‘stujay.com’ My New Language / Polyglot Website – inspired by Benny the Irish Polyglot (Thanks Benny!)
It’s always a buzz to speak with other polyglots and linguistically inclined people. The thing that I really love about the way that Benny approaches the whole language learning thing is that he’s not just in it to rack up a language body count. It’s the social aspect of becoming proficient in a new language that seems to give him a buzz. While I love the whole ‘code-breaking’ aspect of learning a new language, I have to admit that the thing that really does it for me is the ‘buzz’ of getting to know new people. Not just any ‘ordinary’ new people, but new people that had I have not learned that particular language, there’s probably no conceivable way that our paths could have crossed. From Miss Universe delegates, Government and Business leaders around the world, to farmers in an up-country province of Thailand or China- as I look back, I can see that almost all the ‘major’ positive twists and turns in my life have come about through people I have met that weren’t native speakers of English.
I know that Benny loves the ‘act’ of learning languages, but I think that like me, Benny really enjoys the ‘buzz’ of people that come as a result of the language.
As we were speaking and I was hearing about all the fantastic stuff that Benny was doing with his website and the people that he’s been able to motivate with his adventures around the globe, it really inspired me to continue what I had started several years ago in being a linguistic ‘evangelist’.
Language is SEXY
Today I had the honour of being invited by Dr. Masanori Matsumoto to be a guest in his linguistics lecture at Bond University on the Gold Coast, Australia. The topic was ‘Writing Systems’ – one of my favourite topics. My personal goal for being present during this lecture and subsequent tutorial group was to pass on some ‘energy’ and excitement to the students and let them see that even something as potentially dry as ‘Writing Systems’ can be made ‘sexy’ and fun.
Well, I don’t know about the ‘sexy’ bit, but it definitely was fun. In the space of a few hours, we covered a lot of ground and hopefully I was able to pass on some of my energy and passion for languages over to the students. At the very least, they learnt the Chinese Zodiac system (in Chinese) and learned some handy techniques for finding a hot date at the next Asian Night held at the University.
What Can I Do for You?
After I hung up the (Skype) phone with Benny, I was pumped. I don’t know what exactly it was that he said, but SOMETHING happened during our discourse that triggered my enthusiasm and I literally couldn’t sleep for 4 days. Since then, I closed down my old blogger site, started up this new WordPress site at stujay.com, migrated all my old stuff over and I’ve been staying up until the wee hours of the morning over the past few nights planning a whole new dimension in language learning / resources that are available on the internet. I’m setting up in WordPress at the moment just to get SOMETHING off the ground. I’m a weekend hacker when it comes to coding, but I haven’t really done any programming for the past four or so years. My problem is that I want everything to be ‘perfect’ before it goes live. The problem with that is that it’s NEVER perfect and in the end, it turns into procrastination, the enthusiasm dwindles and the ideas die a slow and miserable death. Once the momentum starts to pick-up with this WordPress site, I’m planning and developing a much more robust / functional site on Drupal or Joomla. I’m open to suggestions on that too!
It’s up to YOU to Keep me On My Toes!
I really want to give and share all that I can with you to help you and inspire you to do new things with language (and by extension, ‘people’). In saying that, I realise that I really need to surrender myself into you the blog followers / members hands and rely on your input and feedback as to what you’d like me to write about, what kinds of resources you would like to have, what topics you’d like me to cover in my book(s) and videos etc. I will listen to everything and try and develop things in a way that will bring you the most benefit.
I hope that what happens from here on in is going to spread like wildfire and we can start to blaze new trails in the areas of language acquisition and cross-cultural learning.
I would really like to synergize what I’m doing with other amazing people like Benny the Irish Polyglot, Luca from Italy and the swag of other prominent polyglots around the globe.
So now the ball is in your court – consider this website YOUR website. Let me know what you’d like me to add, write about, conduct courses etc and I will do my best to deliver the goods.
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