Update 12: A reflection on my +1 Challenge Experience

The +1 Challenge has been an incredible experience for me.  I’d first like to thank Brian Kwong for making the whole thing possible … his abundance of highly infectious genki (energy) has spawned something truly magnificent. Secondly, a huge thank you to Benny Lewis for providing me with the fundamental tools for learning any language that I might wish to learn.  Thirdly, and most importantly, a jungle massive shout out to all those who have encouraged me and consistently kept my motivation above the red-line … the monolingual hard-deck. Sometimes in those isolated moments of language learning, it can feel like one is floating in the vacuum of space and will gladly float towards the snugly monolingual hard-deck. But my fellow +1 Challengers and assorted language learners … you are the protective force field that prevents me from burning up  as I skim the surface and bounce off into higher realms of enlightenment … ready and prepared to explore alien worlds … such as the Japans.

The +1 Challenge is a globally distributed system … an online mission control centre for polynaughts … yes, I’ve just invented a new word … ha ha … explorers of languages.  Two years ago, I began learning Swahili … my parents sometimes used to speak in Swahili when they didn’t want my sister or I to know what they were talking about. I grew up fascinated by the romantic visions of Africa I saw in the 1970’s … I wasn’t successful in my flimsy attempt to learn Swahili. Hardly surprising really, since my previous experience in regards language learning left me ill equipped for that mission … in actual fact, I’m not even sure I can say I had a mission … I was simply floating around gazing dreamily at the sparkly wonders of language.  Swahili might well have been the moon and my primitive education was akin to believing that I might get to go there if I found springs for my shoes to make that giant leap for mankind!  Then I began learning Japanese … completely by accident … and in hindsight, it really seems that I did not chose to learn Japanese, but instead, Japanese chose me … and it wouldn’t let me go … I was hooked!  

Whilst I didn’t have a plan formulated, I remembered visiting Japan in 1998 and how I’d enjoyed being there and wished I could have spoken more than the three words I could speak at the time. I made some progress, very slowly, very haphazardly and being a learning technologist, I definitely procrastinated over which technologies I would adopt to enhance my learning of Japanese. After just over a year into learning Japanese, I estimate that I had a vocabulary of around 400 words and I knew some basic sentence structures. I could now at least amaze Japanese people with the occasional delightful utterance of an occasional Japanese word or phrase scattered amongst a plethora of modern English words and mimed Japanese mannerisms that seemed to entertain my Japanese friends.  At this point, I was definitely dreaming of moving to the Japans and worried that I could so easily move to Japan and live pseudo-merrily in an expat bubble.

At this point, I had found myself learning some useful stuff from a Tim Ferriss book that a friend (Danial Hagon) lent me and subsequent to watching a youtube video where Tim and Benny talked about language hacking, I found myself at the fluent in 3 months website … still very much a skeptic to this new fangled way of thinking about language learning.  In hindsight, I honestly believe that the most destructive force in the known universe is the anti-language learning pedagogy I experienced at school during the 1980’s. This installed a belief in me that I was not one of the chosen few … the special people capable of speaking another language … no matter what I did. All school inadvertently did was install a mythical belief in the existence of a language gene. In fact, to support my learning, I had spent 3 summers in France still saying, “CUP OF TEA … PLEASE!!!!!!!!” in utter defiance ... my two fingered salut to the misery of enduring dull story’s of Missuer Lafayette cycling to the supermarche. The least they could have done would be have Missuer Lafayette do something anarchic … explain his way out of a bar brawl … these things would have been invaluable to me a few years later!

Anyway … something changed this year … and it began in August 2013 … because I did Benny Lewis’ ‘Speak from Day 1’ course.  I was rather sceptical before I actually came to the conclusion that I didn’t know everything I needed to know already. Amazing isn’t it … this is an invisible barrier that just gets in the way of everything. However, even though I had made some progress in learning Japanese, I was still not talking very much ... I was just paddling in Japanese rather than immersing myself in Japanese … the thought of diving into Japanese still held some intrinsic fear of drowning as far as I was concerned. I would dip my head below the surface and come up for good old English gasps of air.

