Happy New Year 2013

En français

  New Year has come and it's time for every one to start working on the (un)famous New Year Resolutions.

If you do a little bit of reading through the internet, you will notice two current of thoughts. The first being a bunch of people traditionally listing their new resolutions for the current year and the second people telling that it's absolutely useless and that good resolution won't do anything for you if you don't have a serious plan, that they are too vague, that you can decide to do it at any time during the year so why the hell wait until January 1st like everyone else. And that you'll give up before the end of January anyway. 

  Any of you already gave up ? I know I didn't. I just have been a little bit delayed, traveling to France, moving to Sendai completely which is still ongoing as I'm living in a castle of boxing right now. (Updates on both coming soon). 

But I won't give you a list of my New Year Resolution or more accurately New Projects and Challenges, I'll let you discover them slowly through the blog.

So which current am I at ? Well, a little bit of both. I'm starting new challenges all through the year whether with study, writing, reading (more about this soon) so making a list of resolutions is not really going to do much. I think resolution time is more like a way of looking at what you have accomplished this year and to figure out way to improve during the year to come. Then I also agree that goals are more achievable if they are cut into little pieces. I'll give you an example from my personal New Year Resolution list :

I want to learn Japanese : 

 1) Watch drama

 2) Watch anime

 3) Read Manga (with reading contest help)

 4) Read Novels

 5) Do SRS repetitions

 .....

Telling yourself every day that you have to learn a language is not going to help you because you already know that anyway, you already decided it. It sounds overwhelming to look at everything you don't understand in your target language and to realize that you only have 30 minutes to work on it today so what the hell what is 30 minutes anyway, totally useless, right ? 

Well if I tell you that it's time to watch "Bleach" in Japanese even though you don't understand the intro song completely it's not going to hurt you to watch one episode which is less than 30 minutes then to realize 6 episodes later that it might be time to cook diner, I don't know, it kinda work for me at the moment. 

Anyway no matter what your own resolutions are, don't give up on them, don't give up on your dreams even if you can manage them only 5 minutes at a time or five minutes a day, things will ultimately get done.

Writing Fever : I like useless characters

Yes, yes, yes, I like useless characters. 

Every one of you who ever tried to write a novel, or a story, or something, anything really, involving characters, probably, mostly likely, definitely came across this advice : 

"Develop your characters, every character need to have a role and purpose, use your characters and don't forget them in the middle of the story." 

Not really formulated like this but you get the idea. 

 The thing is....hmmm... NO... so let me explain.

First thing first, what are the ideas behind this advice ?

1) Writing should be straight to the point.

2) There is a lot to write so only write useful things.

3) Why would you write about a character nobody will remember?

4) Why would you spend monstrous time developing a character who will appear only for half a page?

5) People are going to get bored with reading you if you get into digression all the freaking time.

A lot of people seem to think that if something doesn't literally bring anything to the story's plot it is not worth mentioning. But my point is, useless characters are everywhere and they are the background workers, the reason why part of the plot can actually hold. (I like to leave clues about my next novels, which might or might not be written) in the current one. (Anyone cares to look for them ?)

So here is why I think you should use and overuse useless characters. (Other than it help your NaNoWriMo word count)

Next time you walk in the street  count the number of people you see and figure out the number of useful one for you to get from point A to point B. See what I'm saying, you meeting a friend and just saying hello on the way home is not going to bring anything to your destination. Maybe you'll even forget that you met him when you arrive there. Does it mean that those people should die ? Certainly not. Every one of them have a background role and probably did something, at some point, that helped you, or help someone to do something that helped you, or helped someone to help someone to help someone.... to help someone who helped you.

See where I'm going there ? 

If you walk home at night, you're more likely to want the street to be filled up with people than to have one man standing in the dark corner of a door step, all dressed in black, watching you until you finally turn in the street corner.... damn that street never seemed so long. 

Same when you watch a movie, how many of the actors present on the screen actually got a line and how many of them are just called "the woman in black" in the credits. 

Thinking about it, I don't see why novels shouldn't be populated. Accientally making one useless characters jump in can bring a little fun when you get bored with writing or don't have any idea. 

And think about it, no matter how bad it is everything can be corrected if you don't like it.

Maybe I tend to over populate my novels, I don't know. I have a lot of characters ready to use and I like to have them walking around even when they don't bring anything to the story. I like to have them interact and annoy the main characters with their little "useless" life. 

And that friend you run into when depress walking home after a long day work, might be the one brightening your life with a silly joke. 

How many of you died reading the long long.... long fish and plant list in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea" ? But nobody will dare to say that it's a bad book. (or maybe someone will.) It's not useful but the fishes are there to be known and seen.

How many of you died reading never ending description ? It's not really useful either but it gives you a nice feeling of the surrounding even if your characters never make it there.

I believe that adding moving characters, even for a short time, can brighten your story.

So LONG LIFE USELESS CHARACTERS!!!

(At worse, they will give people something to talk about.)

Cyrano de Bergerac : Que dites-vous ?… C'est inutile ?… Je le sais !
                                      Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès !
                                     Non ! non, c'est bien plus beau lorsque c'est inutile !
 ( Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, éd. Pocket, 2005, acte V, scène 6, p. 200 )

So annoyed by busy people (part 2)

Here we go again. I'm so so so so annoyed with "busy" people, still, after all this time and after the first-epic-tell-the-truth post about how people are so busy indeed.
Maybe I should actually start to classified "busy" people into categories, because today I'm going to describe the childish one. And I know that some people will recognize themselves (well at least their behavior) and totally hate me for that.  Well I don't really care about those I'm caring about the one who are going to go "oh it really sucks when I do that actually.... let's try to fix it."



