Thoughts on AI and Language Learning

For the past two weeks, I have been on compliance leave from my work and have been traveling in Paris, France and Taipei, Taiwan. I am writing this in my hotel room in Taipei before heading out for an afternoon stroll. My vacation will come to an end tomorrow and I will fly back to Singapore on an evening flight.

Both in Paris and Taipei, I have been buying numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, in French, Chinese, and Japanese. For the longest time, my knowledge of French has not been good enough for me to read books in French, but during this trip, I’ve noticed that my knowledge of French has grown to an extent that I can now read simple novels without feeling frustrated, so I decided to buy a few novels to read after my return to Singapore.

As I have mentioned multiple times in my past journal entries, I have been studying French vocabulary from a Larousse French-Chinese dictionary since December 2023. 15 months on, I have covered almost 70 percent of the pages. If I continue at this rate, I expect to finish studying the entire dictionary in mid-October of this year. Given my ability to persevere in my study, and the fact that vocabulary learning has been tremendously enjoyable, I should be able to achieve that goal with no difficulty.

My initial aim with French was to be able to understand French novels and movies in the original language without feeling the need to look up words in the dictionary. But now that I am getting closer to attaining that goal, I’ve recently gotten more ambitious: not only do I want to understand French, but I also want to be able to express myself in the language with fluency. Traveling in France made me realize the tremendous joy it gives me to be able to converse with local people.

I believe that a big part of what makes a person sound fluent in a foreign language is mastering the correct pronunciation. In the past, this used to be a major obstacle for learners of French, a language notorious for being pronounced differently from the way it’s spelled, what with the famous phonetic phenomenon of “liaison” and all that.

A few years ago, I even attended a language school for a year for private tutoring sessions in the hope of improving my French pronunciation, but didn’t achieve much progress on that front despite the thousands of dollars I spent. The problem with language schools with prepared curriculums and textbooks is that they are not structured in a way that addresses my specific questions on pronunciation in a direct, pinpoint manner.

However, luckily for me, in recent years, the advent of websites employing artificial intelligence, such as ElevenLabs and Youglish, has made it possible for me to get immediate answers to my pressing questions on pronunciation. ChatGPT has been an effective productivity-booster as well, not only explaining the meanings of words and phrases in detail, but also generating sample sentences to deepen my understanding. These tools have rendered my French sentence books with accompanying audio CDs completely obsolete, so I’m planning to dispose of them soon.

As the barriers to studying French pronunciation have effectively come down, now is a better time than ever to learn to acquire a genuine and native-sounding accent. Given this development, I have recently incorporated pronunciation practice into my study of French vocabulary, so that I can learn not only the meanings of the words but also their correct pronunciation.

By the way, some people might argue that in the age of AI there is really not much point learning foreign languages, as these skills can be so easily learned and as such, are no longer marketable. They might have a point, but I beg to differ—it has become more important than ever to learn foreign languages because technology has made it so much easier to learn those skills, not in spite of it.

I believe that for you to become creative, you need to have the basic foundation of knowledge to work with. Artificial intelligence can help you leverage on your existing knowledge to achieve astonishing feats, but if you don’t possess the expertise to begin with, you have effectively nothing to work on, and therefore cannot create anything of value.

If anything, for a language learning “nerd” like myself, things have gotten more favorable than ever to be my real self and realize my full potential. I intend to take maximum advantage of the benefits that modern technology confers and pursue my interests to my heart’s content.

Would You Live in Johor Bahru?

(Image: RTS Link between Johor Bahru and Singapore)

Friday afternoon, I took a half day’s leave from work and traveled to Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The occasion was to attend the housewarming party of my friend, Jack, who recently moved to JB from Singapore. When he extended the invite to me, I eagerly took him up on it, as I had been curious to find out what JB looks like today as opposed to my previous visit 20 years ago.

I set off from my office in downtown Singapore at 1 p.m. I took the subway to Woodlands, Singapore’s northernmost station, and boarded the number 911 bus to the border checkpoint. Although Singapore is a tiny city-state, it still took me a little over an hour to reach the border, which I didn’t quite expect. Either way, I got there well in time to board the KTMB train that departed from the Woodlands Checkpoint toward JB Sentral at 3 p.m.

KTMB, also known as the Malaysian Railway Limited, is a major railway operator in Malaysia. It used to have an international railway that extended all the way to downtown Singapore. However, in 2011, the Singaporean segment of this railroad was decommissioned entirely and the terminal station was moved to the Woodlands Checkpoint, right on the border. KTMB now operates the KTM Shuttle Tebrau, which provides the intercity train service roughly once an hour.

