Mad for language again

I'm working two languages now... Mandarin and Japanese. Clearly I have gone completely insane, right? It's actually a cunning experiment: now that I have a facile working of French, Spanish, German, and English, and I got stalled on Japanese, I think that my ability to parse the uniqueness of a language is definitely getting pretty sharp. Also, I will say that based on my first week of this, there really is NO chance of mixing them up any more than there's a chance of mixing french and German: The sounds are totally different, the sentence structure is totally different. The only thing they share is some idiogram characters, which have similar meanings but different pronunciation between the two.

And did I mention the SOUND is different? In Japanese, it can be spoken monotone, but Chinese is almost like singing: The same syllable has four meanings based on if you say it with a high flat tone, a medium rising tone, a low "dipping" tone (hi-low-hi), or a high falling tone. An analogy would be if you're calling someone for tea: First call out, "Tea!". Not sure if anyone heard you you'd say "Tea?" rising up. A little frustrated, you'd growl "Tea..." with the falling-rising dip. Then at the end, you shout TEA! with a fall off on the tone at the end. Maybe that doesn't make any sense. But it works for me.

I've discovered two new resources to help me: Web based learning from Japanesepod101.com and Chinesepod.com. Each of these have lessons in 10-15 minute increments at various levels, and accompanying PDFs to show the written vocabulary. They both have online tools for quizzes, and for hearing individual words repeated... But their core audio lessons ARE free, which is superfantastic.

I'm afraid I'm starting to drive Pamela nuts with language now - pretty much everything I say, I repeat quietly in the other languages just to see if I can... and Pamela says "That's a lot of input coming at me." So I'll have to do it more quietly. I'm also considering making a book just for me to practice polyglot-ism: Copy a book, sentence by sentence, and on each page, have one sentence that needs translating into 4-5 languages, plus checkboxes for what learning (pimsleur, podcast, etc) I did...? I think that this idea may actually be too nerdy even for me. Please... HELP ME.

One final detail on Language: I went to a sushi bar tonight, and sat down with a cheerful "Kon ban wa!" (good evening) ready to to chat up my chef (I had a lot of comments ready in Japanese). The guy gave me a look and said "Sorry dude, I don't speak japanese. Maybe you can teach ME something". I got "dude" from a sushi chef. Then he messed up my order too. It was a bit of a letdown, and I don't think i can go there again... They also over-vinegar their rice a bit. Nuts to them.

While doing all of this, I've also been busy with BrainReady: I did a prototype cover for Book 2, which may go to printing this weekend. And the content for Book 3 is essentially complete, it just needs to be dropped into the book template, and that will be at the printers by next weekend.

We're also working on CDs of visualizations, and to support that I've been doing a lot of music - in the past 3 weeks, I've written 8 new pieces of music, which is almost as prolific as I used to be back in the early 1990s (back then, it was 1 piece every 2-3 days for a few years - over 500 tracks written from 1990-1993). I've had to get very efficient, and my new "laptop at the dinner table" studio is proving to be very effective.

Well, it's time for bed now...