So here is the thing. I'm going to show you 2 dialogs. The first one is going to put into action the very irritating "busy" person and the second one is going to put into action the very cool busy person.

Dialog 1 : 
Person 1 : "Hey, this really cool movie went out last night" *hand the flier*
Person 2 : *Takes the flier* hum...
Person 1 : I saw the trailer few weeks ago, it seemed very interesting, I really want to go see it tonight. Can you go with me?
Person 2 : No, I'm busy.
Person 1 : Oh, it's Saturday night, what are you doing ?
Person 2 : I said I was busy.
Person 1 : So do you want to come to see it with me maybe later.
Person 2 : I don't know 'cause I'm busy.

So now here is the state of mind of poor person 1 (I even feel sorry for having to put her through this) What does she wants ? Is she interesting in the movie ? Do I need to wait for her to come with me another day when she is not that busy ? Will she get mad at me if I go without her ? Can I go with another friend ? Does she actually want to see it but not now ?
And of course she cannot ask those questions because that will just make the "busy" person mad.
Person 2 : Of course I'm mad for her asking so many questions, she never understands that I'm busy!
Well let me tell you person 2, you are not busy, you are a kid. But more on that later after dialog 2.

Dialog 2 (she is not interested version):

Person 1 : "Hey, this really cool movie went out last night" *hand the flier*
Person 3 : *Takes the flier* hum...
Person 1 : I saw the trailer few weeks ago, it seemed very interesting, I really want to go see it tonight. Can you go with me?
Person 3 : No, I really hate horror movies, they give me nightmares.
Person 1 : Alright, then I'll go with someone else.
Person 3 : Sure, I hope you'll have fun.

So what is the state of mind of person 1, well she knows that she needs to find someone else to go with her, she might be disappointed because she wanted to go with this friend but she can't possibly force her friend to have nightmare.

Dialog 2 (she is interested version):

Person 1 : "Hey, this really cool movie went out last night" *hand the flier*
Person 4 : *Takes the flier* hum...
Person 1 : I saw the trailer few weeks ago, it seemed very interesting, I really want to go see it tonight. Can you go with me?
Person 4 : No, I'm busy.
Person 1 : Oh, it's Saturday night, what are you doing ?
Person 4 : I'm having diner with my boyfriend, but I'm free on Tuesday, if you can wait that long I'll go with you, I saw the trailer too, it seems awesome.

So now what is the state of mind of person 1, well they can both take there agendas and write down the plan. And that makes the all difference, the topic is closed and they don't have to think about it again until Tuesday except to look forward to it of course.

The difference between Person 2 and Person 3 and 4, is that while Person 2 is acting like a child, they are acting like adults.
What I mean is, when a child is busy with something, he can't see forward in the future, he is busy now and it seems that he is going to be busy forever, so he cannot make plans and if he is not interested, he cannot say that because he always wonder what the other person is going to think of him for stating a contradictory opinion. Also a child doesn't know if few days later he will still want to see the movie, maybe his friends with go out to play basketball, or there will be a better movie, or he will want an ice-cream. That's way too many choices for his little brain to compute.
An adult has absolutely not problem to know when he will be free, he can make plans and stick with them because he knows that it's very unlikely not to be able to turn around the other opportunities which could show up at the same time. In the same way he doesn't have problem to tell what he likes or not, because he knows that his personal opinion is as valid as his friend's.

Hiding behind "being busy" when you can't actually say what you truly mean is a childish attitude and cowardliness and it doesn't help in any kind of relationship. Nobody will get mad at you for having something else to do, but they might get mad at you and stop hanging out with you when you put them in the crappy state of mind person 1 was after the first dialog.
See I'm not always annoyed with busy people, I'm busy too, just with the poor excuses I guess.

Japan : UEC International day

En français
My University held an international day back in June. International students were having stands to present their home country to other international students and Japanese student. At the end of the event there was some presentation of traditional songs and dances from Indonesia, India and  Bulgaria and a quiz about foreign countries. That was very interesting.
Travel table of content 

Japan : 生け花

En français
Still in Mai, I took some 生け花 (or 華道) classes. It was really nice to sit there with your flowers, listen to the explanation of the teacher on how the flowers should be arranged and then to actually make the composition yourself. I went to those classes three times, every time, the arrangement looked a bit the same as for the positions of the flowers in the plate. But the flower themselves were different and we needed to be careful about the color arrangement and also about the length of the stem. At the end of the classes we were allowed to bring the flowers home, that way I had flowers in my room all month making it very lively. I like flowers.
Travel table of content

I-can-do-it-later list

Today's blog is a vlog again. I really have plenty of "me-time" this week-end.
In this video, I want to introduce people with what I call the "I-can-do-it-later list".
Basically, the "I-can-do-it-later things" on the list are all the little tiny things, really no time consuming things that you are procrastinating on.
As an attempt to take procrastination out of your life, working on the important things you are procrastinating on, like work or doing the washing up is a good thing. But working on more tiny and probably unnoticed things is also a good way to get the problem at the roots. It is good to free your mind from the things that you could actually do quickly but always postpone.

Once things are done you don't need to think about them anymore.

All those little things even if you are not thinking about them constantly are kind of nagging you at time. Your own "I-can-do-it-later" list depends entirely on you, it can be anything. You want to free yourself from them and get more thinking space in your brain for important things?
Start working on your "I-can-do-it-later list" today and I can promise you, you will feel as good as I'm feeling right now.

