Despite all that, there are just some things that irritate me to no extreme!  And I have chosen to remain silent, because of my desire to stay positive.  Then I realized, it’s not the sources that makes me annoyed, it’s the people who keep going back to these sources.  So I have chosen to go on this rant, not to put anyone person our thought down, but to point out where I think you shouldn’t go.  I wont name any names in this, just concepts I am not a fan of.

Do your homework!

There are those who like to make fantastical claims and of superfast learning.  They go on these missions to learn a language super fast and if you follow their blog or buy their product, then you will figure out these same tricks.  

Let me tell you, there is no shortcut, there is no “Hack” and there is no way to get there in less time.  Yes there are ways to be more efficient to learn things, but you are going to have to put in the time.

On that same subject, listen and follow those people who actually live lives.  If you like reading expat adventures in some far of country, be my guest.  At the same time, don’t expect them to have any understanding of what it means to try to learn a foreign language while keeping your 9 to 5 job, Which you can’t just get rid of because you have kids to feed and a mortgage to pay.  Then you spend the rest of your free time with those little ones speaking what?  English.

So in short, do your homework.  Have anyone of these people you follow actually accomplish these missions and do anyone of them do it while holding obligations that keep you from your goal?  If not, then don’t follow them.  It’s a waste of time.

Input is Better…No Output

The other pet peeve of mine is you need to do more of one or the other type of language study.  I personally believe that one should try to balance the two out, but I do know that we are all different.  There are some one who recommend never talking for months.  Others say, jump out and start talking.  Who is right?

It depends on who you are.  Your personality will gravitate to one or the other.  The trick isn’t knowing which one is better.  The trick is to figuring out how to use one to help the other.  If you are shy and more of an introvert, a lot of input might seem more useful.  So go ahead.  Listen and read to your heart’s content.  Don’t stop there, find a way to listen to real conversations and practice them.  Then you can be ready when a real conversation hits.

Same goes for Output.  Maybe you are outgoing and enjoy social experiences.  This does not make you better for being that way.  That just means you need to make sure you are listening to what is being said as much as you are saying it.  Don’t dominate the conversation all the time.  Let the conversation move into areas you are less familiar with.

Now I feel better, I got it out of my system and I hope you are all the better for it.

Do you have any pet peeves?  Share them in the comments below.

A couple of interesting things have happened in the last few days that I thought I would share with you.

How do I get to where you are?

I have mentioned before that I am learning to code and develop workbooks/macros in Excel for work.  A year ago, when I started my current job, I knew very little about this kind of thing.  But I saw a need for it and so I sat down and worked really hard to learn it and a year later, I have become a primary point of contact, not just in my group but for others as well.

The other day, a good friend of mine at work asked me.  “How do I get to where you are now?”  That’s a simple question with a complicated answer.  How do you ask Mozart how to write music or Davinci how to paint.  Ok, maybe those examples are too extreme, I’m not a master at what I do, but the point is the same.  It’s not easy to answer.

I still attempted to answer him.  I gave a few pointers here and there, but ultimately I gave one advice that I felt was better than any of them: Just do it!  I learned more by finding a problem (or making up one) and figuring out how to solve it.

The same is true with language learning.  Stop reading about the best ways to learn and just start learning.  When you get stuck, come back to a language blog or a grammar book, but then get back on the horse and keep doing.  You will get further that way.

Working with Thai

I recently found a job posting for a research analyst in Oregon.  The candidate needs to be strong in both Thai and English.  I don’t know if the job will ultimately be for me, nor do I know if I would even be considered, but I decided to put a resume in so I can learn more about it.  Because of that, I will be emphasizing Thai for at least another month or so.

On that note, I would like to remind you all of the best place to learn Thai:  Women Learn Thai….and some men too!     Thanks again for reading and enjoy your week.

I love many things in my life.  I love my wife and kids.  I love my Savior   I love helping others and I love learning new things.  I often have told people that if I could be paid to learn, I would take that job without question.

