Reddit mentions: The best reference books
We found 16,058 Reddit comments discussing the best reference books. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 6,500 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.
1. GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (English and Japanese Edition)
- ◆ "Genki" is an entry-comprehensive teaching materials that are widely used in Europe and the United States.
- ◆Stretched the four skills in a balanced way in the "listening, speaking, reading and writing," and then training the basic skills of the Japanese.
- ◆This second edition, the "teaching Ease" "Learning ease" the intact of the "Genki", was to further enrich the contents.
- ◆And established a new column of the culture and lifestyle information in each section.
- ◆Included with the voice of the new recording and a total of 6 hours in the MP3 file.
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Color | Orange |
Height | 10 Inches |
Length | 7.2 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.8 Pounds |
Width | 1 Inches |
2. Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters
- University of Hawaii Press
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Height | 8.9 Inches |
Length | 6 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | March 2011 |
Weight | 1.50355262684 Pounds |
Width | 0.9 Inches |
3. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
- Villard Books
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Color | Multicolor |
Height | 8 Inches |
Length | 5.2 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | December 2002 |
Weight | 0.3747858454 Pounds |
Width | 0.5 Inches |
4. Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, Pars I: Familia Romana (Latin Edition)
- GAZELLE BOOK SERVICES
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Height | 8.999982 Inches |
Length | 5.999988 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.1684499886 Pounds |
Width | 0.52999894 Inches |
5. The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2300 Characters
- AIRLINE APPROVED: The Sherpa Delta Airlines Pet Carrier is airline approved and part of our Guaranteed On Board program, which provides comfort and peace of mind to pets and their owners; it's perfect for traveling by air, bus, car, or train
- IN-CABIN FRIENDLY: Our patented spring wire frame allows the rear end of the carrier to be pushed down several inches to easily fit under airplane seats in compliance with most major airline requirements and FAA regulations
- PERFECT FOR TRAVEL: Features mesh panels for ventilation, escape-proof locking zippers, top and side entries for easy and comfortable loading, waterproof interior base, and a removable machine washable cozy base liner
- VERSATILE DESIGN: Can be carried by hand with the padded top handle, or over the shoulder using the included detachable carrying strap and integrated metal D-rings - whichever suits your comfort and convenience
- MULTIFUNCTIONAL: The pet carrier can also be used as a soft-sided crate for regular outings and vet visits with cats and small dogs; includes a large storage pocket for treats, leashes, poop bags, and other small accessories
- PRODUCT: Black, Medium, 17" x 11" x 10.5"; fits pets up to 16 pounds
- CHOOSING THE RIGHT SIZE: Choose the perfect carrier size based on your pet's measurements, followed by their weight; make sure not to exceed the maximum weight limit, and allow enough space for your pet to change positions inside the carrier
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Color | Blue |
Height | 9 Inches |
Length | 6 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | December 2013 |
Weight | 2.14289318664 Pounds |
Width | 1.4 Inches |
6. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
- Princeton University Press
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Height | 10.31 inches |
Length | 8.38 inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | September 2008 |
Weight | 5.6879263596 Pounds |
Width | 2.63 inches |
7. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
- Author: Christopher McDougall
- ISBN: 9780307266309
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Color | Sky/Pale blue |
Height | 9.56 Inches |
Length | 6.59 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | May 2009 |
Weight | 1.36 Pounds |
Width | 1.2 Inches |
8. Spencerian Penmanship (Theory Book plus five copybooks)
- Used Book in Good Condition
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Height | 12.24 Inches |
Length | 9.5 Inches |
Number of items | 5 |
Release date | February 1985 |
Weight | 0.9 Pounds |
Width | 0.8 Inches |
9. Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf
- In each chapter, a different tested fundamental is explained and demonstrated with clear illustrations, as though Hogan were giving you a personal lesson with the same skill and precision that made him a legend
- Covers grip, stance, posture, first & second part of the swing and a short summary and review
- Paperback size: 8" x 5A1/4"
- 109 pages Herbert Warren Wind: has been called "the best golf writer in captivity." His works include Thirty Years of Championship Golf (with Gene Sarazen), The Story of American Golf, and The Complete Golfer. Anthony Ravielli, an artist and avid golfer, used his vast knowledge of anatomy and the mechanics of human movement to show the reader the precise positions and related muscles that must be utilized to achieve success with Ben Hogan's techniques.
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Color | Green/Brown |
Height | 8 Inches |
Length | 5.25 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | September 1985 |
Size | Large |
Weight | 0.24 Pounds |
Width | 0.5 Inches |
10. A History of Western Philosophy
- Oxford University Press, USA
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Height | 8.4375 Inches |
Length | 5.5 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | October 1967 |
Weight | 1.9621141318 Pounds |
Width | 1.6 Inches |
11. Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese Workbook I [Second Edition] (Japanese Edition) (Japanese and English Edition)
- ◆Second edition of the most highly regarded teaching text book on the Japanese language.
- ◆Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.
- ◆This is the companion workbook to the text.
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Height | 10.15746 Inches |
Length | 7.28345 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 0.79 Pounds |
Width | 0.3937 Inches |
12. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
- Harper Perennial
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Height | 8 Inches |
Length | 5.31 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | September 2007 |
Weight | 0.9 Pounds |
Width | 0.92 Inches |
13. Getting What You Came For
- DISPLAYPORT TO DVI ADAPTER: DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2 to DVI-D dual-link adapter connects a DVI display supporting 2560x1600 60Hz (dual-link) or 1920x1200/1080p 120Hz (single-link); HDCP compliant; | 15" (37cm) attached cable | USB-Powered | EDID pass-through
- COMPATIBILITY: Active video converter supports DP (single mode) or DP++ (multi-mode) source including workstations, desktops (AMD/Nvidia), laptops, small form factor computers & docking stations
- CONNECT A PRIMARY OR SECONDARY DISPLAY: Connect a DVI monitor or projector or add a second display to your workstation | Compact design |Tested w/ DVI cables up to 25ft | Supports widescreen/ultrawide & Apple Cinema Display HD | Ideal for digital signage
- LATCHING DISPLAYPORT & SCREW LOCKING DVI: Latching nickel-plated DP connector with gold-plated contacts ensure a solid host connection | Supports DVI screw locking cable to prevent cable from coming loose or accidental disconnection | 18" (46cm) USB cable
- EASY TO USE: With no software or drivers required, the DP to DVI adapter converter works with any OS; DisplayPort male to DVI female adapter dongle
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Height | 9.0401394 Inches |
Length | 6.1401452 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | April 1997 |
Weight | 0.95 Pounds |
Width | 1.11 Inches |
14. The World's Religions (Plus)
- Great product!
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Height | 8 Inches |
Length | 5.31 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | May 2009 |
Weight | 0.74516244556 Pounds |
Width | 1.01 Inches |
15. Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas
- Used Book in Good Condition
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Height | 9.25 Inches |
Length | 6.75 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | March 2006 |
Weight | 0.83 Pounds |
Width | 0.5 Inches |
16. Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look
- Triumph Books
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Height | 9 Inches |
Length | 6 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.23899791244 Pounds |
Width | 0.9 Inches |
17. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College
- CD
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Height | 9.299194 Inches |
Length | 7.051167 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.29190885532 Pounds |
Width | 0.700786 Inches |
18. 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love
- Cambridge University Press
Features:
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Release date | October 2012 |
19. Chaos: Making a New Science
- Penguin Books
Features:
Specs:
Color | Teal/Turquoise green |
Height | 8.4 Inches |
Length | 1.3 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | August 2008 |
Weight | 1 Pounds |
Width | 5.5 Inches |
20. The Critical Reader, 3rd Edition: The Complete Guide to SAT Reading
Specs:
Height | 11 Inches |
Length | 8.5 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.79 Pounds |
Width | 0.79 Inches |
🎓 Reddit experts on reference books
The comments and opinions expressed on this page are written exclusively by redditors. To provide you with the most relevant data, we sourced opinions from the most knowledgeable Reddit users based the total number of upvotes and downvotes received across comments on subreddits where reference books are discussed. For your reference and for the sake of transparency, here are the specialists whose opinions mattered the most in our ranking.
The decision is up to you, and your final choice should pertain to your situation/interests, but if you do choose to learn Japanese, then I can give you some pointers:
Learning Material
Start by learning Hiragana and Katakana. This should take you 2 weeks tops. You can learn it through apps like Dr. Moku (apple and android), and practice with Drag-n-Drop.
After that, use the Genki textbooks I and II (make sure that it's the 2nd edition, which has more features added to it), which are the most popular by far within the Japanese learning community.
Japan Times, the company behind the books, also made some pretty neat apps to side with the book. Available for apple and android. There's also a workbook, which is a bit of a drag to buy after buying two $50 textbooks, so I uploaded the PDFs here.
Supplement your studies with Anki SRS (Spaced-repetition-system), which is essentially virtual flash cards.
There's also Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which is pretty good as a reference, but not so much a sole learning material. His website is another good reference resource.
Please realize that it's okay to forget words and grammar points, and you're definitely going to have to revisit some of them along the way.
I should probably mention Kanji. Kanji are characters imported from China during the 5th century, although many have divulged from their modern Chinese equivalent. Genki I+II will teach you 317 kanji (image for scale (sorry for bad quality!!)), and Tobira (the textbook I'm about to mention) will teach you another. There are officially 2136 "Jouyou Kanji", or kanji used in everyday life (e.g. a newspaper). Some people use Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which I wouldn't recommend since it only teaches you the meaning (which it sometimes lies about), and doesn't even teach the reading or any words that use it. I'd recommend learning words and then the kanji that they use. That way you're getting more bang for your buck. While I personally don't use WaniKani to learn kanji, I have used it in the past, and it's really good. Sleek interface, gets the job done, forums for questions. All the good stuff you'd expect out of a kanji learning site. The first couple of lessons are free, and then it's something like $8/month. Despite WaniKani and all its greatness, the creator behind it (named Koichi) also made an "online Japanese textbook" called Tofugu, which I definitely wouldn't recommend. It waaaay too much around the bush, and half of it is just "motivational talk" (which I'm pretty sure is just trying to get you inspired for a night or two, pull out your wallet, pay for a lifetime subscription, and then give up once you get to the 〜ます forms).
Edit: I also feel the need to mention that, despite what pop culture might tell you, only a tiny portion of kanji are truly pictograph (e.g. 川 (river), 山 (mountain), 人 (person), and 大 (big)). The more conceptual ones have almost no tie to their actual meanings, which is why kanji teaching resources that use mnemonics fall apart pretty quickly. After being written with a chisel on turtle shells (called "oracle bone script"), imported to Japan 1500+ years ago, written 1,000,000s of times from people in prefectures miles away, and reformed numerous times, almost all of them lost their original pictographic quality. Just take a look at 働, 色, and 起. What do you think those mean? The answer is: to work, color, and to get up (in the sense of waking up).
Edit 2: Learn the stroke order for the kanji, since it makes them much easier to break down in the long run. For that matter, learn the radicals, or parts, of the kanji. There's a list here.
To clear up any more misconceptions, Japanese is not like Chinese in the sense that a character alone can be a verb. The kanji "起" doesn't mean "to wake up" on its own; only when you add the "き" and "る" hiragana does it turn into the verb. This is called "おくりがな" (okurigana). There are also many different readings for each character, unlike Chinese where there's usually only one or two. For example, the character "日" (day, sun) can be read ひ (or び), にち, or じつ. One kind of reading is called 音読み (onyomi), literally meaning "sound reading" because when the Japanese came into contact with the Chinese, they didn't yet have a writing system (their language was called "和語" (lit. "native Japanese language"). So, they "borrowed" their characters and transcribed the Chinese pronunciation based on their phonetic system. The other kind of reading is called 訓読み (kunyomi), which literally means "riverside reading". This type of reading is native to Japan and was prescribed to the kanji that corresponded with the meaning. On the more extreme side, some kanji can have 10+ readings. Don't sweat it though (心配ないよ!), as you'll learn all of these different readings through context in your vocabulary.
Now to bridge the gap between "beginner"-ish to "intermediate"-ish, use Tobira (which literally means "bridge"). The book assumes you to have a certain level of knowledge, some of which might overlap with Genki and other words/grammar that you may have to look up. It's an uphill battle, but you'll come out triumphant in the end.
On a side note, I'd recommend Jisho.org as your go-to online dictionary, even if some of the example sentences are riddled with errors. "Imiwa?" is a great Jp<->Eng dictionary for android and iOS. If you're really serious, then get "Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary".
Also check out /r/learnjapanese. There's a lot of great questions/resource links on there, and you can ask any questions you might have.
Duolingo has opened up alpha testers for its Japanese course as well. I'm so-so on the quality of Duolingo, since it doesn't even really teach you grammar, but just in case.
There are a lot of great resources posted up on the Kanji Koohii forums, which is where I found ヨミちゃん for Google Chrome.
To go further, read 4chan's /int/ guide.
Oh, and in case you didn't know, stay away from Rosetta Stone!!
Native Material
After Genki II, give a go at よつばと! (Yotsuba!), a simple children's manga with furigana, which is kana above the kanji (intended for little kids). There's quite a bit of slang in it, and almost always uses the casual form. Even in a simple manga like Yotsuba, there will still be words and advanced grammatical constructs you haven't even touched yet. You can get the "Yotsuba Learning Pack", which consists of an Anki deck and vocabulary list here.
You can practice speaking with native speakers on a wonderful app called HelloTalk (available for apple and android). It's pretty great.
There's also iTalki, where you can write journal entries in your target language (so you can do this for Italian too) and have them be corrected by native speakers. You can also correct journal entries in English.
About the JLPT
The "Japanese Language Proficiency Test [Number X]", commonly referred to as "JLPT N[X]", is the standard Japanese test. N1 (Number 1) is the highest and most advanced, while N5 is the most basic. You can see how ready you are for each one here. Honestly, N5 and N4 are so easy, they're really not worth the money you have to pay to take it. N3 is a good warm up to N2. Passing N2 will look pretty damn good on any business related Japanese job. I wouldn't worry about these tests until a good way into your studies.
Conclusion
While Japanese might not be the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (far from it, it in fact), and quite daunting due to the scores of kanji you're required to learn, the rewards are numerous. For one thing, you get 130,000,000 more people to converse with on this planet. You're also opened up to the world of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese cartoons), and the original language of the haiku (俳句). Not only that, but you're also introduced to the literature world Haruki Murakami and other such Japanese writers. Most importantly, you should enjoy it. After all, nobody who doesn't enjoy learning something gets very far into it. If you ever feel incredibly discouraged, take a break for as long as you need. Revisit the material when you feel ready. Never study something if it pains you to do so. PM me if you have any more questions.
This is a compilation of what I gathered from reading on the internet about self-learning higher maths, I haven't come close to reading all this books or watching all this lectures, still I hope it helps you.
General Stuff:
The books here deal with large parts of mathematics and are good to guide you through it all, but I recommend supplementing them with other books.
Linear Algebra: An extremelly versatile branch of Mathematics that can be applied to almost anything, also the first "real math" class in most universities.
Calculus: The first mathematics course in most Colleges, deals with how functions change and has many applications, besides it's a doorway to Analysis.
Real Analysis: More formalized calculus and math in general, one of the building blocks of modern mathematics.
Abstract Algebra: One of the most important, and in my opinion fun, subjects in mathematics. Deals with algebraic structures, which are roughly sets with operations and properties of this operations.
There are many other beautiful fields in math full of online resources, like Number Theory and Combinatorics, that I would like to put recommendations here, but it is quite late where I live and I learned those in weirder ways (through olympiad classes and problems), so I don't think I can help you with them, still you should do some research on this sub to get good recommendations on this topics and use the General books as guides.
I wouldn't worry too much right now about knowing everything perfectly; you're still finding your foundations and areas of interests. Sophie's World is sorta where I started too, and I'd recommend maybe going back and seeing if there are any philosophers that you found particularly interesting. That would be one way to start.
If you want to go deeper into general philosophy, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is like a much (much much much) denser and more intense version of Sophie's World. If you're not sure where to go next, this will give you a much more in-depth view of even more philosophers (although he skips Kierkegaard, which is my main gripe with the book, but oh well, still would recommend it). One thing I personally loves about this book though was how he connected philosophy to history, art, science, poetry, and so many other fields. It's really made me want to switch my major to...Everything! Philosophy's still at my core, but this book really got me interested in other fields as well.