Fish memory

En français

I think the title predicts that there will be a bit of ranting in this post so you have been warned.

I think fish memory is going to be the end of humanity anytime soon, that's an ever progressing epidemic that seems to have been unnoticed so far even though I'm confronted to it every day.

First I should define what I call "Fish memory".
Even though eating fish, give you a lot of DHA (Docosahexaenoic acid), fishes have a very bad memory like commonly people believe that it's about 3 secs or something like that. (In fact the memory span of a fish is more of about three months, which is not too long either)
Anyway what I call fish memory is when you are talking about something with someone or doing something with them and the next day they seem to have forgotten about it.

At first I really thought that people were doing it on purpose, that seems so impossible. They ask you something and the next day they will ask you again as if they didn't even listen to you. Or they will ask you to do something for them and forget that they did and ask again one hour later.
But in fact it seems that people really forgot.
I don't know where it's coming from. Are they just not paying attention? Is it that they don't care ? I'm not really sure, but the fact is, it seems to be spreading with increasing speed and people seem to be able to forget the same thing several time in a row.

So do you remember the beginning of the post ?

Image from here.

About learning : Screw the method

En français
I guess the title says it all, I got a little tired about learning languages. Not that I don't want to learn, just that I want to learn so bad that I just don't. I think I lost myself trying to apply other people's methods that seemed to work for them and possibly other people around but kind of flop for me. Not because they are bad methods, I think more because I was just doing things wrong because that didn't really match with my personality.
I think instead of trying so hard to get something their ways without actually getting the full grasp of it because I'm obviously just myself and not them, I should have got back a little bit and reread (my own crap) the first few posts of the "About learning" section of this blog.
I did learn 3 languages to fluency without having to read about any method before starting-even though two of them are probably starting to fail me due to lack of use but let's overestimate myself like every one else seem to do- so what the hell is wrong with me right now and why the hell don't I speak Japanese after almost one year here.
I can already here people saying that it's ok and that I'm just being too hard on myself. Sorry but screw that too.

I think I just want to speak so perfectly that I got scared and don't speak at all. Fact number 1.
I'm just too much thinking about how people are looking at me. That's a hard one to admit but Fact number 2.
I'm underestimated myself quite a bit, and it's hard to stop. Fact number 3.
But let's face it no matter how bad things turns out for some reasons I don't understand I still have some people calling me a genius at least once a week, no matter how wrong it sounds to me.

Now let's be back to my own shoes or should I say use my super powers and see how it goes.
There is no right method to learn a language because the method should be adapted to the language itself and to the culture behind it and to the person learning it. That's how I learned English mostly reading and watching Hollyoaks. I learned German taking classes in the morning and watching anime in the afternoon with the kids. I learned Italian just for the love of art as my teacher said.



So I just have to figure out what fits with Japanese and Chinese and I think that's not going to be too difficult. I just have to stop trying and let it flow. Let's get to work!

Demon Soul the making of part 3: surprise characters

En français

On the last part of the making of, I introduced the notion of surprise characters. Now I think I should explain a bit more about them. As you start writing the story, you have few characters’ lives evolving in a certain environment. Of course they are going to encounter other people and react to them, they will become enemies or friends. As you start writing a paragraph, either you have planed it a long time ago or you know the character really well, either the character is a stranger.

It is a bit like in real life when you meet your friend’s friend and you already have the feeling that you know him because your friend has been talking about that guy for month or you arrive to a new place and someone start talking to you.

When Sahel has to go to the demon world, I was already prepared to make him meet the bad guys. That was the obvious thing to do, my bad guys were all ready and I knew them so well, the one that appear just for a minute but could have become important if needed or the one that were already there to make trouble. What I didn’t realize at first was that I was going to create a new world call the demon world and that it needed to be as diversified as the world where Sahel was coming from. When Sahel takes his first look at this world, some of the people present are just as foreign to me as they are to him and I will call them "surprise characters". Some will stay basic and never interact with him, in that case he is just observant and the characters aren’t really developed. Some will start interacting with him and in these cases I just have to go back to my questions and lists to build them up while Sahel was discovering them.

Those characters are a surprise for me, they are something that the story is giving me because they need to be there and I didn’t realize while planning. The main reason why you can’t realize everything while planning is because the part that the characters decide to bring to the story is their own and even if it follows the main line of the plot, all the details can only be worked out while actually writing the story. That is a good thing because if you already knew everything about the future of your characters, the little drop of mystery that makes the story interesting would be lost.

