It's that time again

It must be blogging time because it's 4am. 4am is always blogging time. That TED talk about 4am being the time that "nothing good happens" is actually a load of .... It's just the time that I catch up on my blog.

Okay, so let's explain the picture first, and then I'll let you know what's popping in Ulsan.

That picture was taken in Jinhae during the flower festival. I went because some of the people in that picture invited me to go with them, which was nice since there was a nother group of people that I considered friends who specifically didn't want me to go with them. So, I went with these people, who are all 2nd generation TaLK scholars, and we went to Jinhae to check out this Cherry Blossom festival.

Well, it was nice, but somewhere in the mix I ganked my ankle. However, I didn't notice until the next day, when my ankle was hurting a little. It got worse on sunday and then on monday it was painful, and on tuesday, I couldn't think because I was in so much pain. The doctor said I sprained my ankle and that the cause was because I was overweight, so, he said, I needed to diet.

Thanks Sherlock, like I didn't know that.

Anyway, they gave me crutches and a weird half-cast split thing (which wasn't done right, so it wasn't helping) and put me into physical therapy. Thing is, the physical therapy wasn't really working, so I got off that. The pain has continued for weeks now though. Oh well.

Alright, so updating.

Well, this week ended another semester of Korean Classes, which means now I've completed Beginner 3-4 and Intermediate 1. I'm still really horrible at Korean, but in the evening classes with the POE, I'm apparently better that almost everyone in the class. Also, I was listening to my Koreanclass101.com audio files, just the dialogues, today and discovered that I understood what people were talking about. To be honest, I haven't been studying very much since the TOPIK exam, so the only thing that I can figure is that the Lord is really pouring on the blessings for some reason....

...Anyway, Marie and I have a make-up class sometime during this week break to learn how to use and conjugate passive verbs, since we both apparently suck at it, but I was praised by the teacher this week. On our final, I did well grammatically, but really horribly in the vocab department. Vocab, she said, grows no matter what, but the grammar was important. So, she said, I was doing well despite barely getting a passing grade. I think her usual gracious nature is going to step in and provide me with a B like it has the past few semesters.

..but we all know I'm at C level.

That's why I decided to stay. Oh, I don't think I mentioned that before. In July, my contract with TaLK ends and I go back to America, never to return to Korea and poised to lose all the Korean Language skillz I have acquired during my tenior here. BUT, the University of Ulsan introduced me to a new program they are starting called "Learn and Teach in Ulsan."

Wonder who they stole the name from...

Basically, I'll be tutoring english at the university for 9 hours a week, and I'll be studying here. Since PSU has been talking about how this time won't matter, how I'll lose financial aid if I go over on credits, etc. I decided that I'm just going to sign up for the Intensive Language Course, which should 1) help me to speak better Korean and 2) raise my vocabulary level.

Besides, since I'm having to study Korean around my already busy schedule, if I make my classes all about studying Korean, then I sorta streamline the process, don't I. And by streamlining, I get rid of all kinds of anxiety and stress. Basically, asides from the 9 hours a week of tutoring, the rest of my time will be dedicated to studying Korean, which means that I should be able to accomplish what I set out to accomplish during this first year here.

So, I'm sure that I can come home fluent in Korean. Which is great, because I want to work for the US Department of State in the future, and Korean is a "Critical Needs" Language, which means more bonus points for me. More bonus points bumps me up the hiring list and next thing you know, I'm off to work in an embassy.

Lot's of travel, decent pay. Sounds like the perfect job for me.

Actually, the money isn't that great, but since its like 30k more a year than I'm even used to imagining, that's not a bad deal. Besides, if I do move onto a masters (but I'll be like 31 when I finish that, so maybe not) then my pay goes up every year I work for them. And if I do aim for a masters, then I'll have some time to learn Chinese, a "Super Critical Needs" language, thereby guaranteeing my acceptance into the organization (and also seriously increasing my pay. As in, at the end of the 5 years training period, my pay will have increased about 6-7 thousand dollars. That's not a bad deal if you think about it. Maybe I will spend that extra two year...

