Craig Dodge Taiwan

Do you think LeBron James would be such a good basketball player if he only practiced once a week for 2 hours? Probably not. To be good at something takes a little work and learning a foreign language is no exception. If the only effort you put into it is attending a class or meeting with a tutor once a week for a couple of hours, you are not likely to make much progress. You're going to have to make some choices.

Let me tell you a story of two of my individual students, let's call them Mary and Susan. Both are very busy, high-level executives with very full schedules. Both meet with me once a week for 2 hours of business English coaching, but one is making far better progress than the other. In addition to our weekly meetings, Mary spends a little time each day reviewing the notes she has taken during our conversations and listens to podcasts downloaded from the Internet. Susan, on the other hand, spends no time whatsoever between our meetings practicing English.

One day last week, Mary told me she learned a new word: astonished. I asked in what context she learned it and she explained that she recently had to make a presentation to her new boss in English and one of the other managers said she was "astonished" at Mary's English ability. Mary has further integrated the word "astonished" in her daily vocabulary. Susan, on the other hand, has made some progress over the course of our meetings, but not nearly as "astonishing" as Mary's. The only difference between the two is that Mary is putting in a little time every day learning and practicing English while Susan is not.

I am not judging either person. We all have our different priorities and have to make choices on how we want to use our limited, valuable time. In my own case, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, I've not learned much Chinese because I decided that other uses of my time were more important to me, such as work, reading novels, biking, exercise and spending time with friends and my dog.

The bottom line is that with most things we try to learn or do, we have to decide how badly we want it. If we want to take a shot at becoming a professional basketball player like LeBron James, we will have to practice hours and hours. Similarly, if we want to improve our foreign language skills, we need to invest some time into it, even if it's just a few minutes a day. Once a week, folks, is not enough.

So it's time to make some choices. If you really want to improve your English, you have to choose to spend some time on it, which may mean you need to give up some time doing other things. The choice is yours, but your choice will affect how much progress you will make learning English.

As I've written before, many of the students who graduated from ChuLin Senior High School this year were my first group of students 5 years ago when they were 8th graders (junior 2). I feel so lucky to be a part of their lives as they mature into young adults and move on into the world.

One of the things that takes me a little getting used to is seeing them driving scooters. It seems like just yesterday that they were kids, but when I see them on their scooters, I realize they are adults now. But it also scares me a little, not because I don't have faith in their driving skills necessarily, but because driving in Taiwan is about as dangerous a place as any I've ever been. Drivers routinely ignore not only safe driving rules, but even ignore the law. This makes the roads in Taiwan very dangerous for both drivers and pedestrians.

I won't go into all the traffic violations in Taiwan that both aggravate and terrify me because there isn't enough time in the day or space on this web page, and it would be an exercise in futility (pointless). Driving habits in Taiwan are not likely going to change in my lifetime, so I just need to learn how to survive them.  I do want to urge all my friends to be very, very careful out there on the roads. It's so important for you to not just drive safely yourself, but be very aware of the other drivers around you. You may not break the law, but you can bet someone around you will.

Just to make the point very clear, I want to share a video from YouTube of what happens when someone doesn't stop for a red light. What happens in the video is very disturbing, so if you are easily affected by violence, or seeing someone get hurt, don't watch it. After seeing this, however, it might make sure you will never forget how important it is to drive safely and cautiously.

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE

One of the companies at which I have had the pleasure of conducting business English training is Sinotech Engineering Consultants. This project is particularly interesting to me because in many ways, they teach me as much as I teach them.

The program is intended to increase the participants' ability and confidence in speaking English about the core areas of their engineering business. We discussed things like bridge,  tunnel and dam construction, high speed rail, the environment, building design and more. Previously, my only exposure to civil engineering was the fact that my now 94-year-old grandfather used to be a civil engineer in Michigan, designing highways and bridges. Interacting with these professional engineers has really taught me a lot about their field of expertise.

Last week, Friday, was the final exam for the most recent group. After the exam, we celebrated by enjoying dinner and drinks at a nearby restaurant. I am writing this post to acknowledge their hard work on the English training and to thank them for sharing their knowledge with me. Oh yeah, and to thank them for the great meal and drinks. I wish them all the best and I hope our paths will cross again in the future.

