Shortly after taking up Mandarin Chinese early last year, I spent a bit of time reading up on Autodidactism.

I’ve long maintained that one of the most useful things I picked up throughout my formal Japanese language study was not the language itself, but rather how to learn languages in general. Once you understand the general principles of language instruction, advancing your ability – and even teaching yourself new languages from scratch – becomes easier and easier. Now that I’ve finished the Level 1 JLPT, made reasonable headway in Chinese, and taught myself more programming languages than I really care to think about, I’m absolutely convinced that the only true path to mastery of a subject is autodidactic learning. Continue reading »

Following up on this post, I’ve just completed and released my very first Wordpress plugin, designed to allow bloggers to quickly and easily generate Wordpress photo galleries from any Facebook album they can access. Continue reading »

As many of you no doubt know, the JLPT – Japanese Language Proficiency Test – is pretty much the internationally recognized measure of Japanese language ability for nonnative speakers. Something like the TOEFL for students of English. It’s a four-level test, where level 4 is beginner and level 1 is “native.”*

What you may not yet know is that last year, Japan’s Ministry of Education announced that they’d be completely revising the the test in 2010.** Since its format has remained pretty much unchanged since 1984, this means that more than 20 years of accumulated textbooks, practice exams, and study materials are suddenly about to become obsolete. Or at least slightly less relevant. Continue reading »

Throughout all the various additions and revisions to this website over the years, I’ve built up quite a pile of custom code – in the form of Wordpress plugins, widgets, templates, and sometimes as standalone libraries. For ages I’ve thought of releasing some of these as free plugins, so others could take advantage of what I’d written… Continue reading »