I have decided to take this blog up once again and continue to write here. I am not really sure where to begin writing since I stopped writing here some time ago and many things have happened since then. While I was living in Yokohama last year, I did not write at all so many of my adventures have not yet been recorded. I suppose I will begin to simply write about what I am doing now and as I remember my adventures over the last year or so, I will write about them, too.
I moved back to Tokyo, Japan about a month ago (on September 25) and currently I am continuing my efforts to make money online through various projects I am doing. At the moment, my profits are somewhat weakening but on the other hand, I am putting much effort into projects that I hope will flourish in the near future. Perhaps I will be able to reap my harvest later much like how this old favorite song of mine alludes to that I recently came across today again:
“No tardo en comenzar mi camino hacia la meta
Como un soldado me quedo solo en la trinchera
Quiero ser como el atleta que en primer lugar llega
Sembrador que después recoge la cosecha”
You can listen to it here: Fermín IV – Consejo
I am not sure if I should translate the lines or leave them up as a puzzle but since I suspect most of you reading this are not interested in language puzzles, I will just go ahead and translate it for fun:
“I don’t take time in starting my path towards the goal
Like a soldier I remain alone in the trench
I want to be like the athlete that in first place arrives
The sower that afterwards collects the harvest”
Reading my translation in English now, it does not sound nearly as good as the Spanish. Not only does it no longer rhyme but it seemed to make slightly more sense in Spanish than in English.
In any case, I will get around to talking about my various internet projects in the posts to come.
Today, I decided that I wanted to put more effort to learning languages. These past couple of weeks, I have really just been spending my hours towards work and considering it is not 100% necessary that I work that hard at this time, I thought it would be a fun idea to pick up learning languages again since that is what I have always wanted to do when I got the time.
So, I have decided that I am going to start learning German in addition to increasing my knowledge in Japanese. My friend Michael Dreyfuss started learning German on his own recently and it was with him originally that I started learning German from a tutor back when we were in high school.
I have decided that I am going to go through the Foreign Service Institute course for German. The Foreign Service Institute is a United States government department that trains diplomats and other personnel who need advanced foreign language skills to do their work.
Back in the 50s, the Foreign Service Institute developed these language programs to train diplomats efficiently and quickly. These programs have since been released to the public and although they are some of the most comprehensive programs available for learning languages, they also show their age. The accompanying workbook looks like it was written on a typewriter and the program centers mostly around rote repetition to a very high degree.
Also, some of the explanations are amusing. Take this bit about the classification of German noun genders:
“4. Insofar as the basic stock of German nouns is concerned (nouns like house, grass, sky, wine, beer, milk), there is absolutely no sense or rationale to the classification system; there is no way at all of anticipating which class any given noun belongs to. You must simply learn the word for ‘the’ as apart of the noun: the German word for ‘wine’ is der Wein. And you must practice saying der Wein often enough so that das Wein or die Wein sounds as wrong to you as ‘The father of his country — Henry Washington.’
5. Now, Henry Washington is a perfectly good name; but it’s wrong, and every American knows it’s wrong. By the same token, das Wein is a perfectly good form; but it’s wrong, and every German knows it’s wrong. In time, you will too.”
There is just something amusing to me about this writing… especially that line: “Now, Henry Washington is a perfectly good name; but it’s wrong, and every American knows it’s wrong.”
My goal is to try to complete one lesson from this program a night. There are 24 lessons total making up 2 volumes. I think generally the Foreign Service Institute programs take one to an intermediate level in the language so I should be speaking basic German by the end of next month hopefully.
I have determined that I will do mostly work during the day and then use the night time for language study. Earlier this month, I was doing my Japanese studies as one of the first things I did when I woke up by sitting down at my computer and entering in all of the unknown Japanese words I had come across in my reading of novels and then looking up their definitions in Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. However, language study to me seems like something better reserved for the night time so I am going to try doing my language studies at night now.
Wish me luck! I’ll have to see how this new schedule goes.
Oh, by the way, I almost forgot to mention… you can check out all of the Foreign Service Institute programs for free at this site.