Think. Train. Be Awesome.

When can you say that you’re an intermediate learner?

When you realize that you’ve become the hunter.

When you mentally drop your shield and pick up a spear.

When your L2 pees its pants a little bit as you point out that you’re not stuck in here with it; it’s stuck in here with you.

When instead of picking apart a sentence for the one thing you understand, you’re furiously scanning the pages for something you don’t.

It’s the only way you can get hard now.

 According to a trusted source, some people don’t like being intermediate.

But you will, oh yes.

You’ll frakkin’ love it.

When you feel the surge of pure energy as your mental models of grammar and vocabulary, built by thousands of hours of immersion, begin to snowball to the point of having their own gravitational field. New words and constructions are ripped up by the roots and assimilated into The Collective, the L2 singularity spawned deep inside your ever swelling brain.

When the habit of acquisition is so deeply ingrained in your instincts that not pushing further feels like a violation of natural law.

When you see the code around you, and realize that with your new powers, the excitement of the journey until now was just a taste.

GOOD HUNTING!

My fist in your face!

No, actually I’m learning to shoot and edit videos, so I’m going to put up some video content. But I’m not going to be in them, because I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶t̶r̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶  I want to focus on the subject matter.

Stay tuned.

If you’ve been reading long enough, you’ll know that in a galaxy far, far away I immersed in Japanese for about seven months. I ended up walking away from it for several reasons, but something I didn’t know at the time is how great the dividends would be from any time spent learning an L2 (if you do it the r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ fun way). I went to the Japanese bookseller Book Off with some friends today, and found that they had marked down their Blue Hearts CDs to $5 a pop, and had a Rip Slyme 2-disc compilation for $10. I locked down those suckers faster than the LAPD locked down questions about going Waco on Christopher Dorner.

If you spend all your time a-grammar-crammin’ and end up walking away from a language, you’ll be (correctly) left with a bad taste in your mouth: “all that suffering for nothing.” If you learn your L2 the way you learned your L1 (fun & games), then even if you decide a language isn’t for you, you’ll still get something amazing out of it. I found cool TV shows, movies, video games, and music that I never would’ve known about if I hadn’t gone at it with the childlike spirit of an explorer. My friends often ask me “How do you know about all these awesome foreign movies?” Recently a girl in my car asked me what I was listening to and I said “The Blue Hearts… um, a badass old Japanese punk band.” Next in the shuffle was BB Brunes – “a French rock group” – and then Drunken Tiger – “Korean’s most famous rapper.” She looked confused, and then it hit me- it was weird to her, and would be to most people, because they don’t do what we do. We play, we game, we rock out with our appendages out, and find things that are completely off the radar for most people. We’re god damned Marco Polos, and we find some amazing stuff. If people don’t get it, or if you don’t end up sticking with your L2 forever, then so be it. There are other girls, other mountains, and the sun is going to come up tomorrow.

So have fun.

That kid inside you who used to put on an army helmet, grab a stick, and explore the forest behind the baseball fields is still alive. School couldn’t kill him; your job couldn’t kill him; your peers couldn’t kill him; your culture can’t reach him. Your heart is the last thing to age.

YUKON HO!

*Amazing photo by good friend / motion graphics wizard Chris Culp.

“Gaming taught me English AND got me a girlfriend with HUGE eyeballs!”

Seriously.

Once you hit the intermediate level (i.e. “I don’t know one word in this sentence” instead of “I only know one word in this sentence”), get yourself some dubbed video games. After beating the Mass Effect games and Portal 2, I’ve been playing the bajeezus out of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It seems like there are hundreds of hours of recorded dialogue for these characters. A little interaction goes a long way. And talk about a motivator- I get to run around in the Mojave wasteland and do battle with road warriors and rogue factions and whatnot. Input got you to this level, and I have faith that more input will take you to the promised land of milk, honey, and international consequence-free sex.

Don’t want to be a broken record here, folks. This is just what I’m up to lately.

Well that and training to be a fitness model.