To go further in recommendation, Plato's dialogues are generally considered to be pretty important to a foundation of philosophical understanding. The Apology is a pretty easy one; it's less of a philosophical text in the traditional sense and more a sort of kick-off for the field, where Socrates explains why philosophy is important, and why he pursues it. The Republic is also pretty important for understanding Plato's political ideas. All his dialogues, though, are generally pretty good reading, and I'd recommend reading some.
To go past that, Aristotle's often a good read, primarily his Nichomachean Ethics is a pretty good introduction to his philosophy, much of which is a response to Plato.
To move onto modern philosophy, it tends to get a bit more technical and tricky, but a great and very easy-to-read modern philosopher is Descartes. I'd recommend Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method in Discerning Truth in the Sciences as good introductions to modern philosophy, which tends to focus on slightly more technical forms of logic, rather than conclusions drawn from more vague observations.
(NOTE: found a book that combines both the Descartes writing mentions into one here).
Another important thinker who might not be hard to understand but who will definitely shake you is Nietzsche. This documentary is a pretty good introduction to him, but if you want more, I'd recommend this collection as a good overview of his philosophy. His works are quick reads, but they will stick with you, and I consider him to be one of the most important thinkers to understand the modern age.
Eventually though, you'll need to start taking on more challenging texts. Hopefully though, you'll be well informed enough by that time to have found a niche that you personally are interested in, which will make it much more interesting and fun! Never hesitate to come here with questions. Good luck!
Well certainly if you want to go into the computing/IT side of things an apprenticeship or a degree is pretty much the only way in... there are exceptions, but these rely on more right place right time and a big chunk of luck.
My super responsible advice would be, suck it up, get good grades and go to uni, do a vocational subject (e.g Engineering/ Computer Science) and have a decent standard of living (if nothing special) for the rest of your life. But by the sounds of it you are pretty set on going unconventional and to be honest straight out of school is probably the best time to do it (no immediate responsibilities and a good 30-40 years to sort it all out if you fuck it up first time round), so with that i give you the following...
I'm guessing where you say you're quite good at business, you mean you're doing a Business Studies (or similar) A-Level and are quite good at that? There is a lot of differences between theory and practice... in theory everything is easy if you know what you are doing and you know what everyone else should be doing, but academic studies don't always prepare you for real life situations where people "don't play fair". When it comes to setting up a business, you need a great product and a sizeable client base before you even get started.... and that costs money (or a great deal of time which as you will know is also money).
As for you travelling ambitions they also require money (normally).
Now i think you have two options and i am going to recommend you read two books, one for each option (but you should read them both if you can).
First option, you go travelling shortly after you finish your A-levels. You're the perfect age for cheap labour (i.e bar work, retail market stalls etc) and you move from place to place earning enough to live on as you go. To get an idea of how you can do this with little or no start up funds read Vagabonding by Rolf Potts (non-affiliate amazon link) It is probably one of the best non-fiction books ever written and is regarded by many to be the bible of traveling. You can alway come back and return to the conventional life after that.
The second option, and in my opinion the best option for you is to start your own business... Just be aware that what you have been taught will be geared more towards corporate business with the aim of getting you onto a business based degree so not all of it may apply (although things like accounting will, you still have to be legal, even if unconventional). This is where my second book recommendation comes in. The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss (non-affiliate amazon link). Again this is one of the top semi-educational books ever written, and provides a great framework (not a step by step guide) for building a scalable business with minimal capital and minimal responsibility as well as some interesting anecdotes (i should point out the title is not literal, unfortunately). I would also really recommend listening to his podcast "The Tim Ferris Show" where he does super in depth interviews with the most successful people (from entrepreneurs to sports trainers to motivational speakers) on the planet in terms of behaviour, routines and personal philosophies, as well as the occasional "who would you most like to punch in the face and why?" question, which is always entertaining. very much worth your time to learn what it takes to be successful.
My final point is just picking up on something you mentioned... having a "basic knowledge of most things" is no longer what we call a skill or a talent... it's called google, and everyone has it.... don't use it as a differentiator between you and everyone else.
good luck.
Hey you can use any or all of the below mentioned resources:
WEBSITES:
BOOKS:
Hope this helps. If liked, please don't forget to up-vote. And all the best for your preparation and test.
> I've come to the conclusion that my minimum requirements are to see the Rings of Saturn and the bands on Jupiter.
Go big.
I've a 50 mm finderscope (an auxiliary "rifle sights" scope that sits on top of a much larger scope) that can "resolve" the rings of Saturn if I put a strong eyepiece in it, but it looks like a little dot crossed out by a very thin thread. And this is a high-quality Stellarvue achromat refractor.
Get the biggest aperture your money can buy. That basically means a dobsonian reflector. Someone suggested a refurbished 6" dob. If that's all you can afford, go for it. You may have to get an extra eyepiece for it, something like a 12 mm or even 8 mm.
The smallest dob that is not a compromise in any way is the Zhumell Z8 - the archetypal 8" dob. If you can afford it, it could be a "forever scope". If you can't afford it, just get the biggest dob you can - it's the architecture that provides the most aperture per dollar. Smart 8 year olds can handle a 6" ... 8" dob; they may need a small stool to step on when the 8" dob is vertical, but that will cease being a problem in a year or so, when the kid gets taller. :)
You can sort-of cheat with a small-ish aperture for the rings of Saturn, but you'll see them small. Jupiter's bands, OTOH, are low-contrast features. You could see them on a sub-100mm scope, but they are not very impressive; you can tell they are there, but that's it. There is no substitute for large aperture in that case. Go BIG.
Aperture is king.
BTW, Saturn goes in hiding for the next several months. But Jupiter is on the rise in the East; very bright and pretty, go outside tonight and look east.
> Everyone is familiar with refractor telescopes.
It's easy to make small-aperture refractors, that's why they are popular. But as soon as aperture goes beyond a certain limit, things get flipped over and reflectors rule the game.
A good 4" (100 mm) refractor is a thousand bucks. A good 4" dob is 1/4 of that price.
> Do you think we would be disappointed with the 80mm refractor when trying to view Saturn & Jupiter?
Yes. Anything is disappointing after looking at big colorful space telescope images. Well, almost anything, except over-24" dobs under dark skies with great seeing. :) If your goal is to blow the kid's mind, go big. Forget anything else, features, bells, whistles - hunt for aperture instead.
Make sure you have at least two eyepieces; one at, let's say, 30x ... 50x magnification (for wide images - large but faint objects like nebulae), another at 120x ... 180x or so (for higher magnification - small objects like planets or double stars). Good dobs usually come with two glasses like that included. You'll figure out later when/if you need a more diverse collection of glass. This assumes you get a reasonable aperture; a tiny 80mm scope will fall apart at 180x.
Magnification is like a car's speed. You don't drive your car all the time at 200 km/h; sometimes you drive slow, when you go to the grocery store; other times you go fast, such as on the freeway. Each situation requires a certain speed. Same with scopes and magnification. Don't fall into the beginner's trap and believe that "more is better" for magnification. It is not. However, more is always better when it comes to aperture.
Get Turn Left At Orion - it's a wonderful book that will teach you where and how to find all sorts of amazing objects on the sky. It's perfect for the kid too - not too complicated, lots of pictures.
Install Stellarium on a laptop or iPhone. It's like a map, but for the sky. You could also get the Pocket Sky Atlas after a few months - it's a bit more technical but it's a real sky map like the ones "real" astronomers use.
Keep your scope collimated for best performance. link1 link2
Edit: Apparently I had nothing better to do than this evening, so here's a wall of text. Hope it's useful for you.
EditII: Didn't expect so many people to look at this, either.. so I'll say: this isn't an in depth zero-to-hero guide for Japanese, this is just a tidy gathering of the path I took to learn Japanese to my current level (minus a few textbooks), which is definitely still very far from fluent. I'm personally learning Japanese for its literature, and the vast majority of what I did was aimed at getting into books as fast as possible (cough Heisig cough) -- if you don't care about reading, I'll be the first to say that a lot of what's here might not be interesting to you. Google around and see if my suggestions fit your learning style or not. Japanese is weird in that there are literally resources for everything, so I'm sure there's something that fits you.
EditIII: Just wanted to link the DJTguide, a library of tons of resources organized into different skills and stuff. If you don't like my suggestions, I'd personally start here to find something else.
intro -- textbook stuff -- post-textbook stuff -- tutoring -- loose timeline
I have lived in Japan (for school) for two years, speaking nothing before I arrived (fully intended on going to Spain instead lol)...and am now somewhere between N2/N1, which is the level of fluency required to work with Japanese businesses/join a Japanese-conducted program. At this point no conversation is a problem, I can read modern literature for enjoyment (older stuff literally employed a partially different language and requires its own study), and follow movies/comedy shows/anime without subtitles if I'm pay attention.
I didn't try nearly as hard as I could have, so I honestly think you could reach my level of "fluency" if you make a religion of it -- a research student at my university came speaking nothing one year ago and now speaks notably better than I do across the board (on behalf of being forced to communicate with people for like 12 hours a day). Granted, you don't have the luxury of multiple Japanese people needing to communicate with you in order to do their job, and thus adjusting their language to your level to communicate with you all day every day... but I still think you can learn enough in a year to thoroughly enjoy yourself, at the very least.
Here's how I'd do that.
Textbook Stuff
I'm very glad this was helpful. These concepts are very widely misunderstood, but an intuitive conceptual understanding of them isn't terribly hard to grasp. Few people that are in a position to articulate such a basic account take the time to give one, though.
>I'm feeling like there is some implicit connection to epistemology and induction here. Can I trust my gut?
That seems right to me, but it's an extremely general observation. There's some connection to epistemology and induction in pretty much any area of science. I'm not sure if there's a unique one here. What exactly do you have in mind?
>As for the rest of your comment, what else can I say other than you're a great teacher and made it all extremely easy to understand? I really appreciated all of the concrete examples, e.g., the molecule box and especially the solar system example, because it helped provide some perspective on something I was already familiar with in another sense, while allowing me to approach it through a new paradigm. This is all very interesting, to be quite honest. Who knew I'd be going to bed knowing what the differences between chaos, order, and organization were, or how to properly imagine/conceive of them? Not me. But you did it with a few posts.
Thanks a lot--it's really nice to hear that. I really enjoy teaching, which is part of why I dedicate so much of my (rather limited) free time to posting here. It's great to hear that people are getting something out of it. Chaos is one of those ideas that everyone has heard of (and most think is interesting), but few people actually understand in any semi-rigorous way. If you're interested in learning more about this kind of stuff, there's an excellent talk by Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute discussing chaos and prediction in science. Gleik's book Chaos: The Making of a New Science is also a great popular account. On the topic of complexity more generally, Melanie Mitchell's book Complexity: A Guided Tour is very, very accessible while still being quite rigorous and accurate.
>Anyway, I read the book a few years ago, but I remember him writing about how we were trying to figure out the shape of the universe and how our choices of universe shape were underdetermined by our observations, perhaps for similar reasons to what you've written here:
Yeah, there are definitely some connections with underdetermination here. One of the big areas in which chaos matters (and the reason that I really care about it) is in the computational modeling of certain physical systems, including the weather and the climate. The connections between computational forecasting and chaotic dynamics are really interesting, and have lots of practical implications.
>I think your clarification of the appropriate dimension at the top has helped me to better understand why the question I asked wasn't particularly good (with regards to linearity(? if that's a word)), and why an organized system is pattern rich.
'Linearity' is definitely a word. The basic intuitive definition is just that in a linear system, the output is directly proportional to the input, so a very small change will have a similarly small impact. More formally, linearity implies that if two solutions to some equation are both within the allowable space of solutions, then the addition of those solutions is within the allowable space as well. The multiplication of real numbers, for instance, is linear: if x y is a real number and w z is a real number, then (x y) + (w z) has to be a real number too.
Interestingly, it's linearity that gives rise to many of the strange behaviors in quantum mechanics. Because the math of QM is linear, the fact that some particle can be in the state |x> or in the state |y> implies that it can be in the state |x> + |y> as well: a superposition of two states is just the linear combination of the states.
You're in a really good spot right now because you're just getting started out and you don't have to unlearn any bad habits.
First thing I would say is learn what makes a good swing. Not what makes your swing good, but what makes a good swing. Watch the pros. Read books. Get a much information as possible and don't try and replicate what they do, but learn what makes a truly good swing and learn how to make your swing the best it can be.
Here are a couple things to think about:
Right now you're swinging with about 90% your upper body. Your taking the club back with your shoulders and arms and chest, and it's quite visible. When you swing through you are swinging through with your arms and shoulders and your lower body is following your upper body. A proper golf swing is almost exactly the opposite.
Try and think of the swing as something that happens from your hips, torso, chest, and shoulders.
The backswing should start with the big muscle in your left shoulder. Move your left shoulder across your chest for the first movement and when you can't move that shoulder anymore you start rotating your chest. The backswing is complete when your back is facing the target. Do not swing your arms, infact, try and squeeze your arms to your chest (if you lift weights, like when you're doing dumbell flys). Your hands should and arms should always be directly in front of your chest.
This is a good example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajtJHmEw3A
Don't try and swing with your arms, the shoulders lead the swing with your chest and then your hips will turn. Also, as you are moving through the backswing, the weight should be able 60-70% of your weight on your right foot.
Now the important part:
Once you've got a good backswing the downswing and impact are the most important part of the golf swing. Infact there are plenty of pro tours who have an unorthodox, or frankly bad backswing, but their downswing and impact position are perfect.
Once you're at the top of your backswing, your swing should start from your LEFT foot, knee, and most importantly your HIPS. Smoothly bring the weight to your left foot and as you do so, twist and rotate your hips. You should feel like someone is pulling on the belt loop at your left hip, and they are pulling it backwards as if they are trying to turn you around. (hope that makes sense). It is this twist that creates the proper downswing and speed for a good swing.
Watch this swing of Rory Mcillroy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qir6STNfJec
Really pay attention to his hips. Notice at the top of his backswing how he loads his legs (like a mini squat) and his HIPS really start that swing. It will look like he's swinging his arms but I promise you, he isn't putting any energy into them at all. His hands and arms are just along for the ride. His arms are just following his body, as his legs squat and his hips start to turn, so does his torso, followed by his chest and arms and hands and the club.
If you pause the video at impact, (during the slow motion part) You will see his belt buckle looks like it is almost pointed at the target, and it's probably about 40 degrees from center but all pros are well through the turn at impact. If you can start to understand that 99% of the golf swing is done by the lower body, the feet, the quad muscles, and the hips, you will be well on your way my friend. It all starts with the lower body, the stronger your legs, the more powerful your swing will be.
I know that this is a TON of information to take in all at once, but as you learn more and read more you will incorporate more of this into your own swing. And you will do it YOUR way, not Rorys, not mine, but yours. Everyone has a unique swing, but there are certain fundamentals that every good golfer has, and that's the hip turn, and the point of impact.
If you're interested in learning more from the pros, these are the 2 books you need to get. And they will explain it far better than I can. Glad you've found golf, it's a lifetime's worth of never ending learning and fun.
The Impact Zone
Five Fundamentals
Astrophotography is a hobby in its own right.
For the budget you have listed, you would most likely end up buying a mount that is not up to the task.
I would suggest a nice pair of 10x50 binoculars and this book first.
If you are committed to getting a scope, then this is my suggestion assuming the $1000 budget is all inclusive meaning scope, accessories, and books.
2)The skywatcher comes with 2 eyepieces (25mm and 10mm IRC) THe light bridge comes with one. In either case I would invest in a NICE barlow like this one Barlows are an inexpensive way to improve your options. A 24 mm EP in a 2x barlow becomes a 12mm a 10mm becomes a 5mm. Its not as great as discrete eps in those sizes, but it is an economical way to get more versatility out of your existing eyepieces. I also can't talk enough about the Televue Panoptic EPs. They are affordable and incredibly nice. Eyepieces are something that will last through many scopes. I have 10 or so but only ever use about 3 of them.
Get a Telrad or a Rigel finder. The Skywatcher has a finderscope, the meade has a red dot finder. Personally I hate red dot finders. I think they are complete junk. Telrad is the defacto standard for zero magnification finders, I prefer the rigel for its smaller size and built in pulse circuit. They are both about the same price. You will need to collimate your scope, a cheshire works great, or a laser collimator will do as well. Many folks use a combination of both. I have gone both ways, cheshire is fine, laser is fine, a combination of both is also fine. Accessories can go on forever, the only other must have that I can think of is a redlight flashlight. This is a good one or you can add red film to an existing flashlight you have or you can do what myself and many others have done and get an LED headlamp and replace the white LEDs with red ones.
