(no subject)
Feb. 2nd, 2005 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanFirst, the memeage.
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
Hopefully to increase muchly after this year's Golden Week. It doesn't look that impressive, but I've visited several of the same countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, etc.) more than once.
And:
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
This list would be about five times larger if I were to include all the states I've had air travel layovers in.
Today I translated the membership contract of my local gym into English for the gym owners, who are not bilingually enabled. I took one glance at the contract and read it as fluently and quickly as if I was reading English, then translated that bastard like it wasn't no thing. I'm so happy with the progress I've made in this language, and am really looking forward to translating/interpreting full time.
Tangentially, there's nothing like learning a third language in a second language to really revise one's knowledge of the latter. I've reached a dangerous stage in my Japanese learning where people very rarely have any trouble understanding what I'm saying to them. On the one hand, this is good. On the other, it means that I no longer get a lot of valuable feedback. It's understandable; no one wants to be the asshole who corrects the second language speaker's faulty constructions and unnatural phrasing, especially if what they intend to say is clearly evident despite the mistakes. (Also, corrections break the flow of conversation.) So the fact that I'm learning very basic Korean constructions in Japanese means that I'm going back and revising all the basic Japanese grammar I've been fudging with English constructions.
And lord, I just realised that if I ever do manage to become functionally fluent in Korean, I'll probably try to learn Chinese through it. I'm going to be one of those serial language learners (and already am, seeing as I've already formally studied four foreign languages for longer than a year, and as many others on my own in private). I love the excitement of it, and the fact that you can never finish learning a foreign language - it's perfect proof against boredom.
That will be all.
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
Hopefully to increase muchly after this year's Golden Week. It doesn't look that impressive, but I've visited several of the same countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, etc.) more than once.
And:
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
This list would be about five times larger if I were to include all the states I've had air travel layovers in.
Today I translated the membership contract of my local gym into English for the gym owners, who are not bilingually enabled. I took one glance at the contract and read it as fluently and quickly as if I was reading English, then translated that bastard like it wasn't no thing. I'm so happy with the progress I've made in this language, and am really looking forward to translating/interpreting full time.
Tangentially, there's nothing like learning a third language in a second language to really revise one's knowledge of the latter. I've reached a dangerous stage in my Japanese learning where people very rarely have any trouble understanding what I'm saying to them. On the one hand, this is good. On the other, it means that I no longer get a lot of valuable feedback. It's understandable; no one wants to be the asshole who corrects the second language speaker's faulty constructions and unnatural phrasing, especially if what they intend to say is clearly evident despite the mistakes. (Also, corrections break the flow of conversation.) So the fact that I'm learning very basic Korean constructions in Japanese means that I'm going back and revising all the basic Japanese grammar I've been fudging with English constructions.
And lord, I just realised that if I ever do manage to become functionally fluent in Korean, I'll probably try to learn Chinese through it. I'm going to be one of those serial language learners (and already am, seeing as I've already formally studied four foreign languages for longer than a year, and as many others on my own in private). I love the excitement of it, and the fact that you can never finish learning a foreign language - it's perfect proof against boredom.
That will be all.
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no subject
on 2005-02-01 04:27 pm (UTC)IME, you are a serial language learner whether you want to be one or not!
My languages, in (more or less choronological order) are:
Formal study - Latin, French, Japanese, and Korean. (I'm not counting Spanish, which I only had for a semester.)
Self study - Scots Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, and Turkish.
The wishlist: Chinese, Lakota, Russian, Egyptian, French Creole, and maybe some other endangered languages.