Japanese For Busy People I

Review by Javantea
Sept 9, 2021

Japanese for Busy People I cover

Made for beginners, this 1995 book by AJALT is boring, formal, and slow. The fact that is uses hiragana and katakana instead of kanji is a major limitation. Compared to courses made since 2010, this is more historically valuable than the price of the book. I finished this textbook despite being far beyond its material level in a matter of months of podcasts because I wanted the easy stuff to be very solid in my head -- listen, read, and think. Because it has to start at such a low level, it might be good for people who have trouble with the alternatives. But to get a substantial handle on Japanese, one will need more than this book can teach. What does it teach?

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Learning to Read and Write Kanji Row 19

As with other posts in this series, this is the results of a test I took today, July 5th, 2021.

kanji test row 19

歩 速 急 降 心 頼 自 道 米 先 不 配 天 成 便 利 市 券 横 料 多 安 乗 軽 平 貸 個 忙 重

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Learning to Read and Write Kanji Row 11

I've been learning Japanese again. If you don't know what's going on, check the previous posts. This is a test and then a short blog.

Kanji test row 11

席 野 長 少 研 所 切 客 勉 当 番 食 声 代 宅 母 究 目 借 内 教 学 近 貸 仕 森 読 度

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Blog 2


Nov 3, 2016

I spent a little time in the past week porting one of my blogs to Python using Django. If the website looks similar to these four blogs, it's because they are all the same codebase with a handful of tweaks to make it possible to unify them with my other blogs and journals. While they aren't all ported yet, I thought I'd write a quick blog to explain things. For a decade and a half, I've been blogging on a PHP website I wrote in 2002 for Javantea's Fate and improved over time. In 2011, I wrote a blog in Python with Django for my trip to Brasil. When I went to Mexico, I copied the blog and created a second database. When I bought j4va.com for fun and profit (not really), I first put up a copy of java.com with some interesting things in its place. Then when I wanted to turn it into a blog, I copied the Brasil blog and made a third database. Now that I finally want to unify my blogs, it makes perfect sense to simply use the same thing, but copy all the data from the all the blogs into a single database. It's so well-written, that I didn't really need a really bad intro page anymore. So now AltSci.com goes to that unified blog interface. There's a lot of logic that makes it happen, but I'll leave that unsaid.

Of all my travels, only one trip is not available on my unified blog. I decided to use MediaWiki for my Europe Blog and spammers destroyed that blog, so I don't have easy access to the data. Eventually I'll grab the data and post it to this blog. For now, the pictures and videos will do. You have to click on the videos to get them.

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