My Survival Chinese Challenge: Continued

So far in my Chinese challenge, I got delayed in my start due to being extremely busy making the preparations for the trip. No matter! With a week to go before I head to China I've still got preparation time! 

I'm still continuing on! I printed out a list of my Chinese conversation connectors from Fluent in 3 Months! To help with my rusty Mandarin, I'm using the Pleco app to decipher the characters for each of these connectors and then looking at the equivalent phrases in English to make sense of it. Sometimes it's a painstaking effort to write out the characters on Pleco as the Chinese font on my conversation connector pages is really small.

I'm using my Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook and "A Complete Handbook of Spoken Chinese" to help with being able to say basic phrases over in China as well as refreshing what I already learned in my Chinese courses in college. 

I'm planning to combine these basic phrases with the conversation connectors using the TPRS (Total Physical Response System) on myself to remember it not only quickly, but in a fun and memorable way. 

Mi Próximo Desafío de Español: Corregir Mis Errores Gramaticales!

Hola a todos! 

Este post será completamente en español, así si Ud. no es hispanohablante, deja de leerlo ahora mismo. Es mi segundo artículo en español.

Voy a escribir sobre mi primero desafío de español avanzado: corregir mis errores gramaticales y eliminar mis anglicismos!

Siskia Lagomarsino de The Polyglotist, cuando ha leído mi primer artículo escrito en español, me ha puntuado que había 5 "mañas" (malos hábitos) traídos del inglés, que desafortunadamente para mí me delataron como angloparlante. Ella no me había corregido mi artículo, pero me dijo unos consejos importantes:

1. Mi uso de verbos reflexivos: A veces olvido utilizar el pronombre "se" con verbos reflexivos, especialmente como "irse" y "graduarse". 

2. Con sustantivos con terminaciones aparte de "o" para sustantivos masculinos o "a" para sustantivos femeninos, a veces tengo problemas con identificar que terminaciones se caben en cual género de sustantivos, especialmente con sustantivos masculinos que se terminan en "a" como "el agua". Por lo menos sé que sustantivos traídos de las formas infinitivas de verbos siempre tomen el artículo definitivo masculino "el" y esos con las terminaciones "ion, ción, sión" siempre tomen el artículo "la". 

3. Portuñol: Ya que comencé aprender portugués el año pasado, dejé de dedicarme a español durante el año entero me dediqué al proceso de aprendizaje. Mi conocimiento de vocabulario y gramática en el anterior me ayudaba mucho con el último y aún mejoraba mi vocabulario en ambos español y portugués. Sin embargo, desafortunadamente, hay un problema con mi vocabulario entre los dos idiomas mezclando muchas veces. Nunca estudié los dos idiomas al mismo tiempo pero me doy cuenta que tengo que concentrarme más a español para mejorarlo al nivel que deseo lograr (que en mi caso es avanzado) antes de volver a portugués. 

4. Utilizar "ya que" en vez de "desde que" - La evidencia de la influencia de anglicismos se delata más evidente aquí que en otros lugares. Uno de los errores de mi estudio personal era que no pregunté hispanohablantes si mi uso de palabras y frases de conexión fuera correcto o no. Cristóbal del Castillo Camus de Krzysiek.cl me ha corregido antes, y no sabía por qué se usa "ya que" en vez de "desde que" hasta que había buscado en Google y veía que "desde que" no es correcto, pero se trae del inglés "since", pero "ya que" es correcto. Tengo que verificar cada vez si pongo la palabra o expresión correcta o no en una sentencia ya que todavía no hablo español como nativo en vez de traducir expresiones directamente de inglés, y por supuesto también si quisiera ser buen escritor en español. 

5. Lo último es lo más difícil para mí para hacer, porque de hecho, a menos que busco en un libro de gramática, no sé cuando puedo predecir el uso de la preposición "a" en español, así la utilicé exactamente como en inglés, pero para esta estrategia, tendré que leer los libros de gramática. De tal manera, eso es todo lo que puedo hacer. 

