Passion

So what sustains us in the months it actually takes to learn a language? Passion and enjoyment. Learning a language is like  a relationship.  You spend as much time with it as you can. You listen to it talk to you. You talk “to it”. You make plans for it. You work to understand how it operates.  As we all know, passion is definitely  one of the elements that sustains a relationship. It really makes it much easier.

So! Make sure you are passionate about some aspect of the language you are learning. You can be passionate about your goal. You really want to know this language; and this sustains you through the weeks. You can be passionate about the culture and want to understand it better. Nothing allows you to connect with a culture as learning its language will.  You can be in love with this language itself: its sounds, its grammar, its script. This makes it easiest to keep going. You can be passionate about an individual whose native tongue is the language you are learning. That also makes it very easy.  You can have a great need to know this language for career reasons.  That need will make you passionate too.

So rev up your passion. Keep reminding yourself of the payoff, write down your goals and post them even. Imagine what it will be like when you are fluent, when people compliment you, when you make new friendships. Talk to people who have learned it and find out how they did, what advice they have.

Whatever the type of motivation you experience, you also want to do two other things.

1. Make sure you understand how to learn a language, and this one specifically. Get”maps” for your journey. Be realistic about what has to happen. Explore learning materials and learning options.

2. Make sure you use a learning path which you deeply enjoy, which suits your personality and learning style, and which rewards you for learning.  Boredom is never a plus.

Success is an internal experience, measured only by you. The more you know what you are doing, the more you enjoy yourself and the more passionate you are about the language, the easier it will be for you to sustain yourself on the path of learning.

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Easy to learn:

Many people believe that learning a new language is a difficult and boring task. We make it doable and fun. We provide you with the right teachers, the right materials and the right programs. We have thirty years experience helping people learn.

Fast:

We understand how to structure our programs so you can learn efficiently and fast. All you need to do is apply and enjoy yourself.

Cost-effective

We want to make it feasible for anyone to learn: students, business people, travelers, children. Our rates are always reasonable.

Customized programs:

We realize that everyone has different needs. We provide the right program, the right approach and the right schedule for you.

Excellence:

We constantly strive to find the best methods and the best resources to provide the best language programs possible. We also provide you with great support materials.

To set up a course:

Email us  at jps@focuslanguage.com

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Pinyin makes it possible to pronounce Chinese fairly accurately very fast.  You want to be learning how to read and write characters at the same time, but Pinyin will really help you penetrate into the language.

Another fantastic thing it does is it tells you exactly how to pronounce the tones on every word. I will get back to tones in another post, but realize that you must pronounce the tones of Mandarin or you will not be understood when you speak.  At all.!  The Chinese characters do not show you how to pronounce the tones: Pinyin does.

You can learn how to read Pinyin in 30 minutes. You won’t be perfectly accurate, but you will be able to read, learn vocabulary and use correct tones. It is really an indispensable tool.  Yes qi = chi might be a little strange, but you can quickly get used to it.

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Language is sound.  Arrgh! … Oops! … Wow! …  Oh noooo! …  Various combinations of sound  communicate our meaning.  As you approach Mandarin as your new language, get acquainted with its sounds. The better you hear, the easier it will be to understand natives. The better you sound when you speak, the easier your communication will be.

Falling in love

My advice is always to learn a language that you are attracted to. It is much easier to spend time with something you enjoy. If you need to learn for an external reason ( work, family matters), you should at least feel neutral toward the new language. Aversion is never a good place to start.  Strange, unusual even alien are OK.

Get into that crib

Remember when you were living in your crib and you spoke no English? You spent hours listening to Mom and Dad talking and making faces at you. It worked, didn’t it? Remember! It’s never too late to have a happy childhood in Mandarin.

Input: make it so.

So you’ve decided to learn Mandarin. Do you know what it sounds like? To many, Chinese sounds like ping tong ping.  Well it’s time to get on your computer and take a little tour.  Where do you go? Anywhere Mandarin is spoken. YouTube is a good place to start. Movies are another. Internet radio and television are everywhere. Cartoons or songs in Chinese  are fantastic. Listen! Without judging or rejecting. Stay relaxed, breathe and move around. Some speakers will have voices you enjoy. Others may not. Explore! For a few days.

Next time we will talk about specific Mandarin sounds and how to approach them.  But today, go out and listen to your new language. This is not a mental exercise. Go and land your ship on planet Zhongguo and find out what you can about its inhabitants: directly. What do you actually hear? How does its vibration  feel inside your body? Find good-looking actors or actresses being interviewed. They tend to have good voices and they are fun to look at.

The only assignment is to expose yourself to as much enjoyable Mandarin as possible.

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In many ways, learning Mandarin is no different than studying French, Spanish or German. You need to learn new sounds, to get a feel for how natives say things. There are words and expressions to be learned. It naturally takes motivation and time. But there also are different things to absorb. If you approach them smartly, they become very enjoyable.
Initial Exploration

I’d like  to give you a window onto the world of Mandarin.