Anyway, when I do finally finish all this work toward the career choice, then it will be like major monies for me. I don't know what I'll do with it all, but since it's all just imagining and speculation right now, I don't really want to plan for it.

Staying here does mean on thing for certain: I'll be putting off my college graduation yet another year. That's right, I may have graduated from Beaverton High in 2003, but I won't be graduating from Portland State until 2013 at the earliest. I'm not worried about that though, because when all is said and done, I'll have all kinds of experience, all kinds of knowledge, and all kinds of abilities at my fingertips.

And the only person I have to thank for all that is the Lord. He's been at the helm, and so far, it's been an amazing ride. The scriptures say that insomuch as you keep the commandments, you will prosper in the land. I've discovered that is true. The church said that if I went on a mission, I would be blessed in more ways than I could imagine. I've discovered that is true. My mission president, the church authorities, and many other people told me during my mission that if I gave up control and let the Lord fly the plane, I would never regret it. I've discovered that is true.

All these things are true, and when I finally do finish school, with my Bachelor's Degree in Japanese and my Bachelor's Degree in East Asian Studies, minors in Economics and Korean, and, IF I do make it all the way through a Master's program (the one that I've sorta set my sights for is the Double Masters in Diplomacy and Asian Pacific Policy at SETON HILL in Jersey), Masters Degrees in Asian Pacific Policy (which assumes that I will be learning Chinese) and Diplomacy, then I will show up on the door step of the State Department, tired after 12 years of College, speaking 4 languages, having over 16 years experience with Asian thought, culture, and history, being one of the few Korean Specialists that exist in the US anymore, and then I will turn to the Lord and say, "You were right, it was all worth it."

Because, at that point, I will have secured my future, my families future, my childrens future, and the honor of both the UHLS and LEWKOWITZ families. I will also set the bar for successive generations, something for them to look to and say, "Holy Crap, I gotta get to work!"

Well, that's the update. It was full of nice dreams and delusional thoughts, but there it is.

Happy Trails people

Is it blogtime again??

Why is that 4am is the time that I'm up blogging? Maybe it because I have nothing else to do at 4 am. Maybe it's because it's that time of night that is supposedly evil (I referrence TED talks). Maybe its because at 4am, I'm not sleeping, but my roommate is, so all my lights are off and I need something to entertain my mind....

...or maybe it's because I'm lazy and at 4am I've already run through all my options :P

Alright, so the test. It went like this: Beginner test, relatively easy. Intermediate test, sunken chest wound difficult. It was so hard that I gave up. I had to give up because it was taking me 5 minutes to read the paragraph to answer the two questions, but since I was only given 45 minutes for 30 questions, that is way too long per question. I was going to run out of time anyway.

Yeah, I know. Loser.

I figured it out while I was there though. It works like this: intermediate learners take the beginner test, advanced learners take the intermediate test and the fluent speakers take the advanced test. See, the test tells you what level you've completed, which is them used to judge which level you are on. That would mean that if I passed the intermediate test, then I was pretty damn near fluent levels...which I'm not, so it makes sense that I failed the test. I shouldn't have even been there in the first place.

But I'm pretty sure I did decently on the beginner. I'm a little worried that my spelling errors may have cost me, so I might only pass level 1, which would blow, because level one is like really basic stuff. Sigh, but since my vocab sucks, maybe I deserve that.

Anyway, my new goal is to study tons of vocabulary...if I can get myself to study. I've been so busy the past few days that I haven't, and then I'm tired when I can, or hungry or something, and I end up wasting the time away napping eating or the like.

So, that's it. I got my kids to calm down with new punishment measures. Looks like the 5th graders are trying to test me though. Seo Dae-sung still thinks I'm kidding. At least Lee Jeon-Geon believes me. Controlling him actually lowers the level of volume in the class a whole decible. Also, he was attacked by one of the other boys after school the other day and I defended him. It doesn't look like he appreciated it, or that he even cared, but I ended up reinjuring my ankle because of it, looking at another two weeks of recovery. Sigh. The things I do for my kids.

