If you've been following me on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, you have probably already figured out that I am about to embark on a new adventure.

I have recently joined the team at Asia Adventures and will soon relocate to Cambodia to work with them full-time,  helping to promote their unique cycling, trekking, cruise and motorbike tours throughout Southeast Asia.

Over the past 2 years, I've had the pleasure of visiting Cambodia 4 times; 3 times to Siem Reap and once to Phnom Penh. I was touched deeply by the sites, history, culture and most of all, the friendly people. I started to casually look around for what kind of job opportunities there were in the area, and was fortunate to have met the owner of Asia Adventures.

Asia Adventures is a perfect match for me for several reasons. First, although I enjoy teaching English in Taiwan, most of my employment experience is in the travel industry. It will be great to get back into it. Second,  the company specializes in cycling, trekking, cruise and motorbike tours, all of which interest me personally. Finally, I especially admire and respect their dedication to "Responsible Tourism"; supporting the community, charities & local vendors as well as protecting the environment.

Please stay tuned to this blog, or any of my social networking pages listed above, for regular updates!

A very interesting discovery.

In the past couple years, I've been so fortunate to visit Siem Reap, Cambodia 3 times. The first time was on a company trip, which was an escorted group tour, and the second and third times were independent trips with my good friend Tom Lambrecht, allowing me to get closer to the local people and real Cambodian life. People who know me won't be surprised to hear that the people and place have touched my heart. It wasn't just the Angkor temples that made these trips so wonderful, but I also feel like I've made some life-long friends.

People who know me will also tell you that I love bike riding. It's a recent passion that I discovered about 3 years ago by joining former colleagues and students from ChuLin School on rides through the mountains surrounding Taipei, Taiwan. I am not a professional cyclist by any stretch of one's imagination, but I think I can qualify as a cycling enthusiast.

So it was an interesting discovery to come across Asia Adventures, a company that has a wide variety of tours in the area. Besides the usual tours of the sites and temples, they also have more unique tours like Cambodia Cruises on the Mekong River and Tonle Sap Lake   and even better, Cambodia Cycle Tours. 

Perhaps there is an Angkor Temple biking tour in my near future......

I wrote previously that I was putting the blog on hold, but I had such an excellent trip to Cambodia recently,  I have to write something here.

Cambodia hadn't really been on my "list of places to visit" before.  Not that I had anything against going there, but maybe I'd just lost my drive to visit new places. Then I was invited to join a company trip with Serenity Entertainment Group in September 2010. It was an amazing experience visiting the Angkor temples, but as it was a group tour, I didn't get to experience much of Cambodia's contemporary local culture. It was a good introduction, but I needed an opportunity to return.

When my friend Tom suggested we go somewhere for Lunar New Year this year, I immediately thought of Cambodia. We went independently, staying at the Golden Banana Boutique Hotel & Resort. This was one of the two places we stayed at during the first trip and seemed like the quiet, friendly, intimate place for the perfect, relaxing vacation with a local feel. We weren't disappointed.

The highlight of this trip were the good friends we made at the Golden Banana. They are the most genuinely warm, kind, friendly, helpful staff at any hotel I've ever visited. It starts with their own personality and character, but is enhanced by a good relationship with each other and hotel management. The hotel provides the staff with customer service training as well as subsidizes their higher education. All of these factors contribute to excellent customer service and a unique guest experience.

For sightseeing, we got away from the Old Market and the Angkor Temples and went more "off the beaten path". We visited one of the floating villages, swam in some waterfalls popular with locals, and went to the home of our friend/driver/guide Tay in a rural village about an hour from Siem Reap. I played volleyball with Tay and some of the other staff of the hotel, and spent some quality time chatting with them around the pool.

I invite you to see the pictures from both trips in my Photo Gallery or on Google+ . If you have any questions about the trip, please post a comment here, or please e-mail me.

Having recently joined LinkedIn (business networking) and Google+ (social networking), I haven't had enough time to update this blog with the more detailed posts that it would need to be useful. I will focus my blogging to those other two sites for now, and I invite you to visit me there.

If things settle down, and if I can find time to write on language learning or other topics of interest, I will resume blogging here. But in the mean time, I hope to see you either on LinkedIn or Google+.

Sorry I haven't updated the blog in a while. In addition to things getting busier with my job, I've also been enjoying spending time with my friend Helen, who is visiting from England. She's only here for 2 weeks and there are so many places in the Taipei area to show her!

I've posted some updates on Google+, some are public and some are limited to people in my Google+ Circles. If you'd like to join Google+ or be added to my Circles, send me an e-mail or leave a comment here.

By the way, the above photo was not actually in Taipei, but in Pinglin.

Next week, we should be back to our regularly scheduled program. Stay tuned.

Google+ is just over a month old. On this one-month anniversary, many bloggers and other tech writers have shared their thoughts on how it's doing so far, and what it's future might be. I just want to add my own experiences and feelings,

Those of you who know me well, know the concerns I have about social networking sites. I wrote in Facebook - The Social Network about some of those concerns. In real life, we have different social networks which are not meant to be mixed, but online social networking sites put them all together. Things you share with your friends, you may not want to share with your mom.

