Tag Archives: New Zealand

December 28, 2012 · 1:19 am

Priorities

Hello out there.  Long time no post, right?  Yeah I know it’s been a while, but it’s that time of year.  Time to think about God and time to think about family.  To be honest, I’ve thought about writing something, but nothing has come to my mind.  I’ve been distracted and I am not ashamed to say that I am ok with it, because that distraction was my wife and my kids.  I’ve spent the last few days watching Christmases past and making Christmas memories with them.  I am so very happy to be married to my beautiful Kiwi wife who has given me 4 wonderful kids (5 if you count our still-born son).

Priorities in life are important

To be honest, that is what this blog is all about. Continue reading →

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November 30, 2012 · 12:36 am

Why Samoan and ASL are the last two

Normally, I would be announcing which language fell off my list languages in this post.  Typically I not only announce which language came off, but why it was even on my list of languages to learn in the first place.  Over the last few months, the reasons became more and more personal, until there was only two left: ASL and Samoan.

This post, since it is the last post of these before I announce the final language, I decided to dedicate to just the why’s.  I am going to write about why these two languages are the most personal to me to learn and have a strong command of.  Both are very important to me, as you will see, and choosing between the two was really difficult.

Why ASL

English: "American Sign Language" in...

English: “American Sign Language” in SignWriting. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I, like many toddlers who watched sesame street, Continue reading →

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November 3, 2012 · 12:04 am

Thoughts at the end of Esperanto week

Governor of New Jersey at a town hall in Hills...

Governor of New Jersey at a town hall in Hillsborough, NJ 3/2/11 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Crazy week!  Super hurricane Sandy hit my country and though it didn’t come anywhere near my side of the Mississippi, several of Co-workers in those states were personally affected.  I started my Esperanto course, one I plan on adding to as I go.  I may start following the same concept with my Thai course, meaning that I might go ahead and post the “raw” versions online.  My availability to make things like that are so little, that turning around and editing them is even harder!

The Goal of Esperanto

There was another thought that happened this week that pertains to Esperanto. Continue reading →

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June 27, 2012 · 8:13 am

A Day in The Life of a Language Learning Dad reprise

Sunday

Sunday (Photo credit: ex.libris)

When I was in New Zealand, I wrote about a day in my life.  That post was fun to write, because it showed how a regular boring person can still study another language despite their schedule.  A log has changed from that post.  I have moved my family back to the US and I work some place entirely different.  So I thought it would be fun to add a little update or reprise if you will to the last post.  So one can see how my schedule has changed and how I am adapting my study patterns to fit my schedule.  So here we go, a day in the life:

Me Levanto MUY MUY Temprano

(I wake up VERY VERY early)

On a regular week day I get up around 6:00 A.M. so I can get out the door around 6:30. Continue reading →

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June 11, 2012 · 12:03 pm

Where I Stand

Image by James Jordan

This month is ten months of me learning Spanish/Blogging.  Much has happened.  Ten months ago I was in New Zealand, I started learning spanish, and I started a blog to keep an online public journal about what it was like.  Fast forward and I now have a lower intermediate Spanish level, I am Back in The USA and I not just have started a Thai blog, but I joined my Spanish Blog into my Thai Blog.  Along the way I have had opportunities to write about my experiences in learning languages.  This has been a crazy adventure so far.

What is so special about 10 months?

When I started this blog I set a goal that I would be fluent in Spanish in 10 months. Continue reading →

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March 19, 2012 · 3:47 pm

Inspiration, Motivation, and Pride

Despair.com

Despair.com has some of the funniest demotivational posters out there.  I decided to put one up on my post today because that is how I am feeling, a bit demotivated.  An interesting thing about my life in New Zealand was that I could write so much easier there. Crazy how that works isn’t it. Just change a couple of major things in your life, and  now you don’t know what to say anymore.

I loved New Zealand.  It was amazingly beautiful with beaches just minutes away from where we lived.  However, I don’t think it was New Zealand that helped me write in this blog.  I think there were a few differences with my life here as opposed to my life there.

Free Time

I have had way to much free time lately.  I have mentioned before that I think too much free time can be detrimental to your language acquisition, but I think it applies to blogging as well.  One obviously needs some free time to blog or study languages, but too much of a good thing will end up just making things worse.  Too much free time promotes laziness and procrastination.  One must find that good balance in life.

Stuck in a Rut

I feel like my level of Spanish has been stuck in one place for a long time now.  Yes I do agree it is better than when I started.  If you go back to some of my early stuff, you will notice an improvement from what I do now.  I can speak off the cuff better and I can communicate ideas better.  That said I am miles away from where I want to be.  And It feels like I am not getting there any faster.

I went through this before when I learned Thai.  I knew this would happen.  There gets to a point where you practice and study and you make very small improvements and then suddenly, like pressure that has built up, you just start making major leaps in your language ability.  In my head I know this is what’s happening, but It still makes it hard to write about it when you feel like you haven’t made any advances in many days.