Get "Demon Soul" here or on amazon

Demon Soul, the making of part 2: Creation of the characters

En français

I always start creating a story with a quick idea that will later give the beginning. Here that was Brownie staying alone when Yue left. As this is the start of the story you can imagine that at this particular point I was supposed to go further and to start writing what follows. Of course I will but I still had a little bit of something to do first and that was creating my main character Brownie. That for, I use questions and lists.
Questions are really basics first and tend to get more complicated. For instance you can ask yourself what is the favorite color or food of the characters so that it will determine the environment around them like the decoration in their bedrooms, how they react to the meals. And also give some basic characteristic about them, like for example what they look like. The look was easier a bit as I use a game so I could basically see their pictures.
And here, I also had to wonder what happened between Yue and Brownie, why they felt in love? Why they separated? Why Brownie was behaving the way she did? For each answer I write a little paragraph that would eventually appear or not in the story. For example some of what happens between Brownie and Yue appears as flashback or memories.
I also said that I use lists. That is main qualities and main default of the characters. Also a bit of what they like and dislike and for each of those I also write a little paragraph. It is really easy to give a list of quality and default. Writing a paragraph about how the character gets it will allow you to have a consistent behavior and to make sure that the characters doesn’t behave contractor to themselves. The list doesn’t have to be long. You can start with 5 qualities and 5 defaults, you can always add more as the story progresses.
So here was the birth of Brownie and of her relationship Yue. I also created Yue in the same way. He would of course stay a lot less developed than Brownie as he appears only through her.
The other characters will be created as they appear. I have a all bunch of very basic characters just ready to be developed, for example when I first needed Gideon, I knew he was a wizard and really good with his magic wand but that was about it. I had to start with the questions and lists to built him a past and see how he was going to develop in the story and how the story was going to develop around him. And that is valid for every character in the story even insignificant ones. You never really know when a character is going to do something remarkable so you need to be prepare when this day come, but as I said before as the relationship between the characters and the story is very narrow, you don’t need to prepare them all before the story you can create them during the story. That allows you to take a break from the plot and especially you can always introduce surprise characters like the twins, Taram and Torin or Seti.

Get "Demon Soul" here or on amazon



 

Demon Soul, the making of part 1: A very narrow relationship

En français

I truly believe that you can’t have a great story without great characters and at the same time you can’t have great characters without a great story.
Characters are a bit like the people you know in real life. So you have to ask yourself whose story you like to listen to better, the story of the guy telling you his last travel in Southern Asia, the story of the guy who went to the parasite museum or the story of the guy who spent his last week of holiday watching TV. For me, if you read this blog, you already saw the choice.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t like boring character, for example I truly think that Isakael, my angel is really boring. But the thing is that a character is like a person, it needs a good reason to be boring.

Before entering the story, each character lived (except Sahel, right) so before entering the story, each characters needed to have their own story, something that will determine their behavior and point of view and feeling and actions. (More about that in the Character series)

Before starting, the story needs someone there to do something. That’s how stories starts, something happens and there is no coming back. The story makes the characters move forward and the characters make the story take the path that only them with their own background can give to it.
If you are familiar with this blog you would now that the story would have been really different for example if Hitomi had been the main character instead of Brownie. She wouldn’t have done the magic by herself without Gideon and the outcome would have been totally different.
The narrow relationship between the story and the character force me to develop them in parallel, even though I still start with the main characters. But you will soon understand why.

Get "Demon Soul" here

I won AugNoWriMo : Demon and fairy part 8

I won AugNoWriMo, well I passed the 40000 word line I still need to be officially verified.
That time it was really hard, not that much about the story more about a strange brain pattern. Let me explain because if that happens to me I know that it's happening to others as well and knowing about it will help fight it.

I was late on my word count,with the move to America I couldn't write for few days. Looking at the late words now, that wasn't too much. But the thing was I possible couldn't catch up all at once for sure. So what did I do? I felt bad and I didn't write, so the late words started to add up even more because I couldn't make it all at once was feeling like if I couldn't make it at all. And that was the main problem. Just I didn't need to make it all at once I needed to split it, into pieces, like I did at the beginning of the challenge, 40000/31 = 1291 (above integer).

So I split it and I get back at writing every day. Most of the time I didn't even reached the new word count but I was writing every day I was getting closer and that's the main point, because you can't do it all right now doesn't mean that you can't take a little step in the right direction and that little step was just what I needed to get back to my writing motion.
Of course when the week-end arrived I had just four days left to get my last 15200 and I had the feeling that I wasn't going to make it. But I split it, 5000 Saturday, 5000 Sunday so that I just had about 2500 for the two last days. I wrote 5200 on Saturday, 4500 on Sunday but on Monday I wrote 4100 words so that on the last day I just had to write 1200 words and they came to me really easily. On the two last days I was also splitting the writing time, writing each time I had a moment.
I think that one of the most important thing is the desire to get what I said I would and I made it.

The novel is not yet finished with 2 contests won and a total of 94138 words so you can expect to have more to read in the close future. It is going to be my longest novel so far.
All Novels Draft 

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Back to part 7 
To final part 

About learning : If you don't get it now...

En français

... you'll get it later.
So this morning I was in the shower, that's kind of impressive what I start thinking about when I am in there.
Anyway, so I suddenly realized something about a book that I read more than 5 or 6 years ago, about writing. Because as you all know at the moment I'm writing like a manic due to JulNoWriMo. That book's title is "Die unendliche Geschichte" or in English, "The Neverending Story".
In this story, a boy named Bastien is going to a magical world through a book but he has to create stories in this world. The only thing is that he doesn't know that each time he is creating a new story he is giving a part of himself.
I always felt like I was giving a part of myself while writing, every single one of my characters have a part of my personality or something I am interested in in them. What I discovered this morning was that you actually need to finish the story to be able to have it go out of you, just like Bastien needs to finish all the stories to be able to leave the world. I didn't understand why he had to do that, that was always something that puzzled me.

Well the real realization here is not about that really, it's about the fact that your brain is processing information from a while back. I read that book years ago but I didn't have the experience I have now as a writer back then, so stuff like that was still obscure and difficult to get. The good point is that I didn't forget, or my brain stored all that information and decided to actually process it when it had all the pieces of the puzzle.
Isn't it magical?

