Don't worry about making mistakes

I made a new video on my channel about making mistakes in language learning.

Don't worry about making mistakes too much and stay away from teachers who are too strict to beginners. This will all slow you down and create unnecessary stress and will lead you nowhere. Correcting mistakes is of course necessary but it is almost an art form. There is a time and place for every correction and talented and experienced teachers know when to correct a student.

Which language should you learn?

In one word: English

If you speak English well already, then: Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic or Russian

If you need to learn a language for work, then: learn the language of the country where you will be working, or the country at which your work will be aimed at.

If you'd just like to learn a language because you like learning languages, then: pick whichever language you are attracted to emotionally.

Learning languages has always been very popular. At least in countries where learning foreign languages is necessary. The most important language from where I come from to learn is English and if you would ask me, which language should you learn or work on for economic or career reasons, I would not hesitate one moment and say, you should learn English. The languages you should choose to learn however often do not depend on how much money you can make knowing them or by how much better your career prospects will be. Many factors are very individual and greatly depend on the reason why you'd might want to learn the language more than anything (obviously).

The reason

There are several reasons why you might want to learn a foreign language and usually it's one of the following:

Compound pictograms

A compound pictogram is a Chinese character used in Chinese writing, which combines two or more simple pictograms into one character in order to convey a more complex meaning. 看 for instance is a compound pictogram:

Some other examples of compound pictograms include:

投 to throw 
扌hand
殳 spear

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.