Well, I have to tutor Sera in English tomorrow, so I should get some sleep. We're doing one hour of self-introduction work for job interviews and then 1 hour of business english study. She's hoping that she can get a job at another company soon. I hope she can too.

OH, before I go, I ran into Rookie the other day. He's my ex-roommate from the first semester here. I agreed to speak only in english in our room because he wanted to get a job at Hyundai Heavy Industries, and they require excellent english skills for that. Well, turns out that he got the job and was really grateful for my help. I'm glad I could help him. Speaking of which, I should email him before i forget his email address.

Anyway, happy trails people

appologies

And I would like to appologize quickly for my comments that might have been offensive to some people. Like I said, these people who don't speak korean are not worthless, they have great worth, are good people, good teachers, and good friends. They are wonderful people who just don't speak Korean.

And I didn't mean to include anyone in my rant who may not be able to learn korean for whatever reason. No, I was targeting those people who would rather spend their time in drunken hazes that lead to mornings of confusion then learning how to communicate with Koreans. And if I still have offended you, well, perhaps I need to rethink my thinking. But then, maybe you need to rethink yours...

1 day...

Alright, now that it is officially Saturday where I am, I am down to one day before my exams. Yes, Exams. I'm not just taking one exam, but two exams. I will be taking the TOPIK beginner exam from 9am to noon-thirty and then I take the Intermediate exam from 2pm to five-thirty. The idea behind this is that I'm sure I can pass the Beginner test, but if I fail the intermediate test, then I get nothing. They don't say, "Oh, well, he did good enough to know Korean." No, they just give me nothing. So, in case I fail, I decided that I should take the Beginner test too.

I'm not ready for that either.

But I'm pretty sure that I will be able to squeak my way through that one. Not because I'm all full of myself, but because I'm in the University of Ulsan's intermediate class and I'm in the POE's "Advanced" class, so either scale would agree that I've got enough of an understanding to squeek through the beginner level.

Doesn't mean I'm not stressed.

Anyway, I just wanted to write in this blog to de-stress. I was thinking of writting an hourly update on my progress toward the TOPIK exam, but then I thought "Since when did my blog become my twitter account?" so I decided against that. Basically, I'm just studying at 2:30am 'cause I slept through most of yesterday (I'm fasting so I didn't have dinner, which meant that I fell asleep at 5, right after I got back, and just slept until midnight). The idea is that I will study until I get tired again and then sleep, and then wake up and get stuff done and then fall asleep again, and basically completely mess up my sleep schedule that way I don't know if I'm coming or going during the test. That should increase my success, right???

Yeah, sure. And monkeys like to watch the NY Stock Exchange.

No, I'm sick. I woke up this morning (and by that I mean Friday morning) to find that I was more sick then before. Is it stress? Maybe. Is it my body trying to let me in on something? Most likely. But I don't have time to talk to it. After the TOPIK, I can sit, relax, and let myself recover. In fact, coming up around Golden Week time, it's Buddha's birthday and Childrens day, so I'll actually be able to sleep. After that, I want to take a trip to Singapore or Hong Kong, because they're so close and I would be incredibly dumb not to take advantage of that.

But right now, I gotta worry about passing my TOPIK exam. You know, 'cause I really want to be justified in my patronization of the Foreigners who have been here longer and know less Korean than me. Of course, the fact that I'm fasting and asking for the gift of tongues is balanced out by my desire to call my brother Racca. Dang. I really need to get back into congruency. I mean, how mean is my desire? How much of a jerk am I?

But seriously though, I was thinking about it today and was thinking that there's no excuse really. See, even if I started working for a company and they sent me out to the most remote part of the world for whatever reason, I think that I would still not be like these people I keep referring to. Consider than these people have been in Korea for 10+ years and still don't have a basic foundation. Or, consider the fact that there are people who arrived the same time I did, and this not being Thomas but being like the people in my "Advanced Korean" class with the POE, and they still miss pronounce many words...

