I Did a 5 day 121.5 Hour Water-Only Fast: Here’s How It Went and What I Learned

About a month ago I did a 121.5 hour (5+ days) water-only fast and it was such an intense, insane, comprehensive and unique experience, that I decided to write an article about it. I monitored a lot of my metrics closely, did a blood test right before the fast was about to end and then did a control blood test 2 weeks later and I found out some interesting things that I thought were worth sharing.

Reasons

I’ve been doing intermittent fasting (16:8) everyday for 5 years now, main reason being that by doing so, one can achieve a lot of the benefits a prolonged fast (2+ days) can give you, without doing the actual prolonged fast itself. 

So naturally, I thought I would like to do a prolonged fast at some point too, as intermittent fasting or supplements mimicking benefits of prolonged fasting like resveratrol, fucoidan, metformin, spermidine etc., cannot compare in result intensity with what a real prolonged fast can do.

I did several 1-day fasts in the past and two 2-day fasts as well and wanted to try an even longer one. I decided to go for a 5 day fast mainly because of these reasons:

• Autophagy (cellular cleanup): during a prolonged fast, our bodies recycle all sorts of cellular ‘junk’ which isn’t really touched in times of nutritional abundance, like misfolded proteins or dysfunctional mitochondria. These can cause all sorts of problems like inflammatory responses from our immune system etc. 
• Sirtuin activation leading to DNA “repair”: Sirtuins regulate what a given cell is producing by switching the production of a given ‘thing’ on or off. They are basically little cellular molecular machines which physically turn genes in our cells on and off. The information theory of aging suggests, that as we grow older Sirtuins do not perform this function as well as they should and our bodies globally decline. A skin cell that is supposed to produce only skin cell proteins now maybe produces proteins that a bone cell should produce and vice versa. When our bodies are in ‘repair mode’ due to the lack of nutrients, Sirtuins are especially active.
• Stem cell activation, immune system reset: During a prolonged fast, the body also gets rid of dysfunctional immune cells, boosts immune stem cell production and replaces these cells with new well-functioning ones, effectively leading to an immune system reset.
• Reduced inflammation: due to ketosis (energy production from fat) and autophagy body inflammation is reduced
• Surge in human growth hormone levels (HGH): during the fast, HGH is overproduced up to 5 - 10 times more compared to our baseline values. HGH is a hormone which mobilizes our body’s resources to repair all kinds of tissues. While we fast, not much is going on in this regard, because we lack nutrients to do the repair, but after we reintroduce food into our system, adding supplements like protein isolate and collagen peptides, the lingering overproduced HGH then utilizes these to supercharge the repair process.
• To give my digestive system a break: just in general, as I will write later, giving the digestive system a chemical and physical break is a return to normalcy.

The mysteries of being perceived as a native speaker

I was working with the Airport police yesterday with an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. I spoke Farsi, she spoke Dari. I had heard Dari before and knew this sort of Farsi-Dari communication was possible and as no Dari interpreter was available, I was called in. I knew it would be hard but I have to admit, I did't expect I'd have so much trouble understanding her. 

After about 20 minutes the lady said in Dari, "let me try to speak in English, because Dari seems to be hard for you to understand". I automatically thought, well.. my Farsi is poorer than I thought. 

The thing is, if you speak Farsi really well, in theory you should be able to understand Dari pretty well too, so I thought it was clear the problem was my Farsi and not the fact that I didn't understand Dari too well. 

I continued speaking in Farsi and she spoke in English. After about an hour she asked: Where are you from? I said "Here." and pointed to the ground. To my surprise, she asked: "You are not from Iran?" 

Interesting ideas from the Lex Fridman Podcast

About two months ago I discovered the wonderful Lex Fridman podcast. It has kept me company most of my days since then and has made me pause and think about what was said by Lex or his guests and life in general really about a hundred times, thinking about some of the ideas mentioned long after the podcast was over.

