You don't "learn" a language. You get *used to* it. You become familiar with it. You become…"family". # If you want to get used to/become "family"ar with a language, you have to, like family, let it into your private life. # Languages that are not part of the home/private life tend to not get learned,…
Language Is Friendship and Familiarity
by khatzumoto
A language is a person. Of course, it’s not a real person. You can’t see or touch Japanese. But she exists. She exists just like Harry Potter exists. You don’t learn a language, you get used to it. When someone is used to something, what do we call them? We call them an “expert”, we…
URL Shuffler
by khatzumoto
What is the URL Shuffler? It’s a better alternative to bookmarks. Instead of storing those cool L2 sites you come across (e.g. via recommendations on the AJATT Twitter feed) in your bookmarks folder, where they will simply be forgotten, store them in the URL shuffler The URL shuffler will pick a random page for you each time…
Cantonese Mini-Transcript: Star Wars / Clone Wars / I Surrender!
by khatzumoto
“Cantonese is a difficult language to learn — not because of its sounds or syntax, but because it’s hard to find good learning resources” — Eldon Well, let’s remedy that one mini-transcript at a time, as has been the custom established by Edwin and CanteHK! Situation: Obi-Wan “surrenders” to the Clone Army as part of…
Continual Questioning
by khatzumoto
In a lot of personal development literature, they say that asking good questions helps us get good answers. Here are some you can ask yourself continually: Belief What if I were Japanese? What if I had been born and raised in Japan? What if I were Jared in The Pretender and I had to fool people into…
AJATT Twitter Tweets for Week Of 2010-08-28
by khatzumoto
@sevarg KanjiClinic and Chris Houser were big, I think. Dr (Mary Sisk) Noguchi's literacy…those were big… in reply to sevarg # @sevarg Also, I Dr. Noguchi actually forwarded an email to Heisig (呼び捨て) for me. I asked him "are you sure this'll work for Chinese, mate?" in reply to sevarg # @sevarg Anyway. I actually…