I would start with the backyard astronomers guide. Buy that first before you buy anything. It has some very good sections on scopes and observing that can help you answer some questions.
Lastly I always say go with a dobsonian scope. They are easy to setup and use and they force you to learn the sky. Once you are comfortable operating a scope and moving around the night sky, then I would think about investing in an equatorial mount and scope for astrophotography use.
Good luck and Clear Skies!
Writing and reading kind of come in the same package if you need to learn the Kanji. As Kiruwa said, spoken or written first doesn't have an answer because everybody is different. But here are some general suggestions...
But enough of the prep talk. Good luck and if you ever need help, /r/LearnJapanese is a great place to ask! :)
*Of course, all opinions expressed here are my own and may or may not be conclusive for your learning.
Getting your first scope is so exciting! I'm very much an amateur and casual observer myself, but my dad and I have been into astronomy for about four years now.
First, I recommend looking into some space/astro societies in your area, there's Tacoma Astronomical Society and Rose City Astronomers in my area for example! Each club has different resources, but they can be super helpful. You can meet locals and see if they have resources you can rent- like telescopes, or books and whatnot. It's saved me a dime or two. Sometimes they have online forums too. I also highly recommend going to star parties, it's where I've learned the most! You can see other people's set ups, ask loads of questions, and get a better sense for what you might want. We did this for about 6 months before getting our first scope, and before that we nabbed a pair of nice binoculars .
Now, you have to consider, when you get a scope you aren't just getting a scope. You're probably getting filters, eye pieces, protective gear, batteries, red lights, etc. etc. and then probably a tool box to carry all of this- which you might want to customize with foam or something to keep everything safe and tidy. It's an Investment. Now, looking at jupiter and saturn won't require much, but eventually you might want to look at the moon (needs filters), or special eyepieces that let have more magnification, or there's even filters that let you see some colors, etc!
I, personally, would highly recommend getting a manual (specifically, Dobsonian *) scope for your first one- not computerized. Learning the sky and it's constellations is part of astronomy, and having to find stuff yourself is really helpful- and rewarding! Plus, computerized scopes require pretty hardy batteries, especially if you want to take it out to darker skies which usually means more rural aka no plugs. They also require certain stars to be be visible to be able to calibrate. Manual scopes require no plugs, no consistent power source, and no learning computer programs-NexStar can be a pain imo, some reading required (plus Jupiter and Saturn are pretty easy to spot with the naked eye anyways). Plus it's fun being able to point out stuff to friends just by knowing where a few stars are. We only got a computerized equatorial mount (meaning it tracks objects) when we wanted to try out long exposure astro- photography. This 8in dob was our first scope, and I still love it- it's the go-to (Craigslist, amazon used, and other shops are worth a gander too).
*I'm 99% sure dobsonian and newtonian telescopes are the same, except for the mounts they're on (newtonian is tripod, dobsonian is a base that can move up down and in a circle)
Also, I consider Sinnott's Sky Atlas a must!
Lmk if you have any questions!
(Edit: sorry if this is repetitive- reddit says there are four comments, but isn't letting see me them atm.)
The first thing I'd recommend doing is learning ひらがな(Hiragana). Hiragana is one of the three alphabet systems in Japanese. It's made up of 46 separate characters and is used primarily for native words and grammar. You need to be able to read hiragana to actually start learning Japanese. This may seem like it's super hard but it's not actually that bad. I recommend printing worksheets and writing them by hand to start with. After that I'd recommend using flash cards or online/mobile testing programs to drill them in. Hiragana will allow you to read and pronounce most Japanese text (though there are exceptions for particles which you'll learn later on).
I would recommend getting a textbook: Genki is often recommended and you can either buy it on Amazon or find a digital copy floating around somewhere. After that you just need to start working through the textbook. Somewhere in this process you should also pick Katakana, which is used for foreign words mainly. This can be learned in the same way you did Hiragana.
The hardest part about learning Japanese is definitely kanji. Kanji are the (mostly) Chinese characters used for words in Japanese. There are thousands of them and this is where a lot of learners burn out. The important part is to take them slowly and I'd recommend not starting kanji for a little bit anyways just because it's a little overwhelming. That being said, I'd recommend learning kanji with vocabulary. There are flash card sets meant for this using Anki, a flash card program. You don't have to worry about that for a while, though.
This may seem overwhelming at first, but all new languages are, especially one as far from English as Japanese is. The important thing is to take it slow at first so you don't burn yourself out. Languages are learned over long periods of time, not overnight and that's important to keep in mind. Just set yourself a small goal to start and work on completing that, the rest will come in time.
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Here are some resources you might find helpful:
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Well, that's all the procrastination I think I can handle from writing this right now. Ending up being a lot longer than I thought it would be. Hope it helps you find where to start. Feel free to ask any questions and message me for help anytime. Good luck with your goals and happy New Years!
がんばって!(Good luck)
I teach middle school math - 8th Standard and honors algebra this year, but I've also done 6th and 7th in the past.
I really struggled with behavior management when I started out. I really found [ http://www.fredjones.com/books-video/Positive-Discipline-book.html](Positive Classroom Discipline by Fred Jones) to be extremely helpful in practical advice that I could use immediately. I discovered that I was not utilizing body language effectively. Now I don't speak as much, am so much more effective, and students see me as more empathetic.
Two other books I found particularly helpful were [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470550473?pc_redir=1407308994&amp;robot_redir=1](Teacher Like a Champion by Doug Lemov), [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1416612947?pc_redir=1407558335&amp;robot_redir=1](Total Participation Techniques by Pérsida Himmele & William Himmele).
Get to know your co-workers in your building and district.
-Within my department we plan together, slit the creating materials workload, and discussed what did/didn't work. For honors algebra there is only one teacher at each building so we get together once or twice a month at Starbucks to catch up and plan.
-Beyond your department it's nice to know others that work with your student so you are able to get a more complete picture of that student. In my building we frequently seek out a teacher that has a good connection with a kid to informally mentor him/her in other areas. Also you are then able to share accomplishments to other teachers; they are so excited when another teacher comments about something awesome that happened in a different class.
Kids are less likely to misbehave when they are constantly engaged. Choose activities that put the work burden on them and allow for movement/discussion.
-There are a ton of excellent, free resources out there. Some of my favorites are MARS tasks, NCTM Illuminations, and the Engage NY curriculum.
-Kagan Cooperative Learning (website and books) are easy to implement activities that turn any worksheet into a game and kids love it.
Don't forget to take some time for yourself. I used to eat lunch at my desk so I would have less work to take home. Now I find I'm more productive when working if I take a break and socialize with the other grownups for 20 minutes.
Good luck!
Ben Hogans 5 Lessons - Solid foundations from one of the games legends. Great for beginners or those with funky swings, grips, stances, etc (which your <10 handicap dad likely doesn't need) but it's a classic golf instruction book with fundamentals in mind and the first golf book i read. Best part is it's full of really cool old illustrations to describe what he's talking about in each segment.
Next is Harvey Penicks Little Red Book - It's a good coffee table or bathroom book. Each "chapter" is a page or two usually. Harvey Penick was a legendary instructor and he famously had a small red book full of one-liner lessons that he finally published late in life. Another classic golf instruction book that keeps it super simple.
Then we have Golf is not a game of perfect by Dr. Bob Rotella It's written by a sports psychologist who specializes in "the mental game". Ideal for the weekend warrior that wants to have more fun while shooting better scores. I read this when i felt like i had all the skills but was getting in my own way mentally. Helped me work on consistency, course management, and managing expectations for those hot-head moments.
After that i read Dave Pelz' Short Game Bible Written by a now short-game guru and former actual nasa rocket scientist, this book is thicker than most bibles and is super (exhaustingly) detailed. Honestly it is solid science that would work for everyone if they had the time and discipline to practice and implement. But it burned me out before i could finish it. I'm just not at the level where i need to know all of the "how's" and "whys" to every shot ever imaginable inside 150 from every lie to every landing.
Next up is Zen Golf: mastering the mental game by Dr. Joe Parent Another sports psychologist who specializes in thinking smarter/better. A very interesting read. Lots of tips that helped and i plan to re-read very soon. It actually has many lessons that translate well to everyday life, not just golf.
Finally, Lowest Score Wins This last one is a more modern approach to the game. Very simple and straight forward. Very data driven. Kind of like a fundamentals book but more aggressive and concerned with one thing, lowering your score. There's some great chapters on "seeing the course differently" that really helped my course management and it's great for drills on every aspect of the game.
I think the last two are the best all-around.
My first suggestion was the stick mentioned below, but he may already have one.
If you live in a cold weather area, a good pair of running tights might be good. A lot of runners frown at under armour but their tights are perfect for cold running.
A lot of others have suggested socks, those would be good.
They say $80, but you can find these headphones for $60 at best buy or someplace like that. They're great for if you are really sweaty like me, or if you run in the rain very often.
Compression Running Socks are a great functional gift, too.
You might just go check out the local running shop in town. Most of them have shirts that they sell with a local flavor. There is a place here in charlotte called run for your life that has some funny shirts, and when I was in Chi, Fleet Feet always had good ones, too. You might get an idea for another gift, too. If you live in a big city, Fleet Feet is a great place to start.
Born to Run is a great read, too.
I left off a GPS watch because if he is into tri's, the waterproof ones can get quite expensive, and most likely he already has one. If he happens to not have one, and you wanted to think about it, this is the best investment I ever made as a runner, but it isn't waterproof.
I hope this helps!
Hi! It's great that you want to learn Latin yourself - I was in a similar position not long ago, and can share my experience. Firstly, it's not going to be very easy, but it will be a lot of fun - learning Latin will teach you a lot about linguistics, history, and even English.
It seems to be a consensus at /r/latin that Wheelock's, while being a good textbook, teaches to translate, not to read. It focuses on rote memorization of grammar. Lingua Latina, on the other hand, focuses on reading comprehension and is considered by /r/latin users to be a superior learning method. It's based on the natural method: it is written completely in Latin, beginning with very simple phrases which speaker of any European language can understand, and slowly progresses further. To give you an idea, its first sentence is "Rōma in Italiā est". You can understand it easily, and you've already learned 4 words!
While Lingua Latina is a great textbook, I would advise getting some supplements to augment your studying process. All of them can be bought on amazon, or acquired by other means if you wish to cut your costs. Excercitia Latina, which follow Lingua Latina chapter by chapter, will give you enough practice to get a firm grip on each chapter's material. I would recommend not just filling the gaps in, but writing whole exercises out in a separate notebook - making the mechanical memory help you memorize words and grammatical structures. Latine Disco and Neumann's companion are useful companions, which will help you understand grammar introduced in each chapter of Lingua Latina (you only need one of them).
Finally, memorizing words is necessary with any language, and Latin is no exception. Some students find Lingua Latina's method to be sufficient for spaced repetition of new words, but it wasn't enough for me. I used anki, a spaced repetition software based on flashcards, to study words. There is a Lingua Latina deck available for anki, divided into chapters: thus you can easily add words into your flashcard pool after completing every LL chapter.
I hope this helps! If you'll have any questions on the material, redditors on /r/latin are very nice and are always willing to help.
Good luck with your studies!
Valē, amīce!
You should probably just use Genki
It is possible to learn Japanese using only the internet and free sources, but it certainly makes things more difficult. The advantage of using a standardized textbook and traditional learning methods is that you get a solid foundation, both in the sense that it gets you started on the right foot, but also in that it teaches you what sort of things you need to learn in the first place.
I highly recommend you try getting and using Genki. See if it is available from your local library, for example.
Yes, it is possible to learn Japanese using just free resources found on the internet.
These days, everything you could possibly want for learning Japanese exists on the internet right now.
If you learn how to use Anki (the best and most popular free flashcard program) you can get SRS flashcards without paying for a fancy website. TextFugu's free lessons will get you started with using Anki while at the same time teach you hiragana and katakana (the two syllabaries used in Japanese).
If you use Tae Kim's grammar guide and other online sources, you technically don't need a textbook. Imabi is another website similar to Tae Kim that people like. Duolingo might even be worth your time, assuming you utilize the discussion forums and that community to make sure you understand the grammar which is poorly taught by the app.
If you use HelloTalk, iTalki, and HiNative you can interact with Japanese people who'll help correct your compositions, and that could potentially lead to language exchange friendships where you Skype and practice conversation.
You can find free reading material online for practice, both by nature of the entire Japanese internet being at your fingertips, but also due to free websites like NHK Easy News and Watanoc.
You can assess your skills without ever paying for a standardized test by using the J-Cat.
You can find communities of fellow learners here on /r/LearnJapanese (we've got some good guides in the sidebar, btw), on the Japanese Language Stack Exchange, and /jp/'s Daily Japanese Thread (they've got a good guide for getting started over there).
As someone who was almost eaten alive their first year with fifth graders You need to pick up a copy of this, and this. Children need to be taught how to act and yelling sometimes can add fuel to the fire. Give them very specific instructions about how you want them to behave during an activity. When problem behaviors occur I have a "practice academy" until it's done exactly how I want it done. For instance when I taught low socioeconomic 5th graders I noticed that they didn't respond to me being "nice" or when I chewed them out (most are used to being yelled at when at home, what freaks them out is calm, direct, and un-phased). But, when I kept a calm voice (sometimes I have to repeat and repeat) and directed them that's when things got better. Don't use a nice sing song voice develop that I'm calm but serious voice. So, if they came into my room like wild things and ignored my directions I would stop everybody and tell them that we need to try this again. Go through my expectations "When you enter my room you are at a voice level one, you get your journal and have a seat and immediately go to your seat and start your bell ringer". "Now everyone up we are going to practice coming in the room the correct way" when you leave the room together and enter watch for any negative behavior and say " No sorry we've got to start over because we were still too noisy entering the room" repeat expectations and try again and again. I did this about five times one day because they kept running to get in line for lunch saying "whoops we still can't get in line correctly go back to your seat and we will try this again" explain procedure and give them another chance to show you the correct way. They even start policing each other because they hate to practice over and over. Have a procedure for everything and make them practice it until it is done correctly. Even if it's something simple like picking up around their desks. If one in particular is causing a lot of trouble ask them to step out into the hall, direct your class through the procedure and then have a private conversation with the problem student about what you expect them to be doing and that it is not a choice. Have a consequence you can enforce, empty threats just give them more control over you because they know you won't do anything. Our school has a card system, They get a yellow card on their desk as a non-verbal warning, then a red card for a second warning when they aren't following expectations, then a white card and they are sent either in the hall or to a corner to fill out a form about why they are making bad choices, and they are brought back and given one last chance to come back and act correctly. If they mess up again they are given a green card for "Go to the office". I made notes on a clip board to document behavior in case I needed to call parents or talk to admin about problems with a student. I also used the class dojo site to deal out individual points for kids that they could earn for good behavior. I gave daily points for good behavior, then points for bringing homework on time, and points for reading and responding with a book report. You could do tickets or bucks if you don't want to involve technology. On Friday's I would go through and give passes for points. I think I did 20 points a piece. I had a bean bag pass where they could do work on a clipboard and sit in a bean bag, I had a "Stinky feet" pass where they could take off their shoes ( I would use this for a whole class reward too), I had a computer pass where they could go to cool math and play games when they finished their work, Teacher helper pass, Thursdays movie during lunch pass, homework pass, and a draw on a white board pass. Anything I could think of that I could provide pretty much for free because I was spending so much on a prize box my first year and the rewards weren't as meaningful because they like having a little bit of attention from their peers from it (pencils and toys get them like 3 secs of attention but 30 mins of bean bag have their classmates green with envy). Use a prize box as an extra special reward for birthdays and when someone really goes above and beyond to be helpful then bring out the secret special treasure box. For getting participation in a positive way I had an "answer ball"( a squishy koosh ball) I would toss to the person who answered my question and I would only toss it to someone who is quiet and has their hands raised. They also loved getting stamps or stickers on their hands or for the real attention seekers on their face. I would walk around the room and give them out to participators. A few hard lessons I learned: until you get them completely trained don't "desk sit" because you have a lot more proximity control if your up quietly correcting behavior, share things about yourself to help your kids get to know you better they'll do more for you if they don't consider you some random big person in the room, and absolutely never back down to be nice all I learned was that my kids would completely walk all over me when I wouldn't make good on my threats. If you threaten to make them write 50 sentences about talking to much for the sub than you better be prepared to make them do that when they didn't meet expectations and the same with positive rewards if you say they need to be at a voice level zero to get a reward that day don't give them the reward if they didn't meet the expectation .....sorry for the essay but these things helped me.
