Friday, June 29, 2007

Get With The Program!

Expect something good to happen! When stuff happens that you did not plan on, that is opportunity knocking! Guess what? Now what? It is very important to take some kind of action.

Life is precious, (valuable) To be in control of your own destiny you must take the initiative. Life takes place in a decision. When you take action to make something happen, stuff is going to happen. What you do about what happens, after you make something happen is where you take control.

Expect something good to happen! It is very important to take some kind of action with intentions to serve yourself and others.

Be a person that makes things happen! There are only three kinds of people. People that make things happen. People that watch things happen. People that wake up and say; "What is happening?" A journey of a thousand miles always begins with one step.

There is no such thing as luck. People that take control of their own destiny and stay GREAT are called lucky! Everyone knows they will check out someday. Not many people believe they will check out some day.

You had better believe that one day your expectations will expire. You will wonder if you came into your full potential that God had ordain for you to be. You will say to yourself; "I could have been a contender!"

"Regrets I had a few, but then again too few to mention. I did what I had to do…" as the Frank Sinatra song goes. The only regret is that you do not take the first step and go for the brass ring. When you get a result that you do not like say to yourself, "This could be good, when you get a result that you like say to yourself this could be bad."

This will get rid of the stress that goes with unfavorable results. Plan your work each day. Work your plan each day. Get with the program! You are a child of God, be strong and do bold deeds.

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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Learn Spanish Language for Your Travels

The best way to learn Spanish language is to immerse yourself in a Spanish speaking country. The best way to learn Spanish is through a firm grasp of grammar, which will build your confidence in accurate and confident communication. To learn a language is much more than just speak it, to learn Spanish is also to know about the culture.

The first reason why you should learn Spanish is because it adds another way of communicating and adds to your intelligence. One of the most enjoyable ways to use or learn Spanish language is to watch movies in the language. Learning Spanish is a challenge, but it will pay dividends in the future.

I acquired a Spanish language book to try and learn the language, but it wasn't useful and I did not get my money's worth out of it. Another Spanish program was quite difficult to comprehend how to use it let alone help me learn Spanish from it. I realized that reading or listening was not as good as an interactive Spanish teacher.

I ran into an acquaintance that had learned how to speak Spanish. During our conversation I was speechless at well he could speak Spanish. Imagine my surprise when he said he learned Spanish by using a Spanish program online that was very interactive. He said it was a lot like being immersed in Spain and the program made it really easy and fun.

For me the best way to learn Spanish language is using his recommended program Rocket Spanish. All that students need in order to learn Spanish is motivation, good material and a great teacher.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Today's Teaching Tools for Learning Conversational Spanish

Most of us adults had to sit through the classroom experience of studying a foreign language in high school. Many, like me, came away with a very negative impression of the experience. I studied French and remember saying that I could identify at least three separate forms of the French Language.

One, was the form the teacher spoke, two, was the form written in the textbook and three, was the form I presumed that they actually spoke in France!

Things have changed a great deal since then. Technology and better teaching methods have made interactive-audio language-learning courses the preferred way to learn.

The approach is conversational and you hear digitally recorded high fidelity lessons spoken clearly by native speakers of the language you are learning.

You interact with these lessons, listening, speaking, repeating, following the lead of the instructor in interactive audio.

Excellent language-learning courses can be bought on the Internet, downloaded 24/7 and put to use in minutes. The leading courses are (in descending order of preference) Rocket-Spanish, Learning Spanish Like Crazy, Fsi Spanish, Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone Spanish. All are excellent teaching tools for learning conversational Spanish.

Generally speaking the first three of these are strongly oriented towards everyday conversational Spanish and the latter two are more oriented towards formal structure and grammar. Any of these teaching tools for learning conversational Spanish will help you learn Spanish fast and correctly.

All have a version, that is fully digitally downloadable, for around $100. That means that you can get it right now, be learning in minutes.

Since the lessons are in digital format you can offload them to your iPod or other portable audio device. Or you can burn lessons to CD's and listen to them anywhere on any CD player.

So the place and time of your lessons is completely under your control. The speed of your learning is also up to you. You can go fast or slow, can repeat lessons as many times as you want. And you know that you are hearing and learning proper pronunciation as well as meter, rhythm and intonation of delivery!

These teaching tools for learning conversational Spanish are yours. You have possession. You can refer back to them to brush up on your Spanish at any time, even on the plane to Mexico City or in the car on the way to the bullfights in Tijuana!

When I got to Paris, France for the first time (With two years of high school French and 9 semester hours of university credit in French) I quickly found that no one could understand a word I said!

I understood written French, so I had to write down what I wanted to say on a notepad and show it to someone to communicate! (And listen in wonder, trying to learn how to say what I had written down, from how he or she said it!)

In contrast, you will learn correct spoken Spanish rapidly by using today's teaching tools for learning conversational Spanish. You will be able to understand and make yourself understood immediately! And your learning time will be a fraction of that required by other methods!

I only wish these methods had been around when I was learning French and Spanish!!

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

English Language in a Sorry State

In a damning assessment of the state of college education in the United States in the American magazine The New Yorker last month, Louis Menand noted that, of the 1.5 million students who will graduate from colleges and universities in the United States this year, only four percent had majored in English. This figure seems even more start when compared with the 22 percent who majored in business, the largest proportion of all.

