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. . .

Hmm. . .has been a while once again hasn’t it? Not that long actually when I compare myself to some of the other bloggers out there who have ridiculous multi-month long hiatuses. . .compared to that an entry every 2weeks isn’t so bad, but I would like to bring that number up to once every week. That, I think, would be sufficient to keep up to date with things.

Language wise, I’d have to say I’m impressed with myself. I’ve been doing a bit of critical thinking about how I study and have been reading other language blogs, websites, and forums to get ideas on effective ways to study specific languages as well as improve my own methods. While doing this, I stumbled across another blog that…well…to be honest, sparked some major competitiveness in me. The blog is by a guy who is about the same age as me, and has many of the same interests, and was also able to learn Japanese rather quickly and now is interested in learning Korean [my turf!!]. I really respect his achievements, but have to say I got pretty jealous while reading his site and am now doing everything within my power, to 1up him in the nigh-impossible chance that we should ever meet face to face haha. [I usually hate people who react like this, but a little motivational e-competition never hurt anyone. . .]

In spite of this I have been doing very good consistent studying [even before I found aforementioned blog] and also recently decided to breakdown my studies into smaller more extant goals.
A problem I have, that I think probably extends to many of you out there, is that I tend to horde learning resources. I gather a million things that I can do to study from various websites, and do a lot of what I call “mental masturbation” about how it will take me to new heights when I get through with it. . .but then, inevitably, what happens is that I just end up very excited about these resources and continue looking for more and more information without really doing any actual studying [its funny because I actually realized this during one such info digging session]. Looking for resources and info is great, but of course as with too many other things in life, only to a point. Don’t spend your days being a language keyboard jockeys [yes, us language lovers can be KJ’s too].
So I once again made a list of the languages I plan to learn in order of importance to me, and then wrote the one [sometimes 2] minimal things each day that I would do to study that language. The beauty of this is that since it is “minimal” it should be the thing that you would work on if you only had say an hour to study a day as many of us living in the real world do. It forces you to be effective [well me at least so I don’t waste my friggin' time] and target something small enough that you can track your progress in it. You may be wondering at this point, why having a million tiny resources is bad if you do them one-by-one like I mention below...well, its kinda like what a Gestaltist would say

"the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"

When a million tiny things are put together?? It becomes very BIG, almost infinite. You have this insurmountable task ahead of you that you just keep adding to because when you eventually get through it, it will be just oh so beneficial. Nope, ignore pretty much all those things and just focus on the 1 or 2 that you think are most pertinent to your needs NOW. . .and then you can move on. Now in terms of your knowledge the quote above is just as powerful, you want all the little pieces of knowledge you garner to come together as one massive library while the things you do to get that should be the opposite, that is, not something that seems will take forever to finish.
Anyway, here is my daily minimum breakdown:

- Korean: 30mintues of my Anki Korean file repetitions, and 30min of Korean TV or movie inputting new sentences in Anki.
Korean is my best L2 right now and takes a little less effort to sustain it. My focus here is on getting exposure to natural speech. [Notice how this is a self-propagating process stemming from tv and movies]. Also, in the midst of cleaning up my study habits I got rid of Mnemosyne on my computer. It’s still a very good SRS, but I just like Anki’s interface more and had only been using Mnemo for my Korean files. Easier to have all my language SRS’ing in one place.

-Mandarin Chinese: 1hour of Character study (usually about 30 new characters) and listen to 3 Chinesepod Lessons. This is the same as I wrote before, I realized it would be best if I learn the Hanzi before all else so I am going through the frequency list of 3,000 in groups of about 500.I’m still only at about 300 [the 300 I had said I achieved before was more like 150 when I went to review] but I’m picking up momentum. The Chinese pod lessons are just so I don’t lose an ear for the spoken language.

-Japanese: Kanji. Same process as Hanzi, 1 hour of Kanji study probably using Hesig’s Remembering the Kanji.
As I have Hiragana and Katakana down, I need to get the Kanji down as well. According to AJATT the magic number is supposed to be 2046. Not sure if I’ll get confused or not doing this in conjunction with Hanzi, but I’m a proponent of simultaneous language study.

