About this Blog

Introduction

This blog is new, but in the coming weeks I will be publishing a variety of posts on language learning in general,  learning Mandarin Chinese in particular, as well as some more philosophical and personal posts. If you are a language learner, especially a Mandarin learner who would like to keep up to date with a refreshing and new approach to learning language, I suggest that you follow this blog as I believe that you will find my posts very interesting.

There are many great online resources for learning mandarin, as well as many books and apps for the phone. I will try to make reference to as many of these as possible and I encourage people to learn from as many sources as possible. The special focus of this blog will be on the integration of language and culture, as I strongly believe that you can not fully understand one without an understanding of the other.

Inspiration

No language exists in a vacuum, and most fundamentally language is an outward expression of one individuals desire to communicate with another. To speak to another human, is to express a desire to survive, to thrive, to love and to be loved. Given a few hundred years, or even a few thousand years, this accumulation of struggles, fights, confessed love and confessed sin, becomes a kind of exposition and a macrocosm of the culture wherein that language was born. While every conversation is a microcosm of the the modes of interaction within that society, and more profoundly, the way humans attempt to survive, to thrive, to love and to be loved.

I believe this revelation is profound, comforting, and deeply personal as well as making the task of learning significantly more interesting. For if this is what language is, to study a language is not to study a set of relations between spoken sounds and the meanings that these correspond with, but it is to understand the struggles, the hopes and dreams of a community of people as they endured through the ages various pains, natural disasters, war, love, lost love, death, life, bearing and raising children. To learn the language of a people, is to study the entire range of human emotion.

Short Term Goals

In the short term, I hope to write to:

• promote the philosophy that to learn a language, is to study a means to form meaningful connections with other people, to form bridges between communities, and to promote world peace.

• promote a very general interest in paying a great deal of attention to personal and historical elements when learning any language.

• more specifically to promote interest in studying Mandarin Chinese from a variety of new angles that emphasize the cultural history of China.

Long Term Goals

In the long term, I hope to expand this using as many practical materials in as many languages as possible both audio and textual and with a wide variety of language pairs.

I will start with a guide to learning mandarin. For an introduction to studying Mandarin using this personal and cultural perspective click here.

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1 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868
2 http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=2103
3 http://www.sil.org/why-language-culture-studies
4 http://www.lexiophiles.com/uncategorized/the-relationship-between-language-and-culture
5 http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_5.htm