I spend more time on their sites. Plus they too have great hosts and community, and have lead me to tons of good information about the respective languages. Finding Hyunwoo Sun’s (host from kclass101) Naver blog and seeing all that he does language wise, has really been one of the greatest motivators for me [they must be doing something very right hiring people like him~ (you should definetly take a look at his site if your learning korean and are interested in langauges)].

All of this has left me with a question of where my loyalty should stand in regards to the new ChineseClass101 site. Should I side with those who I feel I am established with (in terms of the specific language, Chinese) and give me better content? or those who have slightly less preferable content but I feel more established with overall (the entire CJK through one company)?

One more thing to add is that in terms of being the established model, ChinesePod hands down runs the market on Chinese language podcasts, actually, more correctly amongst ALL language learning pod casts . In a slangish business term i love to use, they were. . .
“the firstest with the mostest”
As far as I know they pretty much started the professional pod casting movement as a means to learn language, as I didn’t know of any others before them. And to be honest, had it not been for knowing that there were Chinese language podcasts, I would most likely have never thought to look for Korean or Japanese ones (I think this is true for many others as well). ChinesePod was 1st and rose up very strong (200,000+ registered users) with more lessons uploaded than anywhere else, and they’re experience clearly shows.

Using the business side of my brain for a second, it seems rather strange that Innovative langauges would launch a competing Chinese language podcast site in spite of such a behemoth (and a valid one at that).
For a very longtime actually, it seemed like they understood that they were looking at a huge catchup game and were risking their new site (plus crew) floundering rather quickly, so would just stick to the major non-Chinese Asian languages (krn and jpn) plus some others, but I guess I was mistaken.
Conversely, it seems like Praxis is being smart sticking to their guns, and will not attempt to launch a Japanese or Korean podcast site anytime soon (unless they got some amazing thing that would convert and draw more future users than the '101' sites, which sad to say, ChineseClass101 does not have [from what I see it right now]).
Including the fact that the '101' sites garnered a lot of inspiration and interest due to the original ChinesePod website, it would seem a bit underhanded that they would launch a directly competing site like this. . .but business is business I guess.

If they can do well, it would actually be really great [especially for us consumers], innovation and good prices come from competition they say, but I get the feeling that the most members at the site will be:
1) - curious current users from KClass101 and JClass101 who already had a general interest in Asian languages and want to learn just a bit of Chinese (probably won’t be paying or stick to it for the long term) and. . .
2) - previous users, again from KClass101 and JClass101, who are crazy Asian/language fanatics and would dole out their money for anything halfway decent related to these languages [I fall into this group haha]
The market of people who want to learn Chinese is very big, but I highly doubt that over the long haul the site will be getting near the number of users as KClass101, even though Chinese is the much more popular 2nd language.

I will admit though, taking competition with Chinese pod aside, that this is a great strategy by Innovative Language to get more from your top 2 largest bodies of users who are interested in Japanese (~100,000 registered) and Korean (~30,000 registered).
With the Asian language "foot-in-the-door" already, it can only help them if they got enough paying users interested in Chinese also, to meet their base costs then grow from there [see how the CJK relationship has come into play once again??]. This may be what the whole point of the new site is. . .or maybe they are just being very kind and putting more good, mostly free material out there for the masses.

Anyway, since I AM a CJK’er and actually really like all of these sites I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking of getting a subscription everywhere despite my sentiments above~ More reinforcement, different styles and approaches, and a base crew right here in nY = more good chinese info using CClass101. . . . so i shouldn’t be complaining should I??

Next Time:
- Progress Update
- New/Favorite/Useful Phrases in Chn, Jpn, Krn??
- Upload speaking one of CJK?
-Study tools?
- random things. . . .

이 블로그 영어밖에 아무 언어 거의 없죠? 다음에, 진짜 진짜 다른 언어로 쓰겠어요 조금만 이라도~

Oh man, exactly a month since I wrote anything here. . .I feel bad about not updating this blog more often, it always crosses my mind to write something up and I have lots of stuff I want to rant about, but I’m starting to think I’m simply more of a “doer” than a “do and write it down” or “write it down and do“. Mostly because whenever the thought comes to sit down and write up a post I end up sitting down and studying or reading something else instead. Not bad but I need to make sure this log stays up to date.

