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Kung Fu: My experience learning about it in a Chinese farming village (& favourite language blog vote request!)

May 18, 2012 | 8 comments | Category: travel, video

Before today’s video, I’ve got a quick favour request! If you have an entire 7 seconds to spare for your favourite language learning Irishman, please go to this page, scroll down until you see “Fluent in 3 months” (alphabetical order), click to select it and then click “Vote” at the end. That’s it! :)

This is a vote for your favourite Language Learning Blog, so if Fi3M happens to be that, then I appreciate your nudging it up in the competition!

Of course there are plenty of other good choices, and I’ll be sharing some of my favourite with you when the results come out. This competition has been a great platform to help this blog reach new readers in previous years, and I appreciate every click and share that helps me spread some positive language learning encouragement to more people!

[And if you have an entire 14 seconds to spare, then you can also cast a vote for the site's Facebook page, by selecting it here. On the Fluent in 3 months Facebook page, I give regular updates and photos from the road, not shared on the blog. Thanks a million for your time!]

[Click "CC" to activate subtitles in either English or in Chinese simplified/traditional. Those in China without a VPN can watch it on Youku]

After getting a train over 2,000km through China, chatting with random people and seeing pandas, meeting a Buddhist monk, and even climbing a mountainside staircase to a Buddhist temple to try and find a guru, one of the other experiences I wanted to have while in this country was of course to get exposure to some real Kung Fu!

Fi3M reader Anna and her husband Ilya invited me to come visit a farming village near the city of Haiyang to give me a chance to see a different side of China.

There, Master Lin sat down with us, had a great meal prepared for us, and chatted a little about how his dialect differs to standard Mandarin. Next, we went outside and he taught me some basic Kung Fu, which you can see in the video. I did a pretty poor job, but I appreciated his patience.

Read the Rest!

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Dropping Barriers: What opera singers study, and how it can help you learn languages easier

May 15, 2012 | 4 comments | Category: guest post

Recently there was an interesting article on Lifehacker called I learned to speak four languages in a few years. Here’s how by Gabriel Wyner. He got in touch with me and asked to guest post about his relevant experience as an Opera Singer (as you can see in the photo!) to help him learn several languages really well, and I was glad to share his thoughts here!

Over to you Gabriel!

If you have the chance to see a vocal studio recital at a music conservatory, you’ll often see something remarkable.

In general, the students will sing pieces in various languages with varying degrees of success, and the audience will clap, and the singers will bow and this will go on for 40-60 minutes until the end, when the students usually sing pieces in their native languages. At this moment, something magical can happen. The singer and the audience both relax.

This is the moment when the singer’s language barrier disappears, and he is able to express himself fully, and even when the audience and the singer don’t speak the same native language, they will be able to communicate on a deep, emotional level.

Dropping this barrier in a foreign language is a serious challenge and it comes with a serious reward – my first moment without that barrier in German was what got me addicted to both singing and language study from that point forward.

Singing and language are inextricably linked; singing is, in some ways, slow motion, concentrated speech. At its core, the goal of a singer’s training is the same as the goal of anyone having a meaningful conversation – the goal of communicating with others.

And so, singers have a lot to offer language learners (at least, those who wish to communicate with others; some people study languages for their literature, or for the mental fun of it, for example, and they may find more suitable advice elsewhere!): Read the Rest!

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Esperanto video and how useful the language can be: Interview with a Buddhist monk and tour of monastery

May 11, 2012 | 8 comments | Category: culture, particular languages, video

Fun video to share with you today… in Esperanto!

Click “CC” to activate subtitles in English (as well as original Esperanto, added shortly. I’ll add any other language if anyone wants to email me translations), or if you’re in China (and not using VPN software to circumnavigate the “Great Firewall of China” as I’m clearly doing to be able to use Youtube) then check it out on Youku.

I made it to Xi’an, and after checking out some typical sites, thanks to a contact in the Esperanto community I got to meet Miaohui at his monastery, which is a bit outside of Xi’an along the Silk Road (China’s “Route 66″). He’s a Buddhist monk who also happens to be an active Esperanto speaker. Since I like to use my languages to share cultural insights, it only seemed right to make a video with him about the monastery and Buddhism in general.

First he gives me a tour of the most important halls and statues, with appropriate historic context, and then I sit down with him to ask him some questions. I hope you enjoy the video!

Esperanto as a useful language when travelling

As with several other videos I’ve made in Esperanto, the purpose is never actually talking about the language itself or how it works. I use it to socialise and experience other cultures, in much the same way as I have with my other languages.

As mentioned before, I don’t consider myself a passionate language learner, and dislike the learning process, so it’s very unlikely you’ll see me take on a language learning project without some real practical day-to-day uses for it, such as Latin or Ancient Greek (well… OK maybe there has been one or two brief exceptions). It would seem like Esperanto is the exception to this; surely I can only speak it with other “language nerds”?

Actually, people may be surprised to hear that I’ve spent an entire 7 weeks of my life just communicating in Esperanto. Both at Esperanto events, and from directly meeting up with other speakers and hanging out with them during my own travels, such as my day with Miaohui. Read the Rest!

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The Language Gene delusion

May 8, 2012 | 29 comments | Category: positive mentality

When you understand “language genes” to be something that some people have and you don’t, then you’re being ridiculous. I’ve seen this in many iterations: language talent, gene, skill, knack etc., and today I’m going to tell you why I think it’s all nonsense.