Interestingly, Malaysia’s immigration and customs are located on the Singaporean side of the border, so passengers go through passport control before boarding the train. The train ride only lasts for five minutes. Once you reach the Malaysian side and get off the train, there are no more checks to go through, so you can freely leave the station. I found it to be a very cool and efficient system.

Coming back to my friend, Jack, he is a Malaysian citizen with permanent residency in Singapore. Although he lives in Johor Bahru now, he still commutes to work in Singapore every weekday. I asked him how he handles the stress of crossing the border twice a day, and he replied that if you commute during off-peak hours, you don’t have to spend too much time clearing the immigration and customs, so he’s been able to handle the commute with relative ease.

Setting aside the fact that Jack is a Malaysian, I believe the biggest draw for him to live in JB is the much more affordable living expenses compared to Singapore. Currently, he is renting a new 700-square-feet apartment with 24-hour security, a fitness gym, and a swimming pool at MYR 3,000 a month (approximately USD 675), less than a third of what he has to pay for a unit of a comparable size and facilities in Singapore.

Jack’s apartment, located on the 24th floor of a highrise condominium, has a view of Singapore across the Johor Strait. Its location is very convenient—a mere seven-minute taxi ride from the JB Sentral Station, and equally close from Bukit Chagar, the future terminal station of the new RTS Link, a modern Singapore-JB shuttle train service slated for completion in 2026. The RTS Link will be capable of transporting 10,000 passengers per hour per direction—a significant increase from the current KTMB Shuttle Tebrau—with a train departure frequency of 3.6 minutes during peak hours.

I’m happy for Jack that he’s found a nice place to live in JB. That said, the idea of living across the Malaysian border while I’m still working in Singapore doesn’t seem practical to me, because I don’t want to spend an hour and a half each way commuting to and from work.

Perhaps, in my retirement years, I could consider living in Johor Bahru to save money, but this will all depend on how hassle-free border-crossing will have become by then. I certainly hope that entering Malaysia from Singapore will start to feel as easy as a domestic journey and no big deal at all in the not-so-distant future.

Buying or Renting—Does It Matter?

(Picture source: いらすとや）

Yesterday morning, I got the faucet for my bathroom sink replaced with a new one after more than 20 years of usage, because it was getting a bit leaky lately. I reported this issue to my landlord, who kindly arranged the replacement with a plumber. The plumber spent around two hours in my apartment and finally got the new faucet installed.

I’ve been renting this apartment for 22 and a half years. In fact, this is the first apartment I’ve rented since migrating to Singapore from Tokyo in 2002. Overall, I’ve been quite happy with this place, so I’ve never moved. As long as my workplace is nearby and the rent stays affordable, I will continue to rent it for the foreseeable future.

There is a constant discussion about whether buying or renting an apartment is a better option for a person’s financial well-being. It’s a fascinating subject for me, so I’ve watched a bunch of YouTube videos on this topic. The tentative conclusion I’ve reached is that both options have their own pros and cons, and in the final analysis, they will work out to be equally worthy from an investor’s perspective.

It only makes sense—in highly developed capitalistic societies like the U.S., Japan, and Singapore, with market mechanisms fully at work, prices for buying and renting properties are constantly adjusted in such a way that arbitrage deals, i.e., trades that take advantage of price discrepancy between equally worthy investments, are few and far between in today’s property market.

By the same token, for those who are keen on buying, there is little point in trying to “time the market,” because the value of a property is decided by estimating the sum-total of all future benefits to be gained from this property that are discounted back to the present value, taking into consideration such factors as inflation and depreciation. If a certain property is showing a cheap price, there most likely are right reasons behind it, so think twice before rushing headlong into buying it.

By the way, my landlord gave me an interesting tip about buying a public housing unit known as an HDB flat in Singapore. He recommended that I buy a unit that has at least three rooms with a floor area of around 1,000 square feet, because they tend to attract well-to-do, highly-educated residents who have relatively decent public manners. While this piece of advice might sound a bit politically incorrect, I think my landlord has a point there, because once again, cheap valuation of a property is a reflection of a variety of issues that are not immediately visible to the investor.

Regardless of whether you’re buying or renting, knowing your preferences well is critical in making the decision about finalizing a deal. For example, I’m someone who tends to attach more importance to the value of time compared to other people, so spending more than half an hour commuting to and from work is out of the question for me. Naturally, I’m willing to pay a premium on a normal rate to live in a place with easy access to train and bus stations. Just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s a bad investment decision, as long as it suits your particular needs well.

