Not bad for a Monday

Man, this miserable weather just ain’t stopping ⛈ But it didn’t affect me today, surprisingly. I just pushed on and did what I needed to get done today 👍 I don’t know how people keep their spirits up in places like Scandinavia where the days can be sooo short during winter! I guess you just do what you gotta do!

And one of those things was figuring out what to do for N’s birthday next week. I know what I want to do now, and I’ll book it in tomorrow 👍 I won’t write it here yet because he may actually read this post and I want it to be a surprise ☺️

One of my students asked me today if I did any Spanish study this past week. So now he has unintentionally made me accountable for my Spanish language study! Spanish isn’t really my focus at the moment, but I try and dabble in it every now and then because Spanish and French are actually the next two languages on my list. But now I feel like it needs to get a bit more attention if he’s going to keep asking me how my own language learning is going! 😂

And then N and I finished season four of Community. Not a bad start to the week!

It’s a win-win on all fronts

Continuing on from my post yesterday, I started going through my Japanese textbook for Chinese speakers today 😂 It’s surprisingly ok so far! There’s actually two reasons why I’m using this textbook: firstly, I wanted to work on learning Japanese using Chinese as the mode of teaching to get away from my constant reliance on English. So I figured that if I eliminate English as much as I can, the stronger the bonds will be between my Chinese and Japanese, and generally just stronger the links will be in my mind across all three languages.

And the other reason is because the level of the Japanese in this textbook is just review for me, it’s not new material. Learning new stuff with Chinese as the teaching language may be quite a tough ask. But I’m really just reviewing material that I already know, just that this time around, the translation is in Chinese. So seeing properly constructed Chinese sentences is also good review. So I’m effectively reviewing both languages – without English 👍👍 It’s a win-win on all fronts, if you ask me 😊

Polyglot goals

I placed an online order this morning for some groceries to be delivered home. The earliest time slot they had was 7-8pm, so I chose that. Four hours later, they called me to check if anyone was home (no one was). What is the point of having delivery times when you’re not even going to stick to them?!? 🙄🤪 Although having said that, a delivery turnaround of four hours from placing my order to their delivering it is pretty damn good! And even though no one is home, HK is a safe enough place (let’s forget about the douchebags for a second here…) where I can ask them to leave the order by our front door and be pretty confident that no one will take off with it. So it was all good, but still! 🤪

I went to the library again today and borrowed yet another book. I have seven books out on loan at the moment, greedy much?!? 😆 Maybe it’d be a better idea if I actually just finished one book at a time and then moved on to the next book… But nooo, I’ll just be a greedy guts instead! 🤪

Because I’ve already started winding down for the year, with N’s brother in town and all, I thought I’d spend a bit more time on my language learning over the next few weeks. Four out of my seven books are actually foreign language related, so maybe I can work my way specifically through these ones over the coming weeks. Polyglot goals, here I come! 🤓

Not entirely a complete waste of time 😉

The other day I mentioned one of my biggest time wasters: for some people it’s Facebook or Instagram, for me, it’s reading up on information about the HK protests 🤪 Now it all wasn’t a complete waste of time, as I have read up on a lot of things about China and HK in the process, and educated myself as well. But I have also wasted a lot of time reading western propaganda on the protests, wasting both valuable time and energy 😒

Another time waster of mine is watching polyglot videos on YouTube 😄 In particular, tips on how to improve my language learning to become as proficient as I can possibly be. I wonder, if all the time I spent watching these polyglot videos I dedicated to actual language learning, how much further along in the language I would actually be now 🤔

Anyway, one of the tips one of these polyglots mentioned is to not get discouraged when you feel like you’re not improving. Just keep pushing through it, continue practising and making sure you’re consolidating all the knowledge that you currently have in the language, making sure that your foundations are really solid and getting all of it really internalised.

I really like this tip because I know exactly what he’s talking about. So rather than learning new grammar points or actively learning new vocab, I am trying to focus on my fluency and being able to communicate with the limited number of words and sentence structures that I do know. Because even the relatively simple sentence, “Would you like to go to the park this afternoon?” can then be changed to numerous other combinations:

Would you like to go to a cafe tomorrow?

I’d like to go to the zoo.