Pride

I was proud of my blog and I still am.  I am not the most popular person out there, but my little following is great!  I have made so many friends this way that I never thought I would.  One of my favorite things about my blog was that I was unique in that I was an American, living in New Zealand, learning spanish.  Now I am just an American learning Spanish.  I haven’t even taken the time to remove the living in New Zealand part off my blog.

I know it’s prideful that I should care so much about that one thing of my blog, but it still bothers me.  But I remind myself why I started this blog.  It wasn’t because I was an american living in New Zealand, it was because I was a full-time Dad who wanted to show that you can learn another language.  That is why I started this blog!

There you go.  no it’s nothing major in my life, just some tweaks and I will be back to my old self again.

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March 7, 2012 · 1:58 pm

The things I will miss about New Zealand

Today is the day!  I get on the plane at 10:45 pm and arrive in Salt Lake City, Utah at 7:45 PM the same day.  I love going back across the International dateline.  It’s kinda like having a time turner from Book 3 of the Harry Potter series.

Before I return home and embrace my life in America, I thought I would take a moment to talk about my time here in New Zealand.  New Zealand has been my home for the past year.  Even though this experiment and adventure didn’t turn out the way my wife and I thought it would, I will continue to have warm fuzzy memories of the time I spent here.  So I thought I would dedicate this post to New Zealand and the things I will miss now that I am leaving the place of my wife’s childhood and my home for the last year.

The Location

New Zealand is a primarily two islands just south-east of Australia.  The location allows it to have mountains, beaches, large cities, and acres of farmland all really close to each other.  There is no wonder that so many movies are made here.  It has so many of those wonderful locations that movies look for but all in that same country.  Everyone is near a beach here in NZ.  Several times, my father-in-law took my family out on his boat and we would anchor at a new beach every day and swim.  The trout fishing I did in the states has nothing on fishing for snapper out in the ocean.   My wife said that this is where God hid the Garden of Eden and I believe her.

The Food

They have food here in New Zealand that you do not get in America.  First of all there are the Bakeries full of Delicious meat pies and sausage rolls.  Then you have the plethora of Takeaway Chinese and fish ‘n’ chip shops every where you go.  Finally, the cookies and candies that you can only find in New Zealand are to die for.  Tim tams, Toffie pops, squigles, Perky nanas, Pineapple lumps, mallow puffs.  The list could go on for a whole post!  It’s going to be amazingly difficult to get these products in America.

The People

We have made some wonderful friends here and I will miss them all, but even more than that I will miss my in-laws.  I really do have wonderful parents-in-law who would help us all the time.  Many of my wife’s siblings are just starting to have children and one just got engaged over christmas.  All these new events will happen with out us.  We are going to miss so much.  One of my wife’s older sisters was another mother to my children.  My kids will miss her, especially my youngest.  He wont know what to do with himself if he can’t go up and bang on her door to let her know he wants to hang out.   One of my wife’s other sisters and her husband have promised to come over once a year.  I really do hope that they will.  We are going to miss everyone here so much

The Future

Now that my journey here in New Zealand is coming to a close (for now at least).  All I can do is look to the future.  For the purpose of this blog, it means I am going to be in a position to use my spanish much more.  Radio, television, and people themselves will be speaking in Spanish much more than before.  I can no longer hide behind my location.  I need to go out and speak and perfect this spanish!  Si se puede!

Thankyou, all who read my blog.  Some of the fun of  being an american, living in New Zealand, and learning spanish no longer will apply.  Even so, I hope that you will all continue to help me as I start this new leg of my journey in America.  Thanks again!  Nos Vemos!

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February 20, 2012 · 12:41 pm

Will you get to the point?!?

Being here in New Zealand, I don’t get any opportunities to practice my Spanish or Thai with anyone in my day-to-day life.  I could probably find a very infrequent and irregular intercambio(language-exchange) over Skype during the wee hours of the morning when I no longer have any other obligations, but to me it’s just not worth it.

As I have said before, this is not an excuse on my part.  It’s a decision.  Based on my life style that I want to keep up, finding an intercambio is just so difficult, that I no longer try.  I have made peace with that fact.

I don’t want to belabor this pet peeve of mine, but one of the problems I have with so many language learning websites is that they are written by single expats living in the country where  they speak the language that they are trying to learn.  They are interesting to read and I have no doubt they help me and other, but I think they also reinforces the idea that they can’t learn a language if you are a married with children parent.

One of the things that I am hope to accomplish with this blog is to show everyone that you can still learn a language and make due, even if your life keeps your from using the “best” tools.  That is one of many reasons why I blog.  I am showing, at the very least to myself, that it can be done. Today I thought I would share an activity that use as the next best thing to an intercambio:

Talk to the wall.