I would say that the best thing that you can probably do is to join a local astronomy club. They're more than likely going to have "star parties" where they all bring different telescopes and look at different things in the night sky. It should give you a good taste of what you can see, the pros and cons of different telescopes, and real world experience. You're also going to have a ton of experienced observers who you can ask questions and talk with.
Besides that, I would probably pick up a book called Turn Left at Orion and a star atlas (my personal favorite is Sky and telescope Pocket Sky Atlas). Turn Left at Orion is essentially a beginners guide to amateur astronomy. It tells you what the best things to observe are during different times of the year, descriptions of them, how to find them, and other things. A star atlas is essentially a map of the night sky. I would also look into Stellarium. It's a free program that shows you what your night sky looks like based on your date, time, and where you live. It's pretty much an interactive star atlas. Also, if you have any book money left over, you might consider getting RASC's 2017 Observer's Hand. It tells you, in detail, what important things are going to be going on above our heads in 2017. It also has some nice articles for beginning astronomers, a bunch of nice maps, and a lot of helpful charts. I wouldn't call it a necessity, but it's really nice to have.
I would also recommend joining an online astronomy forum. Cloudy Nights is my favorite. The folks there are all passionate about astronomy, very nice, and very knowledgeable.
Lastly, and this is the most important piece of advice I can give, is to just get out there and start observing. You don't need a telescope or even binoculars. Go out and try to find constellations or try to find where the planets currently are or see if you can see some of the brighter Deep Sky Objects (those are essentially anything that isn't a planet or the moon). The Pleiades and the Orion Nebula are great first things to look for, for instance. Just enjoy being out there under the stars. It's a great feeling.
Clear Skies!
Wow, I have no idea what that scope is, but it seems like a great deal for $50. Grats!
Definitely collimate it while at home. You'll have to recollimate at your destinations, but hopefully it will be minor, and you don't want to waste precious dark sky time learning how to do it or realizing there's a problem.
As far as gear goes, ergonomics are important! You'll need a good chair, preferably one with some height adjustment. Also, I personally like to use an eye patch for extended viewing sessions. Just pick up a cheap one at a dug store.
Print out a sky map for the month you will travel.
http://www.skymaps.com/downloads.html
Google sky is good, but you should also get a good sky atlas. It's a good investment. Sinnot's Pocket Sky Atlas is excellent:
http://www.amazon.com/Sky-Telescopes-Pocket-Atlas/dp/1931559317
Check the weather report and what the moon will be doing during your trip. And one thing about the desert is that high winds can ruin your viewing (vibrates your scope), so you might want to choose a sheltered camping/viewing spot.
As far as the actual viewing, planets are pretty easy targets in general, even in light polluted places, so I would take advantages of those dark skies to see some DSOs. Then again, it all depends on what the skies will be showing during your trip.
Good luck and have fun!
There are plenty of good resources out there, so there's no one best option. So, try what you can, see what jives with you, and then stick with it.
Anyway, here are the resources I used and liked:
I used this to quickly go through all the important kanji and their meanings. I neglected readings, but I think it was worth it, since now I can recognize characters more confidently, and pick up readings in context with vocabulary.
Unfortunately it's currently unavailable via Amazon, but the item listing lets you preview the book. Use that to see if you like it. Alternatively, see if you can find it at a local bookstore so you can page through it (I bought mine at Barnes & Noble), or check your local library (which may be able to order it if you ask for it). You can also use those methods to preview other books, like RTK.
Yeah, lots! Some of my old technique books were found in the library of a now-defunct printing school in NYC and thus will be very difficult to find again, but a few good ones that you shouldn't have trouble finding are:
– The Universal Penman is a collection of some of George Bickham's most beautiful calligraphic pieces. It's a lovely book for inspiration and general style (not so much technique but rather seeing how the letters are shaped and spaced, etc.).
– Spencerian Penmanship is a good technique for learning the basics of Spencerian letterforms. I purchased the version without the five extra copy-books on Amazon but I'm not seeing it there right now (just the version with the copy books, which could be useful).
– JA Cavanaugh's Lettering & Alphabets is a good place to learn the basics of a few different lettering styles, particularly loose script lettering for advertising layouts and some Roman + Caslon styles.
– Leslie Cabarga's Logo, Font, & Lettering Bible has some extremely helpful tips for digitizing your lettering work as well as other general design tips. It is, ironically enough, a horrendously designed and dated book but the methods are still instrumental.
– Finally, Colt Bowden's How To Paint Signs and Influence People zine is a really lovely modern take on lettering techniques. Though it is geared for signwriters, the techniques taught for building up letterforms has followed me through to my pen-and-ink work as well. Plus, it's a really fun little series and your money is going to a very talented and passionate dude.
Hope this was helpful!
Most people are going to recommend you use some sort of SRS (spaced repetition system) to effectively learn the vast amounts of information you need to memorize. Many recommend Anki (it's my preferred flash card/srs app) but there are others out there. Here's the link to the manual (https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#introduction). It obviously explains Anki specific functionality, but it describes the use and purpose of an SRS system and why it's proven to be effective for memorizing information.
As for learning Kanji, this is the most challenging part of learning Japanese. You're gonna want to use some structured learning material which will help you understand what radicals are and how the factor into building individual Kanji. I personally use James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" and its sister learning site Koohii (https://kanji.koohii.com/study) to create mnemonics for the Kanji and learn to memorize them. I then make my own flashcards in Anki and practice them when they come up on the app.
I've seen others recommend Kodansha (https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268), but I've never used it so I can't speak to its quality. From what I've heard though it might honestly be preferred to Heisig's stuff cause his mnemonics can seem pretty strange or outdated (which is why I get most of mine from the top upvoted ones on koohii).
You're gonna want an english to japanese dictionary. For that I use jisho (https://jisho.org/). You can search for words in english, romanji, kana, and kanji and you'll find definitions, related words, pronunciations etc. It's incredibly helpful.
I don't know about a discord server but I'd be interested in something like that as well.
It takes a lot of time and dedication, and for most people the payoff will only be achieved after years of learning, but it's definitely doable, and learning can be very fun in and of itself. There's a very satisfying feeling to go from looking at Japanese and seeing it as alien characters, to being able to read a sentence that once just looked like scribbles.
More than likely the light novels (7 and 8) will be officially translated by the time you're able to read the untranslated version.
If you still want to learn Japanese though, my best advice is to search around on your own and see what works for you. What I've found works for me has been:
Free Stuff:
First memorize Hirigana and Katakana (Japanese has three alphabets - Hirigana, Katakana (for loan words), and Kanji. Hirigana and Katakana are close to the English alphabet while Kanji is more like pictograms (for example, eye <3 u)). Write them in the margins of notes your taking, buy a set of post-it notes and write down the hirigana and katakana tables every hour or so, and you'll learn it in a few days Certainly less than a week.
For kanji, wanikani (https://www.wanikani.com/dashboard) is a good idea to get started on early (it's slow going at least at first, but a nice review tool - learn the kanji and example phrases on your own if it's too slow). (edit: Actually $10 per month after the first three levels (~1 month to complete first three levels). edit 2: There's a coupon for 50% off forever floating around though.)
Other than that, there are pdfs of the textbook Genki I (link to amazon) floating around (or you could pay $80ish for the textbook and workbook). This is the textbook the majority of people use, and it's basically your standard textbook. The stories of Mary and Takashi are awesome though and pretty fun to follow.
Learning a language requires you to learn a whole host of new grammar rules (Japanese has a good chunk with no equivalent in English) and thousands upon thousands of vocabulary. Tae Kim's Grammar Guide is typically pointed to for those who want to learn the grammar quickly, or have a resource to look at as you encounter new grammar.
Youtube videos. Puni-Puni, and others are quick to watch and really good review.
Watch anime, read manga! It's either very low-cost, or free, and exposes you to the language. You can hear or read the grammar structures your learning about, or see kanji in action. Likely since most are geared towards japanese middle-school-age to high-school-age students you won't be able to understand the vast majority of what you read or hear (without subtitles or translations), but you'll be able to get the gist of it. Here's a youtube channel that takes a sentence or two from currently-airing or recent anime and breaks it down. Also, here's a newer subreddit doing somewhat the same thing.
Lower cost stuff:
I used the workbook "Japanese Tutor" to get from the beginner to intermediate stage. It's $20 but was a very nice way to work my way through the beginner stage to intermediate.
Japanese Graded Readers is a great way to practice reading. They're kind of like scholastic books you would find at book fairs in elementary school. They don't use complex sentence structure or complex words (or complex kanji in japanese's case), and are designed for foreign language learners (so the topics are more adult, less "The dog ran. The cat ate. The bug couldn't swim."). I recommend you start at Level 1 since Level 0 is more about learning odd vocab. You can understand Level 1 books in about 2-3 weeks if you spend around 2 hours each day studying. You get 5 books (15-25 pages each - which is just enough so you don't get tired ever so slowly reading them) for $30.
High cost stuff:
Rosetta Stone is a nice way to learn vocabulary and practice hearing the language, but it's costly at $170-$200 (for all 3 levels - 150 hours). If you have a friend who can loan it to you to try out (or split the cost with) it's a really nice tool since it teaches vocabulary of objects you see in daily life, and you'll be able to look around your house or city and have a word for a good chunk of things.
They are tricky questions to answer because the process and people's experience are likely to vary a fair bit and the funding options are different for different countries. I am a PhD candidate in Education in Australia, so I can share my experience finding a supervisor/funding and what I have seen of other student's experiences, your experience could be completely different. I'd recommend borrowing/getting a book that discusses how to find and apply for a PhD program or looking for guidelines/suggestions for applying a PhD on the website of the institution you would like to do your PhD at. I found Getting What You Came For really useful. However, that book is fairly old, targeted towards US programs which you may not be applying for, and is pretty 'real' (bleak) about how tough a PhD can be and the lack of academic jobs. Someone else may be able to provide a better recommendation for a similar book.
What country are you in and planning to do your PhD in? In the institution I am in (in Australia) most Education PhD students seem to be either funded through a government scholarship (called an RTP here) or do not have any funding. I would not say an RTP is easy to obtain, they are pretty competitive here and I was lucky to have research experience and a publication when I applied for one, which would have helped me get it. It seems like PhDs funded through projects are not as common in Education as they would be in the natural sciences, engineering etc but they are out there. If you find a scholarship advertised as part of a project, then it would probably be easier to apply for that then finding funding for your own PhD project but then you don't have much choice about what topic to research. At my institution, when you apply for a PhD, you have to submit a short proposal about the topic you intend to research and a brief research plan. If you don't have particular researchers listed on the application then the university would allocate you supervisors. This may be different in your country though.
As for approaching supervisors, there is probably a few different ways you could do this. The book I mentioned above has some suggestions. I worked for my current PhD supervisor as an undergraduate student and knew that they would take me on as a PhD student when I applied, so I didn't have to seek other people out. One of the most important things was that they are interested in my research topic and we can collaborate well, so we work on projects/papers together. I know other students that have been allocated supervisors rather than choosing their own when they have started and that can not work out, particularly when the student's research interests don't align with the supervisor's research interests or they don't have a good working relationship. I would suggest looking up different researchers at your local institution/s (assuming you want to stay where you are) and see if anyone researches in the topics you are interested in. If the university's faculties don't have a list of the academic staff, you can try looking up the institution and faculty on researchgate. You can reach out to staff with similar research interests and let them know what you're interested in and ask them what your options are.
Also, I think with your background and qualifications, you will be a valuable person to have around an Education faculty as well. In my experience, there is a need for Educational researchers with mathematical skills (particularly expertise in Statistics). You could try reaching out to staff from Education faculties or keeping on your eye on the jobs at your local university/ies and seeing if there are opportunities to help out with data collection and analysis. This could be a good way to 'dip your toe' in research before committing to a PhD and it may help you meet potential supervisors.
I've been working on learning Japanese for a few years now! My focus comes and goes, and I understand far more than I can write/speak, but I'm getting there! Yes, I am an anime fan, and that's how my interest was sparked, but I love the sound of the language and the challenge of something without a Roman alphabet!
This book seems promising! And bonus! Awesome reviews. Kanji are so difficult to remember, and I've only ever been able to memorize about 20 of them before things start slipping away.
And this is one of my favourite songs. I was introduced to Hyde a long time ago by a good friend, and his voice has always been something I adore!
As for something funny... this has always frightened me with it's super happy intensity! It's one of those things that never fails to make me grin in response!
It was suggested I post here. I have to say it's pretty outside of my location and timeframe. Most of my reading is centered around Buddhism and what I know about India that's not political in nature is mostly centered around Buddhism. Even the concepts I know of Hinduism are usually through a Buddhist lens.
What I do know about the development I also can't provide a source. I studied at the Royal Thimphu College and once sat down with a Bengali professor who explained her own dissertation to me about the development of the Varna system in India, which ended up being a primer on "Brahmanism." (Which then led to a long discussion on the inaccuracy of the term "Hinduism" which was developed post-independence as a response to the development of Pakistan for Muslims, India for Hindus. When I presented the irony that "India" and "Hindu" both stem from the "Indus River" which is currently in Pakistan, Runa, aforementioned professor, winked at me and said "Exactly. Hindus are political, Brahmanists are religious." The logic being that Brahmanists derive religious authority from the Brahmin Varna, just as Christians derive religious authority from Christ, and Muslims from submission to God.)
Anyway, I'll just point out some of the books that have helped me in understanding this complex religion and maybe you can go on with your search from there.
Originally I was interested in Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History but found out it was full of selective information and skewed perspectives. I was more interested in a general history of India and fell upon John Keay's India: A History which he describes as "A historiography of India as well as a history." And he does go over developments of Brahmanism threaded with the rise and fall of conquerors through the region.
My introduction to Brahmanism (though he DOES refer to it as Hinduism) was Huston Smith's The World's Religions which doesn't go over the history as much of any of the religions, but is a nice starting point, especially when comparing say Buddhism with Brahmanism, which most people regularly do. It's also a good outliner for the different Brahmanist traditions (or at least the major trends in Brahmanism).
Finally, probably the most accurate to your original question though it has a broader focus and a point to make, Karen Armstrong's *The Great Transformation remains one of my favorite books on the Axial Age in which she covers the religious shifts that occurred more or less simultaneously in Greece, the Levant, India, and China. Of interest to you would be the Vedic response to the growth of Buddhism and Jainism, the development of the Mahabharata, and the changing understandings of the Vedas and Upanishads. It's a pretty great book, and Karen Armstrong can of course lead you further down the path of Indian religious history.
Hope that helps at all.
Hey!
For learning the Jouyou kanji, I used James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji volume 1 (and volume 3 for an extra ~1000 kanji). It requires a bit of re-thinking how one should go about learning these things:
Usually when learning kanji, people go in grade order, learning the English meaning of the kanji and memorizing all of the possible readings (for some kanji, you'll have two pronunciations -- for others, you can surpass 10 different pronunciations). I feel that this method is ridiculously inefficient, and Heisig agrees. With RtK1+3, you completely ignore the readings, learning only to write and recognize the kanji, as well as their English meanings. On top of that, you don't learn them in grade order, but rather in the order of the elements that make up those kanji (for example, these are taught to you in order: 口→日→刀→召→昭 ...and so on). Instead of being given a bunch of unrelated complex characters, you're given the building blocks, and then shown how to create the more complex kanji by being able to see them as just their individual parts (for example, 鬱, despite its 29-stroke-count, is super easy when you break it down).
As for actually remembering the kanji you learn, check out Reviewing the Kanji, a free web-based SRS specifically for use with Heisig's books.
A common argument against RtK is the fact that readings are totally disregarded; after all, you can't read Japanese if you can't read the kanji, right?? Of course. But the way we've usually gone about learning them isn't all that great. That's not to say it hasn't worked -- people have used it to success before -- but it's slow, inefficient, and prone to failure. Instead, once I'm able to write and recognize a good 2000+ kanji and can read ひらがな/カタカナ, I've got the ability to use everything I need to learn readings: a dictionary. When you're reading and you come across a word you don't know (say, 竜巻), simply look it up in the dictionary. The dictionary will have the reading right there for you (たつまき!).
Traditionally, people would look at 何 and memorize that it can be read なに, なん, て, が... and probably some more that I don't know. Then do this for every kanji they learn -- memorizing these lists of sounds. My thought is, though, even when you know all of the pronunciations for something... you still don't know which of those readings to use in a new word (the 何 in 如何体... the answer may surprise you!). So you're gonna have to look up the word; heck, you'll probably be looking it up anyway because you don't know the word! If that's the case, why not forget about memorizing these contextless sets of sounds and just look up words as they come? In that way, you naturally begin to pick up how kanji are read, in context.