Property investment has been a hot subject for me for years, as it concerns the critical matter of putting a roof over my head. Whether I’m buying or renting, I’d like to be clear-headed about what I really want and be able to make a fully informed decision in the end.

Paris, Je T'aime et Je Te Déteste (Parfois)

Over the past few days, I have been searching travel-booking websites for a hotel suitable for my upcoming trip to Paris, France in the second half of March. Yesterday afternoon, after hours of searching, I finally managed to reserve a hotel room that meets my particular requirements.

I’m happy not so much because I found the right hotel, but rather because I won’t have to spend any more of my precious time conducting searches, and use it instead for things I truly enjoy, such as reading at a café, studying English and French, and exercising.

I’ve traveled to Paris numerous times since my first visit in 2007—in fact, so many times I’ve lost count already. Over the years, I’ve not only explored various neighborhoods in Paris, but also visited several suburban towns. Granted, there are still many areas that I have yet to discover, but I already have a few places that I particularly like, and proximity to those areas is definitely a factor in selecting a hotel for my stay.

As for what I do in Paris, I’m not someone who likes to pack my schedule with too many places to visit or events to attend. Rather, I prefer to have little planning and follow my instinct to visit whichever place that interests me the most at that particular moment.

Normally, I like to shop for books, visit art museums, and spend hours randomly walking around different neighborhoods, taking in the old architecture and occasionally sitting down at a charming café for book-reading and people-watching.

Overall, my numerous stays in Paris have been enjoyable, but as with most travels, my past visits have not been without a few mishaps and unpleasant experiences here and there. Some of the most irritating incidents occurred when I took flights with Air France, the flag carrier of the country.

On a flight back to Singapore in 2012, the air conditioning of the aircraft completely malfunctioned, and the temperature kept rising to the point of being intolerable, leaving passengers sweating and gasping for cool air for hours. No explanation was given by the crew afterward. However, I was naive back then and thought it was a freak incident and didn’t think much of it afterward. Little did I know that I was in for an additional series of utterly unbearable experiences with Air France.

During another trip in 2013, after landing at the airport in Paris, we had to wait in front of the baggage carousel for more than two hours. The area was not heated and was freezingly cold. There was no public announcement about the expected time of luggage delivery, so all we could do was stand around and wait. In the end, I lost my temper and got into an argument with the Air France ground staff, who shouted back at me without providing an explanation or an apology.

Near the end of that same trip, at the boarding gate for the flight back to Singapore, after some passengers had already boarded the plane, the remaining passengers were suddenly asked to stop boarding for some unknown reason and made to stand in line for another hour before the boarding finally resumed.

This time, a staff member made an announcement via the PA system to explain the situation, but none of us understood what she was saying in English because her voice was muffled and heavily accented, and she was talking unnecessarily fast, probably just to show off her English fluency. It was at that moment that I swore to myself never to take an Air France flight again for the rest of my life.

I believe that the inefficiency of Air France is a manifestation of the various issues plaguing France as a whole, to which there are no quick fixes. Setting aside all these issues with the airline company, travelers to Paris constantly experience a constellation of inconveniences, such as accommodation not equipped with an air conditioner or elevator, difficulty in finding clean public toilets, and public transportation being frequently interrupted by labor strikes.

Having said that, since I don’t live there, I don’t have to face these issues on a permanent basis. Instead of dwelling on the negative aspects, I should focus on the overwhelmingly attractive aspects of traveling in the City of Light to make the most of my stay.

Since I understand French quite a bit, language is not a major obstacle for me. However, I wish I could understand French even better, so I can watch a French movie at a local cinema or read a French novel while sitting at a café—in short, pretend to be a Parisian if only for a day and enjoy the same things as the locals.

Even in this era dominated by artificial intelligence and automated translation, ability to understand the local language firsthand can give you immense pleasure that cannot be experienced otherwise. In fact, enjoying my visits to Paris is probably the biggest driving force behind my desire to become fluent in French. As long as I keep visiting Paris for inspiration, I will persist in my studies of the language of Rousseau.

Revisiting Six Feet Under

Last night, after I got home, I binge-watched a few episodes of the HBO series Six Feet Under, which originally aired from 2001 to 2005. It's been more than 20 years since I last watched the show, and I'd forgotten some of the details of the plot, so it was nice to watch the show again and rediscover the fun parts. I kept watching until around 3:00 a.m. and went to bed. 

I woke up this morning at first around 9 with the urge to go to the bathroom, but I went back to bed and slept until 1 p.m. I had nothing planned for today, and the weather outside was kind of gloomy, so I decided to stay indoors and continue binge-watching Six Feet Under. I'm already halfway through Season 2 of the show.

