Category Archives: Personal

Guide featured on NIHONGO eな

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Totally forgot about this as it was sitting in my inbox since early April, but the guide has been featured on NIHONGO eな, a (kinda) new portal site for learning Japanese!

It’s a brief introduction (with a Japanese version as well) so it may be old hat to regular visitors. However, the site overall looks very well put together and looks great for introducing various tools and sites currently on the web for learning Japanese like this one: “Read the same novel in Japanese and English”. Check it out.

In other news, I backtracked to this very well-written article, which translates my explanation of the difference between 「は」 and 「が」 in Japanese. There’s also other interesting posts in Japanese such as 「頑張って」と”Good luck.”.

Online all the time?

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I’ve been following the mobile tech news including the new android and iPhone with interest. It certainly seems like a lot of exciting stuff is happening and many areas could offer innovations in learning languages. In particular, voice recognition could potentially allow a program to check your pronunciation and text-to-speech could read out any Japanese text. Definitely, Android seems to have a lot more innovative stuff that could be potentially leveraged for language acquisition. And we already have touch screens all over the place so I’m hoping it’s only a matter of time before you can look up kanji online by writing it with your finger. Still, I haven’t bought a smart phone of my own, so I can’t test anything myself. I’m just not keen on being online all the time and certainly not by paying $100 every month. I already pay over $40 dollars for broadband. I’m not even on the road that much and have access to a computer most of the time.

Do you have a smartphone and is it worth the money?

Me, myself, and I

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Does anybody else find there’s no good male word for “I”? 「私」 is too formal except for work (which I no longer do in Japanese). I was comfortable with 「俺」 for a while but now I’m too old and Mr. Rogers-ish. And I never liked 「僕」 as it feels a bit too much boy scout-ish. I wish there was something not as rough as 「俺」 but not so boyish as 「僕」. Maybe something new in that crazy slang young people are coming up with all the time?

Thoughts on podcast mics?

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My wife’s friend Akina is coming to visit next month, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to capture her nice voice with a nice microphone. It’s a short visit so time will be limited but I figured I could at least get the Hiragana sounds done (male version by yours truly). I’m looking for a budget mic that costs less than $100 and can be used by multiple people in a quiet room. Does anybody have any good recommendations? I’m currently thinking about buying the blue snowball. I definitely like that it has an omni-mode so that I don’t have to buy a mic for each person once I get to doing audio for conversations.

Thanks to the kind folks who’ve contributed to the audio fund, I now have enough funds there to cover a mic under $100. But you know what? I’m going to pay for it out of pocket because I’d like the donations to go to something more than just gadgets that I want to buy anyway. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank those who have contributed so far (discreetly ordered in dollar amounts heh). Thanks and I hope to bring some audio to the site in the near future.

  • Mike C.
  • Steven S.
  • Jeff M.
  • The Compagniye Store
  • Jonathan G.
  • Oliver N.
  • Daniel C-W.
  • Helen F.
  • Llorenç S. C.
  • William T.

Thanks again!

What’s your major time sink?

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What’s true happiness? Of course, a stable and happy family is essential but for many of us, it’s also about seeking new opportunities, investing in ourselves, and contributing something useful and helpful to the world. All of these things fall under a large category of being “productive”. Even a happy family requires its members to be productive in order for things to run smoothly around the house.

What prevents us from being productive and being a vastly over-simplified definition of the word: “happy”? It’s activities where you don’t produce anything; things like watching TV or youtube, playing games, or browsing sites like failblog.org. It takes a lot less effort then actually producing the TV show, youtube video, or website but the ease of effort in passive consumption is what makes it so tempting.

Lately, one of my major time sinks were playing games. Games are addictive because of basic behavioral psychology of rewarding fake achievements. Hey, I know that. I took Psychology 101 in college. But why did I hardly play any games in college when I was first learning Japanese and began writing the Grammar Guide? It’s because I couldn’t afford it. I had no TV, console, and my laptop could play basically minesweeper and that’s it.

In fact, during college winter and summer breaks, I was dirt poor and bored out of my mind. Necessity really is the mother of invention: the necessity to save myself from going insane from boredom. It didn’t help that the rest of the academic year was spent in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota. Things were different for my good friend, who brought a new computer to college and a copy of the Sims. He would say, “Hold on, my character needs to go to work now,” to which I replied, “But the REAL YOU needs to go to class!”

Anyway, I’ve had a good run playing a whole bunch of games the past few months with my Intel Core 2 Dell and ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO. But now, the system is showing it’s age and doesn’t run GTA IV very well (which I just bought for a measly $20). I could probably afford to buy a new computer, or maybe even a TV and game console. But I’ve decided to just save my money and time by not enabling myself to waste it on games. Now, I really can’t waste my time playing games even if I wanted to.

I realized today that my major other distraction was the huge number of random RSS feeds that I picked up in my Google reader. Any time I go online to do something, it sits there, beckoning me to go dig for jewels of interesting content buried in a huge pile of junk. So I’ve cleaned up my list of everything except for 14 feeds including a few web comics like dilbert and xkcd which are quick to read, my wife’s blog, a couple of really cool or funny technical feeds like hacks.mozilla.org and thedailywtf.com, and cinemassacre.com (I can’t give up my Angry Video Game Nerd fix). Currently, my feed has 0 unread items.

I think proactively removing areas of distraction is really going to help me become more productive and accomplish the things I really want to get done such as the new Complete Guide to Japanese. What are your major distractions and what can you do to remove them? Oh, and don’t forget to add my feed to your RSS reader!!