..of course, there's a few things that I need to consider here if I'm going to break these people down. 1) I should not be judging them in the first place, lest I be judged with the same judgement that I judge upon them, 2) perhaps I'm not the best judge anyway, as I seem to be divinely gifted for this particular subject, thus changing my perspective, and 3) they likely have other qualities which I do not posses that make things different in their particular circumstances.

For example, one of these said people may, in fact, be a way better english teacher than I am (which I totally believe is highly likely situation). Or, perhaps these people have been spending their time developing highly fulfilling relationships.

BUT, I can't say that is the case for all of these people, because I KNOW that some of them are actually just wasting their time, as they have told me about their situations in detail. That still doesn't mean that I'm not just more blessed then they are, but let's remove the possible outliers and look directly at some of the people who I know I can talk about with some certainty (assuming of course that they have other qualities that still make them good people, but I'm examining their language abilities, not their worth as a person. I know that these people have great worth, especially in the eyes of the Lord).

Two acquaintences of mine have been in Korean for 15+ years. These gentleman have Korean wives and jobs here in Korea. One is part of a small business trying to promote new works in the Tech field, and the other owns a foreigner bar and has been part of several small business endavours such as this. But both of these men have been held back by their lack of language skills. In my mind, if they are married to someone who speaks another language fluently (and in the case of one of them, has a couple of children who speak Korean as their native language but English as their nearly native second solely based on him being their father) and has been married to this person for years, they should have been able to learn a significant amount just from attempting to create dialogues with their spouse. Also, if they have been busy with business in this country, and they've been hindered by language, why haven't they tried to rectify this situation?

For clarification purposes, one of these men has been trying, but seems to have a complete inability to perform basic pronunciation exercises. Strangely enough, this same person speaks at least 2 other languages as well, being a part-time professor of French at the Uni.

I blame this kind of situation on lifestyle choices. They could have but they didn't. This brings me to some other aquaintences who also seem to have a problem with the Korean language. These aquaintences haven't been in Korea much longer than myself but don't seem to have any understanding of tense or grammar. Why? The answer can only be found when you look at their lifestyle. This group generally spends their time after teaching communicating with each other or going out for drinks. Most of these people go to foreigner bars, where they can order in english. They drink, they might go to a Karaoke place (which always has songs in english), and sometimes inter-date. This means that their lifestyle is much the same as living in the US, with the added benefit of less bills and thus more spending money. But, their life is almost completely in english. These people are the ones that make it hard for me to ride in Taxis or meet new people, because they help develop the belief that all foreigners are here to get drunk and try to pick up korean chicks. Thanks guys.

Now, considering my own complaints about trying to learn Korean, I'm sure there are many ways to justify these people's behavior, but I think that it's more of a situation of laziness than of actual inability. It's a question of application. Many of this latter group have just finished school (college) and are still in that transitional period before entering the "real world." Some people would call this an admirable move of maintaining ones youth as long as possible, and such "youth maintainence" actions are good things, but when you completely forget about learning because you "are bored with it," well, you don't get any sympathy from me.

I say again that I would not be like them if I were put in some far reaching place in the world. They leave work eventually, right? I mean, they drink and have fun often with their foreigner friends, so they obviously have free time. Why don't they use some of that free time to study? Some of these people are always trying to pick up girls at the bars and clubs. Why don't they try talking to these girls in their own language?

See, now you can go ahead and throw these questions back at me, but I actually can respond. I do study with my free time, and I do attempt to talk to people in Korean. However, more than I few times have I said something in Korean, thinking it was the correct sentense, only to have it thrown back at me with the question, "What the hell are you talking about?" That's really disheartening. But you can ask Eun-mi or Taseol, or anyone that gets a text from me these days, I try to use korean with people who I know understand it. I would do the same thing if I was in Nepal, Norway, Argentina or the Phillipines. If you are in the nation, it is really dumb to waste the opportunity and not get to know the people. And how can you get to know the people if you don't understand what they are talking about?

