The Journey of 1000 MILES!

While you may well be right about the usefulness of learning a language like Mandarin, you, like so many others in the world overestimate how difficult learning asian languages is. I can only assume this is because of the mystification of foreign language that happens in American public schools. There is little necessity to learn foreign languages living in most parts of the US and Canada, so its understandable that this attitude exists for that reason as well.

People think that you need to “learn” a language. Understandable as well, seeing as that’s how almost all people tend to have language thrown to them in the silly educational systems that are government funded. Language is something that we simply get used to, by doing things in that language. I agree, if you try to learn Mandarin, you will have an incredibly difficult time. It will be harder than learning Spanish or French.

However, if I just go do stuff in Mandarin that is fun and engaging then, well, after enough time those minor inflections that change the meaning or words are easy to spot…what people say makes sense…the way I think starts to enter a new operating system. 

The methods for approaching language in the world today have created a completely understandable over-hyping of how hard it is to get a new language to enter our thinking. 

If you are interested in a much better and more proficient explanation of loads of these methods, check out www.ajatt.com (All Japanese All The Time). The website is run by a guy who learned Japanese from 0-Fluency in 18 months. His principles apply to any language…check it out, who knows, maybe you’ll find that getting used to a new language is easier than you think and not a waste of time :-).

evulcapitulist:

The new chic, cosmopolitan thing is apparently to learn-or attempt to learn-Mandarin Chinese as a second language. This is because, as we’ve all been told repeatedly, China is going to replace the US as the great world economic power, and therefore the business language of the future is Chinese,…