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To my class of Japanese students, I pointed out how much English they knew now, gained in 3 or 4 years of schooling. I got them to imagine what they might hope to achieve in their 3 weeks in New Zealand. And then I told them that I would give tips as to how to continue to improve once they got back home.

“Get yourself an English omiyage!” Whether it be a book, an audiobook, a magazine or a newspaper. Something that reminds you about your overseas stay and that inspires you to continue.

I wonder if Sachi will come.

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I’ve started teaching a two and a half week English short course alongside my regular afternoon class for level 2 speaking and listening. I had only 30 minutes for lunch, which I ate on foot, walking from the Meridian to the Polytech campus. I’m a busy man!

Nevertheless, I had plenty of energy and enthusiasm. It’s always interesting figuring out how to get the best results whilst working within the prevailing educational paradigm.

Regarding Japanese ‘home entertainment’ the 3 of us watched the first part of the movie Gabai. It had Chinese subtitles, and seems to be a true story.

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I watched a 10-minute video on YouTube called ‘My biggest mistake learning te reo Maori’. It gave me a lot of insights. I could see parallels with myself being brought up as a bilingual. It drove home to me the importance and complexity political and cultural ramifications. I now see that the issue is hugely complex. In short, after those 10 minutes I now relate better to the whole language learning movement for Maori.

At home, we’ve completed Baby Steps season 2. There’s no 3rd season, so next I’ll search for a suitable slice of life series for family viewing.  

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I’ve a note to myself from I don’t know how long ago that YouTube has Maori language resources.

I see that I’ve started a Maori channel. So far it has 3 items: an hour-long program on flax weaving, and 2 ten-minute children’s stories.

Well, that’s a start. 

I also seem to remember picking up several books from the free box at my favourite op shop. Let me dig those out too.

Just now, I discovered a two-hour documentary about traditional forms of Maori learning. That may be useful for my literacy and numeracy embedding course.

It may all go together.

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Even for 100 hours, I would need to be motivated. I’d need a good reason. And so it’s important to choose a suitable language. 

Overhearing another staff member being coached to give a speech in Maori as part of some professional development gave me thought. Knowing Maori would certainly result in spin-offs.

I’ll do it. I’ll start in 3 weeks (after the next short course). I’ll gather resources (Maori is not one of the 74 languages into which Harry Potter has been translated).

Finally, a good quote: A foreign language is foreign only you are not yet familiar with it!

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To date, I haven’t actually proved that my approach works—not to others, not even to myself. That’s because I prefer theory to action, don’t like feeling obliged to, begrudge having to concentrate on one at the expense of the many. That sort of thing.

But I need to. I must spend 100 days, one hour per day, to see how far I get. Not with German, French, or even Spanish now, because I have some prior knowledge. Would Polish be okay, or Italian?

With Polish I have some incentive, and I’d be starting more or less from scratch, therefore.

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There’s a limit, I believe, to what you are able to explain about learning theory and methodology to a beginner level English class. They don’t have the language, for one thing. And for another, the degree to which they are able to understand unfamiliar concepts is also limited. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that there is limited take-up of these ideas even by mainstream educators.

On another topic, I’ve added to my Harry Potter collection. Yesterday, in the Marsh Lilliput library I discovered a copy of Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen. To think that I’ve already read it!

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People gainfully employed have no time for a life. Not these days. Even partly employed I must work hard to fence off a life for myself. I really have very little time and energy to devote to my interests.

Wasn’t it Steven Covey who wrote the book about the 7 habits of successful people? I remember a demonstration that he gave involving a container and variously sized rocks. You place the largest ones in first.

If, by turning it into a game, I could manage to turn my largest obligation into a passion then I will largely have it made.

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I’m going to have to show Baby Steps to my class. Not the actual story, but the main character’s method of recording notes in a notebook to refer to and learn from. Yesterday in class, the excuses began. Why people wouldn’t be able to arrive on time and leave early. In one case, why someone couldn’t even write! (How had he coped with the placement test then?) People arrived without paper. Without even a pen. And at the end of the lesson, I discovered scraps of paper left lying on desks—abandoned notes. It’s time to start issuing pink slips!

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I’m not sure, but I suspect that the amygdala has something to do with the difficulty that many of us have in attempting to master another language. I’m reading Rewire Your Anxious Brain. There’s stuff in there that I can relate to on a personal level, certainly, though I’ve only completed the first few chapters.

Today I’ll start another semester, again at level 2, but this time with speaking and listening. It’s shaping up to be a large class of at least 20, mostly Syrians.

I’m thinking too about when I retire. To celebrate, I may do a 3100-mile race.

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During the holidays it’s much more difficult to keep up any habit. We spent the weekend at Naseby, and so any language interaction was fast and fleeting.

At the Naseby Ice Festival, the chap in charge of the luge was Polish. His manner and accent reminded us very much of Hubert at Uto.

I picked up that the new owner of the Larchwood Camping Ground came from England, originally.