I means that whatever you have to learn if you can't understand all the parts right now, they will come later when you have more datas. Of course you want to know things now and to be able to use them now but there are always hided things that you can't get without time for you brain to process all the information.
Repetition can probably accelerate the process, if I had read the book several times and more deeply and if I had look at some parts of it and analyzed them in details, maybe I would have understood everything. But was it worth it to put that amount of efforts? Did I need that knowledge back then? Probably not.
Let your brain do the work for you, give it datas and let it compile them, that is the best way to have a strong knowledge of what you know.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. (Dune, Frank Herbert)

About learning : Other people's questions

En français
I know that you would like to be able to learn something all the way and then when you are ready you go show of (speak a language, play the piano, read all those books or watch a movie without struggling....) whatever. I least that's what I want. I want to be able to learn whatever I want without having people on my back all the time questioning about : what I'm doing, what I'm learning, what I already know.... But I figure out that except if you are learning something secretly (difficult to hide the sound of your brand new guitar) that's impossible.

Normally, I'm just fine with questions. They ask me whatever they want and I answer more or less deeply. Trying not to get fights about methods (I had a major one before so I'm done with that and will let that guy being fluent by only using "Assimil" if he wants.)  So I can also get ride of people and their questions as soon as possible. But recently that has been going a lot on my nerves and I think I figured out why.
People have been asking if I understood things that I'm really trying hard to understand. The more effort you put on something the more touchy you get about it. Even your friend innocent question : "How much do you understand?" or "Do you understand it all?" tends to get really painful when you always have to answer "No".
Sometimes I really want to go : "No of course I don't that's brand new and I'm learning so $%#$^%."
Why? It's adding to the frustration I'm putting on myself (I know I should just go watch one more episode of "花より男子" to solve the problem :) ) for not knowing it all already and that's seriously not helping.

Now today someone asked me a different question which is probably the one frustrating me enough to write this all post. We were talking about something that I know way better that he does and after I answered his question with a perfectly fine and correct answer he went :
"Why don't you know?"
And that really killed me. I took it philosophically. Ok maybe I didn't explain clearly enough, maybe that's the language problem again so I explained again, nicely, slowly. And he looked at me as if I was talking nonsense and told me that he was going to find the answer by himself. The answer was just written in front of his nose.

I needed to do a lot of effort to learn English and to be understood, to achieve my native level.
Now, I'm doing it all over again in Japanese because I really want to. But if people dare to speak English to me and don't understand the answer even when I'm already speaking extremely slowly and using the most simple vocabulary I can think of. I want to yell. I don't mind repeating myself, I don't mind changing the words that's not the point.
The point is : don't look at me as if it was my fault if you don't understand after I did all that. In that situation, I'm the one with the knowledge and I won't do anymore efforts to be understood. Enough is enough. It's other people's turn. I worked for it enough already. At some point you have to separate what is your problem and what is other people problem. I guess that was today's lesson for me. Writing that, I'm not frustrated about the question anymore. I know what I know and I know what I don't. But I also learn that I have to say stop and to let the other people around deal with their lack of understanding. I can't be ashamed of my English level, I can't go hide it because some people around won't understand me. I worked too hard for it.

So next, what am I going to do about all the other questions that are going to come my way about everything I learn? Well I'm not to sure. I guess that also depends a lot on my mood at the particular moment when it's asked and who asks it and how.
But what I will do for sure is separate my own feelings about my knowledge and my own wish with the way people look at me. The extra pressure people want to put on you is absolutely not necessary. You're good enough at doing it for yourself. Don't let them take the position of the judge because they are more likely unable to hold it.

And other point. Generally the people who dare ask the worse and more painful questions are the one who are actually not doing anything themselves. Like the people who so really really really really want to do this and that but will never get started anyway because they are too old, or it's too difficult, or they don't have time or are busy or ...
Don't let people giving excuses put you down. You worth better than that, you started already, you are deep in it and you'll start tomorrow again. You're better and you're awesome nobody can take that away.

About learning : Those things you shouldn't care about...

En français
This post is I believe more specific to learning languages than the other posts in this series. I wanted to be general but I always tend to end up thinking in terms of language learning anyway.

When learning a language, there are a lot of things that traditional teaching tend to put in our way, like for example : grammar and rod memorization, penguin talk (I mean textbook version of the language)... I'm not going to tell you about how grammar doesn't exist here as it has already been done on ajatt probably in a better way than I could do it. So I will rather tell you about yesterday suddent discovery and how it made me think about a discussion I had with someone about a year ago about how babies learn.

Yesterday, I was having an improvised lunch with some people, mostly Chinese friends and I suddenly realized that there is no tons in Chinese. Which now gives you two options, either you think I'm crazy and walk away either you read how I came to that conclusion.

First I don't speak Chinese. I took some classes, I had friends teaching me words. I pick up words when people speak Chinese around me. At some points some of my friends even didn't bother to translate things anymore, but since that time, few years ago, I forgot a lot (lack of practice). Anyway one of my friend told me recently that I can understand 2% which I consider still better than nothing (for the moment). So yeah I have no authority to go around telling people that there is no tons in Chinese, but I'll still do it, just because I can.

So here is how it happened.
My friend was explaining the difference in meaning between two Chinese words apparently really close but for me they were sounding different, like really really different. Then we had the pronunciation practice to repeat the words. I know that's weird to do that during lunch time but we do that all the time, probably due to international environment. Normally I repeat and I don't get it right and people end up giving me the tons which doesn't make it always easier. This time I just got them both right. And I realized that I didn't try to figure out the tons before saying them. I just repeated what I heard. That seemed a lot easier actually. That also makes sense.
Do you think Chinese kids are wondering what tons the word has before saying it? No they don't. Just like I don't have to worry about the genders and cases when I'm speaking German because German people don't, of course with some words I still wonder but that's just because I didn't hear them enough. Ask my little cousin why he says "je suis" and not "je être" and he is going to have no clue what you are talking about.
To really speak a language you need to be more like a parrot that like a rule-learning-machine.

