Being happy.

I always hear the question: how can I be happy?
I think that happiness shouldn't be searched for because happiness is inside ourselves. We all have happiness inside so we must change the way we look at the world.
Sometimes I feel miserable, because I focus my attention on what I don't have and on what I could have, and that makes me even sadder. A few days ago I read a book where the writer said that we should't focus on material possessions. On the contrary, we should focus on the power we all have, we should all be faithful, we should have faith in life, and we should accept things for what they truly are. If you are sad, don't try to convert this feeling into a positive one. Accept it, and search within yourself for the source of your pain.
Not everyone listens to their soul but it has the power to make decisions. Our souls are always trying to tell us something.
So my final advices is: to be happy you need acceptance and faith. That's all.
Have a nice day everyone!

My goals is to learn English

Hi. My name is Novomir.
I am a programmer and an entrepreneur from Russia.
My profession and passion is a combination of programming, marketing and design.
For example: creating landing pages, automatic sales funnels, scripts for writing API-interface, chat bots in Facebook and Telegram.
And most of the interesting materials are written in English..
So now I'm learning English. I need some conversational practice :)

I like California because of its climate and because of Silicon Valley.
New York is known for its skyscrapers and the fact that it is the financial center of the world.

I really want to fly to New York for my birthday this fall.

heavy rain

Today there is heavy rain so I will not go jogging.
I will borrow an English book from the library.

well I tried

Hello, everyone! This is my first note on this platform. My name is Vitalii. I'm from Ukraine, but now I live in Poland. I study programming and I'd like to begin studying English. I studied English at school and I want to go on to study English myself. I don't know when I will write the next note and I don't know how many mistakes are in my text. Thank you!

Start again

This is my first note here.
I registered here many years ago but I haven't been on Italki.com since then. Now I see that this was a mistake.
I studied English at a university last time. That was more than 12 years ago. Unfortunately, now I remember almost nothing. In the modern world it is so inconvenient to be unable to speak english that I decided to restart. I suppose that Italki.com is one of the best tools to improve my skills.
I hope that I can find a good teacher here soon.
I want to travel a lot this year so I have strong motivation for learning english.
I also tried to learn german and spanish many years ago. Now, I speak these languages worse  than I do english. I like these languages very much but I decided that I have to concentrate on learning only one language right now, english. I decided this because it is very difficult for a beginner to learn several languages at once.
I hope I will be able to start learning spanish and german a bit later.

Computer games and English

*There was a post on the Discussions board but it had disappeared before I could comment on it. Well, I've already written this text, so I'll just leave it here*


I think computer games can be useful - but only if you like games and find the plot interesting. Otherwise, it would just be boring.

Personally, I played "Skyrim" a little bit a few months ago. It wasn't too bad, even though my character ended up in the Imperial Legion without subtitles after the first twenty minutes of playing. That wasn't my intention at all. I had to turn the subtitles on; After i did that, everything became much easier.

I think these games - the modern ones - are more useful, because of the voiceover. Sometimes there's no text, but you can hear everything and have no choice but to figure the meaning out because you need to act according to the situation. Besides, there are many accents there so you can get used to the diversity (I'm not sure these are "real" accents though... E.g., what accent do Khajiits speak with? Arabic, Spanish, Russian, something in between? No idea).

There's only one drawback I see here: the setting of a story sometimes requires specific vocabulary. So maybe it's not a very good idea to learn English through something like "Knights of the Temple 2" if you're not proficient enough because you may end up sounding like a medieval crusader. I know what I'm talking about, so beware!

If what you were taught became reversed.

I read some books written by authors that were about 80 years old. They were elementary school children when World WarⅡended. They experienced the same thing. They were taught by their teachers during the war that the Japanese emperor was a god and that they must fight against the U.S with their lives for him. However after the war was over, they were taught that the Japanese emperor was only human and that the U.S was an ally who would teach them about democracy, human rights and freedom.

They say that they clearly remembered that immediately after the war was over, the considerable parts of school textbooks used during the war were painted in black with charcoal and their teachers taught them the opposite of what they taught during the war. They say that they can't trust other nations and that they knew the way people think changes instantly from their experience. They worked hard and became a driving force for the economic development of Japan. However they had the intensive experience like that when they were children. Can you guess if what you were taught became reversed.