When I was a kid, if anyone in the family wanted to make a long distance call, we had to wait until after 5pm. Then the Sprint/MCI/AT&T wars came, raging throughout Thursday night primetime and beyond, pushing down the price of long distance. I was curious how much long distance cost back when I was […]
So, how do you learn over 2000 complex Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations each? Anywhere he wants to! Er, wait, wrong joke. Bird by bird! That’s it. Some Japanese learners are lucky enough to arrive with kanji in their pockets because they grew up speaking (and reading and writing) Chinese. There are a few Chinese […]
Why am I writing so much about writing systems and so little about speaking and listening? Because I’m frustrated with my lousy progress at speaking and listening and would rather write about something I’m good at. Kanji is the barbed wired that keeps civilians from getting too close to Japanese. Or as Maciej Cegłowski put […]
Back in the 90s, a couple of lifetimes ago, I was working as a network administrator and trying to get better at computer programming. Somehow I thought it was going to be a thing. I got especially interested in a programming language called Perl, which was once frequently used for writing web-based software. I started […]
