In my last post I talked about what I have coming up this summer. Well, I need your help readers! In order to participate in these programs I need to raise $3,000. To do this, I have started a kickstarter campaign. Please take a look at my proposal page by clicking on the link below and if you think that I am someone you would like to back, please contribute! Thank you all for your support!
James' Kickstarter Proposal
Showing posts with label Mission. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mission. Show all posts
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
2012 in Review, and a Look Ahead!
I have decided this year to go down to one post per month here. This way, my posts should be of a little more substance. This post is going to be my year in review post, with a brief update on this year, as well.
This past year has been one of great growth vocally. I have become completely comfortable in the tenor tessitura, although the high notes do still give me some trouble in performance, due to nerves. I have built a reliable Ab and A natural in the last year, and I am working currently on solidifying my Bb and working towards the B natural. Every day I feel things becoming more and more comfortable and I am beginning to identify with my tenor voice. The fruits of this year have represented themselves through my first contracted role, a comprimario role which I will be singing in March with Rochester Lyric Opera.
This summer I will be moving out of the Rochester area in search of more opportunities for both me and my wife. In preparation for this move, I will be planning and performing a recital in the late spring or early summer. I have not yet decided what the repertoire will be, but I am leaning towards a mixed program of predominantly French and German repertoire, with some Italian thrown in to pay tribute to the area of Rochester I live in, which is practically all Italian.
My year of German was ultimately a success, too. I did not get to the level that I was hoping to in the language, but I do feel comfortable in basic day-to-day conversation and feel that I would be able to get around the country were I to go there tomorrow.
This was my first language I had studied without any prior knowledge, and I feel that my method worked very well. I have found that it is difficult for me to keep up my studies as consistently as is necessary to really achieve fluency in a year. This is in part due to my schedule and the fact that most of my studying was happening while I was at work between the hours of three and five in the morning. A number of times, it was too difficult to stay awake while studying at this time of day, and this ultimately led me to days and weeks where I would not study. I also found that I do not need to invest in the products I was investing in to learn a language. I am convinced that I can achieve my desired level in a language simply by using LingQ and speaking with anyone I come across who happens to speak my target language. This combination of input and output simultaneously has been extremely useful to me and I believe this is how I will approach the rest of my language studies.
This year, my mission is to reactivate and improve my Spanish language skills. I studied Spanish for three years in high school and was fairly comfortable speaking with my friend from the Dominican my first years of college. I have since not really used the language much. While my Spanish is still passable because of my Italian and English, I would like to become more comfortable in the language so that I may use it to my advantage in the day job market.
My goal for this year is to learn 8,000 words of Spanish on LingQ and reach a high-intermediate level in the language. In following the 1.6 ratio I have discussed before, this would translate to about 5,000 word families known. In order to give a better idea of this level, the average native English speaker knows approximately 17,000 word families; so this will get me about a third of the way to native fluency, and should make me very comfortable in the language, assuming I speak as much as I should with friends and at meetups, etc.
This is going to be a very challenging year for me, but I look forward to it. I anticipate a lot of growth this year, both in my language abilities and in my singing and performing.
This past year has been one of great growth vocally. I have become completely comfortable in the tenor tessitura, although the high notes do still give me some trouble in performance, due to nerves. I have built a reliable Ab and A natural in the last year, and I am working currently on solidifying my Bb and working towards the B natural. Every day I feel things becoming more and more comfortable and I am beginning to identify with my tenor voice. The fruits of this year have represented themselves through my first contracted role, a comprimario role which I will be singing in March with Rochester Lyric Opera.
This summer I will be moving out of the Rochester area in search of more opportunities for both me and my wife. In preparation for this move, I will be planning and performing a recital in the late spring or early summer. I have not yet decided what the repertoire will be, but I am leaning towards a mixed program of predominantly French and German repertoire, with some Italian thrown in to pay tribute to the area of Rochester I live in, which is practically all Italian.
My year of German was ultimately a success, too. I did not get to the level that I was hoping to in the language, but I do feel comfortable in basic day-to-day conversation and feel that I would be able to get around the country were I to go there tomorrow.
