Conclusion

The key goal of my blog was not to spoon feed you the answers to perfect language learning. Motivation and individuality is what allows people to learn languages. What I can do in the future is provide things like lists of verbs and vocabulary that I learned, if the demand is there. The main goal of my blog was to inspire people to do better for themselves. You have witnessed me learn 2 languages in 3 months because I decided I had the balls to do something different. I am now very happy with my level in both languages. I do not feel I need to go to a foreign country to learn a language anymore. Motivation and desire surmounts any obstacle in life. I decided a few weeks ago that I was no longer going to spend 6 months at this. I changed the title of the blog to ‘within’ which means I could finish whenever I felt I had reached my objectives.

It is important to remember that in order to excel in languages in the real world you cannot read from a script because life is unscripted. You cannot plan every detail. When writing my blog and making my Youtube videos very little was planned. I had a rough outline but never any detail. This is how I like to live my life. I do not wish to live my life like a zombie, without spontaneity I will never be able to feel alive.

Fluency like all things in life is what you interpret it to be. No two people will ever have the same interpretation on fluency. A lot of people who have read my blog may be completely LOST. This is because I learn languages through LIFE and not just from the classroom. In order to excel in languages you have to study how society functions and an important part of society is people. This is why languages are found in the Arts and Humanities Department at University Level. I always took this little thing for granted until I did this blog. Fluent6months is not the same person as Denis Murphy because Fluent6months is my interpretation of LIFE. FILE was my original name for Fluent6months. This was because FILE is an acronym of LIFE.

People say that ignorance is bliss, however I have always prefered the saying 'Never judge a book by it's cover'. If you don't take the time out to read the book then you can never really have a justified opinion on it. The book will always change according to the reader. Always remember that ill informed opinions and decisions will come back to bite you on the arse. The difference of this bite being a hickey or a bruise will inevitably come down to whether your underlying intentions were good or cruel all along!

Don’t make it boring:

Living for the weekends is not the ideal way to live your life. No matter how ‘crazy’ you make your weekends I doubt if they will ever make up for wishing away nearly 70% of your life! If you are stuck in a job you hate and you yearn to do something else, then what is stopping you! Think outside the box, there is no such thing as a problem without a solution. You will never find a bunch of nettles without dock leaves nearby. Unless of course some ‘clever’ person uprooted all the dock leaves. If you are a person that will consider this ‘clever’ person then consider this first; if you live your life worrying about things that are out of your hands then there will be very little actually left inside them!

This is one of the reasons that I constantly change my methods as I go along. People who know me will probably tell you the same thing. I even do this with my eating habits. I will discover something I like, eat it endlessly for a period of time and then get totally sick of it and move onto something else. Yes, my eating habits are very similar to that of a pregnant woman!

After about 2.5 months I now watch ANYTHING I want in Spanish and Italian. I watch various different videos on Youtube and I now have my own favourite programmes that I watch on the Spanish channels on television. I watch everything as if I am watching something in my native language. What is the key thing that you do when watching something in your native language?

You RELAX! It’s a pastime! People watch television in order to unwind after a day’s work. This is how I now approach watching television, regardless of language. I noticed that a lot of language learners will become tense and uptight when watching something in their foreign language. I know this because I used to be exactly the same way.

You will try and understand every word and then you are almost in tears if there are words that you do not understand. This gets even worse if an ‘external examiner’ in the form of a friend, that does not speak your foreign language, enters the room. When this used to happen to me when I was younger I would start to panic internally. I would panic because I knew there were questions to come and I always wanted to appear like I was really good at French to people. This was because I love languages! Ironically, most natives of your foreign language will not examine your knowledge of their language when you are watching the television among them. Why? Because they are watching the television! Nobody likes to be interrupted while watching the television, has Homer Simpson taught you anything!

Here is my new approach to this ‘external examiner’s’ questions.

Caution:

Response number 1 is not for everyone. Sometimes you can use the most disrespectful way of saying things, with respect, in order to bring a smile to someone’s face! Languages are not just about words!

In order to use the response you need the following; you need to identify the people that will take it in the light hearted spirit intended. You must deliver it in a respectful way, with a smile and with the intention of continuing it up with small ‘chit chat’. Even then it doesn’t work 100% of the time, there are always exceptions to the rule! I only ever use a response similar to response 1 with the people I am relatively familiar with and enjoy talking to.

The typical response by the other person is a laugh and a response like ‘Your such a gobshite’.

What did he say there?

Response 1 : Ah, I think he said shut your mouth, I’m in the middle of watching this.

What did that mean?

Response 2: I was as lost as you there mate.

What is going on?

Response 3: I think someone stole that farmers pig, it’s either that or he is looking for a gig because he pulls out his fiddle from time to time for some odd reason.