To use a skydiving analogy (for Skydiving taught me a lot more about learning a skill than anything else) ... when I began jumping, I did ground school ... just like in language learning where you might learn the absolute basics before you have a conversation. I then did AFF (accelerated free-fall)... in language learning, the equivalent of speaking with a tutor. Then I started jumping with any idiot fine upstanding person ... happy enough to jump out of a plane with me ... equivalent of talking to native speakers of my target language. Now, the hopping out of a plane, free falling for a few seconds and then deploying the parachute ... well, that's the equivalent of what I was doing with language. What you need to do is get "air time" ... and play in the air as much as possible ... make mistakes ... loads of them ... safe in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen whilst your in the air. In fact, another analogy I learned in computing was something I applied to skydiving ... in computing, you make a mistake ... control + z (or apple + z) undoes your last move ... in skydiving ... you try something out in the air ... you recover to a neutral position (boxman, bomb etc) ... language learning ... you make a mistake ... you get a native speaker or tutor to correct you ... forget worrying about making mistakes or being perfect ... you don't learn anything by playing safe in a comfort zone ... and anyone out there who wants to take the piss and laugh at you ... ignore them ... if they want to sit there studying language books forever and never speaking the language - that's their problem ... I got really narked by someone going to great lengths explaining that learning Japanese would take me a very very long time ... in reflection ... I just think that this is what people who take a long time to learn a language tell other people to justify how long they've taken to learn that language. The trick is to learn efficiently ... and the most efficient way (in my experience) is to learn by accident ... lots and lots of accidents ... the child doesn't learn how to walk ... the child learns how to stop falling down! 

Now, in September Benny started learning Japanese. Literally, a couple of weeks after I had got around to doing the “Speak from Day 1” course.  Reading that Benny would be using italki.com I immediately thought I would try it out.  I found that by using Skype with a Japanese tutor to be much more beneficial than any other method of language learning that I had ever used.  Then Benny made a post about the +1 Challenge … for me, I had already formed something of a mission statement, though thinking about other commitments, I had worked on the premise that I would take 6 months to learn Japanese to an upper intermediate level of conversation. When I thought about what I could achieve in 3 months, I simply scaled down my mission for what I felt was achievable within 3 months.  

Amusingly, a couple of days into the +1 Challenge, one of my italki tutors called me on Skype because he’d just finished a session that had amazed him. Apparently, some Irishman had just spoken to him in Japanese for an hour … after only studying Japanese for 4 days! I said, “Was his name Benny?” … the answer, “You know super amazing Benny-san?” … my response, “Not personally, but I know of Benny … and actually, he spent the first couple of days learning the kana! So he just spoke Japanese for an hour after about two days of learning Japanese really” – cue a very very Japanese “eeeeeeeeeeeeeh!!!!!!”.  

Now, at that time, whilst I knew the approach Benny would apply would be keeping himself in the target language 100% of the time, I hadn’t managed to achieve more than about twenty minutes of talking Japanese without coming up for English air. I tweeted Benny to say, “I’m going to try speaking 100% Japanese for an hour. Benny tweeted back, “Let me know how you get on”. “Oh blimey”, I thought, I’m actually going to have to do this now! So I thought I would have a practice attempt at speaking Japanese for an hour with my language partner … and managed 40 minutes of speaking 100% Japanese. That was a milestone moment for me; my language partner exclaimed, “I had no idea you knew this much Japanese”. You see, afterwards it  occurred to me that I had always stuck to a comfort zone when I’d been speaking Japanese over Skype prior to  this. Simply, by attempting to speak Japanese for an hour, I struggled and spluttered out more Japanese than I had ever bothered with before. The following day, I had an hour session with an italki tutor, Hiro-san and I managed to speak Japanese for an hour. I made lots and lots of mistakes … but everything came together … having recorded the session and kept a copy of the chatbox text (where Hiro-san had been typing out corrections to what I was saying) … I had a lot of study material to keep me busy for the next few days.

Along the way, I’ve adapted the way I’m learning Japanese … I’ve learned an enormous amount from the other people on the +1 Challenge … some of which I’ve applied to my own challenge, some of which I’ve kept on the shelf knowing that I could easily get sidetracked into spending far too much time playing around with my learning strategy and not nearly enough time spent doing the hard yards of language learning.  Here is what worked for me over the last 3 months:

1 Italki.com : I cannot emphasise enough how useful it is.

a.       I have completed 28 hour long sessions with a variety of tutors.

b.      I record the session audio and cut and paste the text from the chat box in Skype into an accompanying Word document. This lets me easily review what I learned and just as importantly, look into things that I didn’t fully understand during the session. The ability to do this makes learning over Skype massively advantageous.

c.       I have tried out a few different tutors and whilst I have my favourites, as more and more tutors come on-board, it’s great having some variety and even being able to cover the same topic again with a different approach can be helpful. As I’ve got to know the tutors, we’ve began to understand what makes me tick … with Hanako-san, we’ve done shadowing, reading practice, grammar amongst other things. With Satoko-san, I’ve gained a lot of really practical Japanese that I have an enormous amount of fun using when I’m at Japanese conversation meetups. Hiro-san took me on a trip around a convenience store … that was fantastic … I was on his ipod touch, strapped into the shopping trolly and we had a lesson in the car park outside the konbini that then culminated in surfing around the shopping isles with me talking to him about what I was seeing etc.

d.      I practiced an introduction speech with a friend, Ian and then adapted it with an italki tutor, Satoko-san, so that it would sound more natural. Satoko-san even recorded herself speaking my speech on her mobile phone and sent me an audio file. I listened to it on repeat in the run up to a job interview I had; come the time of the interview, I rattled out my introduction speech very confidently.   