This was my first language I had studied without any prior knowledge, and I feel that my method worked very well. I have found that it is difficult for me to keep up my studies as consistently as is necessary to really achieve fluency in a year. This is in part due to my schedule and the fact that most of my studying was happening while I was at work between the hours of three and five in the morning. A number of times, it was too difficult to stay awake while studying at this time of day, and this ultimately led me to days and weeks where I would not study. I also found that I do not need to invest in the products I was investing in to learn a language. I am convinced that I can achieve my desired level in a language simply by using LingQ and speaking with anyone I come across who happens to speak my target language. This combination of input and output simultaneously has been extremely useful to me and I believe this is how I will approach the rest of my language studies.
This year, my mission is to reactivate and improve my Spanish language skills. I studied Spanish for three years in high school and was fairly comfortable speaking with my friend from the Dominican my first years of college. I have since not really used the language much. While my Spanish is still passable because of my Italian and English, I would like to become more comfortable in the language so that I may use it to my advantage in the day job market.
My goal for this year is to learn 8,000 words of Spanish on LingQ and reach a high-intermediate level in the language. In following the 1.6 ratio I have discussed before, this would translate to about 5,000 word families known. In order to give a better idea of this level, the average native English speaker knows approximately 17,000 word families; so this will get me about a third of the way to native fluency, and should make me very comfortable in the language, assuming I speak as much as I should with friends and at meetups, etc.
This is going to be a very challenging year for me, but I look forward to it. I anticipate a lot of growth this year, both in my language abilities and in my singing and performing.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Der Plan
As we have started a new year, I have already put in two days of study on my new language for the year, German. I figure I would outline my basic plan for the year with regards to my acquisition of German.
Resources:
German with Michel Thomas
German with Ease by Assimil
German on LingQ
In general, my goal is to spend ten hours a week studying German over the course of the next year. As I do not study on my days off from work, that equates to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. I will go through one lesson/track per working day with MT and Assimil. On LingQ, I plan to add approximately 100 known words to my vocabulary every working day. This is a little bit slower of a pace than I would like on LingQ, but I think it is the best plan for the amount of time I have available to devote to this study. As I go along I will have to read more and more material to acquire 100 new known words, so ultimately my exposure will grow exponentially as I become more accustomed to the language.
On the side, I plan to watch a German movie every month and listen to some German radio programming every week. Also, I am going to start praying the Rosary in German and hopefully I will get to the point where I can spontaneously pray in German by the end of the year. I also have a number of friends and acquaintances who speak German, so I will be practicing my spoken German from a very early stage, as soon as I start to know some more relevant material than: Der Tee ist kalt.
Based on my previous work in French, I anticipate that I will get to a pretty comfortable place with German by the summer, at which point I will have finished both MT and Assimil. The rest of my year in German will be spent focusing on listening comprehension and vocabulary building through LingQ.
German does present me with some challenges, the most striking one being that I have practically no previous coursework or study of the language outside of the one month I studied it last year. With both French and Italian I had taken actual classes prior to my self-study, so I had a little bit of a head-start. I am excited to see how I do with my first completely self-taught language and hope to be able to use this working plan as model for my future languages.
Resources:
German with Michel Thomas
German with Ease by Assimil
German on LingQ
In general, my goal is to spend ten hours a week studying German over the course of the next year. As I do not study on my days off from work, that equates to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. I will go through one lesson/track per working day with MT and Assimil. On LingQ, I plan to add approximately 100 known words to my vocabulary every working day. This is a little bit slower of a pace than I would like on LingQ, but I think it is the best plan for the amount of time I have available to devote to this study. As I go along I will have to read more and more material to acquire 100 new known words, so ultimately my exposure will grow exponentially as I become more accustomed to the language.
On the side, I plan to watch a German movie every month and listen to some German radio programming every week. Also, I am going to start praying the Rosary in German and hopefully I will get to the point where I can spontaneously pray in German by the end of the year. I also have a number of friends and acquaintances who speak German, so I will be practicing my spoken German from a very early stage, as soon as I start to know some more relevant material than: Der Tee ist kalt.
Based on my previous work in French, I anticipate that I will get to a pretty comfortable place with German by the summer, at which point I will have finished both MT and Assimil. The rest of my year in German will be spent focusing on listening comprehension and vocabulary building through LingQ.