I also learned, that I like to write.  I like blogging.  I like putting digital pen to digital paper and posting my incoherent thoughts for all to see.  Yeah I know I don’t have this huge following.  I just enjoy writing.  If someone reads it and enjoys it then all the better, but I write for me.

If you like it so much, why did you lose motivation?

I lost emotion, because I stopped writing and learning for the enjoyment of it.  I wasn’t trying to be the next big language blogger, but I also wasn’t writing for my benefit.  It became work, a job, a chore.  With thing picking up at my paying job, it got harder and harder to WANT to write.

One day, it just happened.  I sat down to write and nothing would come out.  I have never wanted to write something that wasn’t real.  I have mailed in a couple of posts here and there, but there were still from me and my motivation to learn and help others learn.  This was different.  I couldn’t get a single feeling or thought out.  So I didn’t.  Next thing you know it been 4 months.

So what have you been up to?

I have focused a lot at work and been doing some minimal Language learning.  I will be honest.  I haven’t learned any Samoan in the last 4 months.  I went back to Spanish.  It was easier and felt more natural.  Samoan made me make new routines and I just didn’t have the heart do it the last 4 months.  Of course I have been with my kids and my family.

So what does the future hold for this blogger?  I don’t know but I will guarantee you,  what ever happens will be because I enjoy it! And I hope you do too.

Doing less can give you more

It’s been a crazy week and a half.  I have been getting ready for a very important event at work and a lot of time and energy has been devoted to it.  This has meant that only the most important things in my life have been worked on and everything else has been left.  No, I haven’t updated my status here at the blog, but I have been learning Samoan.  Despite my really busy schedule and preoccupied mind, I learned and perfected my abilities to speak and understand Samoan.

How might you ask I was able to accomplish this?  I under achieved.

How Can One Under Achieve to Succeed?

I know you might be asking yourself some thing like, “How can one succeed if you do less than all you have? ” or “I thought I was supposed to give 110 percent?”  Yes this is all true, but what I am talking about is not in effort or desire.  I am talking about time.  It’s the thing we all have Equal amounts of and the thing we always mismanage.

I am sure you have recently recommitted yourself to a goal of learning a new language.  Maybe you have committed to spending 30 minutes a day or something like that, in language learning activities.  You may even be doing well on that so far.  But there is one problem, it wont last.

Sometime, you will eventually have the world go against you and you wont be able to do 30 minutes of studying.  We all have bad days right?  Sure!  So you go back to your life and things seem good, and then you have two bad days in a row.  Then another one a day after.  Next thing you know you have done less learning that week than you have anything else.  Not just that, you can’t seem to recommit yourself to get it back in your schedule.  You have lost!

Our problem is that we commit to something based on what we can do on the good days.  We like to be optimistic with who we are and what we are doing.  That’s good, but we also have to be practical or we danger upon hurting that optimism.

What to do

Plan on doing less than you think you can.  If you think you can do 30 mins a day than plan to do 15.  Maybe you think you can read a unit a day, so plan on taking two days to do it.  If you do more, than that is gravy on top.  Otherwise, it is still a successful day.  You will be grateful for this lower expectation on those bad days and despite your “under achievement,” you will still succeed.

Related articles

• First week of Samoan (want2speakthai.com)
• The other language (want2speakthai.com)
• Why Samoan and ASL are the last two (want2speakthai.com)

J (programming language) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For about a year and a half now, I have been learning languages.  First Spanish and now Samoan.  It’s been fantastic and I love doing it.  Learning and writing about it has become such a great love, but I have been learning another language besides Spanish and Samoan.  I’ve never mentioned it before in the blog, not because I was hiding something.  I just never thought it would be relevant.

How could I not think that learning a language would be relevant to this blog.  Well it’s not a spoken language or even one to communicate with another person.  It’s a programming language.  I have been learning how to program Excel using Visual Basic for Application (VBA for Short).  Though it wouldn’t seem like there is a correlation between learning a programming language and a spoken one, I have found a couple of things that are related.