2 Memrise

a.       I have acquired an additional 540 vocabulary words via Memrise … in 3 months!  

b.      I learned about chunking vocabulary and want to apply some techniques I’ve learned from Baron-Jon and Olly Richards in the future. What I’ve done myself though, is try and use the vocabulary I’ve learned on Memrise in conversations with my language partner (Mikie-san) and in my italki sessions. Essentially, I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of vocabulary evaporates if you don’t use it, therefore, I try to use the vocabulary I’ve recently learned as much as possible around the time when it’s in short-term memory. I think this is why I’ve been amazed at how much vocabulary has remained in long-term memory when I do comprehensive testing.

3 Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide

a.       I managed to achieve approximately two thirds of the grammar study that I originally set out to achieve. Essentially, I put an end to learning grammar after two months because I felt that at the rate I was going, I wasn’t spending enough time playing with the grammar as I wanted to. Life got in the way, but again, with italki and language partner sessions as well as meetups, the grammar that I have learned helps me immensely with understanding the gist of what native Japanese people are talking about.

b.      I compressed a lot of what I learned from Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide into easy to review flash cards. This has been useful for me so that I can quickly go over grammatical structures in an italki session by just sending the compressed grammar image to my tutor and then play around with making up sentences that use a particular structure, particle or whatever … all the time, playing around with the latest vocabulary I’ve acquired.

4 Other Input Sources

a.       The best input sources … people … I’ve learned lots of Japanese from my language partner, Mikie-san and also friends I’ve made who are learning Japanese.

b.      I listen to Japanese music, watch drama’s, films and read Japanese tweets. My knowledge of kanji prevents me from understanding many of the tweets, but then it’s always a thrill when I am able to read the occasional tweet and understand it.

As a summary of what I’ve learned on the +1 Challenge.

•  Having a mission plan is vital
• Doing something every day is massively important
• Learning with other people is much better than learning a language on your own.
• Anyone can learn a language … yes, it does take effort … but when it’s fun, it doesn’t feel like work … it feels like play … it is a game … so play it … it’s fun!

Before the +1 Challenge, I must admit that I feared being ‘judged’ by other people on my ability to speak Japanese. What I’ve found though, is that I’m my fiercest critic … everyone on the +1 Challenge has been so supportive of my efforts, encouraged me, motivated me … and well, that’s it in a nutshell … I mean this reflection … that’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned throughout this challenge … we’re all in this together, we all want to be lingonauts … polynaughts … explorers of other worlds, other cultures … and the rewards are enormous.

So what now. Well, I’m going to start planning the next 3 months … I’m also going to start a final module (technology-enhanced linguistics) in the Masters Degree that I started a few years ago.  January to March is looking like my schedule is going to be incredibly busy, however, I want to work on a plan … learning Japanese will be ongoing … I’m going to start taking shodo (Japanese calligraphy) lessons in the New Year – when I teach children, it’s always the messy activities that I enjoy the most … so learning kanji whilst making a lot of mess and getting ink everywhere is hugely appealing! Watch this splat!

+1 Challenge Weekly Updates #10/11

The goal of challenge I set myself was to speak Japanese comfortably. Now that I'm reaching the final hurdle, the stake (dancing to neko mimi switch) enters my mind ... in parallel with thoughts that it all depends on the criteria I use to measure success.

You see, when I set my goal, the criteria of "comfortable" related to how comfortably I speak my native language ... and when I use that to measure my success, sure, I'm still at some considerable distance from my ultimate aim ... fluency.

Myself and Kirsten at London Educational Games Meetup

Yet, this week, my friend and magical girl, Kirsten wrote an amazing blog post How not to learn a language) in which she compares how I've approached learning a language and the way languages are taught in school. I have had quite a few friends and acquaintances telling me that what I've managed to achieve is quite remarkable, in their opinion ... to which, I have to give a very Japanese response of waving my hand in denial to the compliment and saying,「いいえ、いいえ、けんきょなだ」( "No, no, I'm humble."). However, when I think about going to Japan next year, I'm at least confident that I will be equipped with the conversational skills to have a descent conversation. So, perhaps that's a more realistic measure of "comfortable" ... rather than the criteria being relative to how comfortable I am when speaking English, my success criteria should have been how comfortable I am speaking Japanese relative to how well I could hold a conversation in Japanese when the challenge began. Suddenly, I think, wow ... I really have come a long a way in a relatively short period of time.

My profession is an 'Innovation Technologist", I work in education and advise a University on how technologies can be used to enhance the students learning experience. I often feel like Tom Hank's character in the film, "Big" ... they give me technologies to play with or spend time observing how students are using them ... and then I reflect on my observations and report back to the University with my recommendations.

