Leadership Skills Leadership skills are important for people who want to play the leader on a team. A good leader can make the people around him become better persons. In order to help other people improve, the leader must provide constructive feedback to others, especially pointing out people's weakness. Having a conversation with someone about his weakness is a difficult task to do. People will generally get embarrassed when telling them that they haven't done well in certain areas. It takes a lot of skills to make these type of conversations conducted in a constructive way. The leader needs to make sure that the person treats the negative feedback as positive suggestions for me to improve rather blaming and scolding. My current boss is an ex-Google veteran. He worked for Google for more than 10 years. He has tons of technical and people management experience. During our one on one conversations, I could feel that his suggestions and feedbacks were solid and helpful. He tried his best to make sure that I took the feedback with a positive attitude. It has been fun working with him.

Ear Training One key aspect of improving pronunciation is having good ears. I thought good ears were born with. They are gifts for some lucky people. I am bad at distinguishing slightly different sounds, so I always thought I wasn't born with gifted ears. I can live with that, because everyone is gifted in different ways. Today when I was reading a book called "Fluent Forever" by Gabriel Wyner, I realized that my ears hadn't received any formal training in my life. No matter how gifted someone is, if he doesn't train himself, he won't excel. In order for me to have better ears, I need to have some proper training for them. One possible training suggested by the author is hearing one of two close sounds, making a choice after hearing the sound, and getting instant feedback about the correctness of the choice. In that way, our brain will become more sensitive to those slight sound difference. I will definitely give it a shot and see how I progress. It is another good example of using feedback to build up awareness. Without a strong self-awareness, it will be almost impossible to make significant improvements.

Recording My Own Voice Asking the right question is extremely important, because is the first step towards solving the problem. About 2 months ago, I started to address my English pronunciation problem again. I had tried multiple times before. However because the process was not satisfactory and also I thought my English was good enough for people to understand me at the work, I gave up halfway through. Nevertheless taking my English speaking skills to the next level is always in my mind. After I moved to SF bay area about 4 months ago, I found one meetup group, where some native Americans volunteered to help people with improving their English pronunciations. I have been to the meetup every week since I found it, and it has helped me a great deal, especially in terms of helping me realizing some common pronunciation problems I have. The nice thing is that not only those Americans help people spot their problems, but also provide tips to fix them. Realizing the problems is crucial. However it is just the beginning of actually solving them. I practice repeating some difficult sounds whenever I can, driving in the car, walking by myself. However there is still one missing piece--when I practice by myself, I don't know whether I am doing it correctly. If I don't do it correctly, repeating it millions of times only makes things worse! I realized that getting instant feedback when practicing was critical if I wanted to make fast progress. Getting real-time feedback about my English pronunciation is one of the reasons for me to sign up at italki and find language partners. It works to some degree. I have had some great conversations with multiple people and got some good feedback as well. Still I felt it was not enough. I need more practice and I need immediate feedback for it. What should I do then? I found one potential solution to it tonight. I can record myself talking and hear the playback afterwards! When I am talking, I can't hear myself clearly. But in the playback, the sound is much clearer for myself to spot the issues. I don't know how effective the technique will be and not sure how long I can keep doing it. Hopefully I will be able to keep doing it for a while and hopefully the technique will work.

Packers VS Cardinals Tonight I watched a football game between Packers and Cardinals. It was an unbelievable game to withstand. Packers were still down by 7 points in the last five seconds. It really needed a miracle for Packers to come back to the game. And indeed a miracle did happen, when Rogers managed to throw a 41-yard touchdown to Jeff Janis! What a throw and what a catch! I am not a fan of Packers; nor am I a fan of Cardinals. I lived in Seattle for 2.5 years, which made me sort of a support of Sea Hawks. I will probably watch the game tomorrow and hope they can pass to the next round. I like watching professional football games, because they are intense. Football is an extremely physical sports, requiring strength, speed, and stamina etc. However the tactical part of the game intrigues me mostly, and that's why I love watching the games so much. I was blown away every time I watched those pitch perfect throw-catch plays. It is hard to believe that people can do such awesome things. After countless hours of hard work and training, there are indeed no limits for what people can accomplish.

