Learn Taiwanese

Give Me 30 Days And I'll Help You : 21st Century Secrets to Language Acquisition: Brain Research + Today's Technology Disclosure Report Avoid money-sucking language institutions Avoid educational systems that set you up for failure halfway to target Avoid inefficient methods: I uncover where education has failed you Avoid educators' vicious cycle of teach you a little, forget what you learn, then pay more Take control of your study speed Get a guarantee of results: take your career to new levels Make use of your expressive ability in a foreign language Easily stimulate your memory: I'll share with you the secrets of a world-famous professor Strengthen and expand your learning capacity

It's Not Your Fault, You've Been Lied To According to research by the U.S. government, due to the large difference between English and Chinese, these two languages are classified as a Level 3 (largest difference), meaning that by using the efficient methods developed by the U.S. government, it will still take you 2200 hours of classroom training to reach any level of fluency. (The online source) I've improved upon that efficiency and cut it in half by making use of your sleep cycles, review intervals, and how frequently my course work re-stimulates key areas of the brain for maximum effect. The whole scientifically-based report is available below -- no email or download required to read. Mike is Poised to Change the Future of Education Mike once asked himself, why do educational institutions including public and private schools of all kinds continue to use outdated inefficient models for teaching foreign languages? It's my job to care. In fact it's much more than a job. It's a lifelong dedication -- a passionate commitment to help. --Mike Campbell Most people don't realize how big this problem is. How many people spend astronomical figures on language education and don't get any results? Mike's mission is to eradicate this unnecessary waste.

Intro to Teacher Mike Mike Campbell (a linguist) is a leading expert on language acquisition with hands-on classroom experience with over a thousand students. He himself can speak over a dozen languages. Mike Campbell's extensive research on linguistic variation and dialectology has also been used by academic institutions worldwide. Due to his father's work with the U.S. Government, Mike received his education from the Department of Dependent Schools (DODDS) from a young age, and also pursued studies in piano performance at conservatories in Europe and in the US. From his unique upbringing, he was exposed at a young age to communication tactics, foreign languages, persuasion and negotiation devices, including East-European politics and languages. Mike has worked in the financial services industry and is a common participant in Rotary International, Toastmasters, and the hosting of speech competition events. He has been interviewed in print and appeared on several television and radio stations holding conversation completely in Chinese. Mike has tested many methods for acquiring foreign languages only to discover what works best: and through collaboration with world-renowned working memory discoverer, Professor Baddeley, continued to test and make adjustments to reach today's highly efficient method. Using his most recently developed method, he can guarantee students can retain 95% listening, memory, and speech ability. To now, Mike has lead over a thousand students to speaking success using his methods making him more than half a million dollars in revenues since he launched, but at the same time saving his students millions upon millions in lost time and expenses.

Don't you feel that learning foreign languages is painful?

Think about whether the following situations have happened to you before:

•  When class is over, you realize you don't remember everything, but you know you'll go home and try to learn it all. But actually after a few hours, everything becomes a blur. Even when you study and review, you feel there are too many obstacles.
•  Perhaps you really learned a lot of information in class, increasing your knowledge, but when you leave class your communication ability hasn't changed at all. You didn't actually get any speech training in class at all. So what, you know a few more words? You still can't use this new knowledge in fluent speech. So what are you going to class for? Is it for expanding your knowledge, or is it to strengthen your speaking ability? You definitely still lack this communication skill. No matter if you memorize 10,000 words, you're still going to be stuck not being able to put together a single sentence. Writing is torture, not to mention the fear you feel in answering the phone in that language.
•  Students have their study schedules all planned out and set, how many classes and hours per week, etc. And the teachers have their own progress schedule to adhere to. Every class, there has to be progress, maybe do a little review, but both students and teachers both put more weight on how much new material is actually learned. Since students are supposed to go home and study on their own and do their homework, most everything taught in class is expected to be new material. And what if you're the kind of student who can't remember everything from class, then what? What if your family and job life are way too busy there's no way you'd ever touch this stuff once you got home, then what? You'll drown or drop out!
•  Ok, let's say you can't keep up in class, so you take notes, and you have to make sure you take all the notes and get them all down and hope you don't miss a thing. Every note and every hour is money that you're paying for. But what are you really doing in this situation? You're not learning, and not studying! You're just trying to keep up by recording the flow of information--an absolute waste of effort. Nothing of this is going to mean anything to you a week or month from now. By the next class, you'll have completely forgotten the previous class. And the money you've spent? It's not invested in your future, it's invested in your absolute frustration!
•  Or maybe you're one of those excellent students. Yeah, I once thought I could be one of those too. You keep up with the class huh? Congratulations! Then what's wrong with your communication ability in the foreign language? Why are you reading this? If you're so smart, then why haven't you thought how come our educational system can't deliver results?。In the end it seems that studying abroad is really the only way, but why do so many people come back still unable to speak?!
•  So why are you really taking classes? Don't lie to yourself anymore. There are true and tested ways and none of them include any of the above.
•  There are still a lot of problems:
•  When I go home after class, how do I know my pronunciation won't go haywire, does it even help to go home and practice?
•  Every time I sign up for classes, the semester's going to cost me and if I can only afford one semester, then am I really getting anywhere? Can anyone guarantee I'll make progress? Is it just a gamble?
•  No problem, I got lots of money: in fact, I took all the classes they got and I bought their most expensive package and paid out the wazoo. In fact, I don't care what it cost, I just wanted them to get me to my goal. But then why is it when I'm all done with those classes, there's no difference in my ability and the guy with no money next to me? How come the cost of the program has no effect on the results?