Last I went to Norway and observed both how children and adults learn a language.

In the video I made, you can see how much fun we all had PLAYING with language ... PLAY is massively important ... but as Jesse Schell (The Art of Game Design, 2008) would put it, "When play is enforced, it ceases to be play and becomes work".  Think of language learning as a game ... it is a game ... a wonderful game that affords the player the richest reward imaginable ... being able to unlock the cultural levels for you to play in.

Now, when you buy a computer game ... hands up who reads the instruction manuals from cover to cover? I speculate, that actually, if you're like me ... maybe you read just enough information to get started ... and then you dive into the game and usually, you don't last very long before you lose the game. What do you do? For me, my approach will usually be to have the manual sitting there at arms length, so I can read it whilst the game restarts ... or I might pause the game so I can figure out how I can avoid being killed the same way again and again. That doesn't mean I won't be killed the same way ... often I have to practice before I get the knack ... and once I've got the knack .... I've got the knack forever!

Here is a case study ... sitting at Club Ganbatte (the Japanese Meetup group I attend regularly in London) ... I was talking with a couple of people, one Japanese speaker, another English speaker ... the English speaker was telling us about his experiences of shopping around Christmas time ... and he used the phrase, "Window Shopping".  Now, I thought, "hmmm ... I wonder if that's lost in translation ... or I wonder if the Japanese person is thinking he's going shopping for windows ... maybe it's some a Christmas tradition us quirky Londoners uphold!?) ... so I tried out saying 「まどのかいものをわかりますか」(shopping of window do you undersand?) ... and the Japanese person said they knew what I was trying to say, but it didn't translate properly. Asking what a Japanese person would say if they were "window shopping", they said, 「みてだけ」 (only look) .... ah, excellent ... and how すばらしい (wonderful) is that going to be when I'm Japan ... I'm sure I will often be asked if I want to buy something and can't afford it ... or I'll be out and about with friends and they'll want to know if I want to go into the shop to buy something ... and shall now know I can perform my special move ...「いいえ、みてだけ」(no, just looking!).

When I reflect on the way I didn't learn French at school, I can certainly appreciate the way my French teacher strove to make the lessons engaging as much as she could. Ultimately though, I was more interested in drawing pictures of tie-fighters on the back of my exercise book. The elephant in the room was that I simply wasn't interested in learning French. We only had the option of learning French or German; not that I had a desire to learn any other language, however, when given the options of chicken or fish, I would ask if there was a vegetarian option? Back in the 1980's, the argument would have been that our school was fortunate to employ teachers capable of teaching French and German; it was logistically impossible to teach a range of languages. Recently, a friend was telling me that her daughter is learning Japanese at school ... I wonder if Japanese had been an option for me whether I would have taken it? I'm sure it would have appealed to me, but whether I would have made the effort to study is another matter.

What has changed the most for me is that I am learning Japanese through my own free will. I don't need to study at the same pace as anyone else, I don't need to follow the well thought of structure laid out in text books. Yes, there are virtues to studying to a curriculum, being part of a language learning herd etc ... but the internet affords us the freedom to personalize our learning experience. To begin with, my approach to learning Japanese wasn't efficient, wasn't consistent, wasn't even effective ... but it certainly was enchanting and magical. It was the equivalent of not reading the manual and diving into the game ... I wasn't speaking Japanese to anyone ... I was in "safe mode" where I could wander around and take delight at the scenery without the danger of having a conversation. I began to converse with Japanese people via Twitter ... short little hiragana tweets to Harajuku fashion designers, Vocaloid artists, musicians etc ... and the thrill of conversing with people who would have previously been less accessible to converse with ... that kept my motivation up for the first six months or so.  Then a friend introduced me to a retired Japanese teacher and I had my first proper experience at speaking Japanese ... apart from the most basic of introductions, I seem to remember being able to say,「ねこがすきです」(I like cats).

The retired Japanese teacher agreed to give me some Japanese lessons and I gladly accepted. I was a difficult student ... I wouldn't take the direct route from A to B ... it was frustrating for both of us, but I certainly learned some very useful grammatical structures that afforded me to go off and play with the Japanese language. I definitely needed a human tutor ... but at that time, I hadn't seriously considered using the Internet ... in hindsight, I was stupidly thinking, "I will use Skype when I'm ready to make conversation". Of course, nobody will ever be ready ... and waiting until you are ready is the barrier that prevents the majority of people from making progress in language learning.

