I was also tempted for a while to tackle cantonese, but after reading your posts regarding studying only one language at a time, I thought I should get jpn down pat first. Thanks for all the inspiration!

- 住在加拿大的臺灣人

p.s. 中文的學習一切都還好吧？有疑問的話，我會盡力幫忙的！

And keep on playing I did. My friends kept laughing at me, my kid brother (who always told me it was easy, but never actually played it himself) got bored of watching me, and my mom began to hate the amount of time I was spending on video games, but I never quit.

I think the reason why was because even though I was constantly falling into pits, getting hit by goombas, or coming into contact with Koopa’s fiery breath, I found myself enjoying the process. I even enjoyed geting angry at the game every time Mario gave that funny pose with his thumbs up and his legs sticking out as he fell off the screen to his “death.” Funny thing was, this “death” kept happening less and less often each time, and at later and later parts of the game. Eventually, I reached the princess (and I must say, Peach looked very ugly in the first game).

Years later, I learned why my my dad was better than me at Super Mario Bros.: he’d been playing it several months before I had. Apparently, my parents bought the damn thing long before Christmas, and my dad would wait until my brother and I had gone to bed. Then he’d pull the thing out and play it himself. Basically, my dad had more opportunities to fail than I had.

Later on in life, I ended up with friends who would ask me for advice on how to play, or even ask me to kill a boss for them that they “couldn’t” kill. As if somehow I were some genius. Now I own at Super Mario Brothers (although I still haven’t gotten that “dribbling” technique down; never needed it anyway). I suppose I could be better, but I’ve found other interests besides being a Mario champ. But I think you all get my point here. Because I kept on dying, I eventually ended up with Princess Peach as my hotty.

If you like the Beatles and are learning Japanese, I think you’ll really like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VcFuuWGgzA

have fun

Another thing I’ve found is that, I can’t produce any of my sentences! This has to be something wrong with my head, ,but I literally have 4000+ sentences, being doing this for more then 8 months, and maybe can randomly produce a hundred or so of them(and I live in Japan!). Do you attempt to get words into your mind before you srs them? I have an incredibly hard time just remembering vocab.

I wasn’t able to even produce any of them at all will until I dumbed most of my reps down to just be a verb and a noun.
I had to even add in reverse production cards to even be able to get to that level(and I found if I didn’t test myself on production I don’t really remember the vocab, I just kinda remember the outline/what the sentence means and speed read through my 400 reps a day. ) I would kill to have even a 85% success rate on my production cards.

Really I’m at my wits end here, I’m doing everything I’m suppose to be doing, no English except for my job. The only thing I can think of doing differently is reading outloud, but when I do that I never seem to actually be able to grasp the meaning of the sentence

Khatzusmoto – I’ll probably be paying for your consulting soon, so no need to reply yet, but just seeing if the community has any ideas first.

But then after the game I remembered that there are people who have played thousands of games of Go after getting stuck at a certain level and can never seem to improve. The same for Poker, writing, baseball, cooking, Japanese, you name it. Just failing doesn’t help you improve, you have to put in serious effort. Even if you put in the effort, not everyone can reach their goals. Like say if your goal is to be the best, or just better than another individual, or 90% of individuals. I don’t have the stones to accuse everyone who’s stuck that they aren’t trying hard enough.

It were a tricky curve ball you threw, citing the best as also being the best failures. Babe Ruth may have struck out twice as many times as he hit home runs, but other batters could have easily struck out way more times than him if their coach has been masochistic enough to put them up at bat.

I’m afraid I must disagree with you, failing does not lead to success.

I totally agree though that today’s attitude towards failure that is purported by society and enforced in our schools is an unfortunate vestigial mindset that was far more useful when we had to fight lions and bears for our bananas.

I checked it! I found that in cities you may be lucky to see more than 20 stars due to light pollution, while in perfect conditions one could see as many as 2000 stars with the naked eye. However, if you consider all stars visible from all points on Earth, they would add up to some 6000 so you’re pretty close with that statement.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye#Naked_eye_in_astronomy
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/742414.html