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It’s been a while since I wrote about my Pali study, but that doesn’t mean I’ve slowed down any. I’ve been pushing through the A.K. Warder book, entering all exercises into Mnemosyne and drilling them almost daily (I tend to miss a day on the weekend). I’ve just finished Lesson 7. Twenty-three more lessons to [...]

Asian Offbeat has an interesting article about some of the most difficult Chinese characters. These characters were found in a Qing dynasty dictionary. Here are a few of them: Flying Squirrel Exorcism Thunder Wow. That last one has 128 strokes. You can read more about these and others at the original article here (found via [...]

Rikker over at Language Scraps has made a great find: Multibabel. Just type in an english sentence and it will translate it back and forth between several languages and English until you end up with a machine-translated mess! Here’s my entry: Original English Text: I want to eat apple pie. Translated to French: Je veux [...]

I announced in the inaugural Project Mayhem post that I would be studying Fight Club, in Japanese, in order to work on my embarrassingly insufficient Japanese listening skills. Japanese Fight Club is pretty difficult for my level. I’d estimate that 50% of the vocabulary that I ran into in the first 3 scenes was unfamiliar. [...]

Recently Khatzumoto over at All Japanese All The Time wrote a great article comparing language learning to boiling water. Khatzumoto’s metaphor reminded me a lot of one used by my favorite Thai forest monk Ajahn Chah. He said: Nothing happens immediately, so in the beginning we can’t see any results from our practice. This is [...]

In a previous post, I had decided to stop studying after a set amount of time to prevent being overwhelmed. I have studied Greek once since, completing a full chapter, and I studied Spanish tonight, covering about half a chapter. I didn’t quite study for a full hour, instead choosing to stop when I was [...]

The Japanese dictionary order is a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa, n. I’ve been studying Japanese for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned the above dictionary order for the Japanese syllabary. The main reason for this is that I mostly use an electronic dictionary to look [...]

It’s not everyday you see Pali mentioned in the news. I found this piece quite by accident: More than a thousand monks and members of the public to recite Pali text 24-hours a day for 57 days A marathon public reading of the Tripitaka, the earliest collection of Buddhist teachings, began yesterday at Sanam Luang, [...]

Last night, having been delayed by sickness, I studied Step 2 of Spanish Step-by-Step. In this book, each chapter is called a step, which contains a list of sentences and phrases in Spanish which will introduce new words and concepts. At the end of each step is a section called “Instant Conversation” in which you [...]

Quite by accident, I found a site with a recording of a Greek alphabet song. I personally am far too shy to sing this aloud, even by myself, but this could be a good memory aid for those just learning the Greek alphabet. The rest of the site is pretty interesting as well. The author [...]