On that note, I’ve generally been keeping up with my language studies. My online morning job gives me plenty of downtime to study Korean (do Anki reps, mine for sentences, and watch/listen to some Korean stuff). I still need to do something about speaking/producing more though.
The run for 3,000 汉字 has been going well, I am about ¾ of the way through my 2nd set of 500, but sadly I don’t think I’ll hit the mark by the end of the month. I’ll try to speed up and see if I can catch up for next month’s 500.
The thing about the characters I’m learning though is that along with going down “the most common characters by frequency” list I have been simultaneously doing James Heisig’s "Remembering the Kanji 1". Since the two lists I’m using don’t overlap much in order, the number of characters I know in total may actually be 100-200+ more than what I think it is, which is great.

Ok, something that I briefly mentioned last time that I have been thinking about since I started focusing on learning Chinese characters, is going all out for the CJK. Since the day I made up the list of languages I want to learn, and put Japanese on that list, I’ve been trying to decide whether to include Japanese, into the mix of the already strongly progressing Chinese and Korean as my 3rd main-study language and wrap up the CJK (I’m pretty serious with my mains so it would be a big decision). My concerns were whether it would be too much to realistically do simultaneously and how would I study (mainly managing the characters Hanzi vs. Kanji)?

So first off, What is CJK??
CJK of course is a collective term for the legendary East Asian triumvirate of languages, that is Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. According to Wikipedia the term was originally used by programmers and software manufacturers who had to deal with the difficulties of character conversion for these languages.
Nowadays, because these are the countries by far dominating Asia and Asian influence, people usually use CJK to refer to anything Asian in general. Or in the case of many C or J or K language learners, learning all three languages so you can rule. . .I mean. . . have 100% open access to the big “mover and shaker” countries in Asia.
Note: I’m referring to East-Asia when I say Asia here, of course if I meant all of literal Asia India without a doubt would be among the big “movers and shakers”


To be honest, I’ve never really had an interest nor a good relationship with the Japanese language though I was introduced to it very early. There was this fling I had with learning it when I was much younger and was introduced to anime (well before anime was popular in the U.S I might add), but when anime got wayyy too popular and Japanese suddenly became the cool Asian language to learn, let alone the number of half-hearted, “3 day monks”三日坊主(みっ・か・ぼう・ず）and anime obsessed “otaku”(おたく). . . I was completely put off from learning it.
As most of you reading this know, the reputation of Americans, around the world, in the area of 2nd languages is pretty crappy. Unfortunately, from my experience, most Japanese learners don’t do much to help this stereotype (see the type of students I mentioned above). So later, as I was studying Korean, people (Asian and non-Asian included) often tried to relate my studies as an “Asian thing” like what they saw with the vast majority of Japanese learners.
Putting off my efforts with Korean like this really got on my nerves and somehow, as an extension of its learners reputation made me almost despise Japanese as a language, the country, and even its people. Looking back, I know this was so completely idiotic in so many ways. . .but it made me try much harder to distinguish my efforts with Korean and show people what someone who actually has a passion for the language/culture they are learning can do (a good result of a negative stimulus I would say).


As I got better at Korean and became more immersed, I began noticing something. What I discovered was a number of unique relationships/influences between Korea-China and Korea-Japan that wasn’t present with the other Asian countries and seemed to hold an important role in each countries culture.


This ranges from the languages origins and similarities, to how the people follow each others fashions before any western countries while keeping they’re own individual standards and limits
(can you tell which of these pictures has typical C,J, or K fashion??. . .actually the 2 on the right are from Vietnam mimicking Jap and Kor fashion in order, and the 1st is typical Taiwanese),
to even their 3-way rivalry of whose men/women are the best in some area (while ignoring many of they’re not too distant Asian neighbors in the competition). As all of these were revealed to me, and continue to be revealed, I realized the closely intertwined relationship of the CJK countries and that if I ever planned on having a full-grasp of, traveling to, or living in any one of these countries, I may very well get caught up in the world of the other two as well.

This was verified in how I began studying Chinese. Even before I had begun, the make-up of my friends seemed to include more and more Chinese/Taiwanese natives, without any conscious effort towards this on my part. Very likely because of the “Asians hang with Asians” association. . .since I was already hanging out with many Koreans, it made it much easier for me to meet the Chinese who hung out with the Korean kids and from there many other Chinese people also. The same goes for most of the few Japanese friends I made, but for some reason this rarely included non-CJK Asians (which really just reinforces my point of the unique CJK relationship). Of course with this, my interest in studying Chinese burgeoned and I began seriously studying it in addition to Korean.
With the addition of Chinese, unique CJK relationships, especially C-K, became more evident. . . and more importantly, language wise, Chinese was helping me reinforce my Korean in leaps and bounds.

Now recently, as I’ve been progressively learning more about both China and Korea, looking for resources, and working on both languages, I continuously bump into the 3rd member of the group that I thought the least of and absolutely never expected to (re)grow an interest in. . .Japanese.