Sorry for the novel of a comment, but I hope it makes sense. Getting through the kanji can seem like a huge, daunting task, and it takes longer than one might want, but if definitely doesn't take as long as one might fear! Find a pace that works for you -- I went through the first ~300 or so kanji of RtK1 at about 30 a day, but then bumped it down to 10 a day for the remainder of it and RtK3, and it was a glorious pace. Slow? Maybe. But I was making real, consistent progress, and it feels huge to reach the finish line. :) Hope this helps! Have fun!
In my own opinion, grammar is the most important part of any textbook. How well a book explains a grammar point determines how well I like the book. There are 3 major areas of grammar that I look for: verb modification, particle usage, and how well the book explains 関係節 (using a verb/sentence to modify a noun: "The chair that he sat in")
I've looked at a few textbooks:
Yookoso (which has, apparently changed its cover...) is a sort of intense, high-density textbook that makes it a bit hard to look up grammar points. However, it is well written and has a lot of practice. It also only requires 2 books to "get the job done". The grammar explanations are short and don't really explain away the confusion, but it's FULL of practice. There isn't much translation in the book, so if you have a question... your screwed (unless you have a teacher with you). However, you probably won't have many questions while reading because the sentences kind of stay mundane.
This book gets a 4 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": It explains it, gives good examples and practice, but the explanations are lacking depth. Good for learning the basics, bad for learning the specifics.
Nakama isn't really anything special.
Adventures in Japanese is a series of books that I'm using on my website to teach Japanese a little bit. However, I only chose this textbook because it is the book being used by the local high school, so my students are using it. The book isn't bad, but it teaches a lot of things that really don't need to be taught. Also, some of their explanations/translations are... less than accurate? -- I find myself saying "yes, this is right, but... Really it's this" too much to recommend this book. There is also a stunning lack of practice/guidance. It's NOT a self-study book, you NEED a teacher for it. The workbook for this book is nice, however, and would probably be good practice. The grammar points taught in this book are easily-referenceable.
This book gets a 4 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": Similar to Yookoso, however the practice is lacking. It's a textbook and a workbook rolled into one.
Ima! is a book that I kind of detest. When using it to teach, I found myself having to make my own materials in order to get the point across. It's a thin book without hardly any grammar explanations.
This book gets a 1 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice". I hated using this book. A lot. It was just a glorified workbook.
Genki seemed pretty decent as far as a textbook went. It had plenty of practice, the grammar points were short, concise, and easy-to-reference. I would use it as a textbook in the future.
This book gets a 4.5 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": Great explanations and easily referenceable. It seems like a pretty good buy.
Japanese the Spoken Language is my bible. The grammar points are in-depth, effective, and incredibly well thought-out. If you want to know exactly how to use a grammar point, this textbook is the one you want. It is JAM-PACKED with practice that can be done completely solo. It also comes with audio cds that are worth a damn. When I want to know the difference between ~て、~たら、~れば、and ~すると, you can expect a great amount of explanation. The practice sentences in this book aren't just mundane sentences, either: the authors intentionally use weird examples in order to show the student the true meaning of a grammar point. That is, it doesn't just use "one-sentence examples", it uses "entire conversation contexts, and then weird 'breaks the rules' verbs to highlight how the grammar works"
HOWEVER- the language is dated - this book was written in the 80s (earlier?) and has never been updated; it uses a weird romanization system (zi = じ, tu = つ, ti = ち); is intended to teach the SPOKEN language (get Japanese: the WRITTEN language to learn how to write); and the grammar explanations are almost TOO long and convoluted (long and convoluted, but extremely insightful and specific).
This book gets a 5 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice". However, the grammar is SO well-explained that you might be a little confused trying to read it.
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To teach the language, I would use Genki or Yookoso to get people off the ground, then move into JSL. Then the student should be more than ready to self-study and translate native materials.
I know there's been a few others but I can't think of them right now.
Read Keep Your Eye off the Ball. Read The Essential Smart Football. Pay for NFL GamePass. Watch the Coach's Film (All-22). They've archives going back to 2011. It's especially helpful if you watch a game (or series of plays) you're already familiar with. Get pen and paper out and take notes. Watch what each player is doing, both before and after the snap, and be ready to rewind over and over and over and over.
There's a lot of good analysis on YouTube too, if you are a learn-by-watching type.
>Start here, on Brett Kollman's channel. He's a former NFL Network production assistant. Most of his videos are story heavy and analysis light, but that video is about how to watch film.
>
>Sam's Film Room, with Samuel Gold, a writer for the Athletic. Good for beginners. I think he started out at r/nfl.
>
>The QB School, with former Patriots QB, JT O'Sullivan. Focuses on quarterback play, both good and bad.
>
>Dan Orlovski's Twitter has a bunch of quick analysis videos, usually focusing on QB play.
>
>Peyton Manning's Detail is wonderful show, but is stuck behind a paywall at ESPN.com. There are two short videos free on YouTube. Resourceful people can find it elsewhere as well.
>
>Strong Opinion Sports, with Division III NCAA QB Zac Shomler. He has a lot of football video podcasts, but also a QB film analysis playlist.
>
>Baldy Breakdowns, with former Cowboys OLineman and current NFL Network analyst Brian Baldinger. No true focus, but has great insight into offensive line play.
>
>Gamepass Film Sessions. NFL Players and coaches analyze their own plays. The full version is on NFL Gamepass. I'm a particular fan of the one with Joe Thomas.
>
>Voch Lombardi. Focuses on talent evaluation and line play. Funny as fuck.
>
>The New England Patriots YouTube channel has Belichick Breakdown and Coffee with the Coach. Breakdown is the more analysis focused of the two.
If you're REALLY interested, the resources are out there. Good hunting.
I appreciate the quick reply! Yeah, I'm looking at Genki at the moment. I'm wondering which is the best one to get? Is this version suitable? Does it have audio instruction or is it all text? I'm not opposed to text, but I benefit greatly from hearing the pronunciation and flow of things.
Like I said, I enjoyed Pimsleur; if anything it gave me a great jumping off point, I learned basic grammar through exposure, but as you mentioned it doesn't really branch out much, and I feel like most of the lessons have been condensed greatly. I should say I started learning the language out of genuine interest, but I'd love to have it as a career advancement tool in the future, so I'd love to find a good approach to learning the language that I can stick with that should hopefully dovetail with more advanced programs. I don't think my knowledge is advanced enough yet to start working with something like, say Tobira for example.
A few thoughts off the top of my head...
Source: Japanese was my foreign language in college, which included a semester abroad in Tokyo.
>good books to read
The Backyard Astronomer's Guide is a solid book. Covers all sorts of telescopes, mounts, eyepieces, and cameras. I own a copy.
Turn Left at Orion is a good observational book. I don't own a copy.
Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas is indispensable for observing if you don't have an electronic guide (e.g., you're battery is dead.) I own a copy.
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>a good telescope I could start with that I could do some astrophotography with in the future once I
Generally speaking, every telescope is capable of astrophotography. Almost all are very good for it. The single most important piece of equipment for astrophotography is the mount. The longer the focal length you'll be imaging at, the better mount you'll need and quality mounts are expensive.
You can easily spend $10,000 on a great mount and another $5,000 on scope + accessories, plus another $5,000 on camera and filters. My advice, don't even thing about astrophotography yet.
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>A friend of mine sold me an old Meade 175C telescope for cheap today and I was able to get it set up.
That's probably good to experiment with. Might be decent for planetary or lunar work (or if you get a proper solar filter, the sun.) You're ability to see faint fuzzies will be severely limited. So, use it, get familiar with it but I would recommend something else as a starter.
It can be tempting to pick up a an all-in-one combo. Mount + scope + eyepieces all together for $299.99, but it's going to be so low quality that you'll not have a great experience and your views will be compromised. It will end up in your garage or in the garbage within a year.
I would highly recommend a shorter focal length refractor and, as tempting as the price is, I would stay away from achromatic refractors. My first was an achro and it's sitting in my closet and hasn't been used in years.
My most used telescope is an 81mm f/6.6 APO refractor. It fits in my photo backpack, sits on a heavy duty photo tripod, and is attached to a lightweight mount designed for telescopes. It's superb for all the the larger objects, lunar/solar work, and the Messier catalog. It's only so/so for planetary work. It's also great for astrophotography and daytime photography.
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>Unfortunately the skies are too overcast tonight to do anything with it.
This is the problem with astronomy and astrophotography. You can spend $20,000 on gear and only get it out 5 times a year. You get more bang for your buck if you live in the right area and if you permanently mount your equipment at home.
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>Would I be able to attach my dslr to it or no? I know I have to get a t ring and a few other things to do it, but I guess what I’m asking is, is it worthwhile to try with this older telescope once I learn how to find things or should I save up and get a different one?
Don't bother trying to do astrophotography with that scope. Save up $1,000 and get a good quality APO refractor (Explore Scientific and William Optics both make some good scopes.)
For reference achromatic means it has two lenses which means it only focuses two wavelength of light at the same time (usually red/green.) Then means stars will tend to have purple/blue halos. Tolerable for visual use on galaxies but horrible for planets or any type of photography. An ED APO is often a two lens achromat but uses extra low dispersion glass. Still an achromat but with much less dispersion. Good for visual use, tolerable for intro astrophotography. A 3 lens systems is called apochromatic and gets all the visible spectrum in focus. Excellent for visual use and very good for astrophotography. You can also get a 4 lens refractor which contains a flattener which is excellent for visual and photographic use.
This can be the most discouraging advice to give a newcomer but if you don't get that good scope first, then you're going to buy the cheap option, find you're limited, then by a slightly more expensive option, find you're limited, then buy the good quality option. Now you've got a bunch of junk in your closet (or in the local landfill) taking up space.
Just my $0.02.
If I were hiring for this position and you had a strong resume, I would be nervous about your lack of domain knowledge -- but that's something that software engineers are expected to pick up! So I would go in with:
Now, you can also cram. Read this Wikipedia article to learn the names of the positions and formations. Make flash cards! Study hard! Then dive into any of the following books:
A reasonable bar for a non-casual fan would be to be able to answer questions like:
Also... if the team you're applying to is the Ravens, I'll be happy to help you get up to speed.
It's like asking how long it will take to reach 1-dan, it varies so much depending on time commitment, motivation, personal ability and method. I'd expect it would take at least a couple years, though there are examples of people becoming somewhat fluent in 6 months, so anything is possible.
As for the best approach, you'll find lots of opinions. I think people are generally bad at remembering what it was like when they started learning and knew nothing, so all those "here's how I'd do it if I started all over again" are not always the best advice but I'll try to give you my version of it anyway:
Anyway this isn't everything, you need to continue with more grammar, practice, and so on while doing that, but this is the gist of what I wish I knew when I got started. I guess it can seem a bit overwhelming but just get started and go one step at a time...
Also you'll need this: Dictionary :)
Okay, so I'm also new to Japanese, and I'm 15 too, so I'm in the same boat as you. I should probably let you know though how often people tell me to learn Hiragana and Katakana before jumping in to anything else.
You can do that through hiragana and katakana courses on the flashcard site Memrise. It's recommended for general language learning and specifically Japanese vocab. and writing systems often, and I've had a generally good experience with it. Pick up a book on them if you feel like it.
It could take you between a week to a month depending on your skill level and your general ability to pick up knowledge, but once you have them under your belt and only then, start learning speaking, listening and general grammar and vocabulary then. Pick up a textbook like Genki if you feel like it. Genki 1 is recommended a lot here too.
I should probably emphasise the FAQ, wiki and other info here on this subreddit, too. The /r/LearnJapanese starters' guide is your friend, and will give a more wholesome rundown than I did.
One final thing - I'm new to this too, so to you and any other new learners like me reading this: I'm not an expert; I'm just doing what's working for me and is generally advised. To people with more experience learning Japanese with a better idea of how to start: please comment with anything I've missed or messed up; like I said, I'm not a genius. I've seen people here who I think are, and they're friendly, good people. I try to be good and friendly, but I'm no genius at all, I'm just starting like you.
Sorry for the long post, I can't feel my fingers from typing fast. Good luck to you, /u/Harry-kun!
If you want to just know buzzwords to throw around, spend a bunch of time clicking around on Wikipedia, and watch stuff like Crash Course on YouTube. It's easy to absorb, and you'll learn stuff, even if it's biased, but at least you'll be learning.
If you want to become SMARTER, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to either carry a notebook with you, or find a good note taking app you like on your phone. When someone makes a statement you don't understand, write it down and parse it up.
So for instance, write down "Social Democracy", and write down "The New Deal", and go look them up on simple.wikipedia.com (Put's all of it in simplest language possible), it's a great starting point for learning about any topic, and provides you a jumping board to look more deeply into it.
If you are really curious about starting an education, and you absolutely aren't a reader, some good books to start on are probably:
"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" by Randall Munroe
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
"Philosophy 101" by Paul Kleinman, in fact the ____ 101 books are all pretty good "starter" books for people that want an overview of a topic they are unfamiliar with.
"The World's Religions" by Huston Smith
"An Incomplete Education" by Judy Jones and Will Wilson
Those are all good jumping off points, but great books that I think everyone should read... "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, "Western Canon" by Harold Bloom, "Education For Freedom" by Robert Hutchins, The Norton Anthology of English Literature; The Major Authors, The Bible.
Read anything you find critically, don't just swallow what someone else says, read into it and find out what their sources were, otherwise you'll find yourself quoting from Howard Zinn verbatim and thinking you're clever and original when you're just an asshole.
The best way to learn a language is to interact with it as much as you can in every way you can. Yes, you can and probably should spend some time seriously studying from a good resource like tae kim's complete japanese guide(the whole thing is free), but you won't want to do that all the time for all of your free time. Get some Japanese books, manga, tv shows(this is one way to watch the region-locked Japanese Netflix) video games, listen to Japanese music, listen to podcasts in japanese. (You will want to find things with both japanese speaking & japanese text - subtitles are not good for learning!).
Kanji is a difficult hurdle, and there are a few popular ways to tackle it (this is by no means a comprehensive list):
Well hopefully that helps. My personal take on learning kanji is to just learn it as you go from new vocab you acquire. Finding things like games or manga with furigana is very helpful as you can just search for that character in Jisho and all of a sudden you have its basic meaning, on/kun readings and most importantly, its stroke order.
Pretty much everyone will tell you that is nearly impossible to accurately gauge. It depends on how much you study each day, what materials you have to help you, how good you are absorbing the information, etc.
I feel that if you have enough time to absorb around 20 vocab a day (not as hard as it sounds, some days I try for around 50) for the first few months (then cut it down a bit as you go, as the grammar you are covering becomes more involved), and practice 1-3 grammar points a day (depending on their complexity/involvement), and avoid kanji for the first month, then start slowly (5 a day, not learning more until you know the current and it's associated vocab), using this book:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568365268/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
I feel like you could read random sentences of a very simple manga within 6-12 months. These numbers are all arbitrary, as it all depends on your motivation and ability to truly absorb and retain all the information.
I can give you a list of materials that I find essential, and I think anyone that used them would recommend them as well:
A general textbook like Yookoso or Genki. I use Yookoso myself, but have heard little bad about either. You can skip this if you are good about learning what you need to focus on next on your own, or if you have someone else guiding your studies, but they are not that expensive, and I would recommend both levels of Genki or Yookoso.
https://www.amazon.com/Yookoso-Invitation-Contemporary-Japanese-Third/dp/0072408154/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1496923360&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=yookoso
Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (once you learn the majority of it, they have a second and third level of this book [intermediate/advanced])
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=4789004546&amp;pd_rd_r=MARVSJ4E1JD75N4JANKK&amp;pd_rd_w=supQ1&amp;pd_rd_wg=oQkTv&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=MARVSJ4E1JD75N4JANKK
501 Japanese Verbs. Fantastic for learning conjugations, and checking yourself while you practice them each day.
https://www.amazon.com/501-Japanese-Verbs-Verb/dp/0764137492/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1496923311&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=501+japanese+verbs
The Learner's Kanji Dictionary. This will help you look up any Kanji you do not know, and does not have Furigana. It gives you stroke order, Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, and tons of vocab combinations for each Kanji. It is tricky learning how to look up Kanji by radicals, but you only need to learn it once. You can learn Kanji from this, but it would be a terrible idea, as it is a dictionary, and not organized in a way that will help you retain anything.
https://www.amazon.com/Learners-Japanese-Kanji-Dictionary-Bilingual/dp/080483556X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1496923666&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=kanji+dictionary
Lastly that Kanji book I linked earlier. Many will tell you it is silly to not learn Kanji right away as you learn the vocab, but it takes a lot longer, most modern texts have Furigana (the hiragana characters of how to pronounce the Kanji) for all the Kanji, and Kanji do not help for listening or speaking skills anyways.
