My friend Josh recently wrote a blog post about learning Spanish — what has been working, and what hasn’t — and asked for strategies from his readers. When I sat down to write a comment, I realized I had too much to say for just a short paragraph, so here it is. These are strategies that have helped me (and people who I have recognized as effective second language learners) pick up a new language quicker than average — not because we are smarter, but simply because we focus on time-efficient and effective strategies.

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(above photo from our motorbike trip in Newfoundland by Josh)

I’ve recently started a new job and have a new home for the next ten months. Seems to me a good time to reevaluate what’s important to me, set priorities and really focus on the next big goal: buying my freedom.

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Okay so it’s been more than a week. I’ve been busy. I am working on writing up some stories though, which will be up soon.

I love this photo. I took it on a week long river boat trip up the Mahakham river in Borneo, with my Canada World Youth group. We would dock the boat at sunset and go for a swim/bath every evening. We would watch the monkeys and multi-colored birds on the river banks as we soaped up and then jumped of the roof of the boat. I love this one because I caught my friend Marcus holding onto the side of the boat shaving…

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I had a dream a few nights ago that I was living in a frigid cold snow cave. When I awoke, I looked outside my tent to see a blanket of snow covering the desert sand floor and the stunted pinion pine trees. The afternoon before, the scorching 40 degree sun had cracked my lips and burnt my neck a bright crimson red.

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I’m moving in two weeks to Osaka, Japan — a city I’ve spent a grand total of two nights in my whole life. I have no apartment lined up and my previous connections in Osaka have all relocated. Am I worried? Nope. How am I going to make friends? No problem. I have confidence that I’ll be more than fine. This is my fourth time relocating, and I’ve created great social circles in less than a month that revolve around me and people I enjoy being around. Having done this a few times, I’ve noticed there are certain patterns that I follow to successfully create a large, high quality social circle in just two weeks. Here are my 10 steps to creating and being the center of a fantastic new social circle:

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In the summer of 2002, I spent a few weeks hitchhiking town to town from Hokkaido (the northernmost island in Japan) to Shizuoka (near Tokyo), with the vague goal of climbing Mt. Fuji, the tallest and most revered mountain in Japan.

It was a beautiful summer day when I finished the final leg of my hitchhike to Mt. Fuji. The driver who picked me up and drove me there seemed confused as to my destination: the bottom of Fuji-san. He dropped me off on a small side road – “Zisu.. izu… bottom… Fuji-san” — just as the last rays of sunlight were fading.

I hadn’t really read much about climbing Fuji, except that most people climbed it at night — to view the sun rising from the peak in the morning. I soon came across an old rusted sign that read: (in Japanese) “Mt. Fuji 1st station” and a small overgrown hiking path. Okay, I thought. I’m on the right track. By this point, the sky was almost pitch-dark so I fished out my trusty flashlight — which I had bought the day before at the 100Yen store (the Japanese cultural equivalent of our Dollar Store). After passing the sign for the 2nd station and not running into a single person, I began to worry I had started up an old, now-unused climbing path. The more than occasional spider-web-to-the-face only added to my suspicions. I nonetheless decided that the path would eventually have to meet with another path, at the very least at the summit.

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