Pues, eso es todo para ese tema. En mi escritura los 5 hábitos voy a practicar hasta que son completamente corregidos y voy a escribir más tarde cómo y cuando intento lograr mis metas para este desafío. 

Me gustaría preguntarles, cómo está su aprendizaje de español? Qué son sus problemas con él? Qué son sus problemas en gramática, vocabulario, expresiones, et cetera? Por favor contéstame en la caja de comentarios abajo. 

Como siempre,

Enhance Your Voyage! Learn A Language! 

My Survival Chinese Challenge: 3 Weeks to Revive My Mandarin

Hello again everyone!

Just to let you know, I'll be going to China in three weeks, so I'm pretty excited since I'm very interested in Chinese culture!!!

There's one thing however: I need to brush up on my Chinese and I don't have much time to do it. 

In high school I learned Mandarin during my senior year and continued studying it in university for another two years then self studied it for one year. However I learned Mandarin in the traditional classroom method of memorizing vocabulary lists and grammar rules and dialogues based around those and then being tested on it all. When I started studying Mandarin on my own, I naturally applied these kinds of methods to learn Chinese in my last year at university.

I had one additional obstacle to my fluency, however, which were those formidable characters. Unlike other languages that I've learned or have been learning so far, which all have phonetic writing systems, I didn't have an effective strategy to deal with the Chinese characters other than the traditional method of writing isolated characters a bunch of times and rote memorizing them, and like many Chinese learners I ended up remembering and forgetting a lot of characters, including unfortunately many of the most basic essential Chinese characters. 

I eventually burned out from learning Chinese in January 2014 and took a hiatus because of this major root problem: I focused on every aspect of Chinese (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) at once and I went too fast!!!! 

However I will eventually return to learning Chinese after I've taken care of learning several other languages and try to slowly learn Chinese again. 

I obviously won't be a fluent speaker of Mandarin in three weeks, but I will focus on re-learning survival phrases in Mandarin as well as a few conversational phrases and connectors in the next three weeks before the trip, in which I'll be out of the States for 10 days. 

The areas I want to focus on are:

Week 1:

- Basic Expressions

-Personal Information

-Eating Out

Week 2:

-Shopping

-Going Out/Social

-Hotel/Being a Guest

Week 3:

-Telephones, Post Offices, and Banks

-Help/Emergency

Also I'm planning to study the Chinese conversation connectors from Benny Lewis' Fluent in 3 Months page in order to make myself sound a lot more fluent than I am. I'll share more of my strategies with you next week as I update my progress on this little challenge! 

So there you have it people!

As always,

Enhance Your Voyage, Learn a Language!

Mi Primer Blog Post en Español

Hello everyone! So this post is going to be entirely in Spanish other than this first part, as I'm experimenting in creating a multilingual language blog and website in order to be true to the message and mission of The Language Voyager. So many language learning blogs are primarily written in English. While a significant portion of the posts will be in English, I will also devote many posts to being written in other languages, whether it be posts in the languages I know or am learning or posts in languages I am learning. I will list the posts on my website by language in the future. Corrections in my grammar in other languages are ALWAYS welcome! The point is that we never stop learning languages! Until I have reached a higher level in proficiency in other languages, I will mainly talk about language coaching in just English and Spanish for now. I will also take guest posts with special preference given to those not written in English. Ok now, on to the actual post itself! ¡Así vamos a hablar en español!