-Hindi - Get the alphabet down. 1 hour of LiveMocha’s Hindi101 lessons or 1 hour of UniLang’s basic Hindi lessons.
I can’t seem to keep the Hindi alphabet, Devanagari, in my head nor figure out exactly how to pronounce them [ the whole . . .vs. . . series is completely beyond my westernized pronunciation ability]. So I just want to see a lot of words and how they are pronounced, Livemocha’s free Rosetta Stone mimic lessons is perfect for this, as it is pretty much a giant basic vocabulary/sentence source.

-Arabic: learn the rest of the alphabet. 1 Madinah Arabic lesson or any 3 Youtube Arabic alphabet lessons.
I want to start building my Arabic up from what I know already, see my previous entry about the great intro to the Arabic alphabet.

- French and Spansish: 15-30min of common phrases.
These two are on my hit list, but since they are latin based languages I am not going to do anything intensive with for another 2-3years+. So building familiarity with them using phrases books seems like a good way to get into them when I finally decide to get more intense.

So that’s my minimalist studies for now. Clearly I don’t do all of it each day, but I just choose a language or two of the day and do the task, pretty easy.
-
Just realized this was supposed to be my Korean Language Approach entry. . . .ooops, my bad, next time??

Reminder:
- Little things lead to big changes.
- Don’t get caught up in language theory/research.
- Entry on Utility of online Language exchange

Well right now I’m feeling pretty happy with myself. I’ve been at least doing something everyday in terms of language progress, again haven’t spent as much time as I would like [which probably can never happen unless I had the whole day free and the focus to just study] but its also not something to turn your nose up at. [wait. . .who even uses that pharse anymore? i don't think i've ever even spoken those words in real life before. . .don't you love the differences between written and spoken language? lol]

I’ve been going through my Chinese characters list pretty frequently for the past couple of days, and am up to about the 300 character mark. Its weird, even though these 300 only scratch the surface of the total that “needs” to be learned to be considered literate in Chinese, I feel like I can read a large chunk of the characters I run into (on websites and such). This may be because I’m studying down a list by frequency, so of course the one’s at the top of the list are going to be everywhere, but also I think I’m seeing characters that I may not necessarily know but am familiar with or have familiar pieces so I am comfortable with them. Regardless it feels pretty good. I’m gonna definitely keep this up. . .only 2,700 more to go! [or 10x times what I’ve done to go! haha].
I’ve also been listening to my Chinese podcasts almost everyday. These are really a god send, whenever I lay down, am bored, or have downtown time I can pop in the ipod and just go through the more difficult Elementary lessons that I’m on. And even when I may be doing something else I can go through the newbie lessons and still pick up lots of stuff as well as keep the flow of the language going mentally. Pretty awesome~

Korean I’ve been doing a pretty good job keeping up with too. I listen to the easy beginner and newbie KoreanClass101 podcasts while I’m “working” in the morning [shouldn’t even call it that since I just talk to the kids really]. And I’ve even listened to some of the fairly easy intermediate lessons on my ipod.
On top of this I finally got back to doing my SRS reps in Mnemosyne, which contains a lot of my novel Korean vocab. This is a really big deal since I had a horrendously HUGE hiatus in doing them, about the whole of my last semester in college (the last 4 and half months) I neglected my poor Korean SRS and the damage was visible when I first looked at the stats (about 1,100 scheduled words which should ideally be in the 10’s, in addition there were about 300 unmemorized words). I made a huge dent in this number over the past few days and somehow still remember or have a good hint at a vast majority of the words. Although at times I feel it is very tedious, even worse than regular flash cards, I guess my recollection of the words attest to the power of SRS. I’ll keep adding new entries to this as I continue to catch up.
And I’ve been consistently watching Korean programs to top of my nights. I’m not really doing much studying of them, but its good to practice comprehension and what I know and a good source of entries into Mnemo. Korean shows are really entertaining(*note to self* remember to include some fav shows in Korean language approach) I really should probably try to start watching more Chinese programs though.

Lastly, I’ve even found time to learn some Arabic! It just some of the alphabet and a few vowels, but it’s a big start. There are a few, about 5, lessons on Youtube that are done by a terrific teacher here. The way he set up the lessons is really just impressive and I found myself picking up what he said rather easily. I went through all his lessons, and now I can proudly say I can read about 12 Arabic consonants, a few vowels, and a handful of words. Plus he explained the formation of the script very well, I finally understand what was previously a complicated mess to me. It was cool too because all the things taught in the vids built on each other.

