Learning Log : June 11, 2015

I did something a bit different yesterday. Instead of watching Russian World 2 on YouTube, I decided to do some much needed review in Mandarin Chinese. I saw that the same YouTube account, Dallas ISD, also uploaded free Chinese lesson videos.

• Watched Chinese I – A Journey to China Lesson 10 on YouTube.
  • Reviewed age, tone of numbers, standard phrases, etc.

The pace of this lesson was very slow and easy for me, but I wanted to slowly start to get my mind back into learning Chinese. I’ve forgotten a lot of Chinese from when I took it in university, and I want to get back to being able to think more clearly in Chinese, as well as having a better memorization of the tones for commonly used words. In the coming days I’ll skip around the lessons and see which is a comfortable fit for me, with enough new material as well as material to review.

• Completed Turkish Lessons on Duolingo:
  • Completed remainder of 2 part lesson on Clothing in Turkish:
    • pantolon – pants
    • Benim giysilerim – My clothes
    • Benim gözlüklerim – My glasses
    • şapka – hat
  • Completed Review of previously learned Turkish words and phrases:
    • Biz yaşlıyız ama yakışıklıyız – We are old but handsome.
    • eski personel – the old staff
    • Müdür değilim ama mutluyum. –  I am not a director but I am happy
  • Total Daily Duolingo Points : 20XP

• Japanese : Learned about Manyou Gana (万葉仮名), the ancient Japanese writing system that employs Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language, and the influence that it had on creating the Katakana alphabet. I had never known that many Katakana were partly abbreviated Manyou Gana, and how this is evident in the name Katakana (片仮名), where Kata (片) means a piece. In the picture below, the sound indicated by Hiragana is shown with its equivalent in Manyou Gana. The modern Katakana symbols are not pictured in the graph, but if you know them, you can easily make out some of the basic shapes of Katakana characters inside the Manyou Gana characters.

• Read a chapter of Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg, which brings me to Chapter 7 of the final part of the book.

• Read “Checkouts,” a short story by Cynthia Rylant, from one of my old English textbooks from high school. As a former cashier, the story resonated greatly with my own experiences of instantly becoming obsessed with customers. I was also excited to find out that she is also the author of the Henry and Mudge children’s book series, which I recall reading in elementary school. The goofy illustrations of the dog always made me laugh as a child.

This was definitely not as structured of a day as usual, but I enjoyed learning and reading things outside of my normal study regimen.