Español fue la primera lengua aparte de mi lengua materna, inglés, que pude hablar con fluidez (o por lo menos, para decir la verdad, siento y pienso que puedo hablar y escribir con fluidez, pero el punto es el proceso de aprendizaje). Comencé aprender español en 2010 después de graduarme del colegio. La primera razón que estudié español era que por causa de quise y tuve interés en aprender unos idiomas indígenas de Latinoamérica en adición al vasco y catalán. La segunda razón era que tuve interés en aprender sobre las culturas de Latinoamérica, especialmente culturas indígenas. La tercera razón era que hay mucha gente en el lugar donde vivo actualmente que lo hablan, especialmente de México. Sin embargo, aunque quise aprenderlo, de hecho no me interesaba mucho en la cultura mexicana porque esta cultura rodeaba donde vivo en restaurantes, fiestas (como el Día de la Independencia de México, el 17 de septiembre), eventos, taquerias, y tiendas de comida mexicana. En vez de tratar aprender español de México, por causa de iba para España dos veces, entonces decidí aprender el español peninsular, especialmente la variante de Madrid que era mi favorito. Al principio durante mi primer año tenía una tutor de español pero no era hablante nativo, ella ya había aprendido español como lengua extranjera a fluidez por seis o siete años. Luego tenía unos tutores (de España, El Salvador, y los E.E.U.U. que todo eran hablantes nativos) con quien practicaba por mucho tiempo durante mis primeros dos años de aprendizaje. Durante ese tiempo, solamente todavía podía conversar más o menos conversación básica con personas, pero lo cambié cuando junté con unos amigos para formar un grupo de conversación español.

Al principio era muy difícil hablar y no sabía sobre lo que podía decir y me equivoqué muchas veces. Sin embargo hablamos sobre las cosas que nos interesan (incluso lenguas, lingüística, literatura, historia) y todos éramos estudiantes de español, pero uno de los estudiantes podía hablar español fluentemente y nos ayudaba con la gramática. Otra cosa que hice durante mi aprendizaje era que escuché mucha música en español de varios países (España, Cuba, Colombia, México, Perú, Bolivia, Chile, y Argentina) para aprender y entender las letras, y escuché y vi videos de YouTube de esos países, especialmente de España y América del Sur. Al principio era muy difícil por supuesto para entender las personas, pero con tiempo junto con trabajar en mis libros textos, libros para niños, historias cortas, y artículos sobre lo que me interesan, con tiempo sentí más cómodo con leer, entender, y hablar. Escribí muchos ejercicios en los primeros dos años de universidad y ya que había muchos hispanohablantes en mi uni, tenía muchas oportunidades para hablar y practicar con nativos y ellos me corrigieron cuando me equivoqué. El secreto de mi aprendizaje es muy sencillo: leí mucho al contento que me interesó, escuché mucha música y muchos podcasts para estudiantes, escribí mucho, y especialmente hablé en cientos de conversaciones con gente, practicando los mismos esquemas una y otra vez. 

En el futuro, voy a escribir más posts en español, pero para hoy, es el primero. Para mí es un buen experimento. Todavía estoy mejorando mi escritura, así algunos puntos y esquemas en mi gramática podían ser correctos, algunos no serían, y los que no tengo correcto voy a corregir. Escribo al momento artículos en español e inglés para la revista australiana Tongues en Adelaide. 

Como siempre, 

Enhance Your Voyage! Learn A Language!

My Russian Language Mission and Goals

Russian is the most recent of the foreign languages that I began to learn and it's truly a joy for me. It's been only fourteen months since I began to learn Russian in June last year. 

Several things and events greatly influenced my decision to learn Russian, as it was always very high on the list of languages I wanted to learn. First of all, I really was fascinated by Russian literature and heard about its legendary authors like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Lermontov, Pasternak, Bulgakov, etc. In addition, Russian culture, history, and politics greatly interested me for a long time. In general a lot of the world doesn't really make an effort to understand Russian culture through Russian eyes, as Russia always felt very mysterious and attractive for me in a way I can't explain. I had two friends in high school and college that were Russian Americans and fluent Russian speakers, but at the time I didn't really ask them about Russian culture or language. All I knew about Russia was Moscow, St. Petersburg, Siberia, the literature, that there were tsars, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, that the United States and the Soviet Union played part in the Cold War mostly before I was born. I knew about Tchaikovsky through his Nutcracker music every Christmas and I also knew about Anastasia, the last Romanov daughter, from the animated American movie from the 1990s (which wasn't historically accurate). I knew I had always wanted to learn Russian, but I heard it was very difficult so I didn't learn it for a long time. 