Reminds me that youtube is a great general learning resource and people now have any information they want literally just a few buttons away! I will search on there for more good lessons and absorb as much as I can for sure~

Anyway, next up. . . my korean language approach!

Reminder:
- Abuse Youtube!
- Watch more Chinese programs
- Write some entries in a target language?
- Keep it up!

I just re-read my last entry and I feel somewhat ashamed at the amount of time I’ve been able to put into LangStudy, even Mandarin which is supposed to be my main language right now). So many things to think about, plan out, arrange, put in action. . .its killing my available time (working early in the morning and taking a 2hr nap doesn’t help much either -_-). . .I know, I know, same complaints. . .hopefully by the time I write the next entry I will be more proud of myself ^_^.
Anyway, on to the focus of this entry, my Mandarin Chinese Approach!!

I think I will do these language approach entries as a series of my own answers to good questions I would like to be reminded of when I look back and ask myself “Why and how did I spend so much time learning this language?”. My questions to answer for each language I write up will be: 1) Why *insert language here*?, 2) How did you get started?, 3)What’s the hardest part so far?, 4)What are your current study methods and goals?

1) Why Mandarin?
For Mandarin, the reason is pretty clear to me, and all it takes is to look around any urban development, (heck, even most suburbs now). . . yes, that’s right, Chinese people are EVERYWHERE! (no surprise considering the population is going 1.3billion strong). I’ve had a number of Chinese/Chinese speaking friends since middle school, even before I had any interest in languages or other cultures. I had heard of many Chinese traditions before I even cared for their meaning, loved Chinese food since forever, and thought every single Asian person I met was Chinese. Although the average Chinese individual my take offense to hearing some of these, it really speaks of the raw prolificacy of Chinese cultural influence. Looking back, I’m surprised I wasn’t studying Chinese since long ago. I guess this influence is what piqued my interest, and sparked one or two short rendezvous with the language in the past. Considering the vast number of Chinese I doubt I will ever be at a loss for native speakers to converse with, which is a definite plus.
{A little aside on this note. I took a trip with a friend to Chinatown in NYC the other day, and was dumbstruck by the Cantonese-ness of the place. All I heard left and right were the “ah”s and “la”s ever present in Cantonese speech, and met a number of native Chinese that spoke NO ENGLISH at all ONLY CANTONESE!. There was even a rambunctious black traffic cop who said the expression “Fai di la! Fai di la!“ [快啲啦] (“hurry up!”) with ease as my friend and I crossed the street with an old Cantonese woman who gleefully repeated it back to him. Got me thinking maybe the vast number of Chinese speakers are not really the demographic I imagined them to be (in other words not Mandarin speakers). Maybe I should have taken up Cantonese instead??? I actually did for a little while, but didn’t know there was a difference between Cantonese and Mandarin back then.}
In the present I would also add that the awe that results when a westerner says he/she is fluent in Chinese , notoriously known for its mystique and difficulty, is a major motivator. The debated boom in China’s economy and business is another aspect acting as a motivator, it would be nice to be in a position to take advantage of this when the opportunity strikes. . . hopefully, I can learn this language well enough to do so.
And lastly, I will admit there is some interest in expanding my relationship options by about 0.7billion…gotta love the petite Chinese girl ( but you best get that whole Asian persuasion/yellow fever mess outta here, [though somewhat present haha] mine would be more like a global fever~).

*I use “Chinese” in these paragraphs referring to all Mandarin/Cantonese/other Chinese dialect speaking peoples/countries. I know better than to put it like this but unfortunately this is just how I think most of the time. Bear with me~



2) How did you get started?
I first started in high school from a friend who taught me some expressions, the only of which I can remember now is “where is the bathroom?” [廁所喺邊度呀?] (chi-suo hai-bin-do-ah?). But as you can see, her family were Cantonese speakers and I ended up not really getting into it then.
Regained a lust for Chinese again, this time Mandarin, about 8 months ago, and shortly after decided to study it quite seriously (or as serious as I can when time allows) and made it my primary study language replacing Korean.