Which bring me back to my discussion with that guy about learning. He was telling me that baby learn "by trial and errors" and I was telling that they were learning "by exposure to things and repetitions". (You know which school I'm coming from.) At some points we asked to someone with a young kid, that's seemed to be the easy way out. He answered "by trials and error" because no matter how much he showed to his daughter that she had to push the bottom of the bottle up to get the liquid out she was never doing it. So we said "ok", and walked away.
But now I can say that the reason is not because she learn by trial and error the reason is because she was not yet used to the way her body and the liquid in the bottle move. I can look at my friend playing the piano forever. I will never play the same way as he does unless I sit there and hit the keys. By repeating and repeating the same song over and over again I will get there, because first I know what the song should sound like.
 Same for languages if I listen enough the sounds are going to come out right.

Step 4 : Read

En français
I'm writing this especially the show to necessity and power of reading. I recently discovered, when I was writing "Demon Soul" actually that it was difficult for some people to read even five pages a day. For me that was unthinkable, at first it made me laugh because that meant I was able to write faster than people can read. But the more I think about it the more it seems like a scary idea.
Reading those 2500 words would take me less than 3 minutes, I'm a fast reader.
The reading average is 400 words a minute, so that means a bit less than 7 minutes and some people were telling me that they couldn't find time to read that. So I became suspicious and I want to tell you, the first thing to learn anything is to read. So you need to read, anything related to what you are studying and all the time.
Read while watching TV, read while eating, read before going to bed, read in the toilets (more about multitasking and TV later on)

The necessity of reading (a lot) and power of reading

Reading is going to make you happy. It makes some parts of your brain work that nothing else does (not too sure about that) anyway, it will make you smarter. Of course you won't remember everything you read but you will still have an idea about it. Read everything you can either you are learning something specific (languages, history...) or nothing in particular. The whole thing about reading is that it also builds up your mind. It teaches you different pattern and way of thinking, because not two persons write the same way, because not two persons can come up with exactly the same point of view on the same topic. That teaches you to see the world through someone else eyes. It will also show you more about the world and help you to understand other people better. An other good point is that if you really want to remember something you read you can always put it in a SRS and do repetition to remember it (shook head I should have done that while reading Dune)
One of my friend started to go back to read books after stopping for doing his PhD and told me that is was one of the best thing ever. He even started to read more than he planed.

Reading for language learner.

I'm learning Japanese hardcore at the moment, because I can't read the things around me and that's really killing me. I'm reading a bit of Harry Potter everyday, that's extremely slow. I told my friend I can read a sentence, and he laughed at me, not even a page. I feel a bit like a snail already, sometimes I want to throw the book by the window and to stop because it's highly frustrating, I would have finish the book in English by now right. I know but I also know that you can't get faster at reading if you don't practice and that I'll never be able to read a mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana if I don't read. So I need to and I started to read the products' etiquette during breakfast.
It's really important to start reading early, because reading will build up your vocabulary. It will help your pronunciation if you read aloud. You don't need to understand everything and to look for everything in the dictionary, that would be highly time consuming and you would loose patience by loosing the fun part of the story in too much grammar, you just need a global meaning out of it. Of course if a word keep on coming up I will go look for it.

What to read ?

I will go for anything you can find a thing is interesting. I don't really like magazines about people, who cares about their life anyway. I love fiction, whatever fiction it is. There are those books called "Classic", I heard somewhere or read somewhere that they were called that because everybody wanted to read them but nobody actually did. I read some of those in French and English and pretty enjoyed them. I like to read any novel or short stories my friends give me. I'm also a big fan of wikipedia and will read several pages a day on different topic that comes to my mind. Recently it was music as my friend asked me why there was no black fret between Mi and Fa. I knew it was because of the tons and half-tons but I still don't know why they don't call Fa#, Fa and so on to have black fret everywhere. That's the mystery of the moment.
So I'm telling you read everything you can that is useful to you and that you enjoy. But don't forget enjoying it is the first condition, fun always comes first.

You can also read all this blog and the one linked on the right, they contain interesting information.

Back to step 3
Forward to step5

Step 3 : Build up the environement

En français
Now that you are resolute to learn whatever that thing you want to learn (step 1) and that you are aware that you will probably have to face adversity (step 2), I am going to discuss the environment, your new environment. I'm sure that this can be applied to any kind of learning, from ping-pong to languages... but I will here take the example of languages as it seems a bit more obvious. I'm not really sure about that, so many things that seems obvious to me are kind of obscure for others. Anyway, lets describe how to built a language environment.

Why building a new environment for learning ?

You probably already try to learn a language, you probably bought some books (textbooks) you probably attended a lot of classes, maybe tried to talk to some native speaker in your target language. I did it too, I have a lots of textbooks in different languages at home and the audio that go with. I went to all the classes I could attend at University and nearly fall asleep during Japanese classes. Though were the worse I had, together with the second year of Chinese... but that's not the point here.
The point here is, I have tested it, just like you did and I've seen that it doesn't work at all, just like you did.
The reason is that you need a lot of extra work, extremely painful amount of extra work. But the commitment an discipline that you would get out of it is to hard to reach. Except if you make it differently, if you stop torturing yourself with an uneatable amount of grammar exercises and let it flow...

