Recodring yourself

I recently downloaded Audacity, an open-source audio mixing and editing program, to play with recording my self. I discovered listening to recordings of myself made me far more aware of my accent problems while trying to speak Spanish and Japanese than when I try listening to myself while talking.

Listening to yourself on a recording speaking a foreign language in addition to your practicing with native speakers and audio tapes/cds, seems to be a good way to fine tune your ear and your accent for your new language.

Learning multiple languages at one time

Learning and/or maintaining more than one language at a time is very difficult. Of course, focusing on one language for awhile would likely make for speedier learning, but I can never choose just one. I love them all too much. I can barely limit myself to just the three main languages I am currently focused on (Japanese, Spanish, and Italian).

One thing that has helped me to pick up daily words in all three languages has been translating my daily notes into all three.

If I write myself a little note, a small paragraph about something going on in my day, or any other small daily writing, I will try to write it in one of the three languages first, and then rewrite it in the other two.

This helps to compare the different thought processes in the languages, to compare vocabulary, and to reinforce imagery between the languages.

Japanese Idioms by Barron's

For learning Japanese, one of my new favorite books is Japanese Idioms by Barron's. It is a small pocket sized book with more than 2000 commonly used idioms. Idioms are a very difficult part of gaining fluency and books like Japanese Idioms make the task a little bit easier. The book provides at least one example sentence for every idiom, but you will still need to have a friend or other person to converse with regularly in order to really get comfortable with the idioms.

This is not a book on vulgarities, but is instead a book on basic common phrases similar English's "kill two birds with one stone" or "I'm so hungry I can eat a horse."

Very useful and fun book, especially if you know someone who can help work out when to use them.

Language Goals

My languages

Native language
English of the Western US (California)

Languages I've studied formally
Spanish (2 years in high school)
Japanese (5 semesters at university)

Languages I am actively studying on my own
Spanish
Japanese
Italian
Hebrew

Languages I have dabbled with
These are langauges that I like to try to learn every now and then, but get pushed out of the way by time constraints especially because of the above languages.
Arabic
Chinese -- Mandarin
German
Hindi
Swahili
Tamil
Piedmontese
Norwegian
Russian
French

Languages I want to study (in addition to the above)
Portuguese
Catalan
Greek
Korean
Afrikaans
Hungarian
Farsi
Yiddish
Aramaic
Hawaiian
Tibetan
Icelandic
Tswana
Serbian
Czech
Irish
Basque
Ukranian
Belorussian
Romanian
Navajo
Dutch
Danish
Swedish
Marathi
Finnish
Gujarati
Pali
Turkish

Language Goals
I want to achieve fluency in Japanese, Spanish and Italian. I would love to be totally fluent other languages, but I doubt I could seriously do it for all of them.

I go through my stages of liking one language or another at any time depending on the phase of the moon and the positions of grains of sands on the beach. Needless to say, I am highly distracable when it comes to languages. There are simply too many. However, I have some overriding patterns which cause me to shift focus at times.

Primary Languages
Spanish, Japanese
I tend to consider these two langauges to most consistantly be ones in which I want to achieve real fluency.

Western Hemisphere
French, Spanish, Portugese
I sometimes think about how cool it would be to be fluent in the three other languages of the Americas. I would be able to speak to nearly every native born person from north to south within the American continents.

Familial
Italian, Hebrew, Russian, Irish, Piemontese
These are languages which have some connection to be through my family tree.

Language Family
Spanish, German, Irish, Swahili, Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, Hindi, Greek, Japanese, Hawaiian, Navajo, Tamil, Tukish
I have thought it would be cool to have the ability to hold a conversation in at least one language in many of the major language families. I am sure I am missing some in this list of course, but really, just how many languages can someone become conversational in at the same time and be able to maintain that ability?

So in the end what are my real goals? I suppose simply to learn as much as I can and be able to talk to as many people on the planet as possible (oddly, something I actually find very difficult in real life). Languages are a hobby of mine and I want to collect them like others collect stamps, but I definately need more discipline to sit down and actually spend time each day practicing.

"Beautiful Thing"

I just watched "Beautiful Thing." It was a nice cute movie. A simple story of the development of love between two young blokes and the odd assortment of characters that make up their family and friends. Short and sweet. Ends with a very nice scene of them dancing and the main character's mom dancing with the young female friend of her son's. I want to be a writer yet I honestly can't quite figure out how to describe why I liked this flick. Probably the fact I can identify with the main character who was made fun of and rejected in school, but finds himself and finds love with his best mate next door. If only finding love were so easy... I wish I knew in high school what I know now...simply accept who you are.

My new blog

Now to determine what to use this place for.