Judith's language learning blog

So I did 30 days of vegetarianism and 30 days of intensive Arabic study. The results are far from impressive.

Well, that’s it for the first half year of my language odyssey 2010.

Here’s the evaluation of what I did in the second quarter (May to July 1st inclusive):
47,5 hours of Chinese
28,5 hours of French
13,5 hours of Swahili
57 hours of Modern Greek
15 hours of Esperanto (only counting studying, not using the language)
4 hours of wanderlust (Spanish & Russian)

With regards to progress towards my goals, see this detailed post on the language-learning forum.

According to plan, my focus languages should be Arabic and Italian now, though I’m loathe to leave Greek now that I can finally enjoy Harry Potter in Greek! It seems I’m quite close to my goal there. With Swahili I’m progressing much more slowly than expected though, and even my Chinese and French haven’t benefitted as much as I had hoped, so this year will remain challenging.

For the next quarter, I’m tempted to see how far I can get by tackling Arabic intensively for one month before going back to my routine. I like the idea of a 30-day challenge that might help me discover new things about myself.

I’m also thinking of trying to go completely vegetarian for 30 days, because some people have reported significant increases in concentration and productivity from that. I’m already eating mostly vegetarian as I don’t like to cook meat. I only eat meat at restaurants, when invited somewhere or occasionally lunchmeat on bread. I wonder if eliminating it completely would have any effect – anyway I don’t think I’d miss it. If you’ve gone vegetarian, please let me know what your experience was.

(This is personal but also contains a lot of advice for those of you who might move to Berlin)

I grew up in a small town and I never thought that I could like a big city. The noise, the hectic, miles upon miles of concrete… I’m a fan of quiet and beauty and I have enough stress that I don’t need others radiating theirs onto me. Planning the future, I never saw myself winding up in a big city.

If you’re like me and several other forum members I know, you have books on all kinds of subjects and languages that sound interesting but that you may never study, you have dozens of started projects and you frequently re-decide what you want to concentrate your energy on.

I now found a book that seemed to know me better than I know myself. It also had an instant wowing effect on everybody else I know with the above-mentioned issues. The book is called “Refuse to Choose!
“, written by Barbara Sher, and after devouring it over Christmas break I can recommend it to everybody here. The book reveals more about yourself and puts you at ease with who you are, but since that was not much of a problem for me, I found another part most rewarding: the part where the author provides lots and lots of helpful tips and techniques to enable you to pursue your dreams. From where and how to start via time management techniques to how to finish projects that deserve to be completed (or that your boss/school requires), there’s a lot of helpful content.

Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

Go, also known as Igo, Weiqi (围棋） or Baduk, is one of the most ancient board games known to man. It was invented in China more than 2500 years ago. Recommended by Confucius himself, this game has been a standard part of preparation for a nobleman’s or warrior’s career. Spreading to Korea and Japan between the 5th and 7th century AD, Go became also one of the arts the Samurai trained. Asians believe that the Go board can not just represent the strategies and tactics of battle but also that it is a representation of life itself.

What I love most about Go is its surreal elegance. The rules are as simple as you could wish for, hardly more difficult than those of Tic Tac Toe, yet the game they create is so profound that you could (and some do) study it full-time a whole life long.

At every point, you have a choice between more than a hundred legal moves. This makes the game a natural target for AI research, since brute-force calculation is not an option. Humans however see slow, clunky moves, fast, swift and maybe even too reckless moves, ugly moves and moves of a zen-like beauty.

Go is a game I cherish, even if I can’t give it as much time as it deserves. If you would like to learn this beautiful ancient game, try the Interactive Way to Go or check out one of my lectures tomorrow: for Americans or for Europeans.

Finally, here are some of my favourite quotes about Go:

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.”
– from Shibumi , bestseller by Trevanian

“While the Baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.
– Edward Lasker, chess grandmaster

“That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.”
– Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

Let me introduce myself here in this first post.

My name is Judith Meyer, I’m a 25-year-old German girl living in Berlin with my American boyfriend, Chuck Smith. I originally come from Kamp-Lintfort, a small town near Düsseldorf, but I’ve been living in Berlin since March 2008 and I absolutely love this city!

I have a huge interest in languages, programming, politics, history, philosophy and methods of learning and teaching. My university major is French studies, with minors in computational linguistics (wish I could take that as a major!) and management. I just need to write my thesis to complete my degree, but it’s taking longer than expected because I work so much on the side. I tutor people in German, Latin and Esperanto over the internet, occasionally also French or English, and I work as the project manager of GermanPod101.com, also writing and recording most lessons. When I need a mental challenge, I like to program in Ruby on Rails or play the ancient Asian game of Go.

Read more about my starting point in each of the categories!