Today I met with Ebine who is the guy who owns a stock fund company that invests in Thai and Vietnamese stocks. He was nice enough to sponsor my visa here in Japan. Today we met about a company that we are going to create that makes websites and other internet related ventures. At last we finally seem to be getting somewhere in terms of a reasonable idea that we can actually execute. So, I am pretty excited to see where it goes although I cannot be sure that this will work until the moment that we actually get our first customer. In any case, I am going to be designing our own company’s webpage and hopefully that will be out soon by the end of this week.
Also, the redesign of my site Learn That Language Now is coming along. I finally got a finished copy of my new ebook that I wrote (a 30 day training course for learning languages) from a graphic designer who spiced it up and made it look really nice. Now all I have to do is fill in some last bits of content on the new site design and set up some back end coding in order to handle automatic delivery of ebooks once a customer has bought one (before and now I just manually send an e-mail to someone once I see they have ordered a copy and paid for it).
My other website projects are coming along. I am slowly getting various systems of people working together running so hopefully in a week or two, I will have a smooth system that can output a high number of sites in a short period of time. It is somewhat of an investment on my part since I have to pay to have these sites created and promoted before I begin to see a profit from them but I am hopeful that it will be profitable. If nothing else, it is a very good learning experience.
Also the French video learning website I am creating with my friend Michael is almost at the point that we can open the doors to customers. I had to work out some kinks with the back end payment system that took a few days but tonight I finally got it working so I am very pleased with that.
The German studying is coming along. I have decided to do a lesson every few days instead of a lesson everyday since this will allow me to focus more on each lesson and learn everything in it. It will also take some pressure off me so I won’t feel bad if I don’t end up studying one day because I have to work late on various issues coming up in my work projects. In any case, I am almost finished unit 4 now. I am feeling a lot better about some grammar points that I remember having problems with back in high school. For example, feminine nouns in the nominative case take the definite article “die” and masculine nouns in the nominative case take the definite article “der”, however, in the dative case, feminine nouns take the “der” article! As you can imagine, this can get pretty confusing. I think the Foreign Service Institute program works out quite well for this point because it has drills that are just so repetitive that you cannot help but learn the grammar point. It is a kind of mindless drilling that seeps the grammar point into your mind so that it feels natural after a certain point. For this reason, I now have a pretty good handling of the feminine noun switching to “der” for just the dative case.
Also, I am still picking up words in Tagalog from one of my workers who is in the Philippines. I am able to learn them pretty quickly because I get to use them in a real context as I am talking to him about work. This continues to confirm the idea that it is much easier to learn a new language when you have additional meaningful context surrounding the words (rather than just studying them in an unnatural environment like a vocabulary list on a piece of paper in a book).
In any case, hopefully work will continue to go well for the rest of this week and I can start getting some projects towards the stage where I can present them to customers (the redesign of my Learn That Language Now site and the French video learning site, in particular!)