Member since Jan 14, 2018, and what I have learned about languages. This is all my own opinion and ideas taken from various sources that I cannot remember, and it is in English so anyone who thinks this is inappropriate or the wrong use for this notebook entry thing just complain to the italki management and it will give me a reason to talk to, I think he was Russian or something, don't remember but he was in armed forces, and he is a really cool guy. He really cares about the italki community and that was obvious from our previous discussion. So formalities aside. The first thing I would like to mention is the amount of really cool people I have talked to which brings me to the second thing, the amount of really cool people I simply do not have time to talk to. I never really had this problem before, mostly just put up with people, listen to their whining, nod my head as they prattle on about something uninteresting to me, BUT now I have so many interesting and friendly people I want to converse with but with work and sleeping and time-zones the time is not long enough. I had a video chat quite a while ago with a young Chinese man and he asked if I could slow down my speech but it never really worked because the problem was that unless my sentences are short and simple, I could not slow my mind to the speed of my mouth. My solution, type message, send message, read aloud message. Effectively my message became script for me, subtitles for other person. Words not understood can be easily looked up because the spelling is there plus the sound of the words are there as well. My first critic, too much work, not natural conversation, waste of your time. I decided to talk with him, and quickly realised a natural conversation with him was not likely. I have heard, "what words or sentences should I memorize?" A conversation is flexible, relaxed, unrehearsed, about anything, for any duration, between 2 or more people and so memorizing is a pointless exercise. Understanding of the language, knowing what an apple is, knowing what a fruit is, not the word but the actual object the word represents. When you know what the object is then you can understand the possible actions you can perform on the object. An apple can be eaten, bashed, smashed, thrown, blown up, run over, sliced, diced, mashed, cooked, baked, peeled, jumped on, dropped, painted, carved, and other things I haven't thought of. What is wrong with this sentence: An apple ate my dog. Feel free to comment, correct, criticize, voice your opinion, good or bad I don't mind.