Start with your own language

Before you start writing code at all you have to understand what it is you want.  I get done a lot faster, with much better code if I can explain and plan out the code in English first.  If I can’t understand what I am trying to do in my own words, then how can I write the code for it?

Same goes with spoken language.  Your own language is a great starting off point.  Write a sentence or a paragraph about some subject you are interested in and then start translating it.  Give it to an expert and have them check it.  Then memorize it and improve it!

Trail and error is a great tool

Trail and error are two great words in coding.  You know what you want to do, but then you get a stumbling block and nothing you do seems to work ok.  So you keep trying and trying till you finally, and probably accidentally, figure it out and it works.  The reason it works is because you were doing something.  The very act of doing helps you get there.

Language learning is like that.  Just keep trying and even if you are not learning something the most efficient way you can, momentum will eventually bring you there.

Just hit record

Sometimes, you are just so stuck with this or that and you don’t know how to even address the issue.  This is often a good time, in office programs at least, to use the Record macro.  You can then go look at the Macro code and tweak it for what you are trying to accomplish.

Sometimes, we also need to just hit record and listen to Experts of our language.  Then pick it apart and tweek it for what you eventually need to say.  Don’t for get that conversations can’t happen by themselves.  You may have to really try hard, but when you are get a chance to speak with an expert/native speaker, pay attention and “record” mentally what they say.

That’s it.  Hopefully this will help you in your journeys going forward.

In fact I have learned a lot about Samoan and language learning in general that I though I would like to share with you here:

Old and limited resources are not a problem

The older resources, that are not designed around a language learner whose primary opportunity to learn happens in his 40 minute commute to work, are amazingly useful and only take a little bit of creativity to use them.  I have made use of Anki to keep words fresh in my mind, but the biggest thing so far is making use of the “dialogues” I have found in my books.

Many books are like this and mine are no exception.  They have an example dialogue at the beginning that shows a “real life” example of how what you are learning that lesson will be used in real life.  Many, including me, usually spend little time on these, but I have learned that power of these dialogues.  You can take them, memorize them word for word so you can spit them out without thinking.  Then here comes the real power.  Change them.  Re-memorize them again with all the variations that you can think of.  Make the dialogue longer, shorter, add phrases you learned in another book, and/or just change the circumstances of where the conversation is happening.

I like this because, if you think about it, so much of what we say comes out by instinct.  By doing this, I am creating an instinct of Samoan.  Plus it gives me more and more opportunities to practice pronouncing the words, so I feel more and more comfortable with how it comes out of my mouth.  Speaking of pronouncing words:

Thai has helped me speak Samoan

Samoan pronunciation of the letter ‘g’  is not that same as the European pronunciation.   It is pronounced as an ‘ng’ sound.  So a the word for foreigner  palagi, is pronounced like pa – lang – i(not pa – lan- gi).  doing this ng sound can be hard for English speakers, but luckily I know Thai.  In that the have a letter ง which is and ng sound, which is even harder to learn to use because they will put that ng sound at the beginning of words.

Samoan also uses glottal stops, or sounds you stop with your throat and not your lips.  So lou and lo’u are totally different words in meaning and sound.  The first meshes the two vowel sounds together and sounds more like the word low in English, while the second has a stop after the ‘o’ sound and the does the ‘oo’ sound of the u.  A kinda foreign concept in english, but not in Thai.

The last way, interestingly enough, is the fact that learning Thai, which is a tonal language, has helped me with Samoan.  In Samoan they distinguish between long vowels and short vowels with a line over the vowel.  When listening, there is also an obvious ‘tone’ that is never mentioned, since Samoan is not a tonal language.  The long vowels, without fail( so far) all have a tone similar to a tone in Thai that starts at the top of your voice and goes down ( I never learned the names of Tones, never found that useful).

In summary It’s been a fun week.  I am doing thing differently now, because I have different resources available to me to learn this completely new language.  That said, my experience from the past is still helping me learn things going forward.  Wish me luck as I keep going.