None of this is your fault!

Look at 5 year olds speak that language.
They can't read anything yet, but that kid can't stop talking!!!

I don't know a single person who can't speak a language

Languages don't have to be hard.

•  When I buy this course, what is the clear goal that I'm getting?
•  Does this study method eradicate students weaknesses helping and leading them to speaking success?
•  Actually, if the methodology is so great, when you sign up you should be able to get a guarantee! Has anybody ever given you a guarantee of study (diplomas not counted)?
(Actually a diploma doesn't prove any ability)

You wanna know how to make a difference in your learning?
Make a decision now, and read this report.

Hi, I'm Mike Campbell. You're about to unlock the secrets of the brain and how our memory works, how to enhance it, and what really is the best way for learning a language. Why? Because I've spent half a lifetime figuring out how and I've learned many languages to full fluency using my own methods. Not only that, I've already helped over 1000 students reach high levels of fluency in various languages. They are from various backgrounds and various age groups, but they all have one thing in common: they were successful.

Taiwanese is one helluva hard language to learn for a westerner. Its system of tones is not only complex, there are so many of them. The grammar is different, even from Mandarin Chinese or Hakka or Cantonese. When you come here looking for Taiwanese-related study materials, I would expect you have never heard a word of it, but yet, I'll slowly get you past that huge beginning obstacle of not understanding anything to at least saying something--by the end of the first day. And my methodology is different because the material I teach to you is reviewed consecutively over several days because it's impossible for you to learn it in just one day. Expect to get a lot of practice and after about a week, you'll truly feel the progress you've made. The key point to my method is review, review, review--and don't miss a day! It's as easy as opening one sound file a day, listening, and repeating. That's it! So don't get lazy on me!

You really can learn hundreds of new vocabulary every single month, any language, using my method. Anybody can do it. You're human and prewired to do it. I guarantee it.

All you need is the following is the right attitude: patience, diligence, determination and a daily commitment to do one sound file per day. That's all there is to it.

I don't have a complete huge set of modules yet for Taiwanese as this is a peripheral language without huge demand, but for what I've put together and recorded for you, using a native speaker in her mid-20s, is that you'll learn some 600 new words and phrases in this language and it should only take a month. Hopefully, the carefully selected words and phrases gets you, like so many others before you, past that first threshold to where you can actually start forming sentences freely on your own and should be able to hold simple conversation in this fascinating language. And that is what this course will do for you.

Introduction

The course has been developed by a linguist with many years of language learning and teaching experience. The setup of the content of the course is quite different than other courses you may find for learning languages.

Let me explain why.

Learning a language requires the same amount of effort as training muscles when you go to the gym or want to train to learn Kung-fu. Let me draw an analogy for you. I laugh at teachers who throw grammar books at their students saying, go home read this, come back and take a test. Believe you me, I failed those same tests when I was a kid too. I loved taking language classes as a kid, and I took German and Russian in high school, but for some reason I always got Cs because I didn't do all the work. I was in the class because I was buying into the dream to speak a foreign language, but what I got out of this defunct educational system was proof that I didn't have what it takes--or worse I'm too dumb to do it. Strange as it was, I graduated from high school speaking those languages, but it certainly was not acquired from what I learned in class. Now those grammar exercises seem mundane and easy once you know how to speak the language.