3) What’s the hardest part so far?
So far the hardest part is reading. I simply don’t have enough characters under the belt to read in any logical form of the matter. That is one of the crux’s of this language, there is no alphabet, only unique individual characters, that if you don’t learn and recognize. . .well, then you can’t read very well my friend.
Of course making enough study time is really the hardest part, because with enough time and devoted study, the characters WILL become familiar and you WILL be able to read.

4) What are your current study methods and goals?
For Mandarin I’m trying to focus mainly on learning characters, like I said before you can’t do so much without knowing the characters. Characters build words, and words build the phrases. I’m not learning characters exclusively, but word acquisition and understanding moves a lot slower without them.
To learn characters I am going through “The most common Chinese Characters in order of frequency” from the website by Patrick Zein. I printed out the list in groups of 500 and am going straight down the list testing myself on the meaning and pinyin for each given the character (recognition). I then write the characters I can easily recognize on a separate paper, and practice strokes for each given the pinyin (production).I try to do about 20 new characters a day and review the list I already know frequently. I initially planned to input the list in an SRS, Anki, but found it almost useless and impossible to remember unless I have some exposure to the chars already. Since SRS’ing is mainly for long-term memory I will probably start putting chars in from the beginning of the list once I get to about 1,000 or so chars that I recognize.
This approach seems to be working pretty well, since I’m able to read more and more Chinese online, so if I keep up with it I should cover the 3,000 or so characters supposedly essential for literacy in a few months, maybe by summer.

Because I would feel like I am not really learning the language by only studying characters, at the same time, I have been listening to the “ChinesePod” pod casts. I think this is probably the single best Chinese learning resource out there, and has done a lot for my listening comprehension as well as pronunciation. If you are learning Chinese you should definitely get an account , it is very cheap monthly subscription.
I listen to about 3 of their pods a day on my Ipod and try to just understand as much as possible the first time around. The 2nd time I just check to see if I picked up everything in the dialogue, by listening to it individually and seeing if there were any words I didn’t get. When I understand it all, I put a one star (rating) on the pod. The next time I eventually get to that pod I open up the PDF file for that lesson, containing the written dialogue, and enter the words that I don’t know from the lesson into Anki. I also copy down each sentence in the lesson in Chinese chars, pinyin, and English to later test my ability to reproduce them. Once this is done I put a 2 stars on the pod to show it is complete. After that its just a matter of coming across the lesson again and checking if I still understand and remember the sentences.
*Links to the resource websites i use can be found on the right under the language.

Anyway, I guess this sums up some of my thoughts on Mandarin. My two main study methods are just for the time being, and definitely subject to change. If I can think of other questions to ask myself I will edit and add them to this entry.

I think the most important thing to me for all of my languages is that they link me with people everywhere and in that way I become more linked with the world and what drives it at large. I think this will in return make me much more globally minded, if there is even such a thing, and appreciate our world and everything in it more profoundly. Mandarin is a great member in support of these ambitions

Reminder:
- This entry is only about now, write another entry for simple structured long-term method, 1-2yrs+ ahead and where want to be.
- In future entries make point of groupings (for example what am/will I be doing to progress Speaking, Listening, Writing, etc.)

Happy New Year!
Ok, so I'm finally going to start writing in this blog, even though i set it up months ago. I have started writing 2 other blogs today as a new, kind of change of life thing that i decided i would do on the New Year. This blog is for the linguaphile part of me.
The title of the blog explains it all "A personal journal of my triumphs, failures, and overall struggle with the languages I wish i could speak. . .". I am absolutly obsessed with learning languages and have been doing so for quite a while now. This is an attempt to make myself more productive and chronicle my long road to fluency.

My language "lovers" are Korean, Chinese, Hindi, French, Arabic, and Japanese (probably more will come hehe). This is in order of they're relative importance to me, but i spend considerable time on each.

Because i am quite tired right now, and really need to sleep. . .i will explain how i have come to love languages, why they are important to me, and why i want to learn as well as my basic thoughts on each of the aforementioned langauges in the next entry. (maybe including my approach for each language, like a lanuage profile, but we'll see how long that takes)

Reminders:
- This blog is mostly for language learning progress and anything in my life language related (you could probably say that includes everything couldn't ya? lol).
- What I have done/studied/learned between each post
-My methods of study and resources ( critically analyze each - what found difficult and what learned from it)
- Language interactions, language in use, voice recordings, exemplary linguists. . .etc.