Category: Language

General posts about languages and language learning.

【日本語】March 2013 Bookmeter Stats

As my time as a college student winds down, my busy-meter is doing just the opposite.  I did manage to get some reading done with all the dead time throughout my days, but I expect these next two months will contain relatively little reading.

Also, Shion Miura (三浦しをん) is quickly becoming one of my new favorite authors. I also have her work 舟を編む waiting on my bookshelf, so finishing that will be one of my goals for the month of April.

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The Fun Of Codebreaking

I loved puzzles as a kid.

Crosswords, word searches, secret codes for games, code-breaking games, brain teasers, you name it. Pretty much anything that contained searching for some secret sequence of characters was a large part of my childhood.

Sometimes books or toys would come with attached “secret codes” and I would spend the day learning them, then writing secret messages all over the walls in my room. Then somewhere along the way I stopped with the codes and puzzles. I’m still not sure why.

It wasn’t until recently that I noticed how similar languages are to those codes I’d find at the back of a kid’s magazine.  Learning the Russian alphabet and trying to read simple words has reawakened the “code geek” in me.  I’ve realized that I’ve never actually thought about languages in this way until recently.

Languages are a code just waiting to be broken. It’s not impossible. There are already cities and countries full of people speaking/reading your l2/3/4/5 . They just broke the code before you did, and with lots of help from their environment.