Digital Divide

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I’ve dealt with a mix of many different types of technologies in the process of building up this site: firebug, ssh/sftp, perl, HTML, DOM, css, javascript, Drupal, XeLaTeX, PHP, MySQL, akismet, and most recently jquery. Of course, the technology itself isn’t really that important compared to a solid understanding of core programming concepts (especially in procedure and functional languages) and basic networking concepts such as IP and nameservers. Lucky for me, I’ve had 4 years of college learning this stuff and 6 years of professional web development experience. But what if I knew nothing about computers and I wanted to build a site about learning Japanese on the internet? I would be stuck with some platform such as wikibooks or wordpress.com where I would lose a lot of control both in terms of my data and how it’s presented.

Considering how important the internet is becoming to our daily lives, don’t you think it’s ridiculous that I have to pay every year for my domain name and mostly likely for hosting if it wasn’t for ibiblio.org just to have my own website? I also think programming skills are becoming just as important as basic math and writing skills and should be part of every kid’s curriculum. What do you think?

Soul Eater

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I’ve been watching Soul Eater on youtube the past few days.　It’s pretty good and great for keeping up your Japanese. (The subtitled version of course!) But they stopped uploading new episodes in a かなり微妙なところ. Now I need to find more episodes somewhere else, I guess.

A difficult reason for losing motivation

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Reading articles like these really drains my motivation for learning Chinese.

Under Chinese law, carriers of hepatitis B cannot work as teachers, elevator operators, barbers or supermarket cashiers. In a recent survey of 113 colleges and universities, conducted by the Yi Ren Ping Center, 94 acknowledged that infected applicants, required to take blood tests, would be summarily rejected.

No, this is not an excerpt from a history book or an old newspaper article, this is a New York Times article published last week. This is just as ridiculous as the AIDS scare of the 80s in the US except umm… 30 years later and for a disease that’s been around far longer. At this rate of progress, maybe someday kids with hepatitis B may be able to attend kindergarten.

Chinese kindergartens and nurseries will shortly no longer be allowed to turn down children carrying hepatitis B who have normal liver function, says a draft government regulation.
…..
The draft regulation, applying to all kindergartens and nurseries hosting children aged under six, also requires them to report to medical authorities and enforce strict sterilization measures if infected children are found.

I wonder what strict sterilization measures would be required? Tell the kids don’t have sex or share needles?

There’s really no way I would ever consider living in China or even staying for any decent length of time. This really was the final straw after continuously hearing bad news from China including internet censorship, political persecution, tampered baby formula, and dogs dying from contaminated food. Now, I know it’s not fair to judge a country I have never visited with no first-hand knowledge. But why would I want to go a country that well… I no longer want to go to? Sure, I can sign up for a tour and check out the tourist traps but it’s hard to justify the huge amount of resources needed to learn a language just for a vacation. I might as well just bring a travel phrase book and be done with it.

I’m still thinking I might want to check out Taiwan though. Only problem is, now I need to start getting used to the traditional characters.

Am I over-reacting here? In particular, this blog post about trust and the comments really made me nervous about going to China. Interested in hearing thoughts from those who have experienced China first-hand.

The #1 Chinese myth

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Every time I mention how I struggle with Chinese grammar, people inevitably say something like:

Isn’t Chinese grammar similar to English?

Here’s my answer:

No, not really.

Hey, since you know a whole bunch of Kanji from Japanese, and you speak English, learning Chinese should be a snap, right?

No, not really.

To illustrate, here’s a sentence I ran into during some light reading.

你想把他带到什么地方去？- Where do you think you’re taking him?

If you assume that the grammar is similar to English and translate the words literally, you get something like this:

You think (direct object) him, take where go?

Wow, that doesn’t look like very good English, does it? I mean there’s a verb at the end and something similar the 「を」 particle! But it’s not like Japanese either, since the main verb isn’t “go” but “think”. It’s Chinese sentence structure, which so far I’ve managed to break down into the following rules.

Rules for Chinese sentence structure

  1. Order the words so that it “sounds” natural depending on what words you’re using.

In fact, I’ve given up in trying to break things down logically. My current method of learning essentially boils down to behavioral training and osmosis. It works but it’s not something you can really teach or explain. “Hey, just go with it” doesn’t sound very good. 🙂

Drupal sucks!

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Actually, Drupal is a pretty nice CMS and you certainly can’t complain about the price.

A CMS (Content Management System) is supposed to be a simple way to post information online. A blog is simply one form of content management. A CMS usually supports many types of content including blogs and forums.

Drupal is pretty nice and does pretty much what I need, though there aren’t many very good-looking themes and I never bother to spend the time to make my own. However, there is just one “quirk” that I cannot forgive.

If you are filling in a whole bunch of content and you navigate to another page by accident or your internet connection goes down, you will lose all your work! It doesn’t matter whether you’re pressing the back button or reloading the page, you will be greeted with a nice blank form.

When WordPress and Blogger.com has auto-save, this is simply unforgivable. The freakin’ browser will even remember your form data as long as it doesn’t crash! You have to actually go out of your way to physically clear out the form data to do what Drupal is doing! It’s probably dynamic HTML or some AJAX bull-crap from the Web 2.0 kool-aid that’s causing the issue. I don’t care, just don’t wipe my data for a simple navigation error! 6 versions of this software and I write in Notepad so I don’t lose my work. It’s simply ridiculous.