Originally this was part of my Tools for Mandarin study post, but it got a little complicated and crazy so I pulled it into its own post. This is how I configured Pleco to save flashcards to Anki Notes, which automatically creates the Card types I need to effectively study Mandarin. After configuring this, my process for creating new cards in Anki looks like this: Look up a new word in Pleco. Read more...

Intro and inspo It’s generally believed that children learn languages better/faster than adults. At any rate, language learning is certainly different for adults than children. But one advantage that adults have is more learning experience to draw on. We understand how we learn, and we can tailor our approach to suit our individual needs. In particular, we can use tools to accelerate our learning and improve our retention. Below are some of the tools that I use when studying Mandarin. Read more...

At the end of August, my wife and I moved from San Francisco to Taiwan. This was something that we had been talking about for years, and it feels amazing to finally do it “for real”. Of all the new and exciting challenges of living abroad, I think that adapting to a new language (Mandarin) is the most difficult, urgent, and rewarding. In this post, I want to share a little bit about my experience inside and outside of the classroom, my challenges, successes, and strategies for continuing to improve my language skills. Read more...

There’s nothing interesting here, just testing that the image CDN works. Here’s an image!

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, since they tend to fall by the wayside within a month or two. It’s hard to make big changes all at once, and even harder to stick with them. But I think there is a special freshness to the New Year that invites reflection, and it’s a good time to look back, think of the general direction I want to go in the new year, and introduce systems to guide me there. Read more...