• Thaipusam: Masochistic Mayhem

    Thaipusam: Masochistic Mayhem

    Warning This post contains some graphic images. If blood makes you queasy, you may want to skip it. I’ve mentioned a few times how, although I do travel mostly without plans, I also do so […]

  • Dare to Dream

    Dare to Dream

    Somewhere around six months ago, I was sitting in my apartment talking on the phone with my mom. From just outside my window I could hear Buddhist monks chanting at Ninnaji, an enormous wooden temple […]

  • Golden Week 2: Archery

    Golden Week 2: Archery

    Picture yourself looking up at a blue sky peeking through a huge canopy of leaves on a perfectly clear day in Kyoto. As the faint sound of Japanese flutes recedes softly into the background, it’s […]

  • The Mega Trip Part 9 (The Great Wall)

    The Mega Trip Part 9 (The Great Wall)

    With the land-based portion of my adventure through China nearly over, I realized that I was still missing a significant piece of what I wanted to see before returning to Japan. Kung Fu. So, after […]

  • A Different Experience

    A Different Experience

    I’m here. In Tokyo. Finally. During my idle time on the flight over I kept on thinking, “what am I going to write to everyone once I finally get to Japan?” Most of you already […]

  • Huashan: The Danger Trail

    Huashan: The Danger Trail

    On December 20th of 2006, I received an e-mail from my dad. It contained this Powerpoint file. The forwarding messages all included such phrases as: “I CANT EVEN LOOK AT THE PICTURES WITHOUT GETTING DIZZY!!” […]

I was last seen 5 months ago in Los Angeles, .

Plugins: Guestbook and FB Connect

 Public, USA  11 Responses »
Mar 192010
 

As you can probably tell, my current “phase,” after finishing up this site’s overhaul, has involved cleaning up and open-sourcing as much of my custom web code as possible. This started with jKMLMap, as mentioned here, followed by Facebook Photo Fetcher a few days later. Then came the 3 Babylon glossaries I posted in the previous entry (OK, that’s not really web code – just something else I implemented over the last year that I felt others might benefit from). Finally I’ve completed the last two planned releases: WP-ViperGB and WP-FB AutoConnect. Continue reading »

Autodidactic Language Learning

 Public, USA  18 Responses »
Mar 122010
 

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 »

JLPT 1Q

 Public, USA  8 Responses »
Mar 032010
 

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 »

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