Okay,
I know this has been a long post, but it's my first one and i know they'll become a lot shorter in the future.
So as you might know, on facebook I informed a lot of you that I have a set of goals that I'm going to strive to meet. One of these is to strengthen my body by doing more exercise, especially for my lower body as I'm trying to strengthen my inner-leg. This is to counter a problem that I started getting with my kneecap being pulled up to the outside instead of naturally moving straight up upon tensing. Another reason for wanting to work out more was to please my granny and family as they always tell me that i've lost weight. If i get bigger to what i consider healthily sized, then i wont have this problem. I'm not doing this to become "ripped".
The next was to learn more tunes and in doing so, increase my skill in playing the Uilleann bagpipes (na piopai uilleann). To my shame, i was about to give them up and had considered selling them to buy or swapping them for a traditional flute. However i have had a wonderful girlfriend and a number of friends who've encouraged me to stick with it and to pick them up and keep trying and to my surprise, i've come leaps and bounds in the last month and a half and have actually been playing them in beginners seisuns. Which leads me onto my third and final goal.
This one is something I've been very casual about in the last three months as i've been learning it, and as many of you might know, it's the langauge of my girlfriend, Italian. I started to learn it because i find it fairly frustrating when i lack the ability to communicate with people, and since i was going to be spending more time seeing her family and a number of friends who cannot communicate in english at all, I thought it would be a kind gesture. **
I was thinking last night about the progress i've made on the pipes in the last two months and it's only from regular practice, so i considered what it would be like to practice Italian and really dedicate and immerse myself in it. I found another inspiring blog by a guy called benny from Cavan, Ireland [http://www.fluentin3months.com/] which helped me to remember that you cannot fail in language if you try. Communication involved trying, learning, involvement, the only way you can fail is to not try to communicate. His blog is called fluent in three months, and he describes it not as being perfect which is unattainable, but to be able to communicate well.
I had a good chat with Sriram and Fred before he left, and we chatted about fluency and language learning. I took alot of encouragement from their words and experiences and i decided to throw myself completely into this project, (when i'm not working in the lab of course). One other last experience that i'd like to mention was that a piping teacher of mine had once compared learning tunes to language; this might seem odd to you, but it made perfect sense to me; he explained the phrases that you learn, and how some phrases are similar which helps you learn more, and in the last few months I've come to learn so many tunes that I feel very confident with learning more about my new friend Italian.
So these are my goals, they are quite high, but if you have goals you'll do more that if you have none. I would like to say that there is one other goal i have that encapsulates all of these minor ones, and that isn't to better myself, it's to give you hope as a language learner or a musician, or whatever. I want to show you that i can become conversationally proficient in Italian by Christmas 2012. WHEN I reach this goal (not if) then i will continue to learn Italian to higher levels whilst trying to become conversationally proficient in Irish (a language i've always wanted to learn and hoped to see reestablished here) gaeilge - by Christmas 2013-14. You will then be able to take hope from knowing that in the space of my PhD, for someone who was never a linguist at school. If you follow this blog I will be posting updates and smaller goals that i'm working towards within the language learning process.
Remember, whether you think you can or you can't... you're correct,
Thanks for following me,
Rob
** I'm actually very lucky that a number of her good friends actually speak English almost fluently, and im very grateful that they've stepped out of their language comforts in the past so that i can participate in their conversations.
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