Archive for June, 2011
Jun
Jun
Do what you love, don’t worry about perfection
Recently, a friend posted a recording on Facebook of a song she had arranged and sung, along with the text: “I arranged, performed, recorded, and mixed a pretty song. It ain’t perfect, but that’s okay.”
I played the song, and yes, there were mistakes. Exactly as she said, it’s not perfect. But it’s still lovely.…
Jun
Jun
Ear training
When you’re learning a new language, one important and difficult task is learning to correctly hear and identify the sounds of that language. Their s doesn’t sound like your s, their r… rolls differently than yours, and their accent and intonation make it difficult to understand what you hear.
When learning a new language,
Jun
Jun
Fluency is not perfection
I see a lot of people talk about “redefining fluency”. The irony is, however, that the ones doing the complaining are, in fact, the ones doing the redefining. When pressed to describe fluency, they will often admit to expectations that a fluent speaker have a native-like accent, or a vocabulary of countless thousands of words,…
Jun
Jun
Set a task every day
Learning a language is a large, and often unclear task. Many people wade into the task without a clear understanding of how much work is involved. But rather than underestimating the amount of work involved, most people actually overestimate it.
One of the lessons our modern society has taught us is that no one is…
Jun
Jun
How do you keep languages separate?
One topic that seems to come up often in conversations I have with language-learners is the subject of mixing up languages in your head. Often people ask me “how do you keep all those languages separate?” and others ask, almost in disbelief, “don’t they all eventually blend together?”
But they don’t blend together, and it’s…
Jun
Jun
It wasn’t meant to be
I see this lousy advice given all the time. People console each other with this nonsense when they fail. They console themselves when they want to give up. The use it as an excuse to others when they quit. “Oh well, it just wasn’t meant to be.”
Bullshit.
Rocks weren’t meant to be stacked on…