As a tribute to this wonderful intellectual work, since I wrote some of the ideas I found really interesting into my little notebook, I wanted to post them as an article.

I intentionally didn't attribute individual thoughts or paragraphs to their authors (I did attribute them as a group at the end of the article) and there is a reason for that. I've been experimenting with a new concept (at least for me). I noticed that when I read an article by someone and don't know who wrote it or when I listen to a podcast and do not know anything about the person speaking, it's a completely different intellectual experience for me than when I know at least something about that person. Even seeing the picture sets up a certain preconception in my mind. When I know nothing about the person, I am much more open to that person's ideas, listen/read with much less prejudice and just have much less preconceptual junk in my mind influencing my listening in general.

When I listen to Lex's podcast (or any podcast) now, I skip the guest introduction, and let the 'ideas sell themselves'. I might read up on the guest afterwards, but not before the interview and I am trying to do this with articles I read as well (where possible). I have to say it really is a whole new intellectual experience:)

University research about expressing feelings in different languages - interview

I was approached by a university student who is doing research about how people express their feelings in different languages. This short interview will be a part of that research and I thought the questions in it were very interesting and wanted to share. Hope you enjoy.

What made you start learning languages?

I don’t actually know to be honest. I grew up in a multilingual environment, where most people around me spoke several languages and it was just natural to learn at least one or two for everyone I knew. I learned several languages as a child too and just continued learning as I grew older, because I liked being good at something and this was something I could do a bit better than others I guess.

How many languages would you say you speak fluently?

Érzések kifejezése különböző nyelveken

Miért kezdtél el nyelveket tanulni? 

Igazából nem is tudom. Többnyelvű környezetben nőttem fel, ahol a legtöbben körülöttem több nyelvet is beszéltek, így természetes volt, hogy megtanultam legalább egyet vagy kettőt közülük. Több nyelvet is megtanultam még gyerekkoromban, aztán felnőve is folytattam, mert jó érzés volt igazán jónak lenni valamiben, és ez olyasvalami volt, amivel kitűnhettem egy kicsit a többek közül.

Hány nyelven beszélsz folyékonyan?

Nehéz megmondani, mi számít folyékonynak, de talán 8-10 nyelvet mondanék, az anyanyelvemmel együtt. Folyékony alatt pedig azt értem, hogy legalább 85%-ban olyan jól, mint amennyire angolul tudok.

Hány országban éltél eddig?

Interview for Kosice Today about language learning

Polyglot Vladimir Skultety: Motivation is the key

He listens to news broadcasts in foreign languages daily and simultaneously translates them into Slovak or other languages for practice.

He is 31 years old, was born and grew up in Kosice, Slovakia, has lived in several countries and for the last five years in Taiwan. Vladimir Skultety has a Master’s degree in International relations and a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese studies. He currently works as a translator and interpreter of Chinese, English and Slovak. Czech not included, he can speak 10-11 foreign languages. Polyglot (Greek polys – many, a lot; glotta – language) – a person speaking several languages.

‘It is difficult to express the number of languages I speak with a number, because I speak some of them better and some of them not so well. If you are familiar with the A1-C2 language proficiency scale (A1 basic conversational abilities – C2 near native speaker abilities), in my life I have spoken about 8 – 9 languages at a C1-C2 level’ says Vladimir Skultety.

When it comes to individual languages he can speak, he has provided us with a list starting with the ones he speaks best: Slovak (Czech), English, Chinese (Mandarin), German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese and Farsi (Iranian, Persian).

New Youtube channel

Hello everyone, 

I have launched a new Youtube channel as a supplement to my blog, where I would like to share some ideas about langauge learning. I'm currently working on the How to write Chinese characters playlist in which you can find videos explanaining in detail how to write Chinese characters. In each video I explain how to write these characters, explain what writing rules apply to them and what details to look out for when writing them in order to write them correctly and give a little background about their structure and history. The characters for these videos were selected based on my character frequency research starting from the most frequent one. You can find more information about my character frequency study here.