I do feel that learning the Kanji from the get-go is far better for vocab retention, but you will pick up vocab so much more slowly. You can pick up Kanji later, once you can actually understand some basic Japanese and are much more motivated to continue your studies.
I listed the materials I recommend in the recommended order (minus the Kanji book listed early on, which I recommend last). Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions.
Edit: Also, learn the kana first. Both Hiragana and Katakana. There is no excuse not to, they are invaluable. I would go so far as to say do not even bother starting vocab until you are comfortable enough to sound out a word written in kana in your head without a reference. Does not matter if it takes you a while, you will see them every day, and you will get used to them. Bare minimum, write the entirety of both every morning and night, and whenever you find yourself bored throughout the day.
As always, others will argue this, but again, there is no excuse not to learn it. Most good learning resources will use it anyways. They are very easy to learn.
There's no magic formula that can get you writing, but you can develop techniques and habits that maximize your chances of being productive when you sit down to write.
2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love is a great ebook, for a dollar, that walks you through how to prepare for writing, and talks about why each step helps. It has some great advice that will help you be confident by the time you sit down to write.
If $0.99 is too rich for you (or you're skeptical), you can read the author's blog post, which was later adapted into the above ebook. It's shorter and doesn't go into as much detail but still gives the core advice from the book.
In the end, you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. An outline will help you know which direction to head once you start a first draft. You have to finish that first draft and see the story laid out before you. Only then can you go in and start sculpting the finer curves and details and crafting and polishing the best prose.
NaNoWriMo isn't for any of that crafting or polishing. Just write, write, right. Check out the linked tips, and do some practice exercises before November. Figure out what you want to write. You'll be all set by the time it starts.
Let me kindly guide you to the Starters Guide located at the top of this reddit page: www.reddit.com/r/learnjapanese/wiki/index/startersguide
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There are lots of methods and resources availible for japanese learners but the most important thing is finding a method and sticking with it for a fairly significant amount of time (at least a few months). Personally I am a fan of the MIA method, but thats not for everyone. Many people also like following a text book series, the most popular being Genki. The one thing I can suggest the most is getting comfortable with a Spaced Repitition System (fancy name for a gucci flash card app) the most popular and customizable being Anki. What ever your goals are know that learning japanese is someting that takes a lot of time, a little bit of motivation in the beginning, but most importantly dedication. Just find a way to enjoy the journey which for most people means enjoying the thing they already do, just in Japanese, like video games, music, manga/comics, anime, dramas what ever! good luck.
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MIA
Genki
anki
Topology, which is about the shapes of things made from rubber, can be rather fun. Think donuts, Mobius bands, Klein bottles and knots (warning: there is also a subject called "general topology" or "point-set topology", which is rather boring, if technically necessary)
For example, a simple child's experiment: if you cut a Mobius band into two at the middle line, you get a single band, not two ones. Then if you cut that into two, you get two bands, but they will be interleaved!
This stuff be can be approached both from a rigorous point of view but also intuitively, the latter being much more fun. Unfortunately I don't know any popular-level book at the moment :( Possibly chapter 0 from Hatcher's book can help a bit - it's available free here: http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/AT/ATchapters.html
Projective geometry is a subject which is accessible at your level, and is really fun! For example, it turns out that the different conic sections (ellipse, parabola, hiperbola) are in fact the same thing secretly!
Complex analysis is also really fun, but probably a bit too advanced for you at the moment.
Finite group theory can be pretty fun, depending on your tastes (do you like algebra?), and it goes from pretty easily accessible to stuff that only a handful people understand, so you can always find problems which match your level!
hope this helps, and feel free to ask!
edit: oh, and there is a fantastic popular-level book about chaos theory. I think it was this one (I read it when I was younger)
As /u/FreeHumanity has pointed out below, it makes it easier for us to help you if we know what you're interested in.
However, these are a couple of books on my bookshelf that I find interesting and are mentioned on here quite often:
The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, by Julian Baggin. It's 100 ethics-related thought experiments, laid out in a very easy-to-read way. Amazon link here.
If you're interested in something a little more academic and a little more comprehensive, The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, is one of the best one-volume histories of philosophy around. You have to be a little bit careful with him, though--he tends to put his own ideas about the philosophers into his text :) Again, Amazon link here.
If you would like more specialised help, please do clarify what your interests are so that we can recommend books, youtube clips, or other things that are tailored to your interests :)
Hope that helps :)
I plan my observing sessions using a combination of:
For each object I choose to observe, I pick the time to observe it (slot it into one of the four slots per hour), trying to observe it when it's near the meridian, if possible. I try to generally bias my observing list with starting in the west and moving east throughout the night, finishing with objects that are just starting to rise at the end of the session.
I also note for each object, the chart number in my Pocket Sky Atlas. The PSA is an excellent first atlas, and is honestly everything you need to avoid looking at a screen out on the observing field. Be sure to make yourself a Telrad overlay with a piece of transparency film -- this makes it MUCH easier to find objects.
Recently, I also added the Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas to my observing kit. It's an expensive chart, but holy cow is it fantastic. It's designed from the ground up as a visual observer's chart. So all of the objects listed are actually visible with your scope. It even marks whether objects are visible in a 4", 8", or 12" scope.
Here's an example of a recent observing list: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PZMu2tcjgdZTZ3wA6SjJPrPdu9LU_nX9
For each object, you'll note some shorthand:
Out in the field, I illuminate my table with a dim red light. I use nothing with an LCD/LED display at all. Just a red light, my observing list, and my paper charts. It's really fantastic. I never have any trouble with my night vision getting blown out. And locating objects using a chart is just as easy (I might argue easier) as using a computer. All you really need is some transparency film with scaled Telrad rings (or Rigel rings, if that's what you use) and some scaled circles for your most commonly used eyepieces' TFOV.
Paper charts are a lot easier to get oriented in the sky -- you can pick them up and hold them over your head to orient yourself in the constellation. And the PSA shows just the right number of stars to make star-hopping with a Telrad painless. With a pre-planned observing list, you'll never have FOMO and will be relaxed and entertained the entire observing session. I highly recommend it.
I've used a couple of different methods, including the one Rachel Aaron describes in 2K to 10K, but I've found the most success using the Snowflake Method.(Here's the Amazon link if you decide to purchase the book.)
To me, this is a very organic and easy-to-follow method. With each step (e.g., Step 5, which requires you to delve into a character's backstory and role), I find myself filling previously missed plot holes or discovering the real reason for a character's actions. For example while working on Step 8 the other night (creating a scene list), I suddenly found myself adding six new chapters (about 18 proactive and reactive scenes) that completely solved a gap in my antagonist's timeline. When I realized that something didn't quite work, it was much easier to delete one weak sentence than throw away a 1,500-word scene that didn't add anything.
The best way I can think of to summarize this method is that you will start with a very basic idea and then extrapolate it in multiple steps. As you progress, ideas will ebb and flow. Small changes during this process save so much time. You'll find that after you finish the steps, the writing is easy. I know that when I'm done with the steps and finally begin to write, the skeleton and muscle are already there; all I have left to add is the skin and maybe one or two tattoos.
In any case, I would certainly recommend taking a look. One of the women in my writing group just switched to the Snowflake Method after becoming stuck in the middle of her third novel (part of a fantasy series that has had good sales on Amazon). She sent me an e-mail the other night telling me that she was now a believer, having finally resolved the issues that had resulted in a stagnant project.
Hope it helps!
Hey, this is very late, but I am procrastinating studying for my Kanji test tomorrow, so I'm going to write this out again! I hope you see it.
Free is going to be hard. I would suggest less than $50, as that's a hell of a lot more feasible.
Step 0: Get your expectations in Check
You have 3 - 5 months, depending on when you are going. That's enough to learn some stuff, but not as much as you'd like.
You will need to study at least an hour a day, every day. At that point, you'll likely be able to form basic sentences, read basic signs and instruction, and absolutely struggle through the most basic of basic conversations. That's really about it.
You can do more if you study more, obviously. But you also run the risk of burning out. Personally, I would suggest setting an hour a night aside, and at the end of that hour, ask yourself, "Am I good for another 30 minutes?" and continue doing that until you can't honestly say yes.
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Step 1: Learn Hiragana and Katakana
There are lots of apps and books and stuff for this: It's a gigantic waste of money and time. Make yourself some flashcards, drill them into your head at every spare moment over a few days. You should have a basic sense of them. You'll still forget some, that's normal, don't worry. As long as you don't have to stop and look up every other kana, you're going to be fine.
Step 2: Get a Grammar Resource
Textbook, unfortunately. Alternative: tutor or classes but that gets expensive quick.
Any one of us can give you a massive list of vocab and useful grammar points and flash card decks. That will give you a wealth of information and no direction. The important part of a class or a textbook is that it's a lesson plan. You don't need to waste the time deciding what to learn in what order: Just flip the page.
Genki is the standard recommendation, because it's used in University/College classes across North America and there are resources for it everywhere: Downside: You need 4 Books + The Answer Key to use it effectively. That'll end up at $225USD ish.
Skipping Minna No Nihongo because, while it's another popular recomendation, it's MORE expensive.
I used Japanese for Everyone (I have also used Genki and I own a copy of Minna No Nihongo 1 from school, but haven't used it) and I'm going to recommend it here stronger than I normally do. Reason: It's super cheap, because that's the only book you're going to need. Downside is less internet resources and a faster pace.
Free Alternative is Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar. It's useful, but it contains no useful practice problems and a not so great selection of example sentences.
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Step 3: Practice
Once you get 6 or 7 chapters into your textbook of choice, you need to start using it. Even if you're not speaking, at least be writing to someone in real time in text. Input is probably more important than output, yes, but you need some output at least. Lots of people (Me included) put this off far too long and I Definitely suffered when I first came to Tokyo for it.
Free? You want HelloTalk. It's an iPhone/Android messaging app specifically tailored for people exchanging languages. It's pretty much your only/best option for free. Conversations tend to fizzle out when both people are low level, so be persistent.
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Step 4: Additional Resources
One guy writing hundreds of pages of guides that go into mid-depth of Japanese Grammar. This is not a primary resource. It takes the problems I have with Tae Kim to the extreme, and it is very grammar term heavy. It's best used for additional explanation when you don't understand something. Say, you get to ~てしまう in a textbook and don't understand? Imabi.
Spaced Repetition Flashcards. They work, they're useful. Anki is more powerful and has more community vetted resources, Memrise is more "Game-ified" but less powerful and with less resources. You should never use either of these programs as your first contact with any grammar point. They are flash cards. They are used to review.
Goes without saying. Take your pick, 99% of them use the same base database so the only difference is UI. I use mine 500 times a day (But I am in Tokyo).
Here. 3 Articles a day (5 on Friday) taken from the NHK main site and simplified heavily, intended for foreigners and elementary school students. Includes Furigana on every kanji, colour coding places/names, and full audio recording for each Article. Too advanced for you now, but good god is this good to know about it.
Here. Originally made to go with a textbook, and for learning it's pretty well impossible without that textbook. This site is still a fucking goldmine, with over 100 1-5 minute skits and videos in normal Japanese (Except the main character, who is correct but intentionally slow). Full scripts and line-by-line break down in Japanese, Kana Only, Romaji, and English. Listening Practice and Shadowing does not get better than this.
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Step -1: Things to Avoid
Have fun!
As a Latin student, I'm obviously biased, but you should choose Latin. Latin is a really fun language, and it's really not that difficult. Since you've studied Russian, you already have a background in declined languages, and your Spanish will help with the vocab. English will help too, regardless of the fact that it's a Germanic language.
If you pick Latin, look into Wheelock's Latin. I use this book, and I think it does a really good job of explaining everything. It's also loaded with examples and practice work, and has a nice answer key in the back if you get stuck. Since it's a course "based on ancient authors," many of the passages are excerpts or adaptations from authors like Cicero or Caesar. It teaches you about Roman history and culture in addition to the language, which I think is nice.
I've also heard plenty of good things about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, but I haven't used it very extensively.
There's also the Perseus Latin Word Study Tool, which is really helpful. They also have a Greek version, if you decide to go with Greek.
Wiktionary can be useful as well, as it gives full declensions or conjugations for tons of Latin words.
If you progress to a high enough level, you can read the news and tons of ancient authors in Latin.
Also, if you study Latin, we can be language twins. :P
Never done it, I'm coming from Texas to try it.
It's one hell of a hike thats for sure, but I don't think its extremely strenuous overall. There are some climbing parts near the end around Glencoe and I think its a bit up and down around Loch Lomond, but overall I think it's supposed to be a bit nice with a hill climb here and there.
Granted, I do backpack outdoors a fair amount and I'm used to tent camping every night. I know the WHT has bunkhouses and hostels all along the route, so you can get a decent nights rest and some warm grub every night. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to tent camp the whole way or stay at some of the places.
You're definitely welcome to join, even if you just want to meet me at one of the towns on the route and hike a day or two just to try it out.
On the entire backpacking/get out note, I think its a great idea. I'm 26, been working since college, and I'm going insane. I think we're all so focused on "save save save/work work work, I'll do the fun stuff when I retire" that we don't pay attention to the fact that we we'll be too exhausted to do anything when we're done.
So I guess my additional tips/ideas are:
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
That's one of my favorite popular science books, so it's wonderful to hear you're getting so much out of it. It really is a fascinating topic, and it's sad that so many Christians close themselves off to it solely to protect their religious beliefs (though as you discovered, it's good for those religious beliefs that they do).
As a companion to the book you might enjoy the Stated Clearly series of videos, which break down evolution very simply (and they're made by an ex-Christian whose education about evolution was part of his reason for leaving the religion). You might also like Coyne's blog, though these days it's more about his personal views than it is about evolution (but some searching on the site will bring up interesting things he's written on a whole host of religious topics from Adam and Eve to "ground of being" theology). He does also have another book you might like (Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible), though I only read part of it since I was familiar with much of it from his blog.
> If you guys have any other book recommendations along these lines, I'm all ears!
You should definitely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, if only because it's a classic (and widely misrepresented/misunderstood). A little farther afield, one of my favorite popular science books of all time is The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, which looks at human language as an evolved ability. Pinker's primary area of academic expertise is child language acquisition, so he's the most in his element in that book.
If you're interested in neuroscience and the brain you could read How the Mind Works (also by Pinker) or The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, both of which are wide-ranging and accessibly written. I'd also recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Evolution gets a lot of attention in ex-Christian circles, but books like these are highly underrated as antidotes to Christian indoctrination -- nothing cures magical thinking about the "soul", consciousness and so on as much as learning how the brain and the mind actually work.
If you're interested in more general/philosophical works that touch on similar themes, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach made a huge impression on me (years ago). You might also like The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, which is a collection of philosophical essays along with commentaries. Books like these will get you thinking about the true mysteries of life, the universe and everything -- the kind of mysteries that have such sterile and unsatisfying "answers" within Christianity and other mythologies.
Don't worry about the past -- just be happy you're learning about all of this now. You've got plenty of life ahead of you to make up for any lost time. Have fun!
I recommend these books often, but they really are that much more useful than everything else:
Teach Like a Champion and
Tools for Teaching.
Decide who you think the good teachers in your building are, and watch how they work. Ask them questions - most teachers know how important the details of teaching are, and are happy to share. I see a common professional formality among the good ones. It is polite and thoughtful, listening and supportive, but it is not eager to please or quick to react. Easy to say, harder to do.
Anyway - good luck to you!
You described me in high school to a tee. You are an introvert living in (probably) THE MOST extroverted country in the world. No wonder shit's tough. There is nothing wrong with being an introvert. Please PLEASE watch this TED talk by Susan Cain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4
If there was one book I wish I'd read before middle school, it's her book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". When people say that "such and such a book changed my life" I feel like smacking them in the face - what single piece of advice could do a human life justice? If ever I was to proclaim that something helped NEARLY that much, it's this woman's research.
