who's LingQing?

Hello readers of my blog! Long time, no post!

The purpose of today's post is to give away some LingQ points. Are any of you who are reading this post, active members of the aforementioned language learning community? If so, you are probably aware that we can give points to other members now.  Since I am receiving points for my submitted content that is used by other members and I am not so active, I have a lot of points to give away. Why would I give away points instead of keeping them? Because points will expire if they are not used within 90 days. Expired points get redistributed to people like me.

Mixed Messages

Natalie Hunter is not Keith, but rather a guest blogger. She grew up wanting to be a teacher, and is addicted to learning and research. As a result she is grateful for the invention of the Internet because it allows her to spend some time outside, rather than just poring through books in a library. She is fascinated by the different methodologies for education at large today, and particularly by the advent of online education. She also loves to travel and learn via interaction with other people and cultures.

I've been learning new languages all my life. English is supposedly my native language, but it took me years to learn it well enough to speak it. In the years after becoming better at English I took many other languages in the hopes that I would find one I could more easily express myself in. Several of these languages I took very seriously, never really bothering with things like online school but instead traveling to places where they were the dominant language with hardly a word in my memory bank to assist me once I got there. It took me three months in Taiwan to learn how to ask where the bathroom is!

switching circuits by Ryan Somma

One side effect of this sort of learning I'm sure many people have experienced is mixing up my languages. I have terrible dreams where I'm speaking a mixture of Japanese and Chinese to try and interact with someone speaking some unintelligible mishmash of gibberish interspersed with Mongolian. In daily life I will often catch myself before using the wrong term in whatever language I am speaking, and then spend an awkward moment fumbling for the correct word, even in English. Very rarely I won't catch myself among my monolingual friends, which can be embarrassing although they all say they enjoy learning from me.

This sort of mixed speech, when deliberately done, is called code-switching when spoken and macaronic language when written.

can't recall where you left your brain?

I can't vouch for the results reported about yet another brain research experiment. I'm sure this one has some faults too, but it does seem to have made some good observations about our success in trying to recall words. The report was here at Science Daily.

Basically, I think it says that you have better recall ability when the theta waves in the brain are high.

To me, this relates to SRS, because I have questioned the effectiveness of Space Repetition. Let's say you're using an SRS to try not to forget the Kanji. If you do your SRS review while the theta waves in your brain are low, your results will not be as good as if you had used the system during high theta wave activity. This will affect the SRS's ability to determine the next optimal time to show you the ones you are failing. So, say you have a bad day and get a lot of them wrong. Now there will be a day in the future where your need-to-review words will be higher.

the US president speaks Chinese

Did you know? The president of the United States speaks Chinese? And so do his secret service agents. I don't know if it is a secret or not, but you can watch it on YouTube. I've embedded the video in this post below so you can watch it if you're interested in seeing the president speak Chinese. The scene is set in the Oval Office and there is only one bodyguard and the president. It's less than a minute long. If I add more people, they'll all be speaking Chinese! I had fun creating this video and doing the voices. When you record your voice, you can tweak the pitch so you can easily sound different for different characters.