I’ve decided not to ignore the powerful draw of the CJK anymore and have put my previous feelings about Japan/ese behind me. The learners of a language (least of all those that aren’t devoted to it) don’t reflect much on the language/country/people itself and I should never really have allowed myself to think this way (the wonderful Japanese friends I’ve made and people I’ve met, were really the strong factor in melting away my Japan prejudice).

For me, the close interrelationship of these countries and their languages is something I can’t get away from, so I will be tackling the three whole heartedly beginning in April.
FYI, I had already settled my grievances with Japanese well before I started this blog, and had decided to study it sometime in the near future (as you can see it on my list in the first post) but only now have I decided to stop kidding myself and go “all in” with the CJK.
If I would be learning each anyway, learning them as a group now, in the long run seems to make more sense than learning them separately. I would be able to take full advantage of their close relationship to each other language wise, especially starting with a good foundation in the most neutral between the three, Korean; as well as take advantage of the intangible CJK symbiosis~~

For those against simultaneous language learning (even though it’s pretty clear that I‘m an advocate of simultaneous language learning), this is not really simultaneous. My Korean is well ahead of either Chinese or Japanese, and my Chinese is a good 1,000+ characters (plus numerous words and phrases) ahead of my Japanese. . .so each is already well demarcated in my head. (I don’t really suggest going simultaneous if you are a beginner, w/in your first 3-5months, of both languages you want to study).

So yea, CJK is pretty much what I am about now. The other languages on my list are most likely going to be taking it heavy on the backburner, I’ll really only look at them when I’m dying for something fresh and non-Asian, but I’m guessing that will not be a frequent occurrence.
As I already have Hiragana(ひらがな) and Katakana(カタカナ) down, my study time largely consists of character study. Although I know many characters already (in Chinese), going through the first book of RTK, I see many meanings that aren’t consistent with their Chinese equivalents (sometimes not even the real Japanese meaning either!). So my studies is comprise of an intensive comparison and study of the Hanzi(汉字) vs. Kanji(漢字) meanings and readings (pinyin or kana) using RTK1 as the base. It looks something like this:


Since there are 2,000 kanji and 3,000-4,000 hanzi to learn, this will more than likely own me for the next 3-4months or more, but I’m sure I will come out flying with both Japanese and Chinese, and more than ready to dominate the CJK~~

Ok, its been another two weeks. . .seems like 2 weeks is about the time when I start to feel the need to get off my ass and write another entry~
That should probably be changing now since I decided to get rid of my personal/life blog. I realized that my life blog wasn’t really getting any action and I didn’t feel motivated AT ALL to write in it. Also, language is my life, I wake up thinking about languages and I go to sleep thinking about languages, so of course my life pretty much revolves around them. Thus anything that goes on in my personal life would probably be just as relevant here as it would be on its own. On that note, I should be incorporating more of my thoughts on diversified topics on here and filtering them through a linguaphiles eyes/mind.

Some updates:
- Completed the first step in my goal of 500 Chinese characters per month!! Although it’s just a bit spotty (there are about 12 or so I haven’t highlighted in the first group of 500) I am certain I know more than 500 Chinese characters now, including ones that were not in the first group, that I already know. This is really exciting cuz I was able to keep up with a pretty tough and strict goal and if I can keep going at this rate, I will have around 3,000 in June which would be awesome.

-Korean is going strong as usual. . .daily Anki reps, lots of TV shows and Cyworld mining, and chatting online. . .I really need to tackle the disparity between my listening/reading comprehension and speaking abilities tho.

-Slacked off on Japanese and Hindi. Got a little busy and had to cut back on these two. . .plus I’m still not sure exactly how to approach Japanese. I had been thinking I could just do Kanji like I‘m doing Hanzi, but it seems to be a more complicated matter than that. . .I think I’ve found a book to settle this though, but we’ll see.

Anyway, all is going pretty well. . .ok, I’m gonna end here and just list some topics I want to talk about in the next couple of entries.
- Language Approaches! (Korean next)
- CJK (what is this you ask? Weeellll…you’ll find out when I write about it)
- How to make the most of your languages (you know 40+ languages. . .great. . .now what are you going to do with it??)
- Language Vlogs and audio recordings/pod cast (feeling like you sound like an idiot can be a wonderful motivator)
- Influences your L2 has on your L3 ( some interesting stuff here that I just noticed)
- “ your blog is about languages, why do I see mostly English?”. . .this is what I keep asking myself and has been making me kinda feel like a hypocrite if I don’t start writing in other scripts (at least Korean and some Chinese).

Reminder:
- one step a day. . .