Related articles

• Language for 2013 is……SAMOAN (want2speakthai.com)
• Why Samoan and ASL are the last two (want2speakthai.com)

Samoan Beach Fale – Samoa (Photo credit: whl.travel)

Yes it’s official, I am learning Samoan in 2013.  It was a hard decision to make, but ultimately I want my kids to have an understanding of who they are and where they come from.  Since they are one-quarter Samoan, I want them to grow up appreciating what that means.  This reason was the ultimate reason why I chose Samoan over all the other languages.  It has the least practical use for me and the least amount of resources, but it had the highest motivation for me to learn it.

Speaking of resources, I have collected several resources over the last few months using Evernote and I have already started to a Samoan resource page of the ones I have had a chance to review.  Samoan does not have a large amount of free resources online like Spanish.  A good and bad point is that Samoan does not have a plethora of courses, free or paid, like Spanish does.  This means I am not having to filter through a lot of courses, but it also means I have less to choose from.

All of the resources I will be using will primarily come from 3 course manuals I have got my hands on: The book Gangana Samoa, The Peace Corp’s manual for learning Samoan, and the one I am most excited about is the Samoan for Mormon Missionaries.  The Gangana Samoan book needs to be purchased, but the other 2 are available on my Samoan resource page.

Other Changes

I am planning on making some changes, going forward, to how I blog.  I enjoy giving my insights and opinions on how to learn as a full-time busy father, but I have missed things over the last few months and I just recently realized what it was.  I have slowly done less and less keeping you all up to date on my progress, my ups and downs, and my successes and failures.

Once a week I will devote a post primarily to just what I am doing and how I am doing at it.  I don’t want to make it glued to a specific day.  I used to do Spanish Friday and Thai Mondays and it became a chore to blog and every thing get  done half way when I do that.  But I will make sure it is once a week.

The other thing is about my other languages.  I want to develop them and move them forward as well.  I had spent one week a month learning and perfecting a language outside my primary one, but this seemed like I never got anything done.  By the time I would finally get momentum, the  week was over and all my progress was lost.

So I am going to try something new.  All the Odd numbered months will be devoted primarily to the learning of Samoan.  Every other even month will be devoted primarily to the learning of one of my 3 other foreign languages.  That way I can still, not just keep up, but improve all my languages and I will give my self enough time to actually do it.

There ya go.  That is the direction I plan on taking this blog for at least the next year.  In honor of the new year I am putting a Youtube video of a song that will help you all learn a little Samoan. Wish me luck everyone, I am going to need it this year.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Related articles

• Priorities (want2speakthai.com)
• Why Samoan and ASL are the last two (want2speakthai.com)
• What happened? (want2speakthai.com)

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 12 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Priorities in life are important

To be honest, that is what this blog is all about.  You don’t see me jumping countries every few months.  In fact, you don’t see me jumping countries at all.  Yes, I started this blog while living in New Zealand, but my stay there was totally unrelated to this blog and my return back to the US was also unrelated.

I write this blog for those who have priorities in their life that are more important that language learning.  Yes you heard me correctly, Language learning is NOT my highest priority.  It’s not even 2nd or 3rd highest.  It’s possible learning a language is important to you, but probably not the most important thing in your life.  This is why we always fail!

Learning Spanish is the first time I have learned a language, but it is the first time I have learned on without having it be one of the highest priorities in my life.  I learned Thai in Thailand as a missionary for my church to teach people about my beliefs in THAI!  There was little else important to me everyday than to improve my Thai.

I have tried and failed at learning Spanish so many times in my married life.  The only reason it has stuck this time is because I have learned how to learn as a busy, married father, who works a full-time job.  I have learned how to learn when language learning is not my highest priority.

I guess my take away message would be, set real priorities in your life and don’t be surprised if learning another language is not the highest on the list.  And then live your life accordingly.  You will be much happier if you do.

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