I’d like to drink a cup of coffee.

Would you like to watch a movie tonight?

My sister wants to go shopping in the city later today.

My level of Chinese is now much more advanced than this, but even these sentences still take me a second or two to construct – ie they’re not fully internalised yet. And as an adult, I don’t know just how internalised I can get these sentences to be, but I’m going to keep persevering. Surely all this perseverance is helping to build stronger connections in the brain, right?!? 🤓

So I guess my time wasters aren’t entirely a complete waste of time…! 😉

My polyglot dream

They say that you should read as much as you can in your target language, and I realised today that I wasn’t reading enough Chinese material. So I went to the library and decided to borrow a Chinese book in the children’s section again. It’s a simpler version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (eg it only has ten chapters vs the original book which has 19), but I still think it’s going to be a hard slog. It’s still not quite a relaxing read for me, I’m still effectively studying it. But I want to push myself and try reading something that’s aimed more at older kids, rather than the books I usually read, which are written for five year olds 😂

For a Chinese language learner, the library is a treasure trove full of good reading material, as these books are written for native speakers of the language, even if they are five or seven or ten years old 😜 They haven’t been dumbed down for adult learners, like most of my learning materials. This is Chinese written for native speakers, so they’re not going to limit their choice of words to suit the language learner. Which of course makes it that much harder, as you’re constantly looking up words that you don’t know. But hopefully in the long run, all the hard work will pay off 🤞

And then in the evening, we went out for dinner with a few of N’s workmates – another farewell dinner for the same workmate who we had the farewell brunch for last Sunday 😆 She’s had a bajillion farewell dinners! She probably started her farewell drinks and dinners three weeks ago 😂 But she loves her food, so she’s going to as many places as she can before she heads back to Sydney in a few days 👍

They had a colleague from their Tokyo office join us, and when I found out she was Japanese, I immediately asked her “Are you Japanese?” in Japanese. She was quite surprised that I could say that, and was really impressed with my Japanese accent! OMG how cool is that?!? It totally made me even more keen to continue with my Japanese. I also realised today as I was speaking to her that my Chinese has indeed well and truly surpassed my Japanese level. I can express myself better in Chinese now, and the Chinese words come to mind much faster now too 😲 Although I have been much more focussed on my Chinese lately, so I guess this is to be expected. If I spent more time with Japanese, I could probably get it back up to pretty much the same level 😆

And given that these two languages are apparently two of the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker (along with Korean and Arabic), I think I underestimate just how much I actually know of these two languages, and the fact that I can have simple conversations in both. It may take a ton of effort to do so, and I will have a bajillion mistakes, but I’m communicating, and that’s effectively the point of language, right?! So with more practice, I think I could actually achieve my goal of conversational fluency in both languages 😊 Today has given me more fuel to continue pushing on with this polyglot dream of mine 🤓

Another polyglot

I still felt pretty shite today, and so I ended up sleeping for most of it. But it paid off, and I’m feeling somewhat better now.

And in the evening, I just watched a few more YouTube clips that polyglots have posted. I came across Lindie Botes today, and came across this clip of her time in SG. It made me miss that country so much! 😔

She absolutely LOVES Korean, and she also seems to gravitate towards various Asian languages. And what I like about her the most out of all the other polyglots I’ve come across on YouTube so far is that she’s learning my top three Asian languages: Chinese, Korean and Japanese. She’s even made clips about learning all three, which is sooo inspiring! She’s most advanced in Korean, which – despite all the fantabulous dramas that they make – is actually the language I’m least interested in out of the three! 😆 But she says Japanese and Korean are so close that it sounds like you’d sorta get a 2-for-1 package deal if you learn these two languages 😂 So I may consider picking up Korean later on down the track when I get a better handle on the first two 😃

A wet start to the Easter long weekend

We got quite a fair bit of heavy rain today, so much so that we had to stop by 7-Eleven to buy an umbrella and one of those el cheapo raincoats that I seem to like for some reason ☔️ We would’ve been drenched otherwise. It deterred us from doing much at all, unfortunately, and after yet another yum cha brunch 😋 we just went home afterwards.