Almost everyone knows the rule: ‘you must never translate directly from one language to another’. Things just don’t work that way in language land. If there is one thing I learned from learning Irish it is this: You cannot put the cart before the horse. One of my teachers, I’m not sure exactly who, drummed this into my head without me realising it. I’m sure she had a farming background or at least was raised reading the book ‘Animal Farm’.

The rule is all well in good in the fairytale kingdom of the academic world. This is where everyone goes around talking to each other by writing messages. Thankfully there is a basic rule to languages that exists for listening and speaking in the real world. In order to watch something or talk to someone your key is to get at the gist of the story, nothing else! Communicating to people is all about getting the gist of your story across! If people can pick up on the gist of your story then they can understand it and then they can go about spreading your message to other people. The individual words do not matter. When was the last time you were told a message and you were able to recite it a few minutes later using exactly the same words that were given to you? This is one of the key ideas that an interpreter must pick up on in interpreting 101.

So relax and unwind! I have been perfecting this art ever since I was a child! I never could manage to pull every weed in the flower bed or mow the lawn perfectly but I could watch television and pan out on the sofa with the best of them!

Fluent6months Channel: Perché el déguisement Leprechaun?

Yesterday I uploaded my second video ‘Perché el déguisement Leprechaun?’. Today I am happy to say that I have finished subtitling the video. This title does not make sense because I used my 4 different languages to construct it! Some people may find this unconventional but I do not always play by the rules this is why I am a human being and not a sheep!

In the video I describe exactly why I have this ‘unusual’ picture present on my blog and in the social network that I constructed. In the video I speak my 4 languages in a random order. I say a few lines in each language. If you try and find a structure or order to the video, then you will be wasting your time because there is none. There is no structure or order to how we speak in the real world. Living in the real world is 100% improvisation. Keep this in mind if you would prefer to speak 7 languages in oppose to only 1.

El Gran Tiburón Blanco

En este momento miro muchos documentales diferentes en Youtube. Como resultado de ellos puedo aprender las nuevas palabras a través del contexto. Esto es mucho más interesante, y más eficaz, de intentar de aprender las listas de palabras. Desde que era un niño me gustaba ver los documentales de los animales peligrosos, par ejemplo; los leones, las serpientes y los tiburones.

Me encanta ver los documentales del gran tiburón blanco. Son las criaturas muy fascinantes. Ellos tienen dientes muy afilados y son los animales más peligrosos del océano. No me gustaría ser atacado para un tiburón blanco. Tengo el respeto por las personas que han sido atacados para los tiburones pero que no tienen miedo de ir en el mar otra vez. No es un buena cosa de vivir tu vida con el miedo.

Algunos datos:

El gran tiburón blanco puede ser entre 3 a 5 metros de largo. A veces puede ser entre 6 a 6.5 metros.

Tienen cerca de 3,000 dientes.

El gran tiburón blanco puede tener entre 7-9 crías.

Las hembras se reproducen dos veces en su vida entera.

Se pueden nadar en el agua tan baja como 1 metro de profundidad y tan profundo que 1,280 metros.

Me encanta ver los documentales del gran tiburón blanco pero no quiero ver un gran tiburón blanco cuando estoy en el mar!

It is not just about speaking another tongue

The best way to get the most out of language learning is to travel, by yourself, to the country where they speak the language and live there for a period of time. By doing this, by yourself, you turn making friends into a ‘need’ and not a ‘want’. You can also make the decision to try and avoid making friends of your native language. In doing this you will become fluent a lot quicker.

It is impossible to function in this world on your own; friends are one of our basic human needs. At the start it is a bit of hassle trying to make a good first impression with new people. On top of this if you want to make foreign friends then there is a difference in culture which may pose initial problems for you. After a while however you get used to all this. After 5 years I no longer really have any inhibitions about meeting new people. I don’t really get nervous anymore like I would have had when I was 18 and moved to France on my own to study for the first time. You will find that as you get older you begin to accept the person you are. This makes meeting new people and making new friends a lot easier as you are a lot more confident in yourself, most people like confidence!

I found that through learning languages I learned to identify my weaknesses that I had to work on as a person so I could really excel in French! When you start to turn your weaknesses into your strengths then you will begin to see that there are a lot more things that you are capable of doing in life.

How do you find your own weaknesses?

This comes down to you. You have to do an honest internal assessment of yourself. This is something that you will only be able to really do once you have acquired some sort of life experience. It will be a constant process because once you have turned some of your weaknesses into strengths other weaknesses will start to appear. There is no such thing as the perfect human being, just a complex world with complex individuals!

In life you may have already noticed that there are an abundance of people who will point out your weaknesses to your face. The worst are the people who talk about your ‘weaknesses’ when it is plain to see you are standing right in front of them.

‘Oh he/she is way too shy to do that’, or ‘He/ She is not intelligent enough to get into that school’.