Well, now that I've ranted about something that's been bothering me for a while, it's time to get back to TOPIK studying.

Happy Trails people

2 Days...

I bet you're wondering, "What happens in two days?" The answer is: in two days I will be sitting in a room at Busan University with a bunch of other foreigners trying to show that I've got the skills to pass the TOPIK (Test Of Proficiency In Korean) beginner and intermediate tests.

I am not ready.

You see, the test is very vocabulary-oriented. I am not a very vocabulary-oriented guy. I'm grammar oriented, so in the end...I'm screwed. But hopefully I can squeak by. What do I get if I pass? I get this neat little certified that authentizes my Korean abilities and basically gives me justification for being a douche to all the foreingers who have been here for 10+ years and still can't speak Korean (like the dude in my class at the University who's been here for 16 years). It also becomes something I can put on my resume to make it look like I went through some intensive course (apparently learning Korean in one year is impressive to most people), and I can argue for credit back at PSU (whatever).

Why do I want to accomplish this? I don't know. I don't actually know why I want to say I did it. Maybe it's because Japanese was relatively easy for me. Okay, it was really hard, but compared to trying to learn Korean, it was really easy. I'm not sure if that's the nature of Korean or if because I've been learning Japanese for almost 10 years now. Of course, I learned the most in the 2 years I was there, but that was preceeded by 4 years of study, which probably did a good job setting the base. In the case of Korean, I had one year and then WAM! thrown into the deep end and told to survive.

But it seems like survive I might. Hopefully.

Am I stressed? Ninja duh!

So, wish me luck. I only hope my jacked up ankle doesn't flare up in the middle of the test and make it hard to focus. I'm gonna be praying like crazy tomorrow and Saturday that I might be worthy enough for the gift of tongues. If they Lord's will is that I use the Korean language in the future, then 1) I will learn it and 2) I will do well on the test. I have faith, the only question is: Am I worthy?....

ouch.

Happy trails people

Kicking it into Gear...again

So, it's been a while since I wrote in my blog, and it turns out that I actually do have people reading this thing. That's been a strange revelation because, well, I'm buried deep in Blogspot's server. I actually didn't know that my friends and family read this blog since no one seems to leave comments, so I stopped, but it turns out that they actually do.

So, here we go.

Last night, I went to bed at 3am after having a long conversation with Thomas's Roommate. The guy slept in my roommates bed because my roommate didn't come home last night (I'm seriously beginning to suspect that his home is actually very close to here), like most weekends, and Thomas was then able to have his girlfriend and close friend Nathan (the same that appears in my photos or stories because he too is a TaLK scholar). It is "Open House" this weekend, which is pretty much just 48 hours of the students doing whatever they want, going where ever they want, and basically having a good old time. Fortunately, most of the foreign students are either a little older or a little more respectful of the area, so there's no a whole lot of drunken orgies going on. :)

In fact, my Japanese friends had girls in the their room last night, and everyone was drinking, but it was interesting because the typical Japanese drinking fest is loud and full of stories that you can't tell anyone about, but they were calm, contained and decent.

Actually, last night, while I was brushing my teeth and other things, I ran into one of the Japanese girls and a couple of guys standing outside the bathroom labelled with the symbol "여" signifying that it was designated for females. This only occurs during Open House times, and its just a logistical way of making sure that the women who visit have a safe place to go to the bathroom in the Men's dorm building, a place normally off limits to them. But this particular girl was embarrassed and blushing, ranting about how it scared her. I stopped to talk to them, and it turned out that one of the mongolian students, either oblivious to the new designation for the bathroom or oblivious to the meaning of the symbol, had gone inside and was using the bathroom, and she'd walked in on him. It was interesting and eventually cleared itself up while I was chatting with them, but it was funny because she was speaking in Korean at first until the guys said, "Oh, he lived in Japan, so he can speak Japanese." I guess she wasn't listening when I was talking back to them.