So that's were the need for a new environment comes from, you will need to transform you way of live so that every single minute of it becomes a learning moment.

What do I need to build an environment ?

Here I seriously want to say, I don't know. Not because I'm not using one, just because I'm using one that works for me but that maybe won't work for you. So that's really up to you.
I still can give you some basic rules : (Everybody need a bit of structure right.)
1) Get something you are interested in.
2) Get something funny (I seriously believe that boredom can kill you, or at least that it's killing your brain sell which is about the same thing)
3) Get the typical things about the country where the language is spoken.
4) Get the same thing that you have in your mother tongue in your target language.

Ok, now I'm going to explain.
Point 1) You like cooking, get a cooking book, that way you will enjoy trying new recipes and cooking and learning at the same time. I like fantasy books, crime books... that's the type of things that I'm going to try to read. No need for me to read a bibliography as in my mother tongue I will already sleep at the second page, You got the point I suppose, make it interesting.

Point 2) Get something funny or I should have said relaxing, everybody need to laugh and to take breaks. Do it in your target language, stop making it like it needs to be something painful. People (native speakers) have fun in that language everyday. Do the same. Get music, cartoons, mangas, whatever, make is pleasant.

Point 3) I love that one, that's the one that gives you the spirit, the one that is going to make you get the feeling for your target language by learning about the culture. When I need to talk in Korean (I don't have Korean people around 24/7) I talk to 뻬루, well he doesn't answer much but I made him from the teddy in the Korean drama 이 죽일놈의 사랑 (a love to kill).
Get think that native speaker use everyday, because you don't want to be talking like a textbook in the end, you want to be talking like a native speaker, right ?

Point 4) If you really enjoy something, like a drama or a movie or a book or whatever in you own language, so much that it's a real pain not to watch/read/whatever it, than get it in your target language. Like that you will kill two birds with one stone.

What does my environment look like ?

That's a bit of a hard question because my environment is evolving all the time.
I get ride of everything that bothered me to keep only the things that I'm enjoying. But I can still describe my environment at the moment.
So I'm watching 베토벤 바이러스 (Beethoven Virus), listening to my usual Shinee, Shinwa, 1Tym, mp3 version of the drama all day long and reading the book my friend brought me from Korea.
You see building an environment is not that difficult.
And it's rewarding. Can you guess why 大空 翼, (Tsubasa Oozora) was the best player of his team in the キャプテン翼 (Captain Tsubasa) cartoon ?
Because that guy was never letting go of his ball, he even slept with it.
So go for it, sleep with your ball !


Back to step 2
Forward to step 4

Step 2 : Get the attitude !!!

En français
Wah, it has been ages since I release the step 1 and everybody was probably waiting eagerly for this one. I'm really wondering why I didn't get deadly comments.
Anyway, here we go, Step 2 : Get the attitude !!

I guess that's probably more difficult but since you have already mastered step 1 we won't go back to it.

In this step I want to talk to you about the people around you.
Obviously not the ones telling you: "Go for it !", " You'll make it for sure :D" or "You're so good !". No, here I'm talking about the others, the nasty ones, the ones that want to be realistic, the ones that truly believe that they are right and that you are crazy. I'm going to separate several comments that got from different people.

"I wish I could do that but I'm too busy, (I don't have time)."

I love that one, seriously, that's probably my favorite crap sentence ever.
Did you realize how often people say it? Each time you're trying to do something new, it's there, waiting in a dark corner to jump on you. It looks pretty inoffensive said like that, but if that particular day, you are in a low mood, like tending to give up it's going get to you mind.

What this inoffensive sentence is implying if you think about it from the point of view of the person saying it (which is what you do in major cases) is that you should be better working or do something with your life than trying something funny like that, that you will probably fail anyway. What the guy is thinking is that he/she has way more important things to do than trying to do that, which you don't. So that makes you feel miserable and maybe immature.

So now let me tell you what it is supposed to mean and that is going to make you feel way better, I promise.
That actually means that this person even with "her wish" to do that never takes the time to do it, obviously in the real world (my real word) you only got the time that you take. Liberating time for what you want just leads you to be more efficient, (good bye procrastination) and at the end of the game you will be the one with something left.

Personally, I never have time problem for what matters to me... strange.

"You can't do it that way, it won't work go do it like MrX he knows exactly what to do."

Well if MrX knows so well, why isn't your friend doing what MrX says. Because he isn't doing what you say either because he doesn't want to bother doing it.
You have done research on your things, you know how to do it, you created your method, you experienced it...
Why do you thing that MrX will know better ? Because someone who doesn't know what he is talking about say so ? That makes me laugh.
Be confident.
It's like people who doesn't have a clue about English (or whatever is involved in speaking an other language) are telling me, "Isn't it to difficult to speak in English everyday ?" (I have been living in the UK for more than 3 years now, and wrote my thesis in English) "You should meet that guy, his English is so good."
How do they know ? they don't understand him anyway as well as they don't understand how you feel and learn and live because they haven't been through it. And you probably met guy talking English better than he is and you possibly speak English better than he is too.

"You can't do it, seriously just be realistic it's too difficult."

What I like in that sentence is the word realistic, re.a.lis.tic. Why ? Because the person saying it is all except realistic. He/she is just copy and pasting the general opinion others have. Saying "It is too difficult".
Let me tell you one thing, NO IT IS NOT.
And the reason is, if someone did it before, you sure can do it. You just need to try hard enough. People assume they know a lot of thing about stuff because they heard somewhere (they don't even know where) that it was such and such.
Is that knowledge ? Of course not, knowledge come from research on one particular topic in every direction until you can create your own opinion about it. So let them talk, they don't know and they don't know that they don't know. Don't try to tell them they won't listen, just laugh for being so wise.