Also, I dissolved a good portion of my depression by changing my diet. Look at Mark's Daily Apple and soak in as much as you can from that guy:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/welcome-to-marks-daily-apple/#axzz26BkmN7ot
It's probably the purest diet you can follow. However, the easiest diet to follow is the slow-carb diet, which is nearly the same, and much more fun:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/
Tim Ferriss, the one who created the diet, has a book I found to be an inspiration, "The 4-hour Workweek"
As far as work goes, you must find something that makes you feel alive! This is easier said than done because our schools and our whole system don't work that way. Ken Robinson gives you the details as to why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
You might find his book helpful as well: "The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything"
Also, travel can really clear one's head and make one feel alive. No one explains that better than Walt Whitman in "Song of the Open Road". If you've ever wanted to know how to travel for months on end I suggest the book "Vagabonding," by Rolf Potts:
http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1347390437&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=vagabonding
Sorry I sort of went apeshit on you. I'm just excited to share what has helped me. Twenty months ago I went through a similar hell, and the minds I describe really helped me.
I sincerely hope you escape the doldrums.
Welcome! Sure, it's easy to learn and not too expensive. Many lessons are available online for free. Here are a few quick guides:
For business penmanship all you need is a fine (thin) pen. So you don't need to mess with a nib and ink if you don't want to. Just grab a 0.4mm gel or EF fountain pen. It's very elegant and practical for every day use.
Spencerian and ornamental penmanship is very similar.. the latter is like a beefed up version of the latter. You do need to buy a dip nib and ink and must go through the learning curve of these new tools. Mike Sull sells a good beginners set and guide, or this set for practice.
No matter which style you practice, good handwriting will come in very handy throughout your life. In addition to looking professional and cultured, a lovely Spencerian letter is an amazing pants-dropper. Good luck and feel free to share your progress here or in /r/calligraphy
Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
The opening essay of this short read is a condemnation of traditional schooling techniques---and it's also the speech he delivered when he (again) won the NY Teacher of the Year award. Gatto gets at the heart of why public schools consistently produce pencil pushers, not leaders. Every teacher should read this book.
How to Survive in Your Native Land by James Herndon
If Dumbing Us Down is the manifesto in favor of a more liberal pedagogy, Herdon's book is a memoir of someone trying to put that pedagogy in action. It's also a simple, beautiful easy to read book, the kind that is so good it reminds us just how good a book can be. I've read the teaching memoir that made Jonahton Kozol famous, this one is better.
The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori
In the early 1900s, Maria Montessori taught literacy to children that society had otherwise assumed were unreachable. She did this by using the scientific method to study each child's learning style. Some of what she introduced has been widely incorporated (like child-sized furniture) and some of it seems great but unworkable in overcrowded schools. The bottom line is that the Montessori method was one of the first pedagogical techniques that was backed by real results: both in test scores and in growing kids that thrive on learning and participation.
"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum
While not precisely a book on how to teach, this book is incredibly helpful to any teacher working with a diverse student population, or one where the race they are teaching differs from their own. It explains the process that white, black, and children of other races go through in identifying themselves as part of a particular race. In the US, race is possibly the most taboo subject, so it is rare to find a book this honest and straightforward on a subject most educators try not to talk about at all. I highly recommend this book.
If there is any chance you will be teaching history, definitely read:
Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People's History of the United States (the latter book is a classic and, personally, changed my life).
Also recommend: The Multi-player Classroom by Lee Sheldon and Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov
Finally, anyone who plans to teach math should read this essay, "Lockhart's Lament" [PDF at the bottom of the page].
PS, I was tempted to use Amazon affiliate links, but my conscious wouldn't let me.
Hey! Good to see someone interested in East Asian languages! The CJKV writing system normally throws a lot of people off.
CJK Writing System
I wrote a short little rant a while back on how the characters are constructed that you might want to read.
There are methods of learning the characters that make use of their structure. Heisig's RtK and RtH books (Amazon link) are the most well known books I think. Fansites such as Reviewing the Kanji and Reviewing the Hanzi also exist which you might want to take a look at.
Not sure if you like RtK? Here's the sampler. See if you like it after learning 276 characters~
Chinese-Specific
The only thing headache inducing about any Chinese dialect is the writing system and tones.
Note that though we call them "dialects", it is a matter of politics as most of them are mutually unintelligible. A Cantonese or Mandarin speaker is unlikely to understand a Hokkien speaker at all, for example.
Written chinese, on the other hand, is in Mandarin and only in Mandarin -- the other dialects do not have writing systems. Well... the notable exception is Written Cantonese, but that's can be seen as a variant of standard written chinese.
Oh! There are have two variants of the standard writing system: Simplified and Traditional. I had learnt the former in school, and I can read the latter after learning about the simplification process, so just pick one and stick with it.
I personally find Mandarin grammar to quite simple. This might be because it's an isolating language.
Japanese-Specific
Japanese folk have an easier time with Chinese characters. While 6000 Hanzi is roughly college-level (I think?) in Chinese, 6000 Kanji in Japanese is probably more-than-you-need-to-know-ever. There is a Kanji Aptitude Test which is pretty much the only reason one would learn that many.
However, Japanese also have two syllabaries you'll need to know (~50 syllables each). These are phonetic, so they shouldn't pose much of a challenge; most who learn Japanese learn both of them in one or two weeks.
Essential:
Beginner resources:
Books to get:
Mixed collection of Online Resources:
I used it up until about level 8 I think. I liked it and the items that I leveled to mastered/enlightened (as they call it) are definitely in my brain.
However I'm cheap and for the cost of 4ish months of WK (it's like $8/Mo for non beta testers now right?) I just decided to pick up The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course.
This book paired with HouHou is effectively the same thing as WK. Of course you do need to be a little more motivated because you need to add the items to HouHou yourself. I think this is also pretty cool because, for example, I recently switched the language on the weather site I use to Japanese. I've thrown all the new weather terms I've encountered so far along with their Kanji into HouHou.
In the interest of fairness: A major drawback of HouHou is the lack of any app/online review. I've resorted to using Teamviewer to connect to my PC in order to do reviews remotely. WK (and I think Anki) certainly does not have this problem; there is even a pretty good app for WK afaik.
If you're interested, I pretty much do what this guy does (except he uses Anki) and I feel like I've been making as much progress as I did with WK.
Edit: I'd like to add that with WK I never bothered with stroke order or writing any of the kanji at all. Since I've switched to this new approach I've started writing out each kanji ~10 times (sometimes more if it looks really similar to another one I already know etc etc) and I feel like this has helped me remember them immensely YMMV.
The truth is that Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin are not that different. Christian Latin has some interesting new words from Greek like episcopus, and Classical words like gloria take on special new meanings, but it will not be difficult to read and understand the text of the Mass after studying Classical Latin alone.
Yes, learn the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria by rote now and say those prayers in Latin every day. Let yourself absorb the Mass responses week-by-week. But to acquire a broader command of the language—if you hope to understand the Mass readings, for example—I cannot recommend a better book than Familia Romana by Hans Ørberg, every word of which is in Latin. It is written and illustrated in such a way that an absolute beginner can read the first page and figure out what it means without help, and gradually, more and more things are introduced. If you carefully study this book, you will be amazed at how much you can understand.
An alternative with a similar approach, but a stronger focus on preparing the student for Christian Latin is Fr William Most's Latin by the Natural Method. It includes explanations in English and covers some grammatical features that do not occur in Classical Latin, but are everywhere after 200 AD.
Latinitium and Dickinson College Commentaries have some very helpful resources and are well worth looking at. The YouTube channel LatinTutorial is trustworthy. The Word Study Tool on Perseus is helpful if you get stuck trying to parse a word. There is a good mobile game called Vice Verba which drills the player on verb conjugation.
Got a PM asking about books, might as well share what I've read/enjoyed:
Most people recommend Pat Kirwan's Take Your Eye Off the Ball. Some bits of it can be simplistic, but based off what you told me it should be a good read. It basically breaks down each position group chapter by chapter, and has some extra details about coaching, front offices, scouting, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1472878540&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=take+your+eye+off+the+ball
Next I'd put SI's Blood, Sweat, and Chalk. It's a great balance between storytelling and technical detail. It basically chronicles significant advances in tactics on offense and defense over the decades. For example, offensive chapters start with the single wing, then goes on to the wing T, wishbone/flexbone, Air Croyell, west coast offense, spread, etc. (and many more)
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Chalk-Ultimate-Football/dp/1603200614/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1472878672&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=blood%2C+sweat+and+chalk
Lastly I'd recommend Chris B Browns two books (and his blog) - The Essential Smart Football and The Art of Smart Football. These are similar to Blood, Sweat, and Chalk but more detailed and less about story. Still great reads.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=chris+b+brown
For web reading, I loved Matt Bowen's Football 101 series on BleacherReport.com. Unfortunately he works for ESPN now, but he has two years worth of excellent beginner articles on B-R.com He breaks down tons of big picture concepts which can really help fill in details.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2024638-nfl-101-introducing-the-basic-route-combinations
I'm learning Spencerian, and I got a set of practice books that have helped a lot. I'm only like 2/3 of the way through the first of 5, but I'm starting to break away from it and just learn what I need as I need it. The beginning, though, was extremely beneficial. The pages are full of practice lines with everything divided up an spaced for perfect letters. In the first book, for example, the boxes are generally the exact size where the upstroke to start writing a lowercase i takes you from bottom left corner up to the opposite corner in the top right. It's very helpful for getting down the length and the slant, especially since they're core components of the script that apply to pretty much all the letters. It also talks about how certain types of lines in the script are supposed to be made, which again helps with consistency in your writing.
This looks like the one I have, but you might be able to find practice sheets of the appropriate grid size free online, as well as theory. The theory book and 5 practice books are also available separately if you only want one or the other.
For Reading: https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Reader-3rd-Complete-Reading/dp/0997517875
For Writing: https://www.amazon.com/College-Pandas-SAT-Writing-Advanced/dp/098949649X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=college+panda+sat+writing&amp;qid=1563901164&amp;s=gateway&amp;sprefix=college+panda&amp;sr=8-3 or https://www.amazon.com/4th-Ultimate-Guide-SAT-Grammar/dp/0997517867/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2/133-6279214-8476330?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=0997517867&amp;pd_rd_r=b1b3ba1b-4d03-4aef-8534-fb724df88793&amp;pd_rd_w=tVeGd&amp;pd_rd_wg=AG0DL&amp;pf_rd_p=3ecc74bd-d08f-44bd-96f3-d0c2b89f563a&amp;pf_rd_r=S0E4J8G00TRD6F0ZY1ZK&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=S0E4J8G00TRD6F0ZY1ZK
For Math: https://www.amazon.com/College-Pandas-SAT-Math-Advanced/dp/0989496422/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2/133-6279214-8476330?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=0989496422&amp;pd_rd_r=6bc275dd-8dee-497b-aa49-17576266463e&amp;pd_rd_w=YjIig&amp;pd_rd_wg=Pc71l&amp;pf_rd_p=3ecc74bd-d08f-44bd-96f3-d0c2b89f563a&amp;pf_rd_r=P3X7H8SAQZT59M5F6FNV&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=P3X7H8SAQZT59M5F6FNV or https://www.amazon.com/PWN-SAT-Guide-Mike-McClenathan/dp/1523963573/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?keywords=pwn+sat+math&amp;qid=1563901232&amp;s=gateway&amp;sprefix=pwn+sa&amp;sr=8-1-spons&amp;psc=1
For Essay (if you’re taking it): https://www.amazon.com/College-Pandas-SAT-Essay-Battle-tested/dp/0989496465/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=college+panda+essay&amp;qid=1563901277&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-3
For General Strategy: https://www.amazon.com/SAT-Prep-Black-Book-Strategies/dp/0692916164/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?keywords=sat+black+book&amp;qid=1563901330&amp;s=gateway&amp;sprefix=sat+bla&amp;sr=8-1-spons&amp;psc=1
For Practice Tests: https://www.amazon.com/Official-SAT-Study-Guide-2020/dp/1457312190/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=college+board+sat+2020&amp;qid=1563901505&amp;s=gateway&amp;sprefix=college+board+&amp;sr=8-3 (NOTE: These practice tests are available online but I prefer having them on paper, which is why I bought this book.) and https://amp.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/9544rw/all_qas_tests_and_scoring_in_pdf_form/
Good online resources include Khan Academy, UWorld, and 1600.io. Also, I recommend taking a timed practice test often to follow along with your progress and see what you need to work on. Make sure to do the practice test all at once (don’t break it up into section) and try to do it in the morning like you would in the real SAT. Then, go over your mistakes very carefully (this is VERY IMPORTANT) until you truly understand the mistake so that you won’t make it again in the future. This is the most important step. If you skip this, it’s unlikely that you see any meaningful score improvement. Also, It’s up to you which resources you buy/use based on what sections you need help with. Good luck!
I was in the same situation 1 year ago! I just decided to go to grad school but had no idea where to start. It took me a year to narrow down my interest, look up deadlines for the GREs and apps (rolling deadlines, apps being due a year from start date, etc), do enough research on the schools (and PIs) I wanted, study/take the GRE (wish I studied for 2 months instead of 1), get in contact with recommenders, write my SoP, save enough money, and get my application materials in order (scores, transcripts, CV). I highly recommend you borrow this bk.
Here are some things to get you started:
Make sure first that the resources you are working with are top-notch. According to the sub, the best online resource to learn concepts (across all the sections) is Khan Academy. In terms of Reading, this means doing the practice with the various passage types (fiction, social studies, and science). In terms of Writing, this means learning the various conventions of the English language. Feel free to also download the free official SAT Question of the Day App for daily questions (every other day will have an English question).
If you are a book person and willing to spend some money ...
The best Reading resource, according to the sub, is Erica Meltzer. My personal recommendation is that you stick with official practice sections for this one because, quite simply, no one makes questions like the CollegeBoard. Mark off select practice tests for use as full-length exams ... the other tests' sections can be used individually. In the case of Reading, use those for practice. If you're afraid of running out of official material, maybe start with PSATs, which are also easier and can ease you in. Make sure you do deep analyses of your errors (know HOW you picked the wrong answer, HOW to avoid doing that again, WHY the correct answer is right, and WHY the incorrect answers are wrong ... you must do all of those things to really obtain value from your practice) and also examine the questions you were not super confident in. Even take a second look at questions you got right to see if you could find a faster way of arriving at the answer. Note down any vocabulary that might have impeded your ability to understand the passages/questions/answers. Make sure to keep a log of all your analyses.
For Writing, the best resources are Erica Meltzer (if you prefer a very dense writing style) or College Panda (if you prefer something more to the point). Meltzer also has a separate workbook of practice tests. Work through either of these by chapter. After every couple of chapters, do a practice section for a mixed review to see if you can handle dealing with the concepts when you no longer have the benefit of being told what to look for. Keep in mind that Writing isn't all just grammar ... there is a reading component to it in which you must think about adding a relevant detail, shifting a sentence, or replacing a word in context ... this is where your Reading skills should blend in as well.
For explanations to the official tests, use 1600.io. Only the first four tests are free, but the site is quite highly regarded. Give that free trial a go, and see if you think it's worth the money.
Be aware that you'll likely see quick gains with Writing, but I promise that once you get the hang of Reading, that score will also see similar improvement. It just takes some time for most people to grasp it. The main thing is accepting that the correct answer is always supported by something in the passage ... you cannot rely on outside assumptions.
Good luck!
To learn Latin, I always suggest Wheelock--I think the fourth edition was new when I studied Latin, so I can't swear by the 7th edition, but it probably hasn't changed too much. Others frequently advocate for LLPSI because it's closer to immersion (the way most modern languages are taught) than grammar-first (Wheelock's and my preferred method). Obviously you'd need more than just the first volume of LLPSI, but that's where you'd start.
As for Latin resources, the Latin Library has a ton of free texts, including the Latin Fathers. At least some of them are OCR scans, though, so be aware that there may be typos here and there.
For Ancient Greek... I learned with Groton, which tries to be the Wheelock of Greek, but doesn't do as well. Every time someone asks this on r/AncientGreek, there's never a consensus on the best textbook.
Once you understand how the language works, you can start reading texts without translation, as long as you have a dictionary handy. My recommendation is that you always try to figure out each word yourself before turning to other resources, but if you get really stuck, you can use parsers (Whitaker's Words for just Latin, Perseus has parsers for both). Perseus also has a lot of texts available, both original language and public domain translations, and the code for their database is open-source. Even if you don't use their parsers, Perseus has Liddell & Scott (the Liddell-Scott-Jones "Great Scott"/"LSJ" and the "Middle Liddell" sizes), Slater, and Autenrieth dictionaries for Greek and the Lewis & Short (as well as its abbreviated Elementary Lewis) dictionary for Latin.
