Japanese weekend in Slovakia

A taste of modern and traditional Japan in a small eastern European town. A little glimpse at Japanese calligraphy, Haiku, Haiga, Bonsai, Matcha tea and how to make it, Samurai and Ninja (but these told the public not to film them:)

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?

Pictograms

Pictograms are Chinese characters which really look like pictures of what they represent. 人 'person' for instance, is a picture of a person, 女 'woman' is a picture of a woman and 月 'moon' is a picture of a moon.

Woman

The problem with pictograms is, that since they consist of only a couple of strokes, at first glance it isn't always clear what they represent. The reason for that is, that they were created a long time ago (2500+ years ago) and they changed visually very much. When they were created, these characters resembled what they represented much more. 

My Books in Chinese - Part 2

Second part of the video where I talk about the Books in Chinese that I have in my library. 

Books in the video:

Ikebukuro West gate park 池袋西口公園

麻辣教師 GTO

麻辣教師 GTO 湘南14日

Lucifer's right hand 聖堂叛醫

Resident evil 惡靈古堡

Black Echo 黑暗回聲

那些年我們一起追的女孩

1Q84

今田一少年之事件簿

Chinese character types

Chinese characters look the same to us Westerners in the sense that they all seem equally complicated, but when we look closer, we find that there are actually many structurally different types of Chinese characters. Some of them are really pictures of whatever they represent, so for instance 人 'person' is really a picture of a person and 女 'woman' is really a picture of a woman. 

Then there are other types of Chinese characters, much more abstract and much more complicated, with fancy names like the phono-semantic compounds or derived characters and I would like to introduce them to you one by one. 

This series of articles will be an end result of a project which I have been working on for over three and a half years. I will be publishing a book on Chinese characters and wanted to give you a glimpse of what will be inside as well ask you for any comments or suggestions you might have to make the book as enjoyable and useful as possible. 

In line with my philosophy of minimalism and effectivisim, the book will be very clean and easy to use, combining the absolutely best modern Chinese character research with the best learner experience. 

A lot of time and effort has been put into transforming the complicated research data into easy to understand 'look once, understand immediately' chunks. No clutter, or lumping of information onto the reader. Just an enjoyable learning experience.

For more information and regular updates about this and my other projects feel free to subscribe to my mailing list. 

Learn more about:
Pictograms
Compound pictograms

My Books in Chinese

A video about my Chinese language books collection. A lot of people have been asking me, whether I can read and write in Chinese. I tried to talk about it a bit in the video. Hope you enjoy:) 

Books in the video:

Deathnote 死亡筆記本

Emerging 致命病毒

Kendaichi Ichi Shonen no Shikenbo 金田一少年之事件簿

Bakuman 漫畫王

Gantz 殺戮都市

Monster 怪物

Black out 黑幕追緝

Biomega 生化禁區

How to type in Chinese

A video explaining how to input Chinese characters on your computer and phone.

How do Chinese type on computers and phones? What is pinyin? How to use it? How to type in Chinese? People have asked me these questions several times and I posted a short video explaining just that on my youtube channel. Feel free to comment, like, share or subscribe. 

The Right Reasons

Many times I've been thinking about what the key to successful learning is and I'm convinced that it is strong will. Will stands at the origin of every action, including learning. Will makes you take the first actual step. And the second one. And the third one. Strong and lasting will makes you take enough steps to eventually learn what you need. 

At the origin of every will there is a reason. If you have the right reason, you'll have a lot of will. You'll have a lot of will to do what you want, for instance, to learn. More importantly, with a will that originated from a good reason, you will want to learn long enough. If you want to learn Chinese because you like Chinese food, you do not have the right reason. If you want to learn French because you have pleasant chills going down your spine when you hear the French language, you do. 

Strong will is an emotion, not a skill. You cannot practice wanting something very much, but you can have the right reason to which your mind will respond.

Try to work on the reason first. Everything else will be much easier later.

Top 5 tipp a sikeres nyelvtanuláshoz

Nagyon sok népszerű cikket és könyvet írtak a motiváció fontosságáról a nyelvtanuláshoz, a legjobb nyelvtanulási technikákról, a top 10 legfontosabb indok, hogy nyelvet tanulj vagy éppen arról, hogy hogyan válhatunk sikeres nyelvtanulókká. A blogomon általában olyan cikkeket írok, amíg eléggé specializáltak és így a célközönség is jóval kisebb. Gyakran beszélek különböző szempontok alapján a mandarin és más nyelvekről, ami talán nem annyira érdekes mindenki számára. Ezért is gondoltam dolgozhatnék egy kicsit olyan témákon is, amik inkább "átlagosak", hogy a blogom változatosabb legyen.

Próbáltam a dolgokat amennyire csak lehet egyszerűnek megtartani és a következő kérdést tettem fel magamnak: ha csak öt dolgot választhatnék, ami összefoglalja az én nyelvtanulási stratégiámat, mik lennének azok? Képzelhetitek milyen nehéz kérdés volt, még akkor is amikor a sok gondolkodás után rájöttem csak ötöt megnevezni nagy kihívás.

Kicsit megfordítottam a kérdést. Végül rájöttem, hogy amikor valami nem ment jól a nyelvtanulási folyamat közben, mindig elhanyagoltam egyet a következőkből:

Motiváció

Ráfordított erő

Teljesítmény

Következetesség

Ismétlés

Motiváció

Akár napi rutinod, akár nem a motiváció a kulcsa és valószínűleg a legfontosabb tényező a sorrendben, hogy jó eredményeket viszonylag rövid időn belül elérj. A legegyszerűbb mód, hogy bármit is megtanulj, hogy légy teljesen lenyűgözve és hozzá bilincselve. Sokszor mondták már és teljesen egyetértek azzal, hogy ha szereted amit csinálsz a) annyi időt tölthetsz ezt csinálva amennyit csak akarsz anélkül, hogy unottnak vagy fáradtnak éreznéd magad b) az idő amit arra fordítasz, hogy azt csináld amit akarsz az nem munka c) ha tanulsz valamit, amit szeretsz, akkor sokkal gyorsabban fogsz emlékezni dolgokra, habár beszélni egy nyelven az jártasság és nem fogsz rögtön jól beszélni, de nagyon sokat segít.

19 languages 15 minutes

Hello, everyone, 

I went to an event this May called the Polyglot Gathering Berlin 2015 and, in order to prepare for it, I practiced almost all the languages I’ve studied in my life. After the conference was over, I realized that I would probably never speak all these languages this well at the same time again and wanted to make a video to remember it.

Obviously, I did prepare for this video in the sense that I didn't just sit down in front of the camera and started speaking. I had a script in my mind for most of the languages and, as I say many times throughout the video, with the languages I don't speak that well, I asked for my friends' help.

In the video I speak: English, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Serbian, Farsi, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Dutch, Taiwanese, Japanese and Cantonese. 

Feel free to leave comments with your opinions or corrections. Any input is well appreciated.

Vladimir

P.S. If you like, you can follow me by email and receive notifications about new post on this blog. You can do that by subscribing to my mailing list via the 'Follow by email' field on the right.