In Thai I call this พูดกับกำแพง(puud gap gampaeng) and in Spanish I call it habla a la pared.  Continue reading →

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February 8, 2012 · 11:12 am

The Island of Random Thoughts

Its been awhile since I posted. I had a three-day weekend that was pretty full of events. The biggest events of the weekend included an engagement party for my brother-in-law and two baby blessings (like christening, but with no water involved) for my new niece and nephew. On top of that, kids are back to school this week and my 5 year old is enroling in school for the first time. In New Zealand, it is year round school, so the kids only get half the summer break that they do in the States(it’s summer here right now). With all that I wanted to write a post yesterday, but I was too busy at work. I know I make it sound like I just study and blog all day at work, but I do work at my job and it does get busy here.

Despite all that, I have had many random thoughts. I can’t help, but get stuck on the island of never-ending random thoughts. I feel the worst for my wife. My wife will be talking to me about a TV show and next thing you know I am thinking about the day I got so scared that I turned and ran into a parked car, whose owner looks like a guy on a peanut butter commercial, which makes me think about feeding dogs peanut butter, which leads to thinking about feeding any animal peanut butter, which makes me think about the time I got a picture with a tiger, which was at a crocodile farm in Thailand…. Then my wife, noticing that I am day dreaming, asks what are you thinking about. That is always awkward moment for me.

In fact I do believe I mentioned before that I blog because it helps me to organize my random thoughts. Any way, sorry to get off track, I have had many random thoughts this weekend. I don’t know if they would warrant a full post by themselves, but together they make a great update on all my things happening to me. And somehow these random thoughts just fit together.

Teaching my daughter spanish

I have talked about this before, but it is still true. Continue reading →

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January 23, 2012 · 9:40 am

How did I do?

In my last post I set several goals as I was getting ready to get through my weekend of Thai.  Now I thought I would let people know how I did.  It was a very interesting journey, but one that I think helped me a lot to know where I am and how much further till I get to where I want to be.

Input Goals

First of all I had an input goal to read the first book of the Mannii reader.  This I did in a about 10 minutes.  That is about what I expected.  I had hoped to come back and read the 2nd Mannii reader book, but I didn’t get the chance.  Either way I did complete the minimum of my goal.

The second part was I wanted to complete several Audio lessons of the Intermediate Thai and Colloquial Thai audio companions to the books of the same names.  Just to clarify how I judge my ability to complete an Input activity.  If I can understand at least 80 to 90 percent of what is being said, then I feel I have mastered that activity.  I don’t judge myself on my ability to speak Thai during input activities.  These are two different skills and they must be judged separately. I wrote a whole post about it on another blog

I had a problem with the colloquial Thai audio in how I put it on my Ipod(it had no albums and so all the ‘tracks’ got jumbled together).  I decided I would just focus on the Intermediate Thai Audio.  I completed about half of the lessons.  This wasn’t too hard, Reviving my Thai is like riding a bike.  It takes a minute, but all the skills start coming back again.  No I’m not riding with my hands off the handle bars yet, but I am riding the bike just fine.

So in summary my Input day was a success!!!!!!

Output Goals

So what about out put?  First of all I wanted to complete several lessons of Pimsleur Thai and start Thai Typing lessons.  I completed my first lesson which was to learn the home keys of my left hand, which are ฟ,  ห,  ก and ด from pinky to index finger.  That was pretty good.  I am focusing on Typing Thai for two reasons.  The first is because I already know how to ‘write’ the characters.  That is something I never forgot how to do.  The second is that, being in New Zealand, my most likely situation that I am going to have to write Thai is on Facebook with my Thai friends.  It’s embarrassing that I have to go to a Virtual keyboard online and look around for the characters and it ends up taking several minutes just to say a simple comment.  So yes I want to be able to Type in Thai so I can communicate with my friends again.

The second part of my output goal was to complete Several Pimsleur Thai lessons.  I finished 9 of them.  First of all I ‘cheated’ per se.  Since each lesson is about 30 mins each, I wasn’t going to spend that much time on Thai I probably remember.  So this was how I decided to go through the lesson.  Pimsleur is made up of Two parts, each lesson has a dialogue at the beginning and then a section where they dissect and show common variations on that same dialogue. If I could understand 100 percent of the dialogue, then I skipped that lesson.  There was an exception to this.  I decided to stop every 4 lessons and complete the whole lesson, even if I understood it our not.  Why 4?  Why not?  I had to pick a number and 5 seemed to much and 3 too little.

So, Yes I completed my Output goals for the weekend!

Anything else.

Besides those things, I finished the lesson audio for 2 and a half lesson of my course and I am almost done with the 3rd PDF lesson.  I feel this was a very productive weekend. I hope to be back up to my old level of Thai with in two or three more weeks.

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