Six Feet Under is one of the signature shows on HBO from the 2000s, so you might have heard of it. But in case you haven't watched it yet, it's centered around a family that runs a funeral home in Los Angeles. At the beginning of each episode, somebody dies and gets brought into the funeral home for the services.

The show depicts how the two brothers of the family, Nate and David, their mother Ruth, as well as their sister Claire, live their own lives while coping with the stress of providing funeral services and processing dead bodies for viewing. It also portrays how the bereft families and friends react to and process the death of their loved ones.

Nathaniel, the father of the family, dies in a car accident at the beginning of the first episode. The burden of running the funeral home suddenly falls on the shoulders of David, the younger son, who is already working alongside his father as a licensed funeral director.

Coincidentally, Nate, the oldest son, flies into LA from Seattle for a short visit, after being away for a long time. Given the sudden death of their father, Nate decides to remain in Los Angeles and help his brother run the family business, despite the fact that he has no license and knows next to nothing about the business. 

From the outside, David looks like a normal, stable character, but he has his own inner struggles, mainly related to his sexuality, being a closeted gay man. His struggles are made worse because he is also religious, and goes to church regularly, a place filled with bigotry about homosexuality. He agonizes in self-denial until he finally learns to accept himself and comes out to his family.

Claire, aged 17, is the baby sister of the family. She still goes to high school, but hasn't decided whether she wants to go to college in the future. She has a rather distant and sardonic view about society, and struggles to find out the meaning of true happiness and of life in general. She gets involved with a boyfriend with drug addiction issues, and runs into a series of troubles in school.

Ruth, the mother of the family, is perpetually uptight. During Season 1 of the show, she begins to suspect that David is gay, and she has a hard time trying to accept his sexuality. She's upset that all three of her children have drifted apart from her over the years, and tries hard to lighten up and improve her image in their minds, only to have her efforts backfire and create unnecessary tension in the family.

I'm a gay man and I never came out to either of my parents before they died. I don't know whether they suspected that I am gay, but my dad kept bringing up the issue of marriage with me from time to time. I wonder if it would have made things easier for him if I had come out, but now that both my parents have passed away, I will never know how they truly felt. I like to believe that I made the right choice not telling them about my truth, although I am not ashamed of my sexuality.

By the way, the latest episode that I watched today was about a woman in her 40s living alone, who suddenly chokes to death in her living room. Apparently she has no friends or next of kin, so no one shows up at her funeral services. Luckily she had left a note concerning how she wanted her funeral services to be conducted in the event of death, so Nate and David were not at a loss about what to do with her body.

This episode hit a bit close to home for me because Uncle S, my distant relative, passed away last week. He had never married and was living alone. As he had no legal successors who would normally be expected to hold his funeral, the local municipal government will be responsible for incinerating his body. His ashes will be kept for a certain period before being disposed of. It's a bit sad that nobody will hold a funeral for him, but I want to make sure that his ashes are buried in the family plot in his hometown.

Some parts of Six Feet Under are hilariously funny, but due to the subject matter of death and bereavement, each episode contains an unavoidable undertone of profound sadness. It’s this bittersweet mixture of happiness and grief that makes the show interesting and keeps me watching. I was 31 when I first watched Six Feet Under. At 51, I still find it exceptionally well-made and worth watching. I hope I can learn a lesson or two about life and death while viewing this masterpiece of a show the second time around.

Read "Talent is Overrated"

A few weeks ago, I finished reading the book Talent is Overrated, authored by Geoff Colvin. I read the Japanese translated version that I bought during my vacation in Japan last November. Out of the numerous self-help books I’ve read over the years, I’m convinced that this book will be one of the most influential in shaping the next few decades of my life.

To summarize, as its title suggests, this book argues that your innate talent, i.e. genetics are not as important a factor in determining your success in your chosen field of excellence, be it in work, academics, arts, or sports, as it’s generally believed to be. Rather, the book reveals that it’s the amount and intensity of deliberate effort that you put in over the years that really count toward ensuring your success.

As a language-learning enthusiast, there are several takeaways from this book that I can apply to my study of English, French, and Chinese.

First, Colvin argues that in order for you to succeed, you need to keep putting in substantial amounts of deliberate effort, for years on end. He mentions that most world-famous athletes and musicians put in at least 10 years of intensive practice before producing outstanding results in their fields and achieving stardom.

Furthermore, deliberate effort should involve practice sessions that bring you moderate amounts of discomfort. If you keep doing things that bring you no pain, you won’t achieve that much improvement. For example, most drivers learn and improve their driving skills in the beginning, but their skills plateau after a while as a result of automation, as their series of movements become literally effortless. Another easy example would be building up muscle through gym workouts. If you don’t endure the pain of lifting weights, you can’t expect to become muscular.

