Yuck.. news... where have my blogs gone?

 Yuck..

 It's so annoying to read the news every day. Tired of seeing the same guy banging on and making the world a worse place.

I realised how much I have missed since stopping reading blogs. It was the end of the RSS feed that started that. Without that organised stream of new content I wasn't able to connect.

So I am revisiting this blog, MY blog!, where my reading lists were collated and shared for others. Interesting to see so many of them still going, after what has been more than 10 years since I was a regular vistitor here.

I am still language learning. I have lost a lot of that early motivation, but I still perservere. My career, and its attendant dissappointments, have also got in the way. I am still involved in language learning in my work, which should keep me motivated. But the politics and BS that needs to be dealt with in a large organisation is something that has taken the fun out of it for me.

I have also taken on something of a tangent in learning how to code. Or at least improving my tech literacy. I have a couple of certificates now and am trying to complete the Harvard CS50 introduction to computer science. My overall goal is still to develop a good language learning tool. To make use of this revolution to help myself and others with language learning.

 I will endevour to post more regularly. Additionally, I have set up my own blog to write about a trip I will take later this year, back to China. My wife is Chinese and we will visit the Hexi corridor, part of the old silk road. I would like to connect that blog and this in order to write and post more. I will link to it here once up and running.

Ideas for journal entries

Been getting back into language studying after the past couple of weeks of craziness here in Tokyo. It was pretty hard to concentrate on other things while you have half your mind on the next aftershock, and the other half on the latest radiation readings in the area.

Anyhow, I'm starting to get back into the swing of things now, and I've been using Lang8 again a bit more recently. I seem to go through input and output phases, (I tend to output more in the way of writing rather than speaking at the moment, which I need to work on) and now I seem to have gone into output mode again by writing on my Lang8 blog.

The challenge with writing a daily journal is finding something to write about. I don't think my life is dull, but I don't seem to have the motivation to write about the ins and outs of daily life (again, I should probably work on this).

One tool I have been using to generate ideas however is the stumbleupon.com website. This website enables you to "stumble" almost randomly around the internet to find sites that other people have labeled as interesting. I say almost randomly, because the sites you do actually stumble through are regulated by your settings page where you can specify what your interests are, and thereby only stumble onto sites that are related to these interests. I find this site gives me some good ideas for journal entries on Lang8.

Writing this though I realise I should try to work on writing (and speaking) about more mundane day-to-day topics: as these are the kind of topics and language that I probably need to be more familiar with on a daily basis.

OK, that's my goal for this evening. One Lang8 entry about my day today. Hope it's not too dull!!

The flashcard debate

One of my more personalized flashcards

Are flashcards really the answer? Doubts are beginning to creep in to be honest. They're definitely helpful, and with the audio file added, they give me good practice listening and repeating after a native speaker, which is pretty valuable for Chinese because of the pronunciation difficulties.

But I've begun to think that as far as absorbing vocabulary and sentences goes, maybe using podcast material is more beneficial over the long-term. Podcasts give you more context, and are certainly more interesting than the flashcards, which are really just a series of unrelated, random sentences.

I follow a few other language bloggers on the internet, and I know that there are those that are against flashcards, and those that are for. I'd probably say that I'm in the 'for' camp for now, just from the point of view that they are a good tool for remembering certain phrases, and for remembering Chinese characters.

But they do have their drawbacks. One of the main ones—which is really the reason I have begun thinking about them a little more critically of late—is that you really do have to tailor them for yourself, and this can be time-consuming. I sometimes find myself spending more time, looking for, copying and pasting, and uploading sentences, than I do actually thinking about them in a meaningful, semantic way.

But like I said my current deck of cards has definitely helped me progress in some ways, especially with the pronunciation, so I'll keep them ticking over for now I guess, just to keep my options open.

The importance of having options

I think it's important to have a lot of different studying options to hand when you are learning a language, especially in the early stages anyway. It's very easy to get bored with what you're doing quickly, so having a number of different styles of study you can turn to when you get bored with one thing is important.

Today, I've been struggling a bit, I've mentioned this before: if the motivation dwindles it's difficult to get yourself going. But I've been flicking between things tonight, trying to get something done, and I must have accumulated at least one hours worth of useful study I think.

Back when I started studying Japanese three or four years ago, one hour in an evening was a really good achievement, because it meant sat slogging my way through a textbook. Now I have flashcards, podcasts, blogs, music, reading websites, youtube... basically any sort of contact with the language is good in my book now, and I can keep myself interested and occupied. Now one hour is a bad night, which bodes well for my language development over the next few years.

Exciting new blog

I have a new blog!

And no messing around this time. This one's going straight to the heart of the Japanese nation. A Japanese blog, in Japanese.

Check it out:

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/easterngrean

My initial idea is to try and translate Japanese news articles into English. I'm gonna try and select ones that have links to China, and hopefully, as my Chinese improves, I'll be able to translate them into Chinese too. Actually, I mean, from Chinese, into English. Vice versa will probably have to wait a bit longer.

Anyway, hope it's interesting.

Feedback/comments welcome!