Friday, February 11, 2011

what this blog is about

The current title of this blog is "Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning." Let's take a look at what this means.

We'll start with the obvious. This blog is not entitled, Fluent in 3 months. Fluency is not in the title of my blog. Neither is there a time frame, such as, "pretty good in 2 months." It's also not entitled, Quick Foreign Language Acquisition. Quick is not a keyword that I use. The title is not Secrets of Successful Language Learning. Nor is this blog the How-to-learn-any-language Forum. Those are all good sites to visit, by the way.

The next obvious thing is what I put in bold when I wrote the title of this blog in the first sentence. I like to try out the most extreme and unusual thing you can think of to learn a language. Let me tell you why. I go to extremes because I want to do what very few have ever even attempted to do. I've decided I'm more interested in going past the native-speaker level, while most other learners don't even think about getting to the native-level. I don't want to just learn the language, I want to be the language.


Sunday, February 06, 2011

Chinese comprehension challenge

Last night, I took another language test called The Friedemann Chinese Comprehension Challenge. It's a grueling 20-minute test where you watch scenes from a drama and have to catch every technical word and the names of all kitchen cooking equipment. Boy, was I not prepared!

The video below is the result of the previous post where I responded to a challenge from Friedemann.

Actually, Friedemann is not a bad guy. I think from watching the video, you can realize that he is coming from a different perspective than I. We are both learning Chinese but we have a different mindset.

We first tried to do the test mid-day, yesterday but the audio from my side was not transmitting clearly and he could not hear what I was saying. So we met up again late in the evening. At first, I loaded the wrong episode. So, the video you will see below is after a couple of false starts, hence, there is no introduction as I had planned.