Monthly Archives: January 2009

Photo-A-Day

Learning Chinese The BenSpark Way

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Learning Chinese The BenSpark Way
Photo-A-Day #1375

Every once in a while you hear that someone has a New Year’s Resolution to “learn a foreign language”. Well, that is one of mine but with a twist. To keep me on track I am blogging about it on a daily basis. I ran this idea by a few people online who I respect and admire. They had a few things to say about it. They said mostly that I should try and learn a language. However one said that a blog about learning a foreign language, specifically Chinese was too niche and really wouldn’t be of value to anyone and that I should incorporate that into this blog somehow.

Now I could have packed up shop right then and there seeing as I was only 11 days into the experiment. But I decided that, no, this blog isn’t about that part of my life and I made a commitment to see it through. So, I am going to continue to blog about my experiment to learn Chinese in 15 minutes a day at my newest blog 15minaday.com. It has been a really interesting project so far and I’m not doing it to generate money but to learn something totally new. The more I started looking for resources for learning Chinese the more I found tons of them. I think that when the experiment is finished there will be a wealth of value for someone who wants to go about learning Chinese because I will have gone through many different resources that are available and let you know which are good and which are not. I wouldn’t mind generating a little income either so I do have amazon affiliate links on the site in case anyone wants to buy the books I’m using in this experiment.

The resources I am are finding consist or websites, blogs, podcasts, books and audiobooks. Many resources are totally free and have tons of info. I’ve made a few purchases to get started and ultimately I want to use Rosetta Stone but it is a bit expensive. The other day I even used the fortunes from our fortune cookies as a learning project.

I’ve learned a few things about this project.

  1. When a project is new it is fun and exciting.
  2. It takes a while to see the big picture (I haven’t even seen the little one yet)
  3. Learning something new takes time (for me, more than 15 minutes a day)
  4. You can respect someone and still disagree with them.
  5. Breaking a project down to small parts that are manageable allows you to get them done.
Photo-A-Day

Will Smile for Hugs

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Will Smile for Hugs
PHoto-A-Day #1374

Today we went over to visit my cousins. We had a delicious taco lunch. My cousin Carissa made fish tacos, beef tacos and shrimp tacos. It was a delicious spread.

Taco Bonanza

Today’s photo is of my cousin Shaun’s son. I spent a little while trying to capture that huge smile of his. He’s such a cutie.

While we were there Eva and her cousin interacted. She’s is almost a full year older than him. It was fun to sit and talk with Shaun about the stages that his son is going through. It is amazing that I don’t remember as much about each stage that I thought I would. There were three kids at the house, a 6 month old, a 14 month old and Eva, 15 months old. Eva is still a little cool around other kids, she’s used to her own toys but she does settle down and play nice. Here she is playing with my cousin’s son

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On the homefront it snowed so Erik and I took care of the shoveling.

Also, I think I fixed the malware problem. I used Malwarebytes to take care of it, thanks everyone for their awesome help.