Then, Menand went on to write, 'There are more bachelor's degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined.' No wonder that, earlier in his report, he proclaimed, 'College … is, basically, a sleepover with grades.'

What Menand called the 'hypercompetitive' nature of university studies reflects the same quality in the job market into which the new graduates will be trying to find their coveted slots. The relatively low number of English majors mirrors both the cultural devaluation of language and literature studies – especially, it seems, one's own. And, in this increasingly 'practical world,' it points to the meager number of relatively ill-paying job to which English majors are consigned: an ever-shrinking number of university professorships in the same field (in which it seems that, soon, all languages except programming codes will be 'dead' languages); the dwindling number of posts for reporters, critics and the like for the rapidly declining number of print media; and, at the bottom of the sorry pile, public school teachers at the primary and secondary levels.

Nothing in Menand's report suggests that the trend is in any way reversible. In a world that is self-combusting, it's difficult to argue for the need for more Chaucer scholars. Still, the de-emphasis on languages and language skills is, noticeably, taking its toll on the output of graduates in virtually all fields. There are few jobs tailored for university graduates that do not entail some kind of writing – one aspect of which is, presumably, communication.

It has now become an accepted fact that most graduates of institutions as famous and laudable as Harvard and Stanford (say nothing of the other 4,000 institutions of higher education in the United States) – in fields from what were once known as the 'liberal arts' (a term, Menand adds, that has been decommissioned) to medicine – are unable to consistently write a grammatical declarative sentence in English because they don't know what one is.

Think, then, what the plurality of business majors are capable of, language-wise. In an increasingly globalized working environment, communications has become more, not less important. If communications is to be valued as more than a form of technology, some radical – and currently unimaginable – changes are called for. Good grammar is more than polite; it is the means to effective communication and true understanding in a world in which international misunderstandings could have deadly consequences.

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Friday, June 8, 2007

Learning French Made Easy

No matter what your reason is, learning a second language can be very rewarding. The process itself is fun and challenging. There are many languages that you may want to choose to start learning. However, people with English as their mother tongue will find it much easier to learn languages such as French. It is because naturally they will achieve better and faster with alphabetical wording language instead of scripts such as Chinese or Japanese.

Learning French is easier than before, you can go and join available off line course where you meet one on one or in a group with your teacher in a predetermined timetables. However, I believe everyone nowadays is too busy for this, unless you are a student and the main thing you do day to day is study, it is only then you would find time to spend on classes to learning French. If you are, like many of us that have been caught up with already busy life and family, the method of learning a new language is by learning it yourself or through the internet.

One of the e-book that I stumbled upon the net that fulfill your desire to learning French is the Rocket French. This carefully written and constructed by a French native speaker, contains many videos and audios that help accelerate your understanding as your brain will remember easy with visualized materials. It also contains some games for you while learning, and of course all games are constructed in French. This is play-to-remember games and I found it very effective in learning language.

When learning French from this e-book, it also stresses out the importance its grammar. Obviously, it is the basic of all language, and without it you will be simply memorizing instead of understanding. Understanding grammar definitely holds the key to a greater success of learning language, and this applies to all languages. For example through out my life I have known people from variety of cultures and languages. Most of them that learn English successfully will usually have a good understanding of the English grammar. For those that not, they usually will find it hard to even remember a particular easy word.

In the end, if you find that you have mastered or at least be able to converse in French, why not expand your language ability to another!

Happy Learning!

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Monday, June 4, 2007

Learn Spanish Fast With Online Resources

People want to know how to do things fast, and it is no different when they want to learn a new language. In order to learn Spanish fast it is important that you use a resource that offers the essentials to get started immediately, and that follow through in a logical manner so that what you are being taught can be understood easily.

When I first started learning Spanish I bought several books and thought it would be easy. However it wasn't as I struggled to digest what I was being taught by just reading a book. Furthermore many of the books and guides I tried weren't very good. They were often tediously boring, confusing, or poorly written.

Jumping from one book to another slows down the process of learning a new language as you start from the beginning and try to go through everything again. Luckily for me I was referred to a resource that would have me speaking fluent Spanish in a few short months. Learning Spanish has been one of the most rewarding tasks that I've set myself as I can now enjoy speaking the language, which is especially useful as I frequently travel to Spain for vacations with my family.

For me one of the main reasons to learn Spanish was the fantastic pronunciation of words. The Spanish language is beautiful to listen to and even better to be able to speak.

In order to learn Spanish quickly my advice would be to firstly use a resource that has a proven track record of helping people to learn a new language. There are so many guides that claim to be able to teach you Spanish in a week for example, yet they often just provide poorly written "advice" that will have you more confused than before. I will suggest to you my recommended resource for learning Spanish at the end of this article as it is the primary guide that got me to be a fluent Spanish speaker.

When you start to learn new words and sentences don't forget to practice. Talking the language is one of the most useful ways of learning, and it will also help you to overcome any difficulties you have and clear up any misunderstandings in the language, such as pronunciation and sentence structure. A good idea is to have people test you.

One of my favorite things about the resource that I used to teach myself Spanish is the interactivity. By using visual and audio material, along with interactive lessons and learning games it became much easier and much quicker to learn the language.

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