Favorite blogs, websites, and youtube

Youtube Channels:

(food) Cooking with Dog – Francis (the dog) is the narrator for this Japanese cooking show.  It is in English and teaches a wide variety of Japanese dishes.   While I haven’t ever used the recipes, everything seems clear and the instructions are clear.

(food) Vah chef – The Vah chef shows you how to make all sorts of Indian dishes, desserts, breads.  His commentary and facial expressions are quite ridiculous at times,  I followed his recipe for Butter Chicken and it was quite delicious

(music) Jack Conte Music – He is one of the more innovative musicians I’ve seen on Youtube.  He seems to be the originator of the ‘video song’ concept–every instrument on the recording is shown in the video.  He even has an anti-videosong that is entertaining.

(language) Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. – This is someone I’ve followed for a few years, starting on How-to-learn-any-language.com forums.   He is a self-studied polyglot and offers advice to those attempting the same things.   He has videos on methodology for language learning, reviews of the major language resource publishers, and has completed a video series on languages in the Germanic language tree.   I own one of the English-French-Spanish-German dictionaries he published in Lebannon.   If you are interested in langauge learning, I definitely recomment checking him out.

Blogs

(language) All Japanese All the Time – Khatzumoto has become one of the bigger language learning bloggers that I’ve seen in the last 3-4 years.  He claims to have learned Japanese to a highly competent level (enough to get a Japanese only speaking job with a tech company in Japan) in 18 months while going to school in America.   He has good advice and I agree with his language learning ideas.   Input before output.  Ridiculous amounts of input naturally grow language in our minds.

(cartoon) XKCD – one of my favorite nerdy comics.   Enjoy!

(faith) Don Miller’s Blog – Author of Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What writes about various projects, including writing, ministries and his mentoring project.

(international) Coming Anarchy – An interesting collection of articles from a few different writers.  In the past it seemed more focused on China, but at least one of the writers is now in Dubai.

(China) Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿 – I believe this guy is married to a Chinese women and generally posts about thoughtful reflections on the language of his wife, daughter and mother-in-law especially with regard to the Beijing accent.

(Uyghur) This is Xinjiang. – Usually posts pictures from the area, with some personal anecdotes of a teacher living in Xinjiang.  This blog has quite a few recipes of various Uyghur food as well.  Quite rare online.

(Uyghur) Xinjiang: Far West China – Since the author The Opposite End of China had left Xinjiang, there weren’t any very good blogs on people living there.  This excellent blog has come up recently and provides some cool and thoughtful posts.  Sad that the internet is off in Xinjiang so posts are far between.

(food) FX Cuisine – This Dutch blog is by far the best I’ve ever seen on cooking and food.  He explores various farms and shows how to make some great delicious foods.   These aren’t usually fast recipes, but slow and careful.

I may update this from time to time.

Chicago – Day 2 (June 11) Part one

I was supposed to meet Tue for dinner only because her work got busy and she couldn’t catch the Blue Man Group show. I was talking to my friend Sarah and we decided to get lunch. I read about this cheap Indian restaurant on Devon that had good food. Sarah was a little wary, but when I told her the name–Ghareeb Nawaz–she said she had read about it and was willing to try it. The restaurant is named after an 8th century saint of India who cared for the poor, and the name literally means “Sustainer of the Poor”. So we decided to meet up and beforehand I went to Beans & Bagels to read and drink an iced coffee. It’s right under the Montrose stop on the brown line, so it is convenient to stay there when it’s raining.

Reading @ Beans & Bagels

Sarah arrived at the coffeeshop and we headed on the train and bus to get to the restaurant. It was on Devon which is the Indian/Pakistani main street in Chicago. I didn’t take any pictures of the area because it was raining, but i get get a couple shots of the restaurant.

The front of Ghareeb Nawaz

As you can see from the storefront above, a lot of meals are quite cheap. It seems that the vegetarian dishes are around $2 and the meat dishes are closer to $4-5. I ordered chicken biryani and two pieces of naan ($0.50 each), so it was about $5 in total. The dish of chicken was huge, much more than i should have eaten and the naan was quite large as well!

Chicago Trip

 

So I just got back from Chicago last night, and I loaded ~600 pictures onto my computer. Over the next few days, I’m gonna be writing up my trip and giving some commentary along with the better photos. Stay tuned…

The beginnings of dataflow programming (part 1)

I started playing D&D during the summer last year (2008) and am continuing on Thursday nights with the same group. Wizards of the Coast recently released a Character Builder program, and while it seems pretty decent, there are some serious problems. First of all, it only works on Windows, which is rather lame in this day in age. Secondly, I already ran into some issues that don’t function properly, such as changing implements for a character. I decided that I could do better and I started to write a character generator in REBOL. I made it to the point where it was working except for feats, equipment and powers (which I admit are the biggest part), but then I was reading about !Liquid that Maxim has been working on for quite a while, and I thought, “Hey, I should convert this over to the !Liquid engine to finally learn it!”

So, now I begin my first attempt at dataflow programming. It should be a bit rough, but I will try to keep notes and document my progress for everyone that wants to see a beginner attempt to use !Liquid.

So there are four modes of !plug in !Liquid.

