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.

Update and new thoughts on grammar

Well, what with summer holidays and the like it's been a while since my last post, so I'm just writing this as a quick update as to what's going on.

I've got a lot of topics that I want to blog about language learning lined up, it's just that I've come to the conclusion that I'm spending too much time blogging about it and not enough time studying, so I've decided to concentrate on the study a bit for the time being.

I'm using the Oxford Chinese site that I mentioned before, and I'm really beginning to appreciate the benefit of grammar exercises. I think I had been lulled into thinking it was not necessary by some quarters of the language learning world, and this has been detrimental to my progress. Looking back at this blog, I am not sure I would support everything I wrote here or here anymore (although think balance is probably the best way forward, and certainly there is room for both techniques).

It is an atractive proposal not to have to bother with grammar, but I'm finding that studying the grammar really gives you a better understanding of the language and helps to give you a firm foundation from where to build your sentences, and this in turn helps to raise confidence.

Anyway, I'm going to try to make my way through all these exercises over the next month or two, and then perhaps scout around for some new material.

In the meantime, I'll try to find some time for a blog post or two. If you have any thoughts on the benefits of grammar study please let me know in the comments below, or of course if you have any comments on my blog or language learning in general, feel free to drop me a line...

New name

So, I decided to give the blog a new name after signing up to the blog on google reader, and finding that the three kanji characters that make up the pen name I had given myself for the blog: 夜青龍 make up the blog title. These characters are basically a twist on the famous Sumo Wrestler, 朝青龍。His name means 'morning blue dragon', mine is the evening version.

Anyway, that name doesn't really slip off the tongue well for people who can't read Japanese, so hence the name change.

The name is taken from the Monty Python skit below. It's been said before, but Monty Python really were ahead of their time—I can remember sitting through a Spanish Evening Class in the UK that wasn't far off from this in the year 2005, (I specifically remember going round the class trying to memorize cutlery words—what a waste of time!)

Anyway, it's really funny, and I think shows the British attitude to foreign languages quite well.