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

Spanish versus Korean

En français
So I have been learning Spanish for a while now, or should I say, I have been trying to learn Spanish.
What I'm mostly doing is using pimsleur, (when I don't forgot) and reading from the travel blog ¿Donde andan estos?. At the beginning of course I tried to implement a Spanish environment by listening to Spanish music, watching movies in Spanish but as much as I wanted to do it, keeping the Spanish environment turned out to be more difficult than expected. Each time that I was starting to do something in Spanish, I wanted to do it in Korean instead.
Having my Korean environment on is something absolutely natural for me. I can switch it to Japanese without problem when I'm studying my kanjis or decide to watch Japanese cartoon. I also don't have that much problem to switch it to Chinese. But with the Spanish for some bizarre reasons, that completely different. I can watch a movie and listen to some music, without too much problems but after a while that becomes kind of painful and stressful. I think the reason is that I'm not that much into it.

Reading the blog in Spanish is easy. I'm not saying that I understand everything, I'm saying that with my background in French, Italian and Latin, understanding most of it is really easy. That should make me happy but at the contrary I find it extremely frustrating. The words are so close to the one I'm used to, the sentence structure as well, but I don't remember those words as Spanish words, I remember the translation. It's like my mind is translating everything all the time. I don't really feel that I'm learning something.
And now I realize how important that feeling is. That's probably what keep me going with the Korean environment and the kanji repetitions, that sense of achievement when I finally, (accidentally ?) understand a sentence or remember a kanji without struggling.
With the Spanish I didn't feel anything like that yet. Maybe I need to be more Spanish, to have more fun in Spanish. It's a bit of a conflict between something that I really like and enjoy, learning Korean, because I completely felt in love with that language sometimes ago for no particular reasons and Spanish that I'm learning a bit because I feel that I have too.
Getting ride of my Korean even for a short time to do some Spanish feels more like a core than like something really helpful.
I'll keep on trying, we'll see how it goes in the future.

Iceland : Jökulsárlón

En français















We get up early as we have a long way to Jökulsárlón. Jökulsárlón is a sort of lake created from the Glacier and finding his way to the Atlantic ocean. It is famous for the iceberg falling from Breiðamerkurjökull (that's the name of the Glacier).
We spend the morning there, looking at the icebergs and the seals swimming in the lake and warm up ourselves with a little bit of the delicious local fish soup.


Travel table of content

Amigurumi : Kodama

En français
In もののけ姫 (Princess Mononoke) we met strange little forest spirid called Kodama.
I made one for my fiancé last Christmas as he is a fan.