Among other projects, one activity I've been spending more time on since all the COVID-19 stuff got rolling is ramping up the intensity of my foreign language studying. In this post, I am going to explicate why I currently find studying European languages (mainly focusing on Russian, some French/Spanish …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 57
In this post, I'll describe a phenomenon I'll call the xenophilic paradox. This idea is this: people that are very interested in foreign cultures often dislike or feel alienated from the place they themselves are from—while wishing that people of the cultures they admire do not become more cosmpolitan …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 56
In the city I grew up in, there were many unfamiliar symbols all around me. Though I am of Chinese heritage, I did not learn Chinese until I decided to do so myself as an "adult learner". So, returning to places I spent time in as I grew up living …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 55
We can define positive thinking as actively directing one's attention towards some goal (e.g. striving for that which is beautiful). Positive thinking can be contrasted with reactionary thinking— simply responding to bad news rather than actively working towards something.
Language Learning
Allow me to provide an example from language …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 54
During these locked-down times, I've been given the opportunity to work on studying foreign languages again, which is good fun. Here I share some additional tips, tricks, and insights which have been helpful to me. Eventually, I plan to integrate this content into my language learning page which has additional …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 53
It has been a while since I've checked tech news, so I visited Hacker News this morning to see what's going on the minds of the computer nerds. I looked over one article going over how Amazon's Kindle devices collect a "surprisingly large amoung of data". Various other articles concerned …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 52
Here, I will share a technique for learning language(s) in a wholistic system.
- Acquire an old text, translated into many languages. Some suggestions are: pick a favorite Psalm or Proverb from the Bible.
- Learn the basic pronunciation of your target language(s); one trick is to find a YouTube …
Corona Virus Diary, Part 51
Corona Virus Diary, Part 50
The last post here, I shared that I was interested in investigating Orthodox Christianity further. So far, it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. In this post, I relate one way in which Orthodox Christianity (as opposed to other varieties I've been involved with, Protestant groups) has thus far presented …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 49
A friend I met through the Internet shared this jaysanalysis with me. So far, I've been really impressed by the quality/depth of the content. There's a handful of topics here that interest me, including
- Christianity, Church history
- Cultural/symbol analysis
- Geopolitics
I think I've mentioned on this blog once …
read more