Now you are probably seeing the point of this post. People around you, most of them unfortunately, aren't going to be supportive (whatever their reasons might be, and I'm not saying they are doing it on purpose, sometimes they are not.)
Let them talk, if what they say really bother you write it down and analyze it, it will make you feel better. That's what I call get the attitude, make sure that nothing, not even a little grain of sand, is coming between you and your goal.

Back to step 1
Back to introduction
Forward to step 3

Step 1 : Get addicted

En français
Here is finally the first step in the About learning series.
The basic idea to succesfully learn anything is to get addicted to it.
I can already hear people laugh: "Addicted, addicted, you're just kidding right".
Most of people I know tend to be scared by addictions.
Not that they don't have some just that they refuse to admit they have one because saying that you're addicted to something make you just looks weird.
I'm not going to say that all addictions are good, cause they are of course not.
If you're a drug addict, quit it already that's not what I'm talking about here.

So what's so good about addictions ? Or a better question, why do you need to get addicted ?

Lets take the example of language learning.
First you will need to spend a really huge amound of time on it. That already sound scary right ?
Lots of listening (watching movies, drama, listening music, radio...)
Lots of reading...

Being addicted is what is going to make you overcome the scary part.
If you decide to look a bit of a drama everyday during breakfast. It better be a good one. If you don't look forward to see what follows, if it's so deadly boring that you're ready to fall asleep as soon as the main character starts to speak.
Then you'll definitely stay in bed instead of getting up early enough to see more of it.
That's the main difference between someone addicted to what he is learning and someone who is not.

The addicted person is having fun, is motivated because his learning process has become as good as breathing.
The addiction allows you to look forward to do the 200 SRS repetitions programmed on your computer all day while you're at work.
The addiction makes you be sure that you won't lack batterie for your mp3 player because that would make you spend hours without the language you're learning.
The addiction is making you look for new things as soon as you're done with wat you are doing at the moment.

So to really learn something, create an addiction about it. Something that is going to make you go through all possible difficulties and keep the pleasure high. Learning something that you don't like is to difficult to really worth to try.

Why do you think geeks all speak Japanese ? Because they are addicted to manga of course :P

PS: One thing I almost forgot. You don't need to stay addicted to the same thing through the all process, changing your addiction want hurt as long as the new one still carries you toward your initial goal.

Forward to step 2
Back to introduction

About learning : Introduction

En français

Lots of people seems to be a bit confused about my way of learning things. Especially languages but the more I think about it the more I think it works the same for anything.
I was looking on the internet for advice and tricks at learning languages fast.
That's a good thing because that brings me to "All Japanese All The Time" which is a great source of comfort and inspiration for me.
But now I suddenly realized that I do speak 3 foreign languages more or less fine already.
So I decided to think more deeply about it and to write this "About learning" set of posts to share the way that makes me know those languages step by step.
Some of those step won't really be steps, maybe just thoughts about things around the learning process or about what you may have to face when learning and questions you may asked to yourself.
I'm not really clear about it yet, I have just few things programed so far and we'll see what'll happened.

The first thing I want to talk about, as a kind of introduction is the way I learned the 3 languages I already know so that you can get a feeling for what will follow.
I completely agree that language classes aren't good enough. But it's most likely because we are expected them to teach us everything which is a great misconception.
How could a finite amount of time and a finite list of vocabulary and grammar point could ever get us to know all the infinite nuances expressed in a language anyway ? you get what I mean.
Still I can say that I learned English, German and Italian in classes... kind of.
Classes have the good point of getting you started and giving you bases.















My learning of English started at school. The difference that makes me speak it now when the other kids don't is that as soon as I get to now the basic I started to borrow books in English at the library and to read them.
Of course I didn't get everything at first but I liked to pretend I did and continue on reading.
Plus my parents had a very old fashion set of English taps that I use to have on all the time in my room, thinking about it those tapes are so childish and unnatural English.
I also sang "Spice girls" song and Britney Spears until I new the lyrics by heart I can probably still sing some of them now.














German was a bit more difficult due to the lack of listening material. I forgot to mansion that I didn't have internet at that time.
My learning of German was for the first part in school with additional reading from library books (that was more difficult than for English) and tapes from the class text book.
The second part was two month of being au-pair in Berlin, that was so cool.
I took classes in the morning and watch so many cartoons in the afternoon. Kids are also really great teachers.
I think I read there the first German book I understood fully. It was Harry Potter 1. The kids gave it to me with the tapes, I spend few days in my room listening and reading the first chapter again and again, the other were then easier to understand.













Italian is the language I know the least, I had 7 years English at school and 5 years German but only 3 years Italian. That probably have a huge impact on it as I had less exposure to it.
My learning when through classes, listening a lots of Eros Ramazzotti (those song I still know them by heart for sure), reading library books and getting up at 5.30 am to watch the Victor Hebner classes on TV. Me who has so many problems to get up right now, I did it, for the sake of learning.

I think the main reason why I didn't think about the way I learned those languages, only saying that I learned them at school, without taking into account all the "extra work" I did, was because all that "extra work" wasn't feeling like work at all. It was actually just pure fun !!!

Now that you know everything here is the list of steps :
(That will be updated and transformed to link when the posts will be published)

Step 1 : Get addicted
Step 2 : Get the attitude !!!
Step 3 : Build up the environement