Over the past eight months or so, I've been using Skype (both with a language partner ... now friend I made via Mixxr and tutors I've found on italki) and I've been using the applications Memrise and Anki. Just as importantly though, I've learned a lot from listening to many language hackers, polyglots and other language learners. I shall start a blog at some point just to focus on the compressing what I've learned from this marvelous group of people. Certainly, learning from Tim Ferriss accelerated my learning and then doing Benny Lewis', "Speak from Day 1" course afforded me a structure. Then, by participating in the +1 Challenge, I learned probably the most important lesson in language learning ... to keep at it even when life throws you a few curve balls along the way. I've also learned a lot from other participants on the +1 Challenge ... and they've been enormously encouraging. The friends I've made through meetup groups have also been fantastic.

People seem to have been impressed by my progress in learning Japanese. Whilst I know that I've steadily progressed and become more efficient in how I'm learning a language ... I haven't got it all figured out just yet. The first thing I'm going to do post +1 Challenge is reflect on what I've learned, what I want to tweak, what didn't work as well as I'd hoped. We are all different ... what works for one person may not necessarily work for another.

I would definitely recommend participating in the +1 Challenge to anyone ... it's not just an opportunity to progress in your target language ... it's an opportunity to tweak your language learning configuration ... become a better player in any game.  Best of all though, you can't sit there clinging on to the rock, planning your strategy, tooling yourself up etc. You have to let go of the rock. There is no other way. You have to play.

+1 Challenge Weekly Update #9

Over the last three weeks, in addition to learning Japanese, I've been completing my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificates and preparing to demonstrate my skills. Recently, I've been working on an introduction speech and an 'ice-breaker' activity. For the introduction, I initially wrote a script which I ran through with a friend called Ian. I then revised the script when I had a lesson with Satoko-san, and finally practiced with my language partner, Mikie-san. What was really awesome was Satoko-san recorded herself saying my speech, so I could listen to it over and over again. It's been a few days since I actually gave my introduction speech for real ... and for this update, I thought I'd try and re-create it ... I was better last week, but, I'm glad to say I hadn't forgotten any of it!




In addition to completing my TEFL course, I took a specialist certificate on "Teaching in Japan". This has been very beneficial as it's given me a greater understanding of Japanese culture. Saying that, I thought I'd learned a lot about Japanese culture through watching dramas; and for sure, I'd still say that I learned a lot of interesting stuff that way (even just simple things, like Japanese table manners), but what I learned on the course was the sort of stuff that is useful to know to spare me from putting my foot in it without knowing what I've done wrong. As with everything, I'm sure to make mistakes, but at least now I feel confident that I at least know I've made a mistake and continue to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones.

Anyway, I had better crack on. I'm going to Norway for the weekend. In fact, I've just had a Japanese lesson on Skype and had great fun learning a couple of Norwegian phrases in Japanese ... as in, I pretended I was a Japanese student learning Norwegian.  In the same way that I've started learning to play guitar by watching tutorials in Japanese ... I have to admit that I struggle to stick at one particular thing at a time ... but in the first five or six weeks of this challenge, I made such good progress by keeping a regular routine going. Whilst I've recently been a bit all over the place, I've maintained my Japanese learning by doing stuff in Japanese rather than in English wherever I can.

+1 Challenge Weekly Update #8

It's Sunday and I have a stomach swarming with flutterbyes. I can't really talk about why or what this is about on any public timeline at the moment. What I can say that I'm preparing to give a speech in Japanese in front of an audience and it will be recorded on video. Amusingly, I would be nervous enough doing this presentation in English and in some respects, opting to do it in Japanese feels almost less worrying than doing it in English.

Anyway, my Japanese language learning is progressing. I've missed about three days of my scheduled language learning over the last week (things have been a bit frantic!) but then, I've increased the amount of Skype sessions I'm doing via italki.com. These are going really well and I'm trying out different tutors again. It's nice to have regular tutor's who have gained a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses, but I also like having a session once in a while with a tutor I've never tried out before. For some reason, a private joke referring to a John Cage (a.k.a. 'the biscuit') from Ally McBeal quote just sprang to mind.

OK, I had better sign off. I just thought I'd make a small written update as I'm wanting to let everyone know I'm still maintaining progress ... few bumps and unexpected turns from time to time, but it keeps everything interesting.

How to transcend those deeply dippy moments

When I was at school I attended a talk by a rather eccentric Englishman, the adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. During his talk he spoke about the days when he was walking to the South Pole and felt like giving up … only he kept going because he wasn’t going to let his companion beat him to his goal. Whenever I feel like giving up on something I’ve set out to achieve, I always think back to what he said whenever I feel tired and want to give up.

In 1997, I was in Arizona and I met another eccentric Englishman who needed help pushing his car … he conveniently neglected to inform me that what really meant was that he needed help to push his car out of an aeroplane 13,000ft over the Senoran Desert.  I remember thinking to myself, well that’s funny … I only got my skydiving licence yesterday and the first thing I find myself doing is getting involved in a stunt for making a television commercial. But that’s the thing … you see, whatever it is, simply by doing something, the chances of opportunities presenting themselves to you just increase … remember that … because even when you don’t think anything is happening … stuff is happening … it might be that you are just reconfiguring yourself … well, that has to happen in order for you to engage in an action that you would previously have disregarded.