Last year ended up spurring my decision to learn Russian due to the fact that I got a lot of Russian students on italki and they didn't speak English well and because of last year's Olympics in Sochi. I didn't want to start Russian yet, but I ended up giving in to my language wanderlust and voracious curiosity and began to learn it last June. At first Russian was HARD! Though I was used to dealing with complex noun case systems from Latin and German, Russian had a level of linguistic complexity that I hadn't worked with since learning Latin back in high school! Six noun cases!!!! Three grammatical genders!!!! Two verbal aspects!!!! Verbs of motion!!!! It all seemed like it would take forever to learn! And unlike Latin, THIS time I had to use it in a conversation!!!!! I thought "I've learned other languages successfully before, but oh no, how am I going to do this? How will I approach learning all those endings??? I forgot them in Latin immediately after I learned them!!!"

However I then realized that how I learned Latin cases was through memorizing grammar tables and all the endings at the same time, so of course I couldn't remember them! I took a totally different approach with Russian and decided on a conversational approach by learning only one noun case at a time and getting good at each noun case before I moved on to the next one until I had gone through all six noun cases within the span of three months. About two months after I started learning Russian and finished the book The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners (which was essentially a bunch of grammar and texts and quite technical for a first time language learner), I started on the Beginner's Russian Reader. That reader had lots of interesting readings on Russian culture, history, and politics especially from the Soviet era. Going through that book, while it was very interesting, was arduous, as I did many of the exercises so meticulously that I went through countless brain hurting episodes.

I didn't start speaking with native Russian speakers until two months into learning Russian. At first it was extremely painful and I made so many mistakes that I wasn't intelligible at all. My Russian learning for the next few months went quite slow and I got Teach Yourself Russian which helped with conversational abilities. At the same time I was learning Russian I followed Danish polyglot and language learner Chris Broholm on his Actual Fluency podcast and YouTube channel, seeing his Russian learning process and he was only slightly ahead of where I was in my learning since I started learning it two months after him. I watched all his italki Skype sessions listening to all his struggles learning Russian, which really reminded me of my struggles and I totally felt like I could relate to everything he was going through. Thanks to following his channel as well as Kerstin Hammes' YouTube channel, while I was watching their book club event early this year I found out about the Russian: Step by Step series through an interview Chris Broholm did with the Russian: Step by Step team, which I found was a much better method of learning Russian for me than what I tried before. After I purchased all three of the main textbooks in the series I immediately started on the first book and was frequently listening to the audio and going through the exercises. Currently I'm in the second book doing the exact same thing, which leads me to where I currently am in my Russian. I also got the chance to purchase and read The Little Prince in Russian which I listened to about six times so far. I need to keep all that listening and reading repetition going!

Now being where I currently am in my Russian learning, I have a set of goals for Russian similar to the ones I wrote for German last week, but set for next December instead of next June for a high intermediate (B2) level by June and an advanced (C1) level by December.

My goals are:

- to be able to read and enjoy nonfiction books about personal development, travel, history, and entrepreneurship as well as fantasy novels by next December

- to be able to listen to audiobooks on the following topics above and to listen to and enjoy podcasts about language learning, entrepreneurship, travel, and history by next December. To follow Russian Pod 101 every day as well as the Easy Russian YouTube channel every day. To be able to listen to and understand Echo Moskvy and Voice of Russia by that time frame. 

- to be able to speak three times a week with conversation partners from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and/or Kazakhstan and with fluent second language speakers to get regular conversation practice

- to be able to speak fluently and comfortably on all the topics I am interested in during 15 minute and 30 minute conversations

- to be able to have a good understanding of Russian history and cultural references in Russian

So have you learned Russian before? What are your goals for learning Russian? How fluent do you want to be in Russian? What motivates you to learn Russian? What are your struggles and triumphs in learning Russian? Feel free to let me know in the comment box below! Thanks!

As always,

Enhance Your Voyage, Learn A Language!