The heavy rain persisted all afternoon, which made for perfect stay-at-home weather. I just watched YouTube clips posted by another polyglot, Luca Lampariello, while N took a nap. All these polyglots inspire me to keep going, to keep pushing on, so it was quite timely to come across this guy now, actually, after feeling a bit down yesterday with my lack of improvement. He kept saying that the most important thing is to work at it every day, which I am, so I must be on the right track. I just need to continue focussing on the process, not the goal – much like with all my other goals, really! 😊

We were actually planning on going to Shenzhen tomorrow, but the forecast is for thunderstorms there tomorrow, so now I don’t really want to go, especially since the things that I want to do are all outdoor activities. But even if it is raining, we can still just go and do general shopping and other more indoor stuff like eating 😋 Let’s see if we can get ourselves to the train station first thing tomorrow morning, to avoid the crowds 😊

Respect and Languages

I took Kitty to the vet this morning. The Grab driver that I had on the way there had two little yellow cute emoji toys hanging off his rear view mirror, and I commented on how cute they were. He said “yeah, sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh **turns over the 😄 stuffed toy** or cry **turns over the 😂 toy**”. After some more discussion, I figured that what he was basically saying was that some customers are so terrible that he just wants to cry 😢 I asked him to elaborate, but his English wasn’t good enough to explain to me – and the thought of asking him to explain in Chinese crossed my mind, but then quickly realised that that wouldn’t help matters anyway! 😂 But he did say that some customers just don’t seem to have any respect for Grab drivers, and wished that people could just respect one another. I totally agree. I’ve heard a few horror stories from other drivers, and I completely agree this driver today. So I hope I gave him a bit of 😄 for a little while this morning, at least.

I went home and packed, and then headed to the airport. We flew out of Terminal 2 today, which I rarely fly out of, so the whole terminal is still relatively new to me. I spent the afternoon soaking in the surrounds 😊 I was with N, though, and he’s not quite as much of a fan of Changi as I am (well, no one is, so it’s not like he’s the weirdo one 😂), so I didn’t get to see everything that I wanted to see in the terminal. In fact, the only time I get to visit Changi properly is when I’m by myself! 😂 Sighhh… If only I could convert others to become Changi ambassadors as well… 😊

The flight was ok. The meal that I chose was rather mediocre, which is highly unusual for Singapore Airlines. I hardly complain about their food. Although we still got a meal for a two-hour flight, so I was happy about that. We got quite a fair bit of turbulence about halfway through though, and that unsettled me quite a fair bit. I just wanted to get off that plane. So I didn’t finish Finding Momo (Mom), this hilarious French film that I was really getting into before I started feeling a bit sick 🤢 Sighhh… I’ll just have to finish it on the return leg home.

I didn’t really read up on Ho Chi Minh City before today, and I feel a bit bad not even learning some very basic words in Vietnamese. Having this lofty lifetime goal of being a polyglot, I like being able to know at least a few essential words in any non-English speaking country that I visit. So I was feeling rather ashamed that I hadn’t even learnt hello, goodbye and thank you in Vietnamese.

So I learnt them once we’d checked in. O-M-G. I thought Chinese was hard. Vietnamese is also a tonal language, but I think the sounds are even more foreign for an English speaker! So I’m trying to just remember hello and thank you, that’ll be my two words for today! Hello sounds like the first two syllables of ‘Singapore’ in Chinese (xin chào), so I’m cheating that way 😆 and thank you sounds like “come on” (cám o’n). Even though it uses Roman letters, the pronunciation can be completely different, so I don’t know if that’s better or worse than learning Chinese characters! 😂

After checking in, we met up with our dance teacher, who is also here for the comp. We went and had Japanese near our hotel, and then went for a quick walk around Ben Thanh Market before calling it a night.

Crossing the road is going to be a challenge tomorrow! I don’t think I can cross the road by myself (how stupid does that sound?! 😂) I will have to rely on traffic lights as, unlike locals, I cannot walk into oncoming traffic! People keep saying “don’t worry, just walk forward, look straight ahead, and maintain a steady pace throughout. They’ll drive around you”. Errr, no… 😂 I may have to follow a local or two, otherwise I’ll just have to find a traffic light, or just stay on the same block as the hotel!😂