Communication & relationships

Dear Friends,

This was not an easy realization, nor is this an easy admission. Especially considering my history of very vocal opposition, it would be right for you to call me a hypocrite. I will accept that and take it into my heart, knowing that this acceptance will only help to make me a better person. I stand before you today, free of all excuses, to make this confession. I am an addict.

It’s true. For years now I’ve been addicted to e-mail.

I check it on my laptop, on my phone, hell sometimes I even borrow other peoples computers and check it through their web browsers. In a given day I might do this thousands of times. It’s embarrassing to admit, but there are days when I would start to check e-mail in the morning and realize hours later that I’ve done nothing else with my day. When I started having dreams about Inbox Zero, I knew I had to do something.

I’m not proud of this, but I’m hoping with your strength and support I can help beat it. Admitting this here today is my first step.

Now I know this sounds frightening but I assure you I’m working closely with the best doctors in the field and they have assured me I have not past the point of no return. There is a bright future for me, if I am dedicated to reaching it. And I am, I promise you that.

I am going into rehab for this addition and at the very strict orders of these professionals I will not be checking e-mail more than once a week. This is a drastic measure I know, but sometimes that is what is required.

I know there will be detractors who will argue this will make me harder to reach, but don’t be silly. Of course I’ll still be online and reachable 24/7 through any number of other communication methods. Just not e-mail. The people who will make those claims are the pushers, the dealers, the modern day wine merchants and purveyors of this e-mail plague that are plaguing our minds with their plague.

Stand with me, stand against them.

I just want to thank you in advance for your support, with your courage I know I can beat this demon. We will beat it together.

Best,
Sean

I was always terrible at languages in school. I joking tell people I failed every language offered by every school I ever attended, including Latin… twice! The punchline is that it’s actually the truth. On the other hand when I’m around people speaking another language I pick it up pretty quickly, at least from a comprehension standpoint – speaking is a whole other matter. This has bothered me for years and I’ve dabbled in learning many languages on my own. For any one of a million reasons I haven’t followed through with any so I have a partial knowledge of quite a few. I decided 2009 was going to be the year to change that and set out to decide which of the fragments I knew would be easiest to complete.

As I was looking around I started seeing something interesting. A lot of people talking about how learning a tertiary language usually wreaks havoc on your secondary language. Something about how the brain classifies this information, and once it creates a storage area for a non-primary language it doesn’t like to increase the size of it and will just overwrite the data there. Speaking in more layman terms, if English is your first language and you learn Spanish as a secondary, then try to learn French, when you go back to trying to speak Spanish you’ll find yourself accidentally using many French words in place of the Spanish ones you previously knew by mistake. As you can imagine this is disheartening.

I started looking around for information about learning more than once language at once and surprisingly found very little. What I did find was very interesting. For some people, or at least some people who have thought it interesting on their own enough to document, learning several languages at once eliminates that problem. Essentially this practice tricks your brain into thinking you are just learning a very massive secondary language. Even more interesting is that those who have tried this seem to suggest it’s not any more difficult than just learning the languages on their own, it’s simply more time consuming.

This is incredibly fascinating to me, enough so that I’m going to give it a shot. I haven’t been disciplined enough to learn a single language in part because I get board with the constant memorization so maybe doing several languages with varying methods will work out differently. It’s worth a shot anyway. The three languages that I know the most hacked up pieces of and that I’ve tried to learn on their own are Japanese, Spanish and French. I’ve skimmed a few others as well but I think tackling 3 at once is going to be enough for me so I’m going to stick with those. I’ve got a variety of teaching techniques for these including the Michel Thomas’ lessons for Spanish and French, Pimsler tapes for Japanese, Rosetta Stone software for Spanish and Japanese and finally a collection of iPhone apps for Japanese. I studied French the most in School so I feel like that is the one with potentially the most latent skills buried somewhere in my head.

The trick for me, and probably for anyone attempting this kind of thing, will be to make sure to fit in all three languages each week and not start focusing on just one. This is especially tricky since I’ll be in Japan next week so the tendency to cram on that alone is very strong right now – though when I’m there I think I can default to just French and Spanish as I’ll be surrounded by enough Japanese conversation to act as a class in it’s own way. Or maybe not, maybe this is totally insane. We’ll see.