The part of your genetic makeup that helps you deconstruct and understand languages is clearly already there as you can understand what you are reading right now. So congratulations, you have “the language gene“… just like every single other person on the planet (who doesn’t have a real communicative disability).

To discuss it beyond geneticists pinpointing genes things that we all have for biological research purposes is madness.

So, getting more to the point – is the ability to be able to speak a second (or third) language something you are either born with or or not? Read the Rest!

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2,000km train journey video: Benny gets his Chinese name, makes new friends and meets pandas!

May 2, 2012 | 29 comments | Category: travel, video

Here it is! My video of the epic 2,000km (that’s about 1,250 miles in “old money” as we say) train ride I took to get to Chengdu, starting from Shanghai. This video shares the people (and pandas) I met along the way! :) Click CC to enable subtitles (in English, and traditional or simplified Chinese) or watch the video on Youku here.

The last videos I uploaded were from Shanghai. From there I got a fast train to Nanjing and you can see me check out the Confucius temple there at the start of this video. Luckily, you can buy your ticket for this train just before boarding it in Shanghai.

Next, I wanted to head on to Wuhan and was thinking of getting the ferry through some of the river between there and Chongqing, but unfortunately, getting to the train station 2 hours in advance wasn’t enough and I had to stay in Nanjing longer than I had planned so extra travels had to be cancelled if I was to continue onward. From then on, I would buy my tickets a little in advance.

After just a day in Wuhan, I got the most interesting train of all, which was a 16 hour ride! I got the “soft sleeper”, so I could get a decent night’s sleep and arrive in Chongqing well rested. Most of this video covers that train ride and the chats I had with those I was sharing the carriage with.

You can see the moment that they gave me my Chinese name! :D What do you think?

本领 (Benling) means Read the Rest!

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Why Chinese isn’t as hard as you think: over 8000 words of encouragement for potential learners

April 27, 2012 | 57 comments | Category: particular languages

Today, I want to encourage more people to learn Chinese.

If you already speak Chinese and disagree with the premise of Chinese not being super-duper hard compared to every other language and are angry at me for daring to take it off this untouchable pedestal you’ve placed it on, then TOUGH LUCK. I’m not writing this post to you. I hardly ever write posts to experienced language learners – they don’t need encouragement, the rest of us do.

What I’ve read from those who write about Chinese, and especially the discouragement I’ve been given (only ever online) tells me how much the Internet needs some positivity for people considering learning this wonderful language, so they don’t get scared off. There’s nothing to be scared of when you compare it to learning other languages.

Today I want to write a retort to an article about how hard Chinese is, as well as the “shi shi” poem and so many other points that so many people sent me to prove Chinese’s difficulty, relative to European languages.

I’m but a social speaker of Mandarin. I can’t hold philosophical debates in the language, or write essays in classical Chinese. But this week I made a new friend on the train and we talked for two hours straight about many things without using any English, and just today I took her out for dinner for another 2 hour chat. I’m currently 2,000km deep inside China and got here by train, reading signs, buying tickets, ordering food and most importantly: genuinely socialising in Mandarin. I still have plenty of work to do to tidy it up, and you will continue to see me progress in the language as I upload more videos, but right now I have a useful enough amount of Chinese to have an opinion about its difficulty, and today I want to share that opinion.

I have a lot to say on the subject. This is only the first of several posts discussing learning Chinese (other posts will discuss specifics of how I’d recommend learning particular aspects), and it’s already the longest post I’ve ever written on the blog.

“Mastering” Chinese can indeed take a long time to do, but getting to a very useful intermediate level is well within the reach of most people, and from that point progressing further won’t be that bad. It is indeed hard work, but if you put it side by side with European languages, then saying it’s “damn hard”, or “orders of magnitude harder than European languages” is nothing but an exaggeration Read the Rest!

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Why getting mistaken for a native speaker is much easier than you think

April 20, 2012 | 41 comments | Category: learning languages, positive mentality

Someone thinking you are a native speaker of your target language is the holy grail of language learners. It’s something many of us dream about, but then sigh to ourselves that it’s just never going to happen.

Well, today I want to burst that bubble and tell you that many people genuinely thinking you are a native speaker of your target language IS possible, and way sooner than you think, without requiring you to absolutely master every possible aspect of your target language, and thus waiting until your hair has gone grey.

You see, I’ve personally been confused for a native French, Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker on so many occasions that I’ve lost count, and this is despite not even being able to even introduce myself in any of these languages before my 20s.

To help you understand how I’ve done this, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: Read the Rest!

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Review of Chinesepod & chat with co-host Jenny

April 18, 2012 | 6 comments | Category: tools

Note: this video is not an update of my Chinese level, because I recorded it the day after the previous one (John is also a co-host on Chinesepod). [I actually do a little worse with my Chinese than the previous video because I was a sick this day and tired because of it.] Youku link on the way shortly.

I interviewed the show’s other co-host Jenny in Mandarin, and she throws in plenty of English words (as she does during her podcasts, she’s probably used to doing that in that recording studio with a white guy beside her), and then she gives us a tour of the Chinesepod offices, eventually transitioning to mostly English. All parts of the video are subtitled in English, and traditional/simplified Chinese (click CC on Youtube to activate).

As stated in the video, Chinesepod ended up being my favourite resource (apart from the obvious one) for improving my Chinese, especially my listening comprehension. This review has no affiliate links and I’m not paid by Chinesepod, so this is just my honest opinion. I’ll point out a few of my favourite features here, but mention the major drawback that this is a premium paid product, and as such may not be for you because of its price. Read the Rest!

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