Anyway, my situation is interesting. To cover most of what's happened to me since I last posted, I'll give a brief rundown.

-I made two music videos, both now on Youtube. One is a mix of G-dragon from the Korean Hip Hop band "Big Bang" and Maroon 5, both singing their hit "This Love". The other is a compilation of Supernatural episodes done to BoA's song "Eat You UP." On facebook, This Love is fairly popular, but the supernatural video is actually doing better on Youtube.

-I got rejected by a girl who claimed she "wanted to be my girlfriend, but is too busy. If I wait a year, when shes a 3rd year, then she'll be ready." I call this a rejection because 4 days later she started dating her roommate, a guy she barely knew when we first met.

-I haven't finished my "Dictionary of Basic Korean Grammar" but I have been studying pretty intriquitely, and that includes a 6-10 hours of speaking nothing but Korean every week, which isn't alot, but it's alot more than I had before, and that has made a huge jump in my abilities.

-Doran, my co-teacher, quit and I have a new person whose name is "Choi Eun-mi" pronounced as "Che" like in "Checkers", "Oon" as is "Spoon" and "Mee" like "Meet". She's cool, and actually the reason behind the Korean Speaking time because we came to an agreement: I speak with her in English for a few hours a day, and she speaks with me in Korean a few hours a day. We obviously don't see each other every day, but enough.

-There are only 3 weeks left until my TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean) Test, so I have to study hard because I might be getting grammar, and I might be improving my speaking skills, but the test is mostly vocabulary. Damn Koreans and thinking that vocabulary is the key to a language.

-I moved buildings during the winter break time and then moved back when the semester started, and now Thomas lives across the hall. We've been seeing each other more often, which is cool.

-Geoff, my good friend in the TaLK program, went back home to LA. This has been a good and bad thing. He and I basically hung out with each other all the time, which means that I'm sorta alone again. But, I've been meeting up with other friends, so I've been developing relationships with people like Adrienne, Grant, Mao, Marie, Thomas, Eun-mi, Sera and Yasuyo.

-Having started the new semester, I have new classes. One is on Modern China, one is on Korean Politics (which is self study/private tutoring, so I have to read a bunch of books basically for a grade), and the last one is Intermediate Korean Conversation. Apparently I've been doing pretty good with the language.

-My new students, which many are the same from last semester, are so intense and off the walls when their teachers aren't around, that I'm not sure what to do with them. I don't know when they stopped respecting me, but I've spent all my classes at a loud roar, and last time, it degenerated into a bunch of people playing Rock, Paper, Scissors and drawing on the back of their homework. Sigh.

-I started taking the POE free Korean classes, and somehow got placed in the Advanced course, but I'm more advanced then the course. It's fairly clear to me, as the teachers are busily going over grammar principles and vocabulary that comes up so frequently in my conversations with Eun-mi that I forget when I learned it.

-As part of the ULSAN POE/TaLK Cultral Tour program, the TaLK Scholars all took a 3-day trip to Jeju-do, a semi-tropical island south of Korea. It's called the "Hawaii of Korea" as it is tropical-ish, the largest of a small island chain (all belonging to Korea), and has a group of native peoples that are not Korean. It was really cool, and there's some amazing things on Jeju. I was suprised to find that many people on Jeju speak Japanese as well because of the large amount of Japanese tourists. It apparently has some pretty strong parallels to the Hawaiian islands.

Well, I think that's about enough to get things caught up. I'll start posting on a regular basis (crosses fingers) now that I know that I have an audience. I didn't start this blog for an audience, I started it for myself, but I guess not that I have people waiting for their next fix, I should get on top of this thing.

Happy Trails people.





p.s. I hate the new Youtube.

Languages (and fluency)

Okay, so it's been a while since I updated this thing. And, unfortunately, unlike the last post, this is not going to be all that interesting. It will be significantly shorter though...I really got to get on top of this blogging thing.

