Archive for October, 2008

Bean harvest

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Beans! i decided that since it’s getting pretty cool at night now, i should bring in the meager bean harvest. There were a lot of green pods, but there were a couple of yellow ones holding mature beans. The two kinds that i grew were Kidney and Black Coco (which look just [...]

radish harvest

Monday, October 27th, 2008

I just harvested some late radishes from the garden. I have to say, these were the easiest plants i’ve ever grown. In the first week of september, i took my radish seeds out to the garden and put them in two rows, about a half-inch deep. then i waited until today (Oct [...]

acquiring a language, not learning about it

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

This morning i was once again inspired by the latest post over at AJATT. Having Khatsumoto’s advice compressed into a short video talk was quite helpful. He goes over a couple of really important points.
One relates to the common perception of “learning”. Through our experience in the school system, we sometimes come [...]

Improving your chinese on the web

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

In the past few weeks, my main strategy for learning chinese has been to saturate myself with input. I’ve been reading books, and going through lots of understandable example sentences on a couple of websites. One of them is dict.cn, which has plenty of example sentences for every word i look up, and [...]

Learning a new language - sounds

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

When learning a new language, one of the most vital things is getting familiar with the sounds of that language. Every language has its own set of sounds that are “normal” for the speakers of that language, and there are usually a couple of them that will trip up people who speak a different [...]

how to start learning a new language

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I had a question the other day from someone who wants to start learning mandarin chinese, and wants to continue studying french. It really got me thinking, because all of my learning strategies lately have been focused on moving myself from “advanced beginner” to “intermediate” stages, but it’s been a long time since [...]