Archive for May 10th, 2009

After a week of waiting, I finally got the Japanese language text book I’ve ordered last week from Amazon. I bought  Japanese from Zero! 1. Selling for about $16 on Amazon right now.

They have about 5 books in this series and I got the first one. The first day, I managed to finish nearly half of the book. I am a beginner yet not a total beginner so the first part of the book was quite easy. I just flew through.

Although they do teach the japanese writings (Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji) but on the 1st book you will only find romaji and Hiragana. They teach you step by step. At first you will see only romaji, once you’ve learnt  a few set of Hiraganas, they will slowly replace the romaji with Hiragana. Then teach another new set of Hiragana and later replacing the romaji again with the new set you’ve just learnt. Once you’ve learnt all the Hiragana characters, you will only see words written in Hiragana.

Learning a new language in itself is not easy,  to learn a new set of foreign letters does make foreign language learning much more overwhelming. So Trombley’s (the author) approach of replacing the romaji with Hiragana slowly does make it  less scary for a beginner.

Another thing I like about this book is that, at every chapter you will learn to add more ways to make a sentence. For example, after 2-3 lessons you’d be able to say: Kore wa watashino okaasan no kuruma desu = This is my mother’s car. A couple more lessons after that you would be able to form sentence like : Watashi no okaasan wa pinku kuruma ga suki desu = My mother likes a pink car.  Few more lessons after that you’d be able to form more complicated  sentences.

A couple of drawbacks though : no audio aid for those who wants to know how some words are pronounced, secondly it may be a bit too slow for some people. Not a problem for me though. I really like to book so far and already thinking of ordering the second book, so I won’t have to wait once I am finished with this book.

You can check the limited preview of this book here on google book.

Over the years that I have been playing around in the internet world, I have met all sorts of people from all over the world. The internet is indeed a world without any borders. Some of the friendships were short lived some I still hold up to this day.

One thing that the internet has made things a lot convenient when it comes to searching for a suitable relationship is that, you get to find those people who share the same interest and even belief as you have easily. Especially if the interest or belief you profess is something few people in your community shares. Something like Paganism.

Although, Paganism is an age old belief older than Christianity, it is not everyday you can find a Pagan believer. To be honest the only pagan I know is one blogger, whose blog I frequent sometimes.

Now websites like paganchatcity.com hosts free pagan chat rooms that  gives the opportunity for a pagan to find other pagans from within their area or city. Well, if you can find Christian chat rooms, Hindu chat rooms, etc, why not pagan chat rooms, right?

I think it is also a chance for me to know about paganism, a belief which is rather foreign to me. Perhaps chatting into one of those pagan chat rooms I would be able to find somebody who can explain to me more about it.