Fragmented Sentences When I talked to native speakers in English, I could sense that they had a hard time to understand what I had just said. Their facial expressions showed that they were confused. It made me feel nervous and incapable. At the same time, I would try to recall what I just said, hoping to find out what was the issue. There were several things could go wrong here, misusing a word, mixed and wrong tenses, unconventional sentence structures. Even though sometimes I was able to say a grammatically correct sentence with appropriate words and tenses, my Chinese accent would screw whole things up. It was an extremely frustrating and discouraging feeling. Today I got to know a new culprit that could easily confuse people. I was trying to teach some Chinese pronunciation tips to one of the language partner I met on italki. I knew I was doing a poor job. Suddenly she stopped me and said "I am confused..". Embarrassed as always, I didn't know what to say. Then she continued and said " You started one sentence, and before you finished that one, you started a new one. I really don't know which one you were saying. There are several fragments floating around." Sometimes I started a sentence before I had thought through it, because it would take a long time for me to compose it completely, which would cause some awkward silence during the conversation. Most of the time, during the middle of the sentence, I would realize that I was making some mistakes in sentence structures or grammar. As a result, I would start a new sentence, leaving the old one unfinished. I didn't expect this would confuse people, since I thought when I started a new sentence, their attention would shift to the new one and forget about the old unfinished one. However the reality was not the case. Unfinished sentences confused people just as other factors did. It is a bad thing that now I have one more issue to address before I can reach full proficiency in English. However it is also an awesome thing that now I understood the issue, so I can start to tackle it from now on. Starting today, I will try my best to avoid speaking unfinished sentences in any case. Before I open my mouth, I should think through a sentence. Hopefully I will solve this problem within 3 months, as I have so many issues to address.

Availablity Heuristic Availability heuristic is a psychological concept I learned recently. It is used to explain why people make certain assertions about things in their lives while totally ignoring statistical information. The key idea is that our opinions are greatly influenced by the availability of information we have access to. While reading the book, I recalled one article I came across a while ago. The article was about people's perception of crime rate in the current world. Despite the fact that there were less crimes committed nowadays compared to the history statistics, people still perceived that there were more crimes being committed now than they were before. The reason was that the technology had made those crime reports more available to us. Even though less crimes were committed, but more crimes we heard from news, social media, etc. As a result, we came to the conclusion that the society was becoming less safe.

The Importance of Recalling Recently, I have been reading a book about how to learn new languages effectively. There was one point in the book really attracted my attention, preferring recalling to reviewing. It occurred to me that I really didn't do much recalling exercises with English at all. As a result, despite I had spent a lot of time memorizing many advanced words and phrases, I didn't manage to remember them, nor to use them in the right places. In order to improve this, I decided to start practicing recalling skills by using a software called Anki. It is going to be challenging to cultivate this habit. There were many things I knew I should do, but I couldn't stick to the plan as I wished. Due to laziness and limited time, I didn't keep doing many things that I should have been doing. Let's see how it goes this time.

Immigration Status Being a citizen of China, I have to maintain a proper immigration status so that I can live and work legally in the United States. When I first came to the United States, I was a graduate student. During the course of study, I was on F1 visa, which is for international students. After I graduated from school, I started to work for Microsoft. In the first 4 months there, I was still on F1 visa. Although F1 visa doesn't allow students to work legally in the United Students, I could use the OPT (Optional Practical Training) to work for Microsoft. The OPT allows me to work legally for one year. Also, for the STEM program students, there is a 17 months extension, available for applying, to allow me to work another 17 months. After 29 months, if I will be forced to leave the country if my immigration status is still F1. Luckily Microsoft provided H1B sponsorship for me. H1B is a working immigration visa, which allow foreigners to work legally in the United States. However there is a quota for the number of H1B visa annually. Even though Microsoft wanted to provide the working sponsor for me, there was a chance that I still couldn't get the visa, as there were more applicants than available visas. It was a lottery. I got the lottery, so I changed my immigration status and was able to continue working in the Unites States, pursing my dreams and improving my life. However not every one is as lucky as I was. This Monday I had to say goodbye reluctantly to one of my colleagues, because his immigration status expired. He comes from Macedonia and went to MIT as a undergraduate student. He is smart, brilliant and friendly. He is not an American, so he has to maintain his immigration status as well. Unluckily he didn't get the H1B lottery, so after 29 months working in the company, he was forced to leave the company and the country. It is such a pity to watch him leaving. Though I only worked with him for 3 months, I was impressed by his brilliance and his willingness to help others. Life is tough and sometimes bad things happen. Some types of bad things are unavoidable, but this is definitely not one of them. Every year there is a heated discussion about immigration reform, but every year situations remain the same. Hopefully some real changes will take place in the near future. My best wish to my dear friend and ex-colleague.

Better Something Than Nothing It is late in the night, and I feel I should write something for the sake of practicing my writing skill. I started to write journals last year, hoping it could, to some extent, help improve my writing skill. The good news was that I was able to develop the habit and keep writing some random and simple things every day. However my writing skill didn't benefit from it that much, because I didn't get any constructive feedback about my writings. Feedback is critical to me, since I am not able to assess myself properly when I write in English. I only know what I write is not good, but I don't know what kind of things I can do to make it better. I didn't read enough English books, and it was also something limiting my writing skill. I really should spend more time on organizing the contents so that they can be delivered in a more cohesive way, easy for people to read and follow. However since it is late and I am sleepy, I will just write whatever comes to my mind. It is better to write something than write nothing. I will try to write something here every day.