Tag: inspiration

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.

 

 

 

You’ll Never See That

POP QUIZ!

Which of these three things will you never see?

A: A  lion playing a trumpet while riding a tricycle.

B: A salaryman doing handstand pushups while balancing two glasses of Calpis on his feet at Fushimi Inari at 3 in the morning.

C: The kanji 迄.

The answer is….

Continue reading “You’ll Never See That”

My First Year of Japanese

Wow, it’s been one year since I first opened up Genki and started memorizing vocab lists.  I’d like to think I’ve come a long way.

It’s actually been about 8~9 months since I started all the daily listening/reading/SRSing.

To avoid sounding like a language blog parrot, I’ll keep this post short and sweet.

Continue reading “My First Year of Japanese”