Tag Archives: Chinese

Photo-A-Day

They Have Ridges

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They Have Ridges
Photo-A-Day #1377

While I was working on my learning Chinese for the day I was visited by this ladybug. Or rather, it fell on me and scared the crap out of me. I was really concentrating on writing my Chinese symbols that when the ladybug fell it completely broke my concentration.

But we patched things up and it hung out on my thumb while I did some more writing. It was very zen-like. Here I was working to educate myself and at the same time made a connection with this bug. I took a few shots with my DSLR but I couldn’t do very good macro work. So I put the ladybug on the book and went and got my canon SD 800is because it has decent macro. I must have been gone to long because the ladybug took off. I was surprised because it spent about 10 minutes on my thumb.

The nice thing about a DSLR and shooting on the largest size is that you can crop way in and still get a nice shot. I like how the ridges on my thumbprint contrast with the smoothness of the ladybug’s shell.

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.