Since I moved to Taiwan in 2005, I've taken THOUSANDS of pictures of friends, bike trips, vacations and especially of my years at ChuLin. They represent so many fond memories.

I recently had a moment of panic, though, because I thought I'd lost my pictures. When I bought my new computer, I wasn't very organized about where I transferred them. Foolishly,  I didn't put them in the "My Pictures" folder and I guess I just didn't look very carefully through the other folders.  Also, my web site had a problem and everything had to be deleted, including the photo gallery, so I really thought all was lost.

Well, I was organizing my computer yesterday and I came across the old pictures. YIPPIE!!! What a lot of fun memories! I'm still in the process of organizing them and getting some of them uploaded to my gallery. It will take me some time to organize and upload, because there are so many, much of which might not really be interesting to anyone. I will do my best to get some of the more fun pictures uploaded to share with everyone.

The home page of the photo gallery is at: Craig's English Photo Gallery.  I've organized all the ChuLin pictures at:  ChuLin Photo Albums . Please visit periodically as I will be adding new albums over the next couple weeks.

I've never had any love for Apple. There is nothing about their style or OS that I find particularly compelling. From what I understand, Apple's computers are better for those who work in design, graphics and video editing, but I have no need for such capabilities. People say that Apple's OS is more intuitive or user-friendly, but I've never had any problem navigating Windows. Let's say I started this journey indifferent to Apple.

The first Apple product I bought was an iPod. I've had a couple different versions of the iPod, including the first model they came out with that was capable of showing videos. It was easy enough to use, and did the job it was meant to do, but this was when I was first exposed to Apple's brand strategy: Get their hooks into the customer and never let go. Any accessories needed to be Apple approved and there were so many restrictions on how to manage and use the content on the iPod through iTunes. iTunes is easy enough, but doesn't work very smoothly on Windows and I just resent being told how to use my own purchase. Further, the Apple-approved accessories I bought were not necessarily of good quality. The cable I needed to connect the iPod to a TV had to be replaced twice, lasting only a year each time. So while the iPod was useful and stylish, it wasn't very dependable or durable.

A little over a year ago, shortly after starting my job traveling all over the Taipei metropolitan area coaching business English, I decided a smart phone would be very useful for keeping up with e-mail and other tasks for which I needed easy access to the Internet. Android was not yet available in Taiwan and the handsets with Windows OS in Taiwan were only available in Chinese, so my choices were limited to Blackberry or iPhone. I didn't care for the Blackberry keyboard or small screen size, so I bought an iPhone 3G.

The iPhone certainly proved to be useful, but not in any way more useful than what any other smart phone would be. I use it frequently for e-mail, Internet access, VoIP calling, organizing my calendar, reading ebooks, listening to music and taking pictures. There is no application or feature that I use that isn't also available on the other smart phones in the market. Additionally, other smart phones have even more features that would be useful to me that aren't available on the iPhone, especially the Android phones that have better integration with the Google services that I use so frequently. Unless you jailbreak the phone, a process with which I am uncomfortable, you are tied to Apple's iTunes and only Apple approved applications.

Even though the iPhone is useful, it is not dependable. I'm not a power caller, but I still get irritated by how often it drops calls, especially as I am driving through even south-central Taipei City. I will also get missed-call text messages at times when my phone shows a full signal, but no call ever rang. Even worse, on the one-year anniversary of the date I purchased the phone, it went into a crash-reboot cycle and could not be restored. The phone was replaced by the company according to the terms of the warranty, but it didn't instill confidence in the product. Now that the OS has been updated to OS4, the applications open and run very slowly and the phone occasionally crashes. All in all, these issues give me a very bad impression about the quality and dependability of the iPhone.

The bottom line is that there is no reason to choose an iPhone over other smart phones in the market. The specifications of many of the competitors are far superior to those of the iPhone and have the features that are most important to me. My cell phone service contract will be up for renewal at the end of this year and I'm already shopping for a replacement for my iPhone.