Time for a change!
I have written more than 250 posts since I started this blog in 3 languages (Japanese, English and Spanish).
The other day, I learned several things from people of different professional fields, which somehow motivated me to make a change in my blog: adding French.
Opportunity which reminded me of the professionalism
A few weeks ago, the media team (cameraman and journalist) from Save the Children UK and The Guardian (one of the world’s biggest news company) came to Mongolia to write an article about Mongolian winter disaster (Dzud), its victims and what Save the Children is doing to mitigate the damage. Since my project touches a little bit upon this topic (migration from countryside), I accompanied the media team to interview some beneficiaries of the project.
Common things: professionalism
Althoguh camera and writing are 2 different fields, there was something in common: You care about the quality of the product, and to improve it, you just have to keep trying and learning from mistakes.
Below are some of the small techniques:
Example of camera man: caring about light
To capture the general landscape with good light, the shooting team went to one place three times (5:30 to take a landscape, 11:00 to interview families and 18:30 just for a landscape again).
Example of Journalist: visualizing and simplifying words
The journalist said he cares about using adjective more than verb to visualize (e.g. It surprised him → His eyes were wide open). Also, he suggested to use an affirmative sentence instead of negative to simplify (e.g He didn’t accept → He denied).
Biggest change in my blog history
Through this learning opportunity and a couple of thoughts, I finally decided to add French into my blog.I have been self-learning this language for a few years, and I always had this idea of adding French ONE DAY when it becomes better.
Learn by doing
But if you don’t do, the speed of improvement is very slow, and you learn it by doing so, and as long as you keep doing, you will eventually master it. Looking back in the past, I learned English and Spanish writing by writing.
These thoughts reminded me of why I started writing in the first place:
write about “learning” to “learn”.
This time, I learned that:
If you keep postponing, you never make mistake, thus you won’t improve. If you want to improve, just do it and learn from mistakes.