Browsing audio tracks on my laptop, I happened to listen to the start of Pippi Longstocking in what must have been the original Swedish.

But other than that, nothing at all.

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I’m having a discussion online with someone about just what a polyglot is. The other person feels that being able to speak the language is paramount—after all, glot means tongue. However, my emphasis has always been on understanding i.e. listening and reading.

Quite naturally, we watch Baby Steps in the evening. I’m happy to read a little Dutch or German before a nap, or before sleeping. I enjoy ‘knocking off’ 5 kanji at a time twice or thrice a day, when opening up the computer. And I look forward to my sentence mining in other languages. Truly I do!

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I’m making, or have made, the decision not to do languages with the aim of selling something, or to persuade people around to my point of view. I’ve done with that self-imposed pressure. Neither shall I learn languages with a view of impressing others. I won’t go for any record of speed or number. No.

I’ll concentrate doing what I wish—namely to get my Japanese up to a nice functional level. I’ll keep up the Dutch and the German. I’ll develop others at my whim, through dabbling.

My blog I’ll maintain for myself, though I’ll still allow public access.

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People wish for wisdom. People crave knowledge. Instead of seeking it within, by reflecting, they look to others to provide it. They are impressed by achievement. They are impressed by others’ abilities to articulate. But those articulations might not be based on anything substantial.

I hear 80, 90 and 100-year-olds being interviewed about their longevity. I listen to Dean Karnazes being interviewed about his stamina, the coaches on Baby Steps pontificating about tennis, participants in a 3100-mile race explain their motivation, and my colleagues expounding forth on language learning through themes and learning outcomes.

So much of it hot air.

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Applying Pareto’s principle, 1/5 can lead to 4/5, so—by doing a Pareto of a Pareto—1/25 leads to 16/25, and therefore—doing a P-of-a-P-of-a-P—1/100 can yield 50% of the whole. Which is what my approach to school was. Which is exactly how I apply myself to multiple interests. It’s a playful way to engage. The dabbler’s way. It’s kind of the opposite of being a perfectionist. 

And it’s healthy because it turn life into a game. It takes out the seriousness of it all.

In Barbara Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose, she labels people with this outlook ‘scanners’.   

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So Sachi joins me as I write. Looks over my shoulder. I show her the Japanese shadowing course. We discover that there are two parts: from beginner to intermediate, from intermediate to advance (sic). Then we discover a version where the text has Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese translations. Then we come across a Japanese for Vietnamese YouTube channel using cartoons such as Sazae-san plus Japanese video. One thing leads to another.

Sachi also corrects my mistake of scrolling upward with 3 fingers, which reduces my window size and displays all of them at once. Tomorrow I’m going to discuss playfulness.

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I’ve picked up two interesting resources for Japanese. From Dunedin Library, a week ago, I borrowed My First Japanese Kanji Book by Anna and Eriko Sato. It’s bright and colorful. I hope to delve into it. Then more recently—in fact only a day or so ago—I discovered this Japanese shadowing video on YouTube. It also looks useful and interesting. And also, I hope to delve into it too.

According to the Pareto Principle, the top 20% gives 80%. Therefore, the top 20% of the top 20% gives 64%. One step further, the very top 1% gives you 50%.

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Again I considered what was best: to do just the one language and make rapid improvement, or to amble along on a wide front. The solution may be both! Work on Japanese for half of the time, and do a little of everything else the other half.

I update my Alexander Arguelles post and learnt something new: the distinction between a multilingual (who has simply grown up with multiple languages) and a polyglot—doing polyglottery (who deliberately learns many new languages from scratch). 

In Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, there’s quite a lot of incidental material about the dialects of Norway.

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It may not seem as if I’m always engaging in languages. And to some extent, that’s true. However, I am always thinking about how to learn them. That’s the thing I’m fascinated by.

I have that in common with my philosophical musings. In essence my interest in them are exactly the same. What I enjoy is figuring both of them out. Figuring out anything generally.

Apropos yesterday’s discussion about Polish, here is the link to Project Gutenberg’s 43 books in that language, and probably some decent Polish resources on this website. Sadly, some of the links are broken, I discovered.

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I’ve a backlog of links that I want to get through. The first links to The Hound of the Baskervilles in Polish. You can read and listen to the Arthur Conan Doyle novel there. Loyal Books it’s called. Makes use of Gutenberg Project by the looks of it.

At home we, the 3 of us now, have started on Season 2 of Baby Steps. Sometimes the Russian KissAnime site is too slow, so we find it on YouTube.

Finally, I completed a generic worksheet for students to do for their listening portfolio. I meet with Steve today to hand over.

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I’ve decided to merge two of my blogs: Playfool Tongue and A Language, a Life. They cover the same territory, that of language acquisition. I’d started one a couple of years earlier and more or less forgotten about it. It was also written simple and short—as if to my 15-year-old self, so its tone is not that different from Playfool Tongue. The question now is which template to use, and which title?