I meet a lot of people who inspire me in skydiving … one of the earliest inspirations came from a man called Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld (author of “Above All Else”). He was part of a world champion team, Arizona Airspeed, who were training for the national championships whilst I was learning to skydive.  That team were, in terms of language learning, the only people who were completely fluent in the language of flight. But just like native speakers of any language you're trying to learn ... these are the people who don't have anything left to prove ... their smiles are genuine ... that seemed apparent to me when I was learning to fly ... these people really got it ... and that's not to say that other people learning to fly don't get it ... lots of people do ... but occasionally I encounter people in skydiving who don't get it at all ... just like in language learning when I encounter people who seem convinced that because it took them years to learn a language (inefficiently) ... that it's going to really annoy them if anyone else dare to suggest that they might be able to learn a language a lot quicker. You'll hear, "oh, but that's cheating ... as if you can cheat ... it is what it is". I can already speak Japanese ... am I fluent ... sometimes ... I'm fluent at saying introductions ... oh, that's not fluent you fool ... yes it is ... but I aspire to speak beyond basic introductions ... where do I aspire ... well ... that's all part of my plan ... and will I be able to achieve my plan ... well ... back to Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld.

 He gave a TED talk about how to overcome all the odds: 

It boils down to asking yourself two simple questions.

Question 1: “Is it possible that I can succeed?”

Question 2: “Am I prepared to do whatever it takes to make it happen?”

If I can honestly answer yes to both these questions; then I stand a pretty good chance of being successful.  I get dips … sure … I’ve had a couple since the +1 Challenge begun … I had a lesson which made me feel utterly daunted by speaking Japanese … I came away feeling as if I hadn’t got above the tree line and the summit of this language was a long long way up. I had a weekend where I ended up completely exhausted … and thought, “oh dear, what happened to all the fun I was having before … have I killed it?”

I don’t hope that I will be able to speak Japanese one day … hope is simply an optimistic form of doubt. I have no doubt that I will speak Japanese once I’ve put in the necessary work to speak it. Am I prepared to do whatever it takes … yes … that gets me through the minor dips easily … but what about the major ones, the ones where doubt comes knocking at the door … hmmm … that’s when I think about this phantom character named doubt … he’s the guy who tells me learning Japanese will take many years … he’s the guy who tells me that even when I can speak Japanese the Japanese people would prefer me to be speaking English with them … he’s the guy who says, “you don’t deserve to speak another language” … and I shun him … because I’m a human being and I don’t need his permission to earn the right to speak another language, I claim the right to speak another language … in the words of Russell Brand … “I’m taking that right”. Am I prepared to do whatever it takes … yes … is it possible … yes … and to put this character called doubt in his rightful place … I take a step back and see him in his true perspective … I see the fun I have speaking Japanese already … I imagine how much more fun it will be when I’m better acquainted with this language … I imagine the opportunities that can occur once we’ve become better friends (for example, the moment I helped a lost Japanese tourist in London … the look of bewilderment and delightful sound of “eeeeeeeeeh YOU SPEAK JAPANESE!!!!” when I gave this guy directions in Japanese) … and when I watch drama’s and can understand a little more than the previous time … that reminds me that I am making progress when I don’t feel like much progress is being made … and I think about the other +1 Challengers who have given me words of encouragement … and I think about other people who’ve taken an interest in my language learning … people seem to have noticed that I’ve got the bit between my teeth and am striving forward … and I think about my language partner who says I’ve inspired her to learn more English because I’m catching her up in regards it always being her who has had the greater language ability in the past … but yeah … most of all, I look ahead and think, “wow, I’ve already had some amazing experiences on this language learning journey already … but this journey is going to be whatever I make it … let’s not sit around staring at the same scenery … lets go further … lets go off-piste … lets go higher and deeper and wider and take this path and that path and perhaps do a little dance here … I don’t know … this works for me … where’s my map … oh yeah … the plan … it’s good … but let’s not be too ridged … as Lao Tsu said, “a good traveller has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving”. Some people don’t get that message … they instantly see it as being, “let’s not have a plan or a goal” … they’ve misunderstood … it says nothing about not having plan or a goal … it says, “don’t fixate on the route … don’t forget to enjoy the scenery” … for this is what makes one a good traveller … and this is how I get out of the dips … I transcend them … they are merely lower contours that one experiences on route.

Is it possible for you to succeed … most definitely yes … are you prepared to do whatever it takes …  you decide … when you think about the glorious possibilities that speaking another language affords … it’s well worth it isn’t it?