When you begin a new language, it is very useful to understand where you will be going, and what you will need to learn.  So! What are the important features of Mandarin?

1. New sounds.

All the sounds of mandarin are quite learnable.  They all exist in some form in English. You will simply have to learn a few new distinctions. Chinese syllables are also  more staccato than those of English. Chop, chop, chop!

2. Tones

Chinese speakers actually  ”sing” all the words of their language.  There are 4 tones or notes  in Mandarin. Your first job is to begin to hear them and to start reproducing them. We as Westerners are not used to this.  The tones are not difficult to hear or to speak, but they take a while  getting accustomed to.

3. Characters

Chinese characters are an incredible writing system, but they require quite a bit of memorization. Take your time learning them, but begin to study them immediately. You will need to know them to be literate. Fortunately, there is a much simpler way  to read Chinese initially.  It is called …….. Pinyin.

4. Pinyin

Pinyin is a way of writing Chinese that uses our own Roman alphabet. It is very systematic and easy to learn. It allows you to read and write words in Chinese immediately. It also tells you where to pronounce the tones. Pinyin is your best friend.

5. Vocabulary

Yes, you have to learn words. The best way is to hear and see a lot of the language.  And actually, the more characters you know, the easier it is to absorb vocabulary. More on that later.

6. Grammar

Chinese grammar is  easier to learn than that of a  new Western language.  It has no verb tenses or conjugations; no singular or plural; and no declensions (like Russian or German). Simply stated, the words do not change in any way.  Remember those French irregular verbs? and the German der die das? Throw them out. They are not needed here. Chinese does have some new concepts, but they are easily grasped.

7. Word order

Chinese word order is different from ours. Simply listen and model what you hear. The expression “Long time no see” actually comes from Chinese. Easier to say  than “it’s been a long time since I have last seen you”, isn’t it?

These are all the things you need to consider initially: the “What ” of Mandarin. The next part in this series will begin to deal with the “How”.

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Whenever you learn a language, the great limitation is vocabulary – in speaking and also in understanding. Trying to increase my own fluency, I just created the following technique for  practice.

I was listening to a guided meditation in English and was trying my best to translate what I was hearing into Chinese.  I was vitally hampered by my lack of vocabulary.  I played with my English-Chinese dictionary and then my Chinese English one for a while. (The great danger in using a dictionary – paper or electronic – is that it may give you a completely different or inappropriate translation. That’s why you should always translate  in both directions.)

Led by my curiosity, I went on my computer and started using the Google Translate Tool to test my own knowledge and learn new words.  I usually find the tool’s results are remarkable, especially when translating  European languages – close linguistic relatives.  With Chinese, the accuracy is more limited but still useful.  I started typing sentences in English and reading the Chinese translation.  I would then take the Chinese translation and plug it back into the tool to retranslate into English.  (This catches many gross mistakes.)

This taught me a lot of useful expressions and vocabulary. The next step will be to run them by a native, to see if I found the right words and how natives would use them. Fortunately I love being laughed at.

The important thing to remember –  if you decide to play with this technique – is to use very short and non-ambiguous sentences.  ”The woman laughed at the dog” is much safer than “Although he feared the elevator had begun to malfunction, he rushed out to the street in search of a new diagram.”  The more complex the grammar, the more likely an incorrect, hilarious translation.

If you use this system with care and a big grain of salt, you can test your capacity to generate sentences while learning new vocabulary.  It is a fast and fun way to develop your capacity to express yourself. It is definitely not 100% or even 80% accurate but it is still amazing. The next step is to check with a native of course.

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So how do we resume study seamlessly?

The first part is mental. Remind yourself it is normal to take breaks. Even after years of not using a language, we can relearn what we had learned  ten or twenty  times faster than when we started out. Vocabulary fades really fast if we don’t use it – even in our mother tongue.  But we can easily relearn words we used to know. I always found that grammar stayed in place dormant and was pretty easy to reactivate.  It’s the same thing with pronunciation. Your mouth and your ears remember.

The best way to reawaken a language is to reconnect with the familiar. Find your old recordings and podcasts and just start listening. Be passive. You are recreating an echo. It is useful to have the written texts as well.  Refresh your eyes as well as your ears.

The other best way is to find brand new fun materials that attract you. The internet language tools available keep multiplying: movies, videos, tubes, games… There is an endless wealth of language resources.

The third best way is to connect or reconnect with the culture of the language you want to learn. Find meetup groups on the internet and go play with natives and other people who want to learn. There is no substitute for being involved with other people.

So in with the old and in with the new. Within a week or two you will be amazed how much you have recovered of your previous knowledge.

