Anarchocyclist

hey all. just letting you know that these days i’m mostly blogging about language learning, over at Language Fixation.

Here’s a little taste of the articles i’ve been reading online lately. Firstly, i’ve been curious about what obama is gonna do as the new emperor of the world. I think it’s a good bet that the character of his appointees will indicate his direction. Along those lines, check out what Paul [...]

It was my birthday today, and also “Guy Fawkes day” to some, where they either celebrate or pretend to burn the man who tried to blow up the English parliament a few hundred years back. I’m not much for birthday celebrations, so i tried to keep things quiet and have a couple people over [...]

I went out to the local Mandarin Meetup tonight, which happens twice per month. Lately i’ve been a bit worried about my ability to speak, but i think this is more of a symptom of my perfectionism. I want to be fluent already, dammit! Anyway, in the past few times i’ve gone [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]