To keep growing your skills, you need to deliberately step out of your comfort zone and make endeavors in the learning zone—tasks that are slightly unfamiliar, yet not entirely foreign. In terms of language-learning, you can focus on vocabulary words and sentence patterns you’re unfamiliar with, and keep using them until you get them down pat. The author also points out that your efforts need to stay within the learning zone. If you step further out into the panic zone and take on challenges that are too difficult, you’ll only end up being discouraged. 

 

Second, Colvin stresses the importance of receiving feedback on your practice, so that you’ll know whether you’re exercising in the right way. Aside from taking lessons, practicing for numerous hours on your own is a must, but you also need to integrate a mechanism in which you can receive pertinent feedback.

Currently, I regularly practice expressing myself in English through writing journal entries. The beauty of this method is that I have my writing proofread by ChatGPT, which generates instant feedback on how a native speaker would express the same content. Plus, I take online lessons with my Canadian teacher, who provides his own inputs from a native speaker’s perspective, alerting me to the potential pitfalls of relying on artificial intelligence alone. I’ve learned immensely from this practice, and my fluency in the language has been improving by leaps and bounds. 

Third, if you’re lucky enough to find the right method and teacher, the earlier you get started with the practice, the better. Mozart began playing the keyboard at 3 years old and composing music at 5 years old. Tiger Woods first held the golf club to practice at 2. If you want to make a name for yourself in a certain field, there’s simply no better time than now to start practicing, as the expertise to be recognized as world-class requires years, if not decades, of deliberate and painstaking effort.

As a 51-year-old man, I certainly don’t stand a chance to become world-class in any field. That said, I’m still glad that I’ve read Talent is Overrated at this juncture of my life. I can apply the principles explained in the book to make various improvements in the things I engage in, both professionally and in private life. As long as I can keep achieving modest successes measuring against myself in the past, I’ll be more than happy. This is indeed a life-changing book for me, and I want to keep revisiting it for inspiration for years to come!

A Blessing in Disguise?

Happy New Year!

A few nights ago, my apartment building was filled with smoke all of a sudden. I found out about this upon returning home from work. When I stepped into the building, I smelled the smoke and immediately started panicking, afraid that something might be burning inside my apartment. I also couldn’t rule out a gas leak, so I was really scared when I turned the key to open the apartment door.

Once inside, I gingerly turned on the lights, fearing that it might cause an explosion. Thankfully, nothing happened—there was neither a fire nor a gas leak inside my place. I stepped back out to check the source of the smoke. As it turned out, it was emanating from a Chinese barbecue restaurant opposite us. Their smokestack was blowing thick smoke into our building through our back door, which is only covered by a metal grid, with no plastic sheet over it.

Although I kept my apartment door firmly shut throughout the night, it couldn’t prevent the smoke from wafting into my room, and I woke up the next morning feeling sickened by the foul air.

I recorded a video of the smokestack billowing out thick smoke toward our building with my phone and forwarded it to my landlord. She in turn lodged a complaint with the relevant authorities in Singapore overseeing the food and beverage industry. I also reported this incident to the property management company of our building, but so far I haven’t received their reply.

I’ve been living in this apartment for more than 20 years, but this is the first time I’ve had to endure such unbreathable air. I imagine that this kind of complaint will take a long time to be addressed by the authorities, so most likely I’ll need to endure this unpleasant situation for at least a few weeks. To make my surroundings a bit more bearable, I’ve purchased an air purifier, scheduled for delivery tomorrow. Hopefully, it can help me breathe more normally going forward.

Speaking of improving my living environment, recently, my robotic vacuum cleaner which I’ve used for the past five years has begun to malfunction, making it unable to clean my apartment effectively. In light of the Chinese New Year sales promotion starting tomorrow, I’ve decided to buy a new one.

The model I’m thinking of buying is a combo device with dual functionality of vacuuming and mopping. Since my apartment is relatively sparsely furnished and I have no carpet on the floor, my place should be ideal for the new device to move around. I’m looking forward to experiencing an enhanced level of cleanliness in my apartment with this new device.

The recent incident of our neighborhood restaurant blowing smoke into our building has certainly been annoying and unpleasant, but it has at least helped me decide to get the most sophisticated appliances available in the market. As I’m not the kind of person who keeps chasing the latest trends, this incident could be a blessing in disguise, by making me embrace modern technology willy-nilly. I can’t wait to start using the new air purifier and vacuum cleaner!