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I have a student from China who is learning English. She studied English for 10 years but initially could not understand much.  She had just arrived from Sichuan and was quite  frustrated.  After 6 weeks of daily practice, she is able to understand and we can now enjoy interesting and humorous conversations together.  It is not that she has learned that many more words or that much more grammar; it is simply that her body is actually beginning to hear and compute the English language.

I also remember coming to the US as a 13 year old.  I had studied English in France – for 4 years – but my initial experience was of an incomprehensible wall of sound. Aaargh!  So you who are learning may occasionally feel discouraged: “I really can’t understand anything! What’s wrong with me?”  Nothing! Your body and your psyche have just not yet begun to take over the comprehension of the language.  Remember that it is not the conscious mind which actually creates and comprehends language. It is a subconscious function out of your actual control. All you can do is expose yourself to that wall of sound and hang in there.  Keep studying grammar, learning words, etc!   It can be very uncomfortable, but know that when the click takes place, you will begin to track and know what is being said to you.  Forever!

This is a very exciting place to be.  It is much easier to accomplish this process if you are having real interactions with natives.  Fortunately, these days, natives can be found everywhere with online video calls. The internet can instantly transport you to the country of your choice. In my days, we had to practice speaking uphill and in the snow.

So hang tough in that incomprehensible wall of sound; and know that understanding will come.

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The antithesis of meditation is multi-tasking.  I am riding my motorcycle while  texting my friend, eating lunch and planning my afternoon meeting.  The problem with that is lack of depth.  The biggest challenge through time in learning a language is remembering thousands of words and their proper context.  It is virtually impossible to do this efficiently without creating deep associations.  Without associations memory melts like snow in the sun.

What are the principal elements of meditation?  Focus.  Relaxation.  Comfort.  Effortless patience.  Pleasure.

We have already mentioned focus: the one-pointed concentration on a piece of information and the use of multi-sensory associations.  This really is the great key.  Which do you think you would remember faster: your neighbor’s social security number or the number to a Swiss Bank account in your name containing $500,000?  The difference would be the focus applied to memorizing.

Relaxation and comfort are also vital.  Stress is really a form of pain.  Can you dance  if there is a nail poking through the sole of your shoe? So get comfortable.  Study in a place you enjoy, a place which relaxes you and makes you feel comfortable.

Effortless patience is an interesting one.  Meditation gives you the ability to be fully present in your body, to enjoy the physicality of the moment you are living, to let your thoughts move through as clouds in a Summer sky.  Every physical, mental or emotional experience that surfaces becomes the source of your meditation.  Applying this to memorization is very fruitful.  You are fully associated as you process, code and imprint the new words.  Someone who enjoys reading poetry would automatically do this.

Pleasure is the direct result of all the other aspects, whether you are sitting in meditation, painting a portrait or learning new vocabulary words.

So there you are!  Meditation is another powerful tool to be applied to learning a language.

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Yet, in spite of following paths considered less desirable or dead-ends by many in our efficient, goal-oriented society, I have succeeded in becoming fluent in eight or nine languages.  I do study hard – sometimes almost fanatically – but I am able to maintain my focus and happiness through time.  Looking back on how I became accomplished in multiple language, I notice some common elements and patterns.  They are perhaps obvious and easy to apply but they are at the core of my success in learning languages.

Love, Beauty and Nature

Learning a language is a subconscious activity.  You may work like a slave in Roman salt mines but you cannot impose the absorption or integration of a language onto your brain/mind.  The more you experience the beauty of your new language, of its sounds of its grammar, of its culture, of its world view, the easier it is to keep a powerful,spontaneous and unending desire to improve your skills.  I have had highly intelligent language students who became very frustrated in spite of their urgent need and high motivation to learn a new language.  They lacked one thing: the actual desire to learn and a genuine attraction for their new language.  They were in purgatory or jail, waiting to be released with a new skill at their command.  Painters love color, creative programmers love the elegance of their code, lovers love their beloved.  Language learners must also be in love with the object of their pursuit.

Language is music, mathematics, theater, history, culture and art rolled into one.  Ignore this, and even if you learn a new language, you will miss much of its depth and the pleasure of knowing it.

What do nature and breathing have to do with the intelligent pursuit of learning a language?  Everything  in my case.  Separate me from access to nature and I feel restricted and incomplete, while the breathing techniques I use daily (from yoga and qi gong) improve my brain functions, relaxation and general health.  They allow me to concentrate powerfully on the object of my study without normal fatigue.  Without nature and breathing meditations I would be a pale insubstantial  shadow of who I am today.

At a later date, I will write in more detail about this accessing of the right cerebral hemisphere.  One of its consequences is the experience of bliss in ordinary circumstances. Poets and artists routinely experience this phenomenon. It can only enhance whatever experience you are engaged in.

You must naturally discover your own path of beauty and bliss as you apply it to your language learning.  Yet, the more powerfully you access it, the easier and the more effortless your progress will be.

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