The first mode is called a LINK mode !plug. This is a one-sided dependency. It receives data from another !plug called its subordinate. When the subordinate !plug is updated, it sends a signal to the LINK !plug to become dirty. That is, it tells the !plug that the subordinate has data, but it does not give the data until the LINK !plug requests it. The term for this is called lazy evaluation. Setting a LINK !plug to be stainless? makes it immediately request the data from the subordinate when it receives the dirty? signal.

to be continued….

Blog status

I have rescued my old blog content from my old Grinnell account, but I haven’t been able to import it into Blogger. I was thinking about switching this content to a WordPress page and just sticking with that. I don’t have my own server besides a home machine anymore, but maybe I should invest in one.

My classes and also teaching have been swamping me lately. I want to get all this content up from my travels again and process through some of it, but who knows when the time will arise. I have thousands of pictures that I could journal through, but I’m not sure that anyone would read it. More for my own benefit than anything.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Public key!

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Video

I have to say, this is one of the most amazing videos I’ve seen in a long time, thanks to Charlie

News

Haven’t really been a blogger lately, but maybe I should change that. Trying to finish up my last semester and graduate. Teaching is different this semester with twice as many students as last. Trying to keep my lesson plans decent and useful for students. I’m trying to work more materials that my students are interested in, but I have doubts that one text will keep them interested. Not sure what I should do. I would like to act as more of a guide for them, but they are so not accustomed to that, and they don’t take charge of their own learning for the most part. I continue talking with one of my students from last semester, and I think she is the most like a “success story” that I have had along that lines. She is at least using Anki a significant amount of time to manage her vocabulary review, and she is taking a regular university class–public speaking.

I’m working on a research proposal for SRS (Spaced Repetition System) like Anki to empower students through training to take charge of what they want to remember. I’m still refining my research question and working out details with dependent/independent variables. I might not be able to do as large of a scope as I want, but this proposal will be a good exercise for me to think carefully about what is going on during vocabulary acquisition.

My studies of Chinese have been a bit lazy for the last 7-8 months. I’ve listened to a lot, haven’t been studying characters much, but I got in the mood last night and review a few. I still want to get up to 2000-2500 before I make it to Taiwan. I’ve been chatting with a lot of random people on Skype in Chinese, and I do pretty well with a dictionary enough that I can hold most conversations without miscommunications. Some of the people have been really helpful and explain grammar mistakes in Chinese. Sometimes I just don’t have the right mentality for saying certain things. For example, I was trying to say “I dance while I teach English” and for some reason I said “正在教时候，我跳舞” when I should have said “我邊教英文 邊跳舞”. Kind of a silly comment, but I think I can adjust and I will pay more attention while I am listening.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I have updated my blog!

My response to Mr. Kaufman

A new language is a new language

At times it seems that many well meaning language teachers seem determined to push their learners back into their native language. Here are two paragraphs from well meaning teachers on how to help their learners. I am opposed to these ideas since I believe that to learn a language you want to distance yourself from your own language as completely as possible. The only exception is the occasional dictionary or text translation into your own language. For the rest you need to let the brain get used to the new language naturally. The following two paragraphs do not represent natural language learning at least in my view. I welcome comments

>>>>>>>>>>>
……..the quickest route to understanding students’ language problems and solving these problems is active error analysis. At this time I have speakers of four unrelated languages in my adult class. I ask them questions about their languages such as “What is the closest sound to this one in your language?” “How do you say this in your language?” etc. and we do quick comparisons. Putting the structures of English and L1 next to each other on the marker board is productive. This seems to help a lot and students generally find it interesting to see how different languages work. At the same time, I learn a lot about how different languages function to better help the students.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What a fabulous idea! I never thought of having my adult learners write a
children’s book based on their cultures. That is such a wonderful way to
show that you respect and honor their culture and heritage, and yet all the
while have them working on their target language skills.

Steve

Hi. I haven’t commented here before. I may try to split this into what I see a couple issues. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

Re: age & classrooms in general: As an ESL teacher at a university, I am of the impression that students are mainly going to be successful if they have a strong interest in learning the language. I have many student who seem to have no desire to learn English at all. They spend all their time speaking their native language outside (and even inside class despite English only policy). There are large differences between students with motivation and those without. In my opinion, students with motivation will learn much more outside my class than inside. My responsibilities include working with both kinds of students, so capturing students interests can be a big problem.

Some of the things at work in students’ seeming lack of motivation are affective filters (I don’t remember if you ascribe much to Krashen). Activities to lower these filters can be good, including ones that include the first language. However, I, like you, also don’t think first language activities are so great for adult learners. On the other hand, these can be especially helpful to children in ESL classrooms, and in this case more than any, I think it is appropriate for this “repect and honor” for their culture. I would suggest reading Igoa’s The Inner World of an Immigrant Child if you want to explore the topic.

Re: error analysis: I do think that meaningful error analysis for teachers is a good thing. Notice the kinds of errors that a student makes can tell a teacher the types of grammar areas in which the student needs to improve. Solely marking up a students’ output (as in giving a recast) can be vague as whether a teacher is correcting content or form.

Re: second quote: What is your issue with writing a children’s book about their culture? It seems to be in the target language, which is what you promote.