Sorma by Sezen Aksu | Cover by Peter Jendrichovsky and Vladimir Skultety

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to share a little piece me and my friend recorded in his house in the north of Slovakia. It is our cover of the beautiful Sorma song by Sezen Aksu. It was impossible to play it as nicely as the original, but we tried :)

My friend used to be one of the best classical guitarists in Slovakia and it was an honor to have him as my teacher when I was young as well as playing this song with him now. I've been playing the guitar since I was 14, almost completely stopped at one point but I am slowly starting to practice again and hope to completely get back into it again someday.  

Have a nice day,

Vladimir

My student's key takeaways

Hello everyone,

even though I try hard in my videos and in the articles I write to explain how I am learning languages, I don’t always succeed:) The reason is I’m too deep in the whole process and have been learning languages for so long that everything seems natural and when someone asks me to tell that person what I do, I start explaining stuff from the middle, talk about things I find important and do not necessarily transfer the key premises or elements my learning is based on.

That is why I love when there is someone else who can summarize what I do :) There is a nice Chinese idiom for this

旁觀者清

“Those, observing from the side see things more clearly (than those involved in whatever they are doing).”

Interview for gaudeo.sk

We all know what the word polyglot means. Do you consider yourself to be a polyglot? When did you find out that you have a talent for languages? What is your motivation when it comes to language learning? Is language learning something that fulfills you?

A polyglot is a person who speaks several languages, so technically a polyglot is already someone who speaks two. In reality, since there are a lot of opinions on how many languages and at what level a person has to speak in order to be considered a polyglot, it’s more complicated. I think that the lower limit is six languages at a C1 level.

For me personally, the word polyglot was always also associated with praise and to this day I have a problem to talk about myself like that. 

When it comes to when I realized I had a talent for languages, again, it’s a complicated question, because to talk like this about yourself is not easy, but I think I discovered it very early. Probably when I was about 6 or 7 years old. My motivation is most probably interest in foreign languages and foreign cultures in general.

How long does it take you to learn a new language? Lets say an easier one. How do you choose which language you are going to learn next?

Never give up

Two years ago, when I was probably at the lowest point in my life due to my back injury a friend of mine, Alex Voloza, asked me to answer a few questions for his project about motivation. He was probably hoping to get a lot of positive answers to questions like how to be and stay motivated and just overall long-term dedication, but I was very sad at that time and couldn't give him answers like that even if I tried. 

I was in a situation where I wasn't able to walk for 4 months, immobilized in bed, it was winter, I was home alone most of the time and all I did was think about everything I had learned about my life to that point. 

To give you some background on the injury, I was suffering from chronic back pain for about 10 years. I was gradually giving up on more and more of my activities that were bringing me so much joy, to one day when I completely tore my intervertebral ligaments and couldn't walk without excruciating pain. Doctors were sending me to invasive surgeries resulting in a very decreased quality of life and an almost certain inability to do sports later. Furthermore, the outcome of these surgeries was questionable and I wanted to take my time to make the decision. 

Understanding Chinese Characters

Learn to recognize 70% of Chinese characters you encounter in a few weeks.

Maybe you want to learn Chinese characters but don’t know where to begin. Or maybe you’ve started studying Chinese characters but found them difficult to remember. Or maybe you would like to have deeper knowledge about Chinese characters that is historically accurate but not overly academic.

Understanding Chinese Characters helps you understand Chinese characters for what they really are, combining the best modern Chinese character academic research with the best learner experience.

This book will give you a firm foundation in how Chinese characters are put together so that you have a deep understanding not only of the characters in the book but also countless other characters that you are likely to come across. You won’t be memorizing endless mnemonics to master each character—you’ll understand how each character sounds and what it means, based on its structure and history.

Books about Chinese characters are either very difficult to read, because they've been written by researchers and are not intended for the everyday learner, or are very reader-friendly and appealing like Chineasy, but are also very imprecise, incomplete, impractical and just frustrating.

Understanding Chinese Characters is easy to read and yet as accurate as the latest academic research allows.

Word sculpting

What is word sculpting?

Word sculpting is a way of learning words from top to bottom, slowly removing layers of difficulty on all levels. I started calling it like this for the lack of a better name, but it is pretty accurate actually. 