If you buy into how everyone else views you, whether it is negative or indeed positive then you will not go far in life. If somebody asked me in the morning what another person was like then I would say something like 'I think he/she is shy, outgoing etc'. The words ' I think' are important here. By saying I think you are accepting the fact that you do not truely know what this person is like and he/she may well act a lot different around other people. People who think that they can label everyone in a definite manner are almost as bad as the people who use the famous phrase ‘No offense’. As if these 2 words magically make what they just said a lot less offensive. Whoever came up with this phrase was probably the most irrational person that ever lived. To point out how ineffective ‘no offense’ really is I would like you to think of the last time you heard a dialogue similar to this:

John: You have a face like your mother gave birth to you on the toilet, realised you were a floater she couldn’t manage to flush away and decided she had to keep you, no offense though.

David: For a second there that sounded quite offensive and I had already started to plot how I was going to get you back, only you included ‘no offense’ at the end so I will take it for the delightfully witty comment it was.

This of course is not how real life works. If you intentionally offend someone then no matter how many times you say ‘no offense’ this will not stop the other person from having no problem offending you back. This is called reciprocity and it is an important thing to keep in mind not only in language learning but also in life.

Did it ever occur to the people who apply 'definite labels', that the reason this person may appear quite or even stupid around them may come down to other factors.

Maybe they find you dull and boring or extremely irritating; maybe they just don’t have anything in common with you and can’t be bothered making small talk all the time. There is only so much small talk any human being can take. It is called small talk because it is meaningless conversation. What person in their right mind would want to spend most of their life on small talk?

There are people you can chat endlessly with and other people you can barely string 2 words together with. Different people have different interests, it is not possible to make 6 billion friends so don’t become preoccupied with becoming ‘best friends’ with everyone you meet. Even if you have 1,000 friends on facebook you would be lucky if 0.02% of that list were your actual friends.

At the end of the day you are the only person that will truly know yourself and it is you that will work out your own self awareness using a mix of both internal and external factors. Nobody should ever be able to convince you to get in the box that they have just labelled for you!

How to watch the same thing more than once?

I never could and never will understand the people who will watch the same film more than once. No matter how good a film is or even if it starred one of my best friends as the lead role, I will never be willing, out of choice, to waste 2-3 hours of my life doing the same thing more than once. However in language learning there is method to this madness!

By looking back on things that you watched when you started to learn the language you can keep track of your progress. You will see if you pick up on things you missed the first time around. Watching something twice when learning a foreign language is nothing like watching something twice in your native language. It is like watching a Saw movie all over again when you realise at the end that the answers were obvious all along if you could only manage to really open your eyes! Here is how to go about it effectively.

My first basic rule is to pick something that you are interested in. The ideal is to be able to pick something you were interested in, in your native language, before you started to learn the foreign language, e.g I had an interest in people like Jose Mourinho and Penelope Cruz before learning Spanish and Italian. The second thing is to choose something that is not too long. If you go watching one of the Saw movies (about 2 - 2.5 hours) it will be very hard to put yourself through another 2.5 hours. The longer the item is, the less of a concentration span you will have and the less you will get out of it! What I do is, I pick interviews of people I am interested in which don’t last any longer than about 30 minutes, interviews generally do not last any longer than that anyway.

As you saw yesterday, the first time around I won’t understand too much. In order to watch it right through I use my imagination and my humour. Two key aspects of being a child, remember at the very start I said I go back to being a child in order to progress quickly! If I understand nothing in the interview for a few minutes I begin to say things to myself like ‘What is this crazy Spanish woman on about?’ or ‘Has he/she started off by speaking some sort of breed of Chinese? ’. I do this not because I am a bit mental in the head but because it allows me to take things less seriously! If I took becoming fluent in Spanish and Italian 100% seriously with my end goal, being the same as the education system's, of knowing every single word in the language, then I would have had a nervous breakdown by now! In the history of language learning FLUENCY HAS NEVER EQUALED PERFECTION. That 'x line' in the diagram that the education system has taught us, subliminaly, exists in foreign language learning, is just an ILLUSION in your head.

By using my imagination, I begin to concoct ideas of what the person is saying due to the fact that sometimes I know what sort of a character he or she is before watching the interview. I also pick up on the body language in the video to be able to determine what sort of an interview it is e.g laid back, intense. Being aware of the effectiveness of body language is VERY IMPORTANT in languages. This is another thing that is subliminal!

Having good body language is not easy. People give off the wrong vibes all the time without even realising it. Just think about how hard it is to determine if a potential boyfriend or girlfriend is interested in you. This boils down to the complex nature of body language. While I think I will never fully master my body language just like everyone else, I find that you can improve on becoming aware of your body language by forcing yourself out of your comfort zone of having the same core group of friends all your life and living in basically the same area.

Tomorrow I will talk about how language learning is not just about learning to speak another tongue but it is also about growing as AN INDIVIDUAL and becoming more self aware.