You all know English, so let me give you an example from the TOEFL test just to show you how obvious things are when you already know the language. Most students get this one wrong. They have to decide which of the underlined words is wrong:

Butterflies rest with their wings hold upright over their backs, and moths with their wings outspread.

The answer is blaringly obvious with the incorrect passive participial adjective, "held". But a native speaker doesn't need to know that term to know that it's incorrect. They just know. And you know.

The reason why I laugh at these kinds of teachers, is because the same is true if a Kung-fu coach threw you a book showing a thousand Kung-fu moves, saying, go home, read, learn, come back, fight me! You'd be like, nah, I'll pass.

That coach, were he good, would be by your side all the way showing you inexorably all the moves necessary to achieve proficiency in this martial art. And personally, I don't care if you're learning to ride bike, walk, jump, swim, or whatever, your brain associates the actions of those muscles with the activity in which you're engaged thereby strengthening the synapses in the brain cells of the working memory.

And the muscle of language is the tongue in our mouths. However, your tongue is only trained to move in certain ways that create certain sounds belonging to your own language. When training for a new language, we have to learn how to move our tongues differently, putting it in new positions, moving it in different combinations and ways. It's like a Kung-fu master or a health fitness guru trying yoga for the first time. That guy isn't necessarily going to get it right the first day. So just like everybody else, it will take many long hours of practice to start getting your muscles to work the way you want them to. Michael Jordan is a good case study of foreign language-muscle achievement: he went from basketball (his mother language) to baseball and went all the way to the major leagues (fluency in a foreign language). He had the right attitude, and that's the attitude you should adopt too.

Based on my years of experience training others to learn foreign languages, I have found that most people practice foreign languages by learning how to read the text off a page. This is fine for basic understanding but is absolutely no good for developing your ability to speak or listening comprehension for that matter. Think about it: who reads the Kung-fu book when standing in the middle of the gym training Kung-fu?

The reason for this is simple. As we learn a foreign language, we learn how to automatically transfer the sounds or words we see on a page into audible sounds produced by our tongues. The whole process can become quite mechanical and effortless actually. Our brain uses little or none of its capacity in accomplishing this goal. That's why so many students, when asked after reading a text out loud, have no idea what they just read. They were so involved in this mundane task of producing sounds out of the words on the page, nothing actually made its way into the brain.

Professor Baddeley sums this whole process up succinctly with the following flowchart:

With my own permission, I'll steal a few graphs and charts I made for one of my other sites in Chinese, but I think you get the general idea here. I've translated Baddeley's flowchart into the following graphic below. This graphic details the limbic system in the middle of the brain clearly showing the hippocampus region. The two paths, either auditory or visual create two very different results in our capacity to learn:

Visually, we turn the written word into sounds automatically without any stimulation to the hippocampi, the region responsible for creating new memories in our brain. This is why most people don't remember what they've read after reading something out loud. They haven't forgotten; they never created the memory in the first place.

The human race developed as a species being able to communicate by sound. Therefore, our ears are the best tool for comprehending language, not the eyes! And by way of evolution, you'll be gladly amused that it is our ears, the auditory networks, that directly stimulate the hippocampi, in turn creating some initial memories in our brain.

But what do these memories look like? Without any structure, let's say you just start memorizing a list of words, you'll end up with what looks like the following representation:

All those connections you see represent synapses, or links between nerve cells. Those links are important because they represent that a memory exists. I can't tell you what kind of memory, but at least something's happened and it's there. When hearing a story, it means that we put two and two together and that we understand what happened. When hearing a foreign language, it means we link the meaning of what we heard to the meaning in our own language, so think of each of the links as a translation that you understand. And guess what, without understanding, nothing happens. That's why if you hear Tibetan for the first time, it literally goes in one ear and out the other: nothing sticks or connects at all. Below is what your synapses really look like:

The only problem with these initially conceived memories is that because of a lack of structure to anything else, they just as easily disappear! Without continued stimulation of the hippocampi, they'll become less and less important to what your brain needs to actively use and they'll most likely get used elsewhere.

What we want to do is something like the following. Through use of sentence structures, language structure, repetition and review, you get the following memory structure in the brain:

Now this is great stuff. I want this in my head because now I have a structure that's easy to add to. I can add and learn ad infinitum with this. Even though it's easier to retain these memories now, they're still just initial memories, or short-term memories. Without repetition and use, they'll never become long-term memories.

