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!)

Since it’s late again, I’ll have to save the information for later.

Today, I hired some more people… 13 more back linkers and 6 article writers. Tomorrow I’m going to sit down and focus again on process and also send out some new orders to my worker in charge of site creation. I also did some investigating today on various forums about back linking methods to get more knowledge in that area.

One of my friends is urging me to create a new blog strictly to write about my endeavors in making money so I may decide to do that and keep more personal stuff in this blog. I am not sure though if I want to have two blogs to update each and every night!

In any case, I continued studying German tonight. When I went to the supermarket to buy dinner, I listened to one of the second unit exercises again that I had done yesterday. It actually worked quite nicely. I turned on the exercise when I left my apartment and it finished up just about when I got back to my apartment 20-25 minutes later.

I finished the rest of unit 2 and moved on to unit 3. Although I am not finished with unit 3 completely tonight because I got distracted talking to my brother and various friends of mine online, I will be sure to complete it tomorrow and move on to unit 4. Since it’s later, I don’t have time to add the unit 3 words to my notecard program but I will add them tomorrow along with unit 4’s vocabulary and see where I am at. Today, I did review all of the German words in my notecard stack without any problems so I am happy for that.

In any case, I am off to sleep again since it is already late.

I actually got quite a bit done today so I am pleased. I also started making a lot of moves including hiring new people to work for me to continue to build new sites. I also hired 7 back link builders who my sister will be commanding.

Since it is late, I will talk more about this business later. However, besides doing a lot of work today, I also got some German study in, as well.

I still have the last exercise to do for the second unit of the FSI German course but I think I have a fairly good grasp of it so I should be able to finish it tomorrow and get a good start on the third unit if not finish it also.

My favorite German word that I have come across so far is “wahrscheinlich” which just has a nice ring to it. The meaning of the word is “probably”.

As I did with the vocabulary from the first unit, I entered all the vocabulary from the second unit into my notecard program (Mnemosyne) bringing my total German vocabulary to 247 words. Not bad at all.

Unfortunately because I worked so hard today, I did not have any time to study Japanese so I will have to make sure to leave more language study time tomorrow night to finish up the second unit of FSI German, finish the third unit and also get some Japanese study in, as well.

Today it rained which I was quite pleased about since rain is one of my favorite kinds of weather. Ayaka told me online that the rain was actually part of a typhoon that came through. It seems that the typhoon was not very strong since it only rained a little bit and although I did see a bit of wind, it was also not very strong and didn’t last long. Unfortunately, it seems that tomorrow it is not going to rain much. Looking at the weather report though, it may rain later in the week so I am looking forward to that!

In any case, it is already late here so I have to hurry off to bed. Good night!

I, of course, ordered a Philly Cheesesteak and Ayaka had the same. Friday’s restaurant is probably one of the only places in all of Tokyo that one can eat a cheesesteak. It actually tastes pretty good considering that I am on the opposite side of the planet from where the food originated.

Before I left to go to Shibuya, I put the audio files for the FSI German course on my iPod Touch and as I rode the train and then walked home from the station, I finished up the rest of the audio for the first lesson.

The drills for the lesson are particularly repetitive and involve a lot of replacement within a standard sentence structure. Also, there is a lot of emphasis on giving the German translation upon hearing an English phrase.

I did pretty well considering that at times I had to concentrate on other things like stopping at the convenience store on the way back to my apartment to buy soap. I continued to listen and do the drills in my head even as I paid the cashier and said thanks in Japanese (????.

All in all, I was able to get through the drills pretty well but perhaps that is because it is only the first lesson and I have a good grasp of the material from my past German studying.

Another nice thing about the text which is part of this program is that it has a list of all the vocabulary used in the unit at the end. I figured out a way to take this list of vocabulary and import it into Mnemosyne which is the notecard program I use to study and review foreign language vocabulary.

So, I successfully imported the words from the first lesson to make a total of 107 words in my German stack.

I started to do the second unit as well tonight and did perhaps the first third to half of it. It is getting pretty late here so I will finish it up tomorrow night.

Tomorrow is Monday and I want to begin anew my efforts to make money online through various projects so for the next two weeks I am setting a daily goal to finish up some sites each and every day. It will take a bit of effort but I am hoping that the outcome will be worth it.

Also, I am in the process of updating my learnthatlanguagenow.com site. I hired a site builder to update the design and among other things I am going to add a forum for people to talk about language learning. I have also decided that I am going to use a text that I wrote sometime last year to create a new ebook which I will begin selling on the site, as well. I will probably also use this ebook as a way to get people to come to my forum (by sending out an e-mail to my mailing list, now around 2,337 people, and telling them I will give them a free copy if they sign up for my forum and make 2-3 posts or by some other similar kind of incentive).

I also have some other projects going on but I will get around to talking about them later.

For now, it is getting late so I am going to go to sleep and hopefully get some good work done tomorrow.

Good night!