+1 Challenge Weekly Update #6

Language Learning through the lens of children.

No video update this week ... I have a video but completely forgot to ask the other person involved for their approval to use it. So with that in mind, I looked at the video in question and thought, "OK, what was the most important lesson learned this week?" I've kept up with my plan to learn 50 new vocabulary words again ... but that's not it ... I've increased the amount of italki.com sessions and they've been awesome ... but, nope, that's not it either ... learning some useful grammar ... nope ... what is it then ... it's simple really ... remembering why I fell head over heals in love with learning Japanese in the first place ... because talking a foreign language is hilarious fun ... especially so in the very early stages.

As I've said before, I began learning Japanese completely by accident ... I learned katakana in order to be able to have fun with vocaloid software, yet the first time I googled images of downtown Tokyo and was able to identify an electronics shop sign saying ソニー (Sony) was an incredible moment for me. It's still a thrill when I watch a J-Doroma and can identify shop signs ... とふ (Tofu ... on Aya's family tofu shop in One Litre of Tears) ... ミツビシ (Mitsubishi - on the back of the mechanic's overalls in Mou Ichido Kimi ni Propose) ... each time I can read something that I wouldn't be able to read if I hadn't learned the kana, I get so much joy from knowing that if I hadn't acquired this skill, I'm getting just a little more insight into things than I would do if I hadn't bothered.

Anyway, I didn't begin learning by speaking from the very beginning. In hindsight, now that I've listened to Benny Lewis and other people with a great deal more experience at learning languages than myself. I really wish I had begun learning a language by speaking the language from the very start. But I didn't ... and I can't roll the clock back either ... but I can at least take what I've learned and apply to the next language I learn (I'm thinking Japanese sign language next time). So why didn't I interact with other people at the very beginning? ... it seems so obvious to me now, that it wasn't the fear of speaking to native speakers which put me off (my travels have at least taught me that the effort to attempt speaking the native language is pretty much always appreciated by the locals ... and often results in getting to experience something you might not have experienced otherwise) ... but I certainly feared being around other people learning language ... why?

Well, I've been thinking about that ... it's really surprised me on the +1 Challenge that everyone else has been so encouraging. That's not what my language learning experience was like at school ... my French teacher was battling with a group of 30 eleven year old boys who were forced to learn French or German against their will ... I think we mostly opted for French because we were interested in buying flick knives and cheap wine on the day trip to Boulogne (pronounced Ba-log-nya by everyone I ever met except the French teacher who spoke all poetically and Frenchylike). There wasn't the option to learn Japanese. I might well have learned Japanese at the age of 11 if it had been an option ... but who knows ... I was really into Star Wars and wasn't interested in much other than Star Wars back then!

Have you ever played an online game? I have ... I played Call of Duty on the PS3 online ... I didn't play for long though because everyone else online was either far more skilled than me or as I like to think, perhaps they just have better internet connections and can react faster than I could ... the point being ... I'd last about ten seconds max before someone would shoot me in the head ... and there's only so many times you can be bothered to play when you keep being shot the whole time. I played against the computer a bit more thinking I would skill up so that I could last longer playing against other people ... but nope, I still got shot in the head just as much as before ... so I didn't bother playing online.

The equivalent in language learning I suppose is when you meet other people learning the same target language and they discourage you about learning the language. It happened to me about six months ago at a Japanese event I attended ... I met a person who told that learning Japanese would take me many years. I thought to myself, "Well, I've been learning for about a year ... this person said they'd been learning for five years" so when a Japanese person came up and said something I couldn't understand. I sensed the joy of the person who had been telling me how learning Japanese takes years and years because, after all those years, he could understand something that I couldn't ... and boy did he seem to enjoy talking away in Japanese for next few minutes whilst I just looked on awkwardly wanting to throw in a 「猫がすきです」 (I like cats) or something to at least feel like I could say something Japanese and therefore have just as much right to be attending this Japanese event as anyone else. Anyway, as this guy carried on talking I started to sense that the Japanese person was feeling just as awkward as myself in a situation where this guy was banging on what I thought might have been Japanese ... but could have been Klingon for all I knew. Anyway, so when he finished, I seized my opportunity to say, 「猫がすきです」and the Japanese person became very interested in speaking to me. I then bought a beer, but instead of pronouncing "Asahi" as it should be pronounced, and how I usually would pronounce it correctly, the word just came out as "Arsey" ... everyone around me laughed and it became the source of much amusement for the rest of the night with people taking the piss out of the fact I couldn't even pronounce Asahi ... only then this Japanese person who'd taken an interest in my sophisticated conversational announcement regarding my liking of cats turned to the barman and asked for a bottle of "Arsey" and when we both had our bottles, we chinked our bottles with a 「乾杯」 (cheers) ... and I felt for just a moment like I really understood what was the most important thing in learning a language ... period ... just have fun ... whatever your level of ability is in a foreign language.

