Japanese great success

I could talk! Yesssssss!

This week I was helping in the organization of an event, and there were a few japanese presenting their papers. I could talk a bit with them about their work and tell a bit about the city I live. Easily! Hurray!

Mandarin project begins!!

Ok, after French I'm now going for Mandarin.

I think I'll have more success now because I'll manage to do the study from Chinese to Japanese, that's it, I won't abandon Japanese, like I was more or less doing with French.

So for 1 week I watched Taiwanese TV and I'm already getting used to a few sounds. Unlike Japanese, Chinese sounds are really different from Portuguese and I'm finding them quite challenging to get used to.

Well, I grabbed this sentence pack (http://smart.fm/lists/132095) from last.fm and used the anki plugin to withdraw them. I now have a deck with 540 cards with 2 models.

Reading: Chinese sentence -> Japanese translation

Listening: Chinese audio sentence -> Chinese with Japanese translation

Handbook of Bilingualism

This is a book recommendation for those wanting to learn about second language acquisition.
It is not about learning languages it is about how people learn languages.

Check it by yourself and be surprised on how much it tunes in with AJATT and Kaufman's views.

It is really fun how it debunks old research, specially about grammar based learning and the critical period hypothesis.

The first chapter is about learning vocabulary!
One thing that I found really interesting is that it says that each word generally has about 25 meanings and more than that, these meanings evolve with time.

There are 2 chapters that talk about brain function and have pretty pictures of brain imaging comparing Early Second Language learners and late second language learners with poor or great skills. It seems the brain gets less and less active with the improvement in skill in the language.
The book didn't got to this conclusion, but isn't it maybe the vocabulary solidifying?

Btw, the link is here:
http://tinyurl.com/o5tjvb

Final Fantasy XIII news and Famitsu

If you like games you might like to follow a few new sites to be aware of what's going on in the scenario.

This generation, for the XBOX 360 and the playstation 3, unarguably the best games are coming from west, so for most of the games you'll want to read the news in English, as they were written, not a clumsy translation to Japanese.

But there are still many Japanese titles you don't want to miss, one of them might be Final Fantasy XIII. So, welcome to Famitsu:

http://www.famitsu.com/review/title/0000/0000/0001/9553/

Btw, the thing I don't like about it is this:
※詳しくは週刊ファミ通2009年9月10日号（2009年8月27日発売）をチェック！

Does someone know a better source of news?

New, blank anki deck + New anki kicks ass

I just created a new, blank anki deck. I still have my old one somewhere, but it's been some time I don't open it anymore. There still vocabulary I'd like to use anki to learn so I threw that out and created a new one.

Btw, new Anki ROCKS!!!
This new reading generation system + furigana is AWESOME.
5 stars of 5.

Also I read the first volume of Kimi no Todoke. Even if you don't like Shoujo manga (like me) it is very entertaining. I give it 4 stars of 5.

Claymore chapter 94

Wheew, very tense. When will this act come to an end? And how?

The secret to speech

When I find out I'll tell you!

I new reached a stage that even thought pronunciation is super easy, my speech ability is still very weak. But I do I feel it improves a bit everyday, even without virtually no effort. So I just keep doing what I always did.

When I'm closed in my mind I can speak what I want, but when I face a real opportunity I simply can't maintain the pace. I can't come up with words at the required speed. Like an iceberg, the words are there, but very little shows up on the surface. I'm afraid of doing mistakes or I feel ashamed of what I might say.

I feel what I need now is not really output training, it is social interaction.