Anyway, I was up at 4am this morning, for reasons I can't explain very well. I wasn't able to sleep and so I just turned on my computer started working on stuff, making headway into some of my projects.

Let me explain what I've got going on.

Because I was annoyed at the lake of Korean Grammar books (or the inefficiencies of those books), I started making my own Grammar book, based almost entirely on the "Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" series (I say series, but it's really only two extremely thick books). I think that the one I will complete here will be the "Dictionary of Basic Korean Grammar" as I'm hard pressed to get anything too overly intricate. I'm trying to take the stuff that you really need to know in order to communicate effectively in most circumstances and calling them "Basic", which is working out fine. I'm also trying to give easy-to-understand explanations based on how I've come to understand the grammar principle.

In order to do this, I'm compiling info from several sources: "Navigating Korean", Seoul National University's "Korean Conversation" books, "Korean Grammar for International Learners", Cambridge's "Using Korean", Ganada's "Korean for Foreigners", and KoreanClass101.com's Newbie, Beginner and Intermediate lessons.

In the end, I've come up with a ton of grammar principles that I find to be fairly necessary for most conversational needs. The book "Korean Grammar for International Learners" has a whole lot more grammar than I'm using, but Korean Grammar for International Learners is so complex that it requires: 1) A basic understanding of the Korean language beforehand, and 2) that you understand linguistics. Both of these are broad assumptions, hence the inefficiancy of the book. I predict that there will be 2 or 3 books totally before I can call this project "complete".

But anyway, that's what I worked on. In the end, I was bored and started walking myself through a lecture I might give on language study. I did this because of my second project which is going slower because of the lack of neccessity behind it, which is "Japanese Fluency in 6 weeks or Less." Yeah, I've got this delusion of graduer that I might be able to create a race of superhumans capable of speaking Japanese after only 6 weeks of learning. This would be an intense program, but I think I could pull it off.

As I walked through my fake lecture seminar thing in my mind, I came up (rather, was inspired with) with 6 steps (or laws, I have to test these things) to fluency. I decided that I'd put them in this blog and call it good. So, here we are.

6 step process to gaining fluency in a language
1. Step 1: Determination
a. You have to decide that you want to learn the language. If you don’t want to learn, not matter what happens, you won’t learn hardly anything. You may pick up random basic phrases, but that’s only if you are listening and if you want to keep those phrases in your mind.
2. Step 2: Dedication
a. You have to put effort into the language. You have to pay attention to anyone speaking the language and listen to the words they say and how they say them. You can have translations all the time, but if you aren’t actually listening, you aren’t actually putting forth effort, you won’t learn much more than if you didn’t want to learn the language.
3. Step 3: Language does not exist
a. Communication does exist, but languages do not. Language is an arbitrary word we’ve attached to a method of communication. All communication is articulations and established orders and reasons is arbitrary
4. Step 4: Learn Grammar
a. Despite the fact that language that does not exist, grammar is like the roads of a civilization: without roads, you can’t connect cities and people, and without grammar, you can’t connect sentences or ideas.
b. A language is like math, you plug in the parts in the places they should go. Once you’re past that, it’s all vocabulary.
5. Step 5: Get a dictionary (but don’t just read it)
a. Dictionaries are useful to learn a word, but the people are your best source for learning new words. As they say them, look them up.
i. 1st time: won’t remember it.
ii. 2nd time: You probably won’t remember it, but you will kick yourself for not remembering (which will cause your brain to mark it as important)
iii. 3rd time: You will likely remember it after this point because your brain has already marked it and now it’s becoming repetitive. It won’t necessarily be integrated into your vocabulary, but it will become fairly high on the scale of words you suddenly understand.
6. Step 6: Become involved in that culture
a. A lot of what we learn in communication comes in context, and without context, we don’t understand. A phrase or word in a different context may means something different or may mean nothing at all. When we give ourselves a cultural background, we will learn much more from context alone, and have more things to talk about, than if we don’t get involved.


Well, hope things are going well for you guys. Happy Trails people.