So actually, there's no real difference between long-term and short-term memories except on the strength of their synapse: it's like a tendon holding two things together. But what then is a working memory? A long-term memory is a fact you know, and it's in your brain because you've learned it. When you're standing up giving a speech, perhaps you can't recall it or it's on the tip of your tongue, but it doesn't mean you forgot it -- you just can't recall it. That is the difference between your long-term memory and your working memory. To get that piece of information into your working memory, use my method by saying it and repeating it over several days, and you'll never have trouble recalling it again. In other words, the working memory is merely a manifestation of everything you're able to do and say: the complete sum of all your abilities, including Kung-fu!

Just remember: Every ability you possess is tied with your working memory and your muscles' ability to execute that memory.

When I go into a language class I don't like to see teachers asking students questions that students have trouble understanding. The reason for this is because the students don't have the tools necessary to speak the answers and the teacher is wasting both each others' time and energy.

The proper method, instead, is to train the students how to say all kinds of questions and answers, giving them the artillery to speak. Once they've built up this foundation, they're more readily able to create and converse on their own, more or less using the confines of that language's grammar--not through grammar exercises but rather through a natural feeling for the flow of that language.

How to Use the Course

Contrary to popular belief, it's certainly not reciting from written text, although I've used this technique myself many times. I'd leave it to after you've already built up your speaking foundation first. So right from the beginning, I recommend reading through your materials to get familiar with how it looks written down, but once you start listening to the recordings, it'll probably sound completely different than what you anticipated. Work on mastering the sounds you hear, for it is the sounds and not the text that represent this language. Text is a far cry from what a language actually sounds like, and English is the proverbial epitome of that.

The key to learning to speak a foreign language is by listening and repeating consistently what you hear. What you hear has to be understood. So we use your own language to build the understanding of the target language. People will say though that target languages have words and phrases and meanings that don't exist in our own language and that you can't learn everything through translating or else how will you ever learn how to think in that language? I say, forget about that for now. When you are able to function in that language, you have the ability to build more understanding of new concepts using the tools of that language rather than your own language. If you're worrying about this now, you're thinking way too far ahead of yourself.

So don't read along when listening to the recordings. Try to repeat the best you can. And I know you won't be able to repeat it very well the first day. THAT'S OK! We'll keep nudging you along day after day and there's plenty of repetition and review. Don't worry about forgetting. Don't give yourself any pressure whatsoever. That's how people get frustrated and give up.

Future Development of Courses

Here at Glossika, I'm dedicated to building and sustaining more and more platforms of efficient and as-effortless-as-possible language acquisition methodologies providing solutions for individuals and businesses alike around the globe. I now have a team of more dedicated individuals working hard to make this vision and dream become a reality. Perhaps it is your vision to see this happen too, and I welcome community involvement.

Our English platform finally launched January 1, 2008, with over a thousand lessons in both audio and video formats for our Chinese subscribers--and we continue to add content on a daily basis keeping us busy around the clock. A new Mandarin Chinese learning platform was launched March 21, 2008 and we're in the process of building up the same size repository of training materials for Mandarin and other languages -- geared for English speakers. Provided the time and physical space resources, we will build several complete training modules in both audio and video for the Taiwanese/S Min language and hopefully work will begin on this initiative before the end of the year. With more users on our sites, this also enables us to greatly lower the cost per lesson that you as the end user pay.

Ready to Get Started

When you purchase this course, I'll send you the text file via email. You'll need Unicode or UTF-8 support to see the characters. There is an online copy of the course material using my updated Campbell Universal Pinyin (see my Chinese Dialects site for more info) making the use of extra Unicode characters obsolete, but we haven't released this version publicly yet, so we'll keep you updated.

I can give you a Cantonese course packaged together with the Taiwanese, so you're getting two for the price of one. I didn't write the Cantonese course, but it's well-written, highly recommended, and I know that'll give you some real value for your money. That's 10 more hours of recorded materials I'm giving away.

And to think, by summer time when the summer break gets into full swing, it doesn't matter if you're in Taipei or meeting Taiwanese travelers at home, you're bound to find a use for your newly acquired Taiwanese!!!

If you're ready now, then click here:

Just $38.88 for 600 Taiwanese sentences and vocabulary in 30 days + bonus of 10 hours of Cantonese (over $200 value)