Anyway, why am I regaling this story. Well, as much as I could be using the time to be going hard at the Japanese study etc ... this morning I saw the picture that a friend of mine had posted on Facebook (the picture at the top of this post) and also the words his son spoke whilst talking about flashbangs, " you see us kids are so curious & imaginative I want to try out lots of things with these. You won't understand as an adult because all you adults do is talk nonsense and try to grow up, you miss the fun stuff".

Wise words I think you'll agree ... certainly answers one of the questions I've asked myself recently ... given that everyone on the +1 Challenge has been so encouraging ... why have I always avoided other language learners in the past ... I guess it's because, as my friends son said, "adults talk nonsense and try and grow up, you miss the fun stuff".

I got my TEFL certificate for "Teaching Younger Learners" this morning ... however, I feel more humbled at the fact, that if anything, it is children who teach us the important lessons ... we're just here as evidence that the more sophisticated we become with our methodologies, the less fun we make it for ourselves.

So my lesson this week ... play ... play ... play ... I do have a tendency to analyse everything a lot ... I think having a plan is very important ... certainly, without one, I just potter around learning Japanese and don't make anything like the progress I've made during this challenge. I've drifted into a period where I was exhausted a couple of weeks ago ... put myself back on course with just resting up a little and making sure everything I planned for the week would be fun ... and its been a good week. As I continue with the challenge, I hope my face is more like the one below (taken during a Skype lesson with an italki tutor) ... that's what it's all about.

 "Yes I do believe I might be having fun" - Bic Runga, Get Some Sleep

+1 Challenge Weekly Update #5

Another busy week with lots of Japanese learning happening. As you can see from my video update, I've recovered from a short period of exhaustion. I was doing too many things at the same time and not wanting to give any of them up. This said, it did force to me to evaluate things and further optimize the approach I'm taking on this language learning mission. I haven't changed that much in my approach, but although I'm strictly keeping to my original plan, I've added "shadowing" as an activity which I'd not tried before. I tried it with an italki tutor and although I wasn't very good at it, I noticed how much more focused I became on listening to every sound that was uttered and sat there with a big gloopy grin on my face at the end of the session as I realized, that yes ... its more than just helping me my pronunciation of Japanese, it's re-configuring the way I listen to Japanese. Now, maybe it will take me some time to be speaking Japanese all clickety-clackity (that's the technical term I've invented to describe what I don't have the English vocabulary to actually describe) ... but that's the main difference between what I hear and what comes tumbling out of my mouth. Additionally, doing the "shadowing" has given me a lot of confidence that, yes, with some more practice ... I shall indeed be clickety-clackity-drum-sounding-babbler-awayerer in Japanese ... and that's an important difference ... I suppose it's because I've spent many years speaking only in the violin tones of English ... and I learned Japanese without talking it for quite a long time ... and then when I began talking in Japanese, imperfect pronounciation hardly ever prevented me from being understood. However, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of speaking Japanese really well ... it's such a beautiful language. Yes, I shall continue to speak it with grammatically large boots for a while ... because when I become too conscientious of my pronunciation, fear of making mistakes creeps back into my mind ... and so, I think I decided that, yes, I shall aim to be a elegant verbal ballet dancer ... for that is my ultimate goal.

I also thought I'd get back into learning タイヨウのうた. I really love the song and the J-dorama it came from, but also found that it's been covered really well by natsubayashi on youtube:

 

Additionally, I decided that rather than learn to play the guitar from watching English tutorials, it was much more fun to learn to play the guitar in Japanese. So when I discovered that natsubayashi had created a tutorial teaching beginner's how to play this song, it soon became apparent that I don't actually have to understand that much Japanese to understand what he's communicating in his tutorial ... he's a great teacher in my opinion ... and I love the fact that he's teaching me Japanese without knowing it. I like to think that I'll search him out in Japan and say こんにちは なつばやし。あなたが僕ギタや日本語を教えました。ありがとうございます。

Anyway, I think that's all I'll write about in this blog update. It's been a while since I uploaded any of the materials that I've created over the last couple of weeks. I've made a few, but not shared them. I shall at some point ... but I'm hungry and want to go and make something to eat and then I'll be speaking with Mikie-san ... and then I think I'll have an early night because I've got an early morning italki session.

I'm on track as far as going through Tae Kim's grammar guide goes ... and I've apparently increased my vocabulary by about 350 words since the Challenge began and I've been noticing how much more frequently I'm hearing these words when I'm watching Japanese dorama these days. I'm addicted to a new series called "Miss Pilot" ... in the first episode I was amazed how much of the dialogue I could understand; they speak a lot of formal Japanese in this series because it's following a group of trainee pilots and they're often in formal situations. This said, I still haven't got a clue a lot of the time!