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Linguaholic

kaiiren

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Everything posted by kaiiren

  1. I argue against the notion that "speaking the same words has a great impact on relationships." I think its much, much more likely that speaking the same words indicates or predicts a healthy relationship. So, it's not like the action itself is encouraging a great relationship - the action itself is the product of a great relationship.
  2. I would personally be reluctant to teach Japanese to anyone for the following reasons: 1) I'm not a good teacher. 2) I'm not that great at the language yet. 3) It's a MASSIVE amount of time to invest in something. Perhaps your friend is thinking along one of my talking points.
  3. I'm not sure if there are specific vitamins that you can use to improve precisely Broca's area of the brain. However, generally speaking, living a healthy lifestyle helps you learn better. I can attest to this from personal experience - I've noticed pretty significant improvements in cognitive tasks depending on my health at the time - and here are a few of the top ones for me: 1) I avoid sugar as much as possible, it screws with so much in your body. 2) 50% of any meal you eat should be COOKED veggies. 3) Caffeine and L-theanine works wonders. I get this from drinking about 2-3 cups of organic green tea a day. 4) I exercise 30 mintues of cardio 5 days a week. Hope this helps!
  4. !00% agree with this too. Watching media in the language you're trying to learn most certainly helps you with many elements of speaking a language - pronunciation, regional variations, sub-cultural differences, etc. I've been working my way up from children's shows to more adult-oriented material these days, myself.
  5. Well, I suppose it depends on how bad the name was, really. I mean, there's a big different between "dummy" and "****ing idiot", you know? But I definitely agree that you have to draw the line somewhere. After all, name calling you in a language that you can't really speak that well doesn't give you that much opportunity to counter/combat that person on your terms. As such, name calling in this circumstance becomes some sort of social power play, which can quickly become fatiguing to deal with.
  6. I haven't had anyone say that to me yet, but I expect the general trend would be for more people to learn languages through hard work rather than talent. In this case, I agree with you OP - I can understand how it would seem very disheartening to see your hard work minimized by someone who doesn't understand the hundreds of hours you must've put into study. Maybe if they were learning a language, too, then they'd understand how you felt.
  7. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, scientific studies have demonstrated that when someone is feeling angry or upset, their pre-frontal cortex shuts down, as the lower limbic systems override decision making processes. So in other words: your rational mind literally shuts down as your emotional mind takes over. Furthermore, the areas of the brain responsible for language are heavily interconnected with the areas of the brain responsible for reasoning. So what happens to me is that I switch immediately to English and start berating whoever I'm talking with in an upper-class English accent x.X
  8. This might sound a bit of a cop-out, but it's not, really. My greatest accomplishment was simply starting. No, really - before I committed on New Years Eve to learn the Japanese language, I'd spent about 5-ish years telling myself, "I'll start to learn this language eventually." It wasn't until NYE that I finally made a solemn pledge with myself to actually START learning the language, come up with a plan, goals, ect., that kind of thing. ^_^Y
  9. This sounds really embarrassing, but I have to come out with it eventually, I suppose. I've watched Anime for quite some time now, subbed. And then one day I thought to myself, "Dang, I'm watching so much of this stuff subbed, literally 100s of hours... why don't I just learn the frigging language already?" So, that's what I decided to do Because, otherwise it'd be a bit embarrassing, really, to be watching 100s of hours of something in a foreign language, yet not be able to speak that language itself. That's just my personal opinion though ~_^Y
  10. I think its complete bunk. It comes from the whole "multiple intelligences" movement that is being continually debunked by cognitive psychologists to this day. Rather, what cognitive scientists have discovered is that people are either of high or low GENERAL intelligence, and that people who score higher on G tend to be better at everything. So people who are naturally intelligent are better at languages AND science, at art AND mathematics. I think the multiple intelligences misconception arises from what I like to call "the price of attentional sacrifice". Mainly, the idea that whenever you focus your attention, you're neglecting to attend all other things other than that which you're focusing on. So basically, you increase your skills at whatever you attend to... but you're neglecting your skills at everything else. Therefore, for people who are "good at music but terrible at math" - its not that they're innately bad at math, it's just that they've spent more time doing music than math, so of course they're going to be better at it. Same with people who are "good at science but art" - think about all the serious scientists that have been good at art too, I can barely think of any off the top of my head, because their attention was on SCIENCE, not ART. However, if they were good at both, then that's probably because they're a genius, that they have high G. But there's very few of those types of people, because those types of people are inherently geniuses.
  11. For me, my journey of learning Japanese started with my love of Japanese culture and entertainment. If I never felt a cultural connection with Japan, I would've never started to learn the language. Even today, when I studied some Japanese, I thought to myself "Grrr.... this is starting to get really frustrating." However, when I thought about my love for its culture and my true desire to understand the Japanese, I felt myself much more motivated to continue my study session! :-)
  12. Like some people have said in reply, I think that it's a good idea on paper. However, I doubt it'd be a viable idea for many reasons, despite its obvious utility. I imagine some of them being: many people crying cultural imperialism/western imperialism (world language would probably be english...), loss of cultural stability from loss of mother tongue, older people generally bucking the trend and making universal adoption - these and other reasons would drive nails into a OWL movement :/
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