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.

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.

in response to Friedemann's challenge

In this post, I will respond to Friedemann's comments and his challenge.

Friedemann says little kids cannot understand the new because of their intellect. I say, they cannot understand the news because of their lack of words and experience.

Friedemann asked which dramas some words would be considered rare ones? For most of the words he mentions, I would say most dramas do not focus one those things. There are many other phrases that are just constantly repeated in dramas.

Apparently, I wasn't simply asked, "Where do you live?" which is exactly what Friedemann wrote as one of the questions I didn't understand.  The keyword in the actual question I was asked apparently had the word for city or town. I do not know that word.

"What languages do you speak?" This is a very rare question in a drama. Everybody is speaking Chinese. The dramas are not about people speaking foreign languages. Sure, people will ask Friedemann that all the time in China. But they do not make many dramas about polyglots.

"Could you say again please?" Again, another question Friedemann has to use all the time, but in dramas there is no need for this as it's all scripted out. I have heard often in the dramas, "What did you say?!" But not because they couldn't hear what was said. They say it because they can't believe what they heard.

My response to the above questions is not to make excuses. I never pretended like I was going to do great in the first conversation. If someone had thought of those questions which I would likely have been asked and asked me if I would be able to understand or answer them, I would have answered No.

breaking the silence

Here it is! My first time to speak after an extended silent period.
I'll refrain from criticizing myself and let you all criticize me instead.

Of course, I've kept my promise to record the first conversation. I will record more when I can.  This video is what I call a language time capsule. I'd like to thank Rony Gao again for allowing me to record and upload my very first Chinese conversation. You'll be seeing him again. I should also mention he is a tutor at LingQ.

Yes, LingQ saved the day! I could not find many new contacts on Skype. The search function of Skype has become useless for finding new friends, as you cannot limit it to online people only. I sent out a bunch of hellos, and all of them went "pending..." because the people in the results list were not online even though I set my search function to search for people in SkypeMe mode. In fact, I learned that Skype has recently removed SkypeMe from it's PC version.

The reviews are already pouring in on YouTube (sort of.) I look forward to someone bashing me and telling me they aren't impressed. I haven't put this video up to impress anybody. It just says this is where I am on January 24, 2011 with my Chinese. Let's see what the next few months bring. Happy New Year!