When my good friend Cage Chung sent me an invitation to Google+, despite being totally opposed to joining Facebook or any other social networking site, I joined. I have always had good experiences with Google products and services, and they largely resolved my concerns about privacy and mixing of social groups with Circles and with easy-to-use privacy controls.

After 1 month, I'm happy with Google+, but I am not sure about its future.

Google+ had rapid growth in the first month, reaching 20 million users, but now what? They'd better open it to the public, and do a good job of convincing people why it's better than other choices, or it's going nowhere.

Reports show that the number of visits to Google+ and the time spent during each visit have declined. The articles say it's too soon to know if it's just a blip or the sign of something deeper, but my own experience has been similar. I'm not seeing as many posts or replies from my friends and acquaintenances. Too soon to tell, though, but just noticing.

So what do you think? What kind of future do you see for Google+? Can it draw people away from Facebook? Are there enough people willing to participate on several social networking sites? Has Google really made the case for why Google+ deserves your attention?

By the way, yes that's me in the picture.

Vocabulary building is a life-long process. When first learning a new language, we need to pick up new words quickly to be able to communicate, so we study and memorize long lists of words. But, even advanced learners and native speakers will continue to pick up new words throughout their lifetimes.

Today, I will write a little about how to use your time more effectively when trying to build your vocabulary.

In a class this week, there was a word in the article we were reading that no one in the class had ever seen, including me: phlegmatic. Do you know what it means? Do you care? Should you? We'll come back to this in a moment.

In the high school where I used to teach, students had to memorize long lists of vocabulary words. The students worked very hard at this, took tests on those words, then promptly forgot most of them after the test. Looking over the lists, two things were obvious; many of the words were not likely to be of interest to the student, nor would they likely have any opportunity to use them.

The most effective way to learn and remember new vocabulary is for it to be about something that interests you and that you can use in your daily conversation. Memorizing lists of words that you don't care about and won't have opportunities to use is not very effective.

As an example, let me tell you another story about a former high school student. When he took his English tests, he would write his name on the top, turn the paper over and fall asleep. He found the whole experience very frustrating because the grammar and vocabulary being taught was above his ability and outside of his interest. I found out that he was very interested in basketball, so I taught him some words and expressions commonly used in basketball. Even several years later, he still remembered those words and was able to use them.

So if you want to use your valuable time to more effectively and efficiently learn vocabulary, let me make 2 suggestions:

First, read more material, or subscribe to podcasts on topics that interest you. If you like business or economics, read about those things. If you are a sports freak, read about sports. If you love computers, read about technology. If you are interested in the topic, you are more likely to remember the vocabulary.

Second, when you come across a new word, ask yourself if you think that word might be useful to you. Think about ways it might fit into your active vocabulary. If you can't see any situation where you might likely use that word, don't waste your time trying to memorize it. If you use new vocabulary in your daily conversation, you are more likely to remember the it.

This is not to say that there aren't times when we have to be more agressive about learning new words, which may require that we study from lists. Taking the TOEFL test, for example, requires a sizeable vocabulary. But, if time is limited and you need a way to efficiently build vocabulary that will be useful to you, then try those two suggestions above.

Back to phlegmatic. Here is the definition from Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary:

phleg·mat·ic - adjective

not easily upset, excited, or angered: She was phlegmatic even during the most difficult moments of the crisis.

I will leave it to you to decide if 1) you are interested in that word and 2) if you think you can add it to your daily conversation.

In the early stages of foreign language learning, we usually depend heavily on translating. We use translation dictionaries, software and electronic devices to get a translation of a foreign word in our own language. When I studied French, I carried my French-English dictionary everywhere. Here in Taiwan, many of my students have electronic translation devices. (I wish we had those when I was learning French.....)

This is understandable and reasonable, but let me tell you why it might be time for you to stop translating.

Once we reach a certain level in our learning, we need to stop (or at least reduce) relying on translating and stay more in the target language. There are two important reasons for this.

First, it's important to develop the skill of figuring out words from context. I mentioned this in "Get the Idea?" . If you always rely on translating, you won't develop the ability to figure out the meaning of words on your own. We learn our native language largely by figuring out the meaning of words from context, and we can use this skill to figure out the meaning of foreign words.

This brings me to my second point: Without the ability to figure out the meaning of at least some new words from context, we will get stuck any time we hear or see a new word. I wrote about this in "A Deer in Headlights".We freeze, focusing on the word we can't understand and miss everything else the speaker is saying. Or, if we are reading, we stop all the time to look up every new word, which gets very frustrating.

When we hear or see a word we don't understand, instead of reaching for a translation dictionary, we should listen to the rest of what's being said, or keep reading, get the main idea and then figure out the meaning of the new word ourselves.

In the worst case scenario, and you can not figure out the meaning of the word from context, before you reach for your translation device, try looking up the word in an English-English dictionary (or a dictionary of whatever language you are learning).  This benefits you not only by getting the meaning of the new word, but also by keeping your thinking in the target language. This is an important stage of language learning when you really start to make amazing progress.

You might argue that the definitions in English-English dictionaries are even more confusing. I agree. This is why I highly recommend Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary. The definitions in a learner's dictionary are much simpler than in a standard dictionary, and therefore easier to understand. There is a Learner's Dictionary widget in the middle column of this blog, and another here:

Good luck with your English learning!