Imagine you're somewhere at a beginner - intermediate level in Mandarin Chinese and you'd like to learn the word 'situation'.

You ask your friend and they say the word situation in Mandarin is: qíng kuàng

You could either stress your brain and try to remember everything about the word perfectly on your first try - every sound, every aspiration, intonation, tones, word usage etc., or you could break the process down into steps:

Relax and just remember whatever you can in the first step. Lets say, you will only remember that there is an 'i' in the first word and an 'a' in the second:

Step 1: .i.. ..a..

The next time you have to say the word maybe you'll have an easy time recalling the 'i' and the 'a' and in addition you will think: Oh yeah, the first syllable was starting with an aspirated q sound:

Step 2: qi.. ..a..

List of UN country names in Chinese and their meanings

Recently I made a video which was a part of my Experimental Chinese videocourse teaching Mandarin Chinese without characters and without tones to complete beginners and someone asked a question about the story behind the word 美国 (the Chinese name for USA) in the comments. A discussion followed and since I love etymology, I thought it would be a good idea to write an article about the names of all countries in Chinese. (All UN member countries to be precise)

There are 4 types of country names in Chinese:

1. Names that have a meaning in Chinese (中國，日本，冰島)
2. Phonetic transcripts with no meaning in Chinese (斯洛伐克，捷克）
3. Names that are a combination of 1. and 2. （ 安地卡及巴布達， 白俄羅斯）
4. Abbreviations 
1. Abbreviations of longer 2. type country names（印尼， 阿根廷）
2. Abbreviations of longer 3. type country names（美國，德國，法國，澳洲 etc.)

1. Names that have a meaning in Chinese

中国  China (Zhōngguó)

中 means 'center' and 国 means 'country'. The most common way of translating this name is Middle kingdom, it is however not entirely correct. The term 中国 originally referred to kingdoms (plural) on the central Chinese plain in Ancient China that were collectively related to each other through the same Ancient Chinese culture and related languages. Equally, they were labeled Central kingdoms as opposed to the barbarian states and nations around them. Only later the name shifted from Central kingdoms to Middle kingdom.

Experimental Chinese - Lesson 1 | No characters, no tones

Translation

Hi, hello,
I am a Law school student,
My name is Wang Yinghong,
but you can call me A Hong.

Vocabulary

Hai = hi
ni hao = hello
wo = me, I
shi = to be
falü xi = department of law, law school
de = apostrophe "s", of the kind
jiao = to call
jiu keyi le = it's good like that

One of the reasons why Mandarin Chinese is so difficult to learn is that there are too many things students have to deal with as beginners. We have the structure of the language which is very difficult in itself, but then in addition to that, there is the very challenging pronunciation, especially tones, Chinese characters, a ton of words students have to learn, unpredictable syntax, cultural aspects of the language etc. All of this makes the language very challenging. It's almost as if a person who's never been to the gym before would be asked to benchpress 150 Kg on their first try.

Top 150 most useful frequent nouns

The following is the list of the top 150 most frequent, most common and most useful nouns to learn when learning a foreign language and its Italian translation.

It is based on about 5 different vocabulary frequency lists and my personal word lists which contain words that were occurring organically when I was learning languages from scratch or improving the languages I knew (Persian, Serbian, Polish, Cantonese, Spanish, Hungarian, French). This list contains only the most important nouns from all of these lists, that give you most language coverage, re-arranged so that they would roughly be ordered from the most useful, most general ones downwards.

I also worked on English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian (Cyrillic and Latin), Slovak, Hungarian and a Romance combo noun frequency list.

Buy other noun lists here

My Patreon page

Hello everyone. Recently, more and more people have been asking me whether I have a Patreon account. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Patreon is a way of directly supporting creators (video makers, bloggers etc.) you like. I never really thought of creating a Patreon account, because I don't actually create that much content and my philosophy has always been that since I've learned a lot on the internet for free, when I create online content, it's just my way of giving my little share back, also for free.

On the other hand, I too often wondered how I could support this or that writer or musician directly, I also give donations or send money to projects I like and if someone finds the videos I make or the articles I write helpful and can afford it and would like to support me a Patreon account is a very good way to do so. If you like my work and would like to show your support feel free to visit my Patreon page :) Thank you very much.

https://www.patreon.com/vladimirskultety