I haven’t started, but I’m very keen to start mining sentences. Copying them out would be slower, but more powerful that simply cut-and-paste. I might mix languages.

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When I did some Spanish the other day, I concluded that, although I was covering a lot of ground, there were only a few sentences that I was able to recognize. And that got me thinking that I ought to apply a little more focus. 

One way to do that would be to collect, or mine sentences, as per the suggestion of Khatzumoto. He used to suggest that people collect around 10,000 sentences from authentic texts, and to learn them Anki style.

He himself went off the idea for some reason, but I think it is one of his best.

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I disagree with Paul Nation’s notion that you need 95 to 98 percent word knowledge to be able to read a text. Yesterday I wrote a post about that. Then, to be fair to the man, I viewed a 15-minute clip of him speaking. I learned about fluency and how to teach it using the 4-3-2 technique. 

I plan to use it with my Speaking & Listening class this semester. I’m finding that I’ll need to tweak what others have done. Fewer, fairer and less onerous assessment, for one thing. This is Level 2 what we’re talking about after all.

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A few days ago I wondered about the reason why I’m using the library less. Alarms that beep? Loss of habit? Plain laziness? Hyper-choice?

Yesterday I believe that I reversed that direction. I learned about a couple of areas in the children’s section that have foreign language books for youngsters. And for Sachi, I showed her the Japanese section where she pounced on a series of manga that was her favorite back ‘home’. She needed all 10 volumes right away.

We were waylaid by The Great Taste on the way back, and spent some quality reading time as a result.

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We hosted a get together with Ian, an old school mate, his wife, Mark and his family, Moto with his sons. The context of much of the talk was about immigration in the aftermath of the second world war and the notion of retiring in rural Japan.

With my kanji code collection, now that I’ve ‘tagged’ almost the first 1000 kanji, there’s up to a paragraph between new ones, which means that I’m getting a lot of exposure through reading the intermediate text.

Oh, and I completed some more Spanish, identifying sentences I’d be able to identify out of context.

659

Collected/completed some more pages of short Polish sentences. The activity is certainly an addictive one. It’ll be interesting to see how far that takes me by the time I reach the end of the novel. Then I’ll be choosing the next addictive activity.

It seems to me that it would be useful to serially engage with a number of languages using Harry Potter paragraphs. I’d cover that text—in different ways, and to different degrees—in Dutch, German, Japanese and so on down the line. Kind of like doing the Heinrich maneuver like Hendrix in a room full of mirrors. 

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Getting ready in the morning, I see that Sachi is interested in a children’s science book. There’s a recipe for slime, or rather ‘slijm’ since the book is in Dutch. Next thing I know she has Google translate open, keying in the instructions! That’s initiative, as I reported to her teacher later that day at a parent teacher meeting.

Myself, I added points, or quotes, to the post that I wrote about Frank Smith’s Reading Without Nonsense. There’s just so much good stuff from just the preface and the introductory first chapter.

Got in some Baby Steps French before retiring.

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The main language-related activity I did today—yesterday—was to do a little Polish. On my Kindle, not laptop. That is significant, as I’ll explain later.

Anyway, I went through and highlighted sentences of 6 or fewer words. Nothing more—no looking up meanings. Not even comparing sentences Heinrich maneuver-style. I just want to gain a sense of which words are most common, and of word order.

The documents of the novel—Lee Child’s One Shot—are slightly different. One letter is either a ‘z’ or an ‘s’ capitalized and with a diacritic depending on the Kindle or laptop version. 

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With Baby Steps, we’re up to over midway in the first—of two—seasons. Sometimes the subtitles are in English, sometimes Indonesian, and sometimes French. I find that my French and Japanese are roughly at the same level—reading French and listening to Japanese. But that would probably not be true if I were to listen and French and read in Japanese. I suspect that my reading is stronger.

Yesterday I learned I’m no longer a teacher! Sometime in the late 1980s a register was prepared of those currently practising. Nowadays you need to ‘renew’ your teacher-hood every 3 years.

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I use the library less, though I read as much as ever before. What’s the reason? Could it be something as simple as being beeped when I exit with a book that I bought for $1.50 (The Bat by Jo Nesbo)?

And when do I go public with Th’playfool Tongue? How often do I post on it? Where, and how often do I announce those pearls of wisdom?

It’s a funny electronic world. Where are all the real people?

From another library I buy (for 50c) I am neurotic – and so are you. Sachi’s as interested in it as I’m.

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The novel I’m reading is set in Uruguay. The protagonist grows up on the pampas, riding horses as a gaucho and picking up backwoods Spanish. Natural language acquisition.

Meanwhile, I’m cobbling together my latest blog: Th’playfool tongue. (I’m playing around with the name.)

I’ll link together the take-home messages from its posts and write up the personal approach that I arrive at. At that point, I may go public.

I’m surprised by the size and range of the response to the language poll that I set up in the Facebook Kaikorai Valley High School group. Combined collective experience. Very nice.