In the future, I would like to do more videos like this on Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and other langauges as well. I would also like to record interviews with other fellow language learners and post them on my channel.

Hope you enjoy the channel and if you the videos useful, feel free to subscribe.

Vladimir

Interview with Luca Lampariello

Dear all,

a few weeks ago my good friend Luca Lampariello was kind enough to do an interview with me on his blog and I am very happy to say, that I can now return the favor and do an interview with him in return. Luca is a friend of mine whom I met about 3 years ago and based on our mutual passion for foreign languages and I think mutual respect as well, we became good friends. He speaks several languages at a C2 level and has been by many people proclaimed to be one of the best polyglots on youtube – a statement to which I subscribe.

I was thinking for a while about the topic, that would suit our interview best, since I didn’t want to talk about motivation or general language learning strategies, but rather something more specific, something that would be interesting and useful at the same time. I know very well, that I have lost the capability to acquire a 95-100% native pronunciation in a foreign language, but I think Luca is one of those people that still can do it and since it is something that interests me very much and something I personally can learn a lot from, I decided to ask Luca questions related mainly to his accent acquisition techniques and native-like pronunciation development.

My language history

I was born in Kosice in South-east Slovakia, which at the time was Czechoslovakia. As our city is only 20 km away from the Hungarian border, a lot of people living in our city speak Hungarian to some extent and my mother, even though I was of completely Slovak origin, decided to put me into a Hungarian kindergarten to learn the language which I acquired as a secondary native one. Living in Czechoslovakia, we were constantly exposed to the Czech language as well, so by luck or chance, I grew up with three native languages (even though I didn't use Czech actively until I was a student in Prague in 2007). I continued my studies at a Slovak elementary and later a secondary grammar school. At the age of eight I went to USA and at the age of 12 to Austria, learning both German and English almost to a native level of a 15 year old American or Austrian/German kid, which are both levels that I have sadly lost now.  

Jazz fusion

Back in 1996 my guitar teacher gave me a tape recording of the 1982 Friday night in San Francisco concert by Paco de Lucia, John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola. I knew little about guitar music and was very lucky to be introduced to these three composers so early on. They had a great impact on me as a music listener and occasional player. Although I am far from being a professional, guitar playing and improvisation alone or in duets is a great source of joy for me. After being introduced to these composers I listened to a lot of works from all three of them and gradually got to know more and more music outside of my traditional musical library, which back then consisted mostly of hip hop (which is not a bad thing either).

Since there is a great number of jazz fusion artists and since some of the readers maybe have never listened to Jazz fusion, I will try to introduce some of the players that I have been listening to over the years and the kind reader has to rely on my musical taste which he/she of course may or may not like. I am not an expert on jazz fusion or music in general, but I do like to listen to beautiful musical melodies and nice harmonies that have deeper ideas and I hope that some readers who don't know jazz fusion or have never heard of Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucia or John McLaughlin might come to love their music just as I did.

My interview on www.foreign-languages-guide.com

Not that I am such a narcissist that I would enjoy posting things other people wrote about me on my own blog, but since this is the only time ever anyone interviewed me and my first and only interview, I though maybe this situation is a little different :)

FLG: How many languages do you know and what are they?

Vladimir: When posed with this question, I always have a problem giving a good and objective answer and a one that doesn’t get boring after 20 seconds of explanation.

Unfortunately in order to be accurate, it is difficult to say how many languages one knows and what it means to actually know a language.

For someone knowing a few simple sentences or being able to conduct a simple conversation in a language means "knowing a language" and some people say that no matter how hard or how long you study, you can simply never know a foreign language well enough, since there is always space for improvement.

It is also difficult to say how well one speaks the language itself and there is no impartial way to determine that. Some people are great with language tests but fail when it comes to real life discussions, some speak with native accents but cannot read books or they commit frequent grammar errors and have limited vocabulary and expressions.