German does present me with some challenges, the most striking one being that I have practically no previous coursework or study of the language outside of the one month I studied it last year. With both French and Italian I had taken actual classes prior to my self-study, so I had a little bit of a head-start. I am excited to see how I do with my first completely self-taught language and hope to be able to use this working plan as model for my future languages.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Frustrations, Progress and a Diatribe
In the past two and a half weeks I have had quite a few different emotions running through my system in regards to language, singing and life in general. Starting with languages, I had a week of solid conversational French practice while I was in Kentucky on a mission trip with my friend Ernest. For those who don't know, Ernest is from Cameroon and fluent in about eight languages ranging from Italian to Bengali. After that week I jumped right back into my studying and am progressing at a very pleasing rate in French. I anticipate that I should be able to call myself fluent in French by the new year. That may seem far off to some of you and not long enough at all to others, but the truth is that languages can be learned quickly if the motivation is there.
The frustrations of my past two and a half weeks came in singing. During my week in Kentucky I was unable to practice at all outside of singing for daily mass. When I got back in the practice room the next week I felt like my voice was not doing anything correctly. Then, luckily, I began to turn things around late this past week. I also had a realization that I have been breathing far too shallow for far too long. Now that I am taking completely full breaths I have found that singing is feeling much better again. My current frustration now is finding the funds to get down to NYC for a lesson with JRL. I posted an ad on my facebook asking for applications for a patron, but no one seems interested which is sad for me.
Now onto my diatribe which will take this blog of course momentarily. This past evening I attended a "Teen Life Mass" at a nearby Catholic Church. I had recently heard stories about these masses from traditionalist (like myself) speaking of various horrors inherent in this style of mass. To my mind, these were all verified during the course of the mass. The purpose of a Teen Life Mass is to reach the teens through more "accessible" music and encourage their participation. However, to me, I was attending a protestant mega-church worship service rather than a mass. The major problem I have with the music is not necessarily the music itself; contemporary christian music has its place, but not in the mass. There was a huge disconnect between the upbeat, bubble-gum music and the solemnity of the rest of the rites of the mass. Not only that, but the music had nil to do with the actual readings, which it is supposed to according to the general rules for the mass. Also, the whole point of this music is to engage the teens and youth of the parish more, however I saw a very small percentage of these people actually participating in the singing! There were other problems within the course of the mass liturgically speaking. During the mass I vowed to never be at another Teen Life Mass in my life. What this type of mass does is set up the youth of the parish to leave the Church! I pray that the new missal and future reforms will save our youth from the horrors of the Teen Life Mass and bring back a sense of reverence to the Mass.
The frustrations of my past two and a half weeks came in singing. During my week in Kentucky I was unable to practice at all outside of singing for daily mass. When I got back in the practice room the next week I felt like my voice was not doing anything correctly. Then, luckily, I began to turn things around late this past week. I also had a realization that I have been breathing far too shallow for far too long. Now that I am taking completely full breaths I have found that singing is feeling much better again. My current frustration now is finding the funds to get down to NYC for a lesson with JRL. I posted an ad on my facebook asking for applications for a patron, but no one seems interested which is sad for me.
Now onto my diatribe which will take this blog of course momentarily. This past evening I attended a "Teen Life Mass" at a nearby Catholic Church. I had recently heard stories about these masses from traditionalist (like myself) speaking of various horrors inherent in this style of mass. To my mind, these were all verified during the course of the mass. The purpose of a Teen Life Mass is to reach the teens through more "accessible" music and encourage their participation. However, to me, I was attending a protestant mega-church worship service rather than a mass. The major problem I have with the music is not necessarily the music itself; contemporary christian music has its place, but not in the mass. There was a huge disconnect between the upbeat, bubble-gum music and the solemnity of the rest of the rites of the mass. Not only that, but the music had nil to do with the actual readings, which it is supposed to according to the general rules for the mass. Also, the whole point of this music is to engage the teens and youth of the parish more, however I saw a very small percentage of these people actually participating in the singing! There were other problems within the course of the mass liturgically speaking. During the mass I vowed to never be at another Teen Life Mass in my life. What this type of mass does is set up the youth of the parish to leave the Church! I pray that the new missal and future reforms will save our youth from the horrors of the Teen Life Mass and bring back a sense of reverence to the Mass.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)