AJATT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugrOTjzLTYk

My hobby, my life

Link

I've been reflecting these past couple of days. I put my languages on hold. I wanted to think about how I was doing them, why I was doing them.

And it came to me that I'm doing them as a hobby. That how I wish to treat them. I don't want to do them seriously. Not to prove a point. Not to read a goal. Not to impress. Not to break records. But just for fun. Just to enjoy them. Just to enter a state of flow.

That's how I plan to treat my whole life. That's how I used to as a kid. But then life got 'serious'. It became important. Time to earn a living now. No more fooling around. You've got to get down to it.

I reject that approach. I now see that it was wrong. So for me it's back to regarding my life as a pastime, as a game, like performance art, in a sense. The word 'hobby' is as near as I can get.

Scanner's approach

A bit a re-evaluation yesterday. What happened was that I listened to a webinar by Lydia Machovar. Her ideas got me thinking - especially the concept that you don't get better at speaking unless you speak. Which, in turn, got me to wonder why I haven't put any emphasis at all on that skill.

I realize that I've been avoiding it. Speaking feels uncomfortable to me. I prefer to read. I choose input over output. But why?

I'm not a good language learner. I'm a poor one. I'm probably one of the worst. And it'S worth examining why this is so, because that knowledge could well help me in other areas.

The reason I and many others shy away from speaking (even in our own language) is because of our conditioning. We have mistake phobia. Our education system together with our society have made us averse to making mistakes. We regard them as failures. That's why we would rather avoid to engage than risk failure.

When you are a beginner again - in a new language - you lose status. You feel yourself to be a child. You place yourself in an uneven power balance with repect to another. I know that I am particularly suceptible to the feeling.

Oh, and by the way - that picture of Tom Hanks from the movie Castaway? Lydia used the analogy of needing to swim out past the last strong wavein order to achieve that fluency and ability where you were comfortable in the language you learned. Otherwise you are always being pushed back to the shore.

What I want to do is remain true to my nature of being a scanner: maintaining an interest in many interests i.e. languages. But I'll start each day with an hour spent on one: Japanese. Then, in the evening I will cycle through another 5 or so for fun. I shall also keep a shelf of books on topics that I'm interested in. They will include a current book in each of the languages that I'm good at.

Polyglotery

I came to hear about a polyglot online conference. It is going on as I write. Briefly I considered joining it. I could have used some of my professional development allowance from work. But eventually I decided against it.

I checked out the 3-day programme. It looked interesting enough. But the deeper I looked, the more uneasy I felt.

Members get to wear badges of flags. The flags stand for the languages people can speak; the more flags, the more mana. And that rankled with me. It smacks of showing off, of seeking the approbation of others. Maybe yes, maybe no.

There were talks about how to up one's game. There's an emphasis on speaking. How to speed up the results. Discussions on how to increase your motivation when it, um, 'flags'. All of which leads me to suspect that there's something artificial going on.

I could be wrong. However, I'm not convinced that it's not an ego thing. If you were doing it for fun, or for its own sake, you wouldn't be concerned with proving what you knew, with what level you were at. You wouldn't give them much thought. 

Vindication!

At about the 40-minute mark in this talk by Alexander Arguelles are described all the 'way-out' ideas I also have developed for using actual and audiobooks in conjunction to learn foreign languages.

He finishes the talk with another concept: Polyliteracy. (I did not co-invent that!)

Lydia Machova

I stumbled across a discussion yesterday between Steve Kaufmann and Lydia Machova. Steve, I've known about for many years. Lydia, I hadn't.

It quickly became apparent to me that Lydia espouses many of the same principles and ideas about language acquisition as me. But she expresses them much more clearly and personably. I subscribed to her website and received a free ebook. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it describes the Gold List method, the same method that I started with about 8 years ago in Japan to improve my Japanese.

I plan to view the many videos of Lydia online to glean anything new.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XVt5rdpFY
and with steve
Lydia's website
with Olly

Linking language

For the past month or two, I've linked languages to physical activity. I've created an association between each language and a specific exercise. I've used yoga, kung fu (the ancient silk-weaving set), animal movements and the body weight calisthenics from Convict Conditioning, among others. The idea is to both break up sitting at a desk and to get into the habit of regular work-outs.

In the future, I may even weave in non-fiction books I mean to mine for ideas.

Re: Omar Sharif

Up to now, I've been rotating my languages in an order that, though it is not rigidly fixed, tends to cycle. But this morning, walking, I started thinking. I reviewed what I'd been doing. 

If I did one language per day, one cycle would take me a month. Four a day, a week. Six days for five languages; five days for six languages. I would revisit languages every 3 days, if I did 10. It would require me to do 15 languages if I wanted to do them every other day.

And then I came to an op shop. It was the first time for me to enter one since the lockdown started 5 or 6 weeks ago. I bought a book: Monsieur Ibrahim und die Blumen des Koran. It's in German, translated from the French.

It was only at home, when I searched for an image, that I realized I knew the story. There had been a movie with Omar Sharif. I think I watched it with my father. Omar was once one of the best bridge players in the world. I got the book he wrote about it for Dad, but I doubt he ever read it. In his late 80s, all he did was watch TV.

So anyway, I'm going to read Dutch, German and Japanese at will. And I'll freely change the order of the rest. It's time to mix it up a little! (Maybe even include a little TV.)

Polyglot discussion

Listening to a discussion between two polyglots, Steve Kaufmann and Gabriel Silva, it struck me that even though the two are well-versed in acquisition (listen to Steve from 10:00 until 10:40, and Gabriel from 10:40 to 11:10), and even though they promote exposure, they have a tendency - as they themselves admit - to worry, obsess, and try to force their language learning with conscious effort.

In addition, I've some other observations and questions.

First, why this concern with performance? Why this need to live up to others' - and one's own - expectations to speak? Is it that our society cum education system makes us feel as if we're always being tested? Who cares if we are A2, B2, C2 or whatever? Those aren't the ABCs I'm interested in. Personally, if I am able to listen and read, then I'm well-satisfied. I'm happy to understand the language as much as I'm able to any degree. I don't need to please anyone. I don't need to pass anything. My ability to produce a new language will arrive naturally at its own pace. I'm in no hurry.

In the discussion, I heard a lot of worries expressed over leaving languages untouched for long periods of time, and about how to judge when you know a language. How strange. 

This talk about maintaining, reviewing, practicing, and further learning - it leaves me cold too. I'd rather enjoy any language I'd improved in by reading stories. I want to immerse myself in a warm pool; I don't want to engage in a regime, or a challenge that I ought to endure out of a sense of duty. Language isn't about practicing scales. Surely, when your familiarity with a language reaches a certain level, you feel like making it a part of your life. Then you wouldn't need to push yourself to spend the time. Otherwise - why do it in the first place?

And yet, I do understand the difficulty. I too am conditioned to think of languages in terms of levels, performance, assessment, and the like. It's hard to trust that natural exposure is sufficient and to simply go with the flow. It's hard not to take notice of what other people think.

Neri Rook

Even though I've mentioned Neri Rook in a previous post, he deserves one to himself. That's because of his generosity for providing free a series of books for learning a great number of languages (and also the methodology of how to go about it.) Here's the link to his blog. It contains the link that takes you to his books on Smashwords which you may freely download in a number of formats.

New total

I've recently added several languages. I've posted about some of them (and added labels). I'll write about the others some time. But for now I'll just do a new list: 

Afrikaans, Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Gilbertese, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Maori, Norwegian, (nothing for O, Q or the rest of the alphabet from U onwards), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese and Turkish.

30 by my count.

Gutenberg has books in many languages