If you're flush with cash, the Loeb Classical Library has, I would like to say, almost everything in Greek and Latin side-by-side with translations. It's an easy way to read and study the classics without first learning the languages (or while you learn the languages). If you have access to an academic library, you can usually find/access them without having to buy them. Now that I work far from academia, I just have to lament sadly that I can't afford it. (Before I get too old, maybe I'll buy an individual license for the digital version.)
As for Church Fathers in general, like I mentioned above, many Latin Fathers are available for free, and most (not quite all, I don't think) Church Fathers are available for free in translation. The Greek texts are harder to come by, mostly because they aren't collected in one quick place that I'm aware of (except perhaps sites like Perseus).
Trying to find free resources can be a challenge because university presses are behind most publications of classical texts, which means (1) they get to copyright the texts because of their translation, critical apparatus, or editing, and (2) those copyrights last a long time when assigned to an institution instead of a person, especially when they keep refreshing them with new "editions" that barely change.
Logged comment posted by /u/Genesisbook1 at 01/31/15 03:51:22:
> I believe in god not that kike Jesus was a savior
... in response to comment posted by /u/US_Hiker at 01/31/15 03:04:15:
> > Still love god though
>
> Jesus is God is a Jew. Still love God?
____
Removed comment posted by /u/Genesisbook1 at 01/31/15 06:35:37:
> I don't know. I'm still going to go you church because I love church even though I don't fit in or talk to anybody but I don't know. I have to talk to god tonight. Appreciate it brother
... in response to comment posted by /u/US_Hiker at 01/31/15 04:54:23:
> >What do you mean by fringe beliefs?
>
> Well, anti-semitism isn't that rare, but it's not mainstream. It's less common yet to talk to somebody who unapologetically identifies with it, much less is willing to leave a religion for it.
>
> I suggest you get this book: http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Religions-Plus-Huston-Smith/dp/0061660183
>
> A local library should have it if you can't afford it. It's a good, scholarly but sympathetic look at the major religions in the world.
>
> Many religions may give you solace for this personal hell of yours, but do remember that each demands much of you, often quite similar things.
>
> I'm off to bed for the night. I'd welcome any more details you're willing to share, by PM or otherwise. Cheers.
Hi, I'm fairly new to learning Japanese too, here is what I know so far: At first it seems like there is a brick wall that you have to break through. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. If vocab are the bricks.. grammar (particles, canjigation etc.) Are the morter that hold everything together. Its more like having to build a house by yourself then it is breaking through a brick wall. It requires hard work, sacrifice and dedication. First thing is to learn kana, then focus on grammar and reading. Don't study kanji starting out and when you do start learning kanji, make sure to learn it in context. At first you will be focused on each character, then you will start to recognize words, and then you will begin to see sentences and then have to get used to keeping track of what the topic is (は).
SRS is good but won't help you learn well unless you are reading native materials also (such as graded readers or manga). At first I studied as much as possible for the first 4 months to get past most of the absolute beginer grammar. Also, after the first 3 weeks of learning vocab and honing kana skills I started wanikani. Now there are a lot of people who push RTK but having memorized 350 kanji from the book before getting serious about learning.. if I knew then what I know now, I would have gon straight to wanikani. (Anki is ok too if you're on a budget). RTK is good for overcoming fear of kanji and for learning correct stroke order (which comes in handy when looking up kanji that doesn't have furigana). This to me doesn't justify using RTK though in my mind.
I will say that it is better to go at your own pace instead of burning out like I did at first. To me, studying is what you must do in order to achieve your goal. Learning is enjoyable and even leisurely. Finding a good balance is important.
Also, I was in a class that was being taught on discord for a while. Now I'm learning on my own. The internet is full of resources that can help you.
Here are some good resources:
Takoboto (android or windows)
http://takoboto.jp/
WaniKani (I know there are wanikani decks for anki for free too if your watching $$$)
https://www.wanikani.com/
Anki (Free)
https://apps.ankiweb.net/
Japanese Graded Readers (level 1-2 I hear will get you high enough to start reading manga, but I cant confirm this as fact.)
Level 1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079Y2GR81/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_pr9nDb0JQRYY3
Level 2
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079XY9XTM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_vt9nDb32S5E9H
RTK (1st book is the only one worth using)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0824835921/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_Eu9nDb5SK9WP7
Genki 1 & 2 (more for in class but can be used to study on your own too)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3STG9N/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_jw9nDb50CDXS6
An introduction to Christian doctrine and what Christians believe is completely different than an introduction to the Bible.
For a free, online, scholarly introduction to the Bible I suggest OpenYale's courses on the New Testament and Hebrew Scriptures available here. Both Christine Hayes and Dale B. Martin are excellent. Biblical Literacy by Timothy Beal is an excellent accessible and mostly moderate[1] introduction to the the Bible for someone who's never read it before.
As far as both doctrine and the basis for doctrine go, that'll differ drastically from denomination to denomination. Most Protestant denominations claim that they believe in "sola scriptura" or "scripture alone", but perhaps the biggest blow to this statement may be the fact that you can't read the Bible and instantly divine everything there is to know about Protestants. Understanding the history of Protestantism is necessary. Even within the realm of Protestantism you'll find a diverse spectrum of beliefs. I personally have more in common theologically with some Muslims than I do with fundamentalist Protestant Christians.
Catholic and Orthodox traditions both explicitly state the importance of the church and church tradition, and so simply "understanding the Bible" won't get you very far there.
I'm tempted to offer Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright or the famous Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, but I cannot overstate the fact that even given their wide acceptance among the vast spectrum of Christian traditions, they are speaking out of a very particular perspective (they're both Anglican). A fair question, asked by Lamin Sanneh, is, "Whose religion is Christianity?" There are completely separate articulations of Christianity that have nothing to do with the Western culture it is so much associated with today. In his book he explores Christianity beyond the west. C.S. Song's book Jesus, the Crucified People: The Cross in the Lotus World covers specifically ways in which Christianity has risen across Asia.
I've got to run, but last I want to suggest Houston Smith's The World's Religions. He does a great job of highlighting the best of each of the world's major religious traditions.
__
[1] When people say "moderate" they don't mean "I believe in it moderately" but rather "In the spectrum from conservative to liberal interpretations of the Bible I fall somewhere in the middle".
Exploring the world's many religions is a fun and enriching activity. I'll tell you what I tell everyone who makes this post here:
First, you should start out by perusing one or both of the following websites - [BBC Religions] (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/) and [Harvard University's Pluralism Project] (http://pluralism.org/religions/). Both of these sites offer high-quality, scholarly yet accessible introductions to most of the world's major traditions. These sites alone can keep you occupied for days.
Once you're ready to jump into books, you have two options. Your first option is to find a book that offers an overview of what's called "comparative religions." The classic is Huston Smith's [The World's Religions] (https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Religions-Plus-Huston-Smith/dp/0061660183/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1536540983&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=huston+smith+the+world%27s+religions). There are others that are newer and probably more up-to-date, but this is a beloved book for a reason, and won't disappoint.
Your other option is to dig into one particular tradition that you've identified as of special interest from your internet search. If you go that route, which has its advantages and disadvantages, I'd encourage you to do some research online (including on the tradition's individual subreddit) to see what books are recommended. If you have specific questions on this, I may be able to help as well.
Hope this was helpful - good luck!
Anyways, having looked over my bookshelf, here are some recommendations purely for the sake of recommending. Maybe not spot on what you're looking for, but why not...
Neverwhere. A book I've read about nine times. Because it's awesome.
Time Traveler's Wife. Kind of established/re-ignited my hope and sense of romance. My father isn't much of a reader and usually takes months to go through a single book, but after losing his wife, my stepmother, he went through this in a week and thanked me profusely afterwards.
Island. I'll tell you right off, it's one of those 'intelligent reads'. The end is proclaimed early, it comes as predicted and it's depressing, but the book overall is nice. You read it first, to check :)
Gates of Fire.
Born To Run. Just read this recently. Fun, interesting, quick.
I was on mobile before and couldn't answer as thoroughly as I'd have liked.
Basically, I take the approach that my kid hasn't read the books and doesn't know how they're "supposed" to act regarding sleep or potty training or anything else. So I read as many books on as many subjects as I can, figuring that there will be something useful from every expert. So for example I read all the big sleep books out there, from Ferber to Pantley to Sears, and I picked and chose what worked for me. I read about attachment parenting AND Babywise. I read Baby-Led Weaning and Super Baby Food. And it's ALL come in handy - my oldest hasn't fit a single mold perfectly, but having all those tools in my toolkit helped me help her (and myself).
For baby development, one of my favorites is [Baby Meets World] (http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Meets-World-Journey-Through/dp/0312591349) because it talks about what happens in the baby's first year but also gives a really good historical overview of different practices like feeding (from wet nursing to pabulum to the current breast/bottle debate), which helps me stop freaking out about the latest trends - basically, it gave me perspective. Touchpoints is another great development book, and The Language Instinct is a fascinating read on how language and cognition develop.
For blogs, I like Ask Moxie's archives.
I read a lot - books, short stories, graphic novels, screenplays, plays. Not only do you learn from studying how other writers construct their work, but by studying different mediums you tend to strengthen specific writing muscles. For example, when studying screenplays you learn how to craft better dialogue. When studying graphic novels you become better aware of how to utilize your setting.
A trick I stole from college is mimicking the style of a writer, or book, you admire (I actually do this after every good book I read). You'll inevitably pick up at least one cool thing you can use in your own writing, and it's a great way to hone your own style.
I recently bought this book on Amazon, which gives tips on how to write faster. It's only .99 and, personally, I think it's aimed towards amateur writers but the one thing I got out of it was planning before you write. It sounds like a no-brainer but I used to hate outlining. But the way she describes it, it's more thorough than traditional outlining and I've been able to write 10,000 words in one sitting without becoming frustrated.
The best method for learning Kanji is a system by James Heisig in Remembering The Kanji.
It's a little atypical—book 1 is meaning only and book 2 is pronunciation—but if you stick with the method it's quite incredible. At my peak I was learning ~100/day with excellent retention.
And then it's just drill drill drill like everyone says. But when drilling focus on writing. Production is harder than recognition as a rule so that's what you should focus on.
I use an excellent flash card app called Anki which has desktop and mobile versions. It's pricey on mobile if I recall correctly but worthwhile. It's got a bit of a learning curve but definitely worth the investment. And you'll find lots of shared decks, including if memory serves, one based on the Heisig books. (Although there is definitely value in building your own yourself.)
I'm on iOS and you can add the Chinese Traditional Handwriting IME in "Keyboards" which allows you to practice your writing. It's not great for general Japanese input, but for Kanji practice it gets the job done. I'm sure there's something similar for Android.
Good luck!
Edit:fixed my mangled link
For future reference, /r/askphilosophy exists for these kinds of questions.
Now, if you're looking for something more narrative that will allow you to get your feet wet, you have a few different options.
Sophie's World is really quite enjoyable, though I suppose its intended audience is probably younger than yourself.
If you're looking for something more mature, you might try philosophical fiction like Camus' The Stranger or Sartre's Nausea. Both are a great way to get into something philosophical without having to worry too much about terminology or technical language.
If you're looking for something more analytic (logic, phil math, phil science, etc.), you might try something like Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. It's a pretty good read and it's short.
If you're looking for a general introduction to philosophy, something more mature than Sophie's World but focused on the history of philosophy as opposed to a particular area, you might want to look at something like Russell's The History of Western Philosophy. If you do get more involved in philosophy, you'll discover that the book has its flaws, and Russell was wrong about several of the philosophers that he discusses, but it's a good introduction to the history of philosophy that is easily accessible if you have the time to sit down and read it.
In terms of which one's are more fun to read, I'd say the philosophical fiction and Sophie's World are at the top, as the other two books are a bit more dry, but if you're looking for something substantive and not too technical, then all of these might serve your purposes.
I hope that helped in some way, and in future, if you have any philosophy related questions, don't hesitate to ask over in /r/askphilosophy.
Please don't do it. Serious.
Anime characters have a very distinct speech pattern, and you do not want to speak a language like their cartoon character. Trying to learn Japanese from anime is flawed from first principle; you will get endless shit from native speakers if this is the route you choose to learn the language.
It's kinda like how some Japanese learn English by listening to Elvis Presly songs. Just don't.
It sounds like you're new to the process, so I suggest you pay /r/LearnJapanese a visit. They are a great community, and you'll learn about what you have to learn in order to master the language.
Other resources:
Heisig's Remembering the Kana. A fantastic way to learn the basic alphabet. You want to start reading Kana and stop reading romanization as soon as possible, and this can help you do it literally over a weekend.
Remembering the Kanji by the same author is the next obvious step. Much more tedious, but that's the thing with Kanji. You sit down, shut up, and learn it. This book makes it as painless as possible.
With that said, trying to memorize a lot of information is a solved problem in human psychology; this means there are softwares implementing proven techniques that will help you do it. I highly recommend Anki.
Finally, if you want a glimpse at the grammar, there's a fantastic guide over at Amaterasu translation.
Good luck, have fun!
(Full disclosure: I'm essentially a n00bie at the process myself. I tried to learn the language too, but it's on shelf right now due to other stuffs in my life. I do not know Japanese.)
Any of the basic primers (with the exception of the Oxford Latin Course) are probably fine, though Wheelock's is the time-tested standard for many Classics programs. However, once you get beyond the first few units, I would warmly recommend something like the Lingua Latina series, which not only is written entirely in Latin (with a graded difficulty curve as you advance), but also gives a nice in-situ introduction to Roman family life, civic institutions, etc.
Really, the major problem for any Latin student—or student of any language, really—is gaining proficiency in the language via an inventory of vocabulary, grammatical structures, idioms, etc. With a purely textual language like Latin, one can't easily use daily conversation (or 'immersion' in the current pedagogical lingo) as a means of reinforcement, and thus reading great quantities of text is the only way to improve one's comprehension. Since the bulk of extant Latin literature is 'high' literature, attempting to read even so-called 'easy' authors such as Caesar can be incredibly frustrating to a novice, as even these authors were writing in a style that was the result of years of intensive rhetorical schooling. The canned readings in Wheelock's are okay, but none are longer than a few pages, at the most. The Lingua Latina books can help supplement one's reading, particularly with the graded difficulty approach that they are designed around.
A final bit of advice: memorize everything. You will never, never achieve any degree of proficiency with the language if you don't work at it; I recommend (and regularly use) a flashcard program (Anki in my case) for vocab, forms, names, whatever. You simply can't half-ass this aspect. Most student's trouble when learning Latin is the result of imperfectly knowing a) the vocab, and b) grammatical endings, constructions, etc. Despite its reputation and popular sentiment to the contrary, Latin is not any 'harder' or more complex than English or whatever other language one might be native to. Remember that at one time all manner of people learned and spoke Latin: slaves, foreigners, statesman, plebs, etc. You can do it, but you have to put in the time. Be patient with it, work at it, and you will be rewarded. Good luck!
Start with a good algorithms book like Introduction to algorithms. You'll also want a good discrete math text. Concrete Mathematics is one that I like, but there are several great alternatives. If you are learning new math, pick up The Princeton Companion To Mathematics, which is a great reference to have around if you find yourself with a gap in your knowledge. Not a seminal text in theoretical CS, but certain to expand your mind, is Purely functional data structures.
On the practice side, pick up a copy of The C programming language. Not only is K&R a classic text, and a great read, it really set the tone for the way that programming has been taught and learned ever since. I also highly recommend Elements of Programming.
Also, since you mention Papadimitriou, take a look at Logicomix.
Will start by throwing a few into the ring:
The Beach by Alex Garland - While its plot is certainly limited with regard to imitability, it offers a very interesting perspective on the types of people you meet in the more interesting places you'll travel.
Vagabonding by Rolf Potts - A quintessential nonfiction guide for anyone who's considering traveling long term. It's preachy in places, but it'll fire you up to get moving.
Off the Rails in Phnom Penh by Amit Gilboa - You'll see this one being sold by street children in Phnom Penh often, but it's not too hard to find a copy anywhere else. A really great, enjoyable view of expat life in Phnom Penh.
Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac - On the Road is, of course, the standard American road novel, and Jack's most famous, but the Dharma Bums offers a really unique perspective on travel - that of a spiritual nature.
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner - Another highly enjoyable read by an author who travels to the world's most purported "happy" countries. Great take on the subject area.
Best thing you can do is read your little heart out. Find a copy (electronic or library) of something like the Princeton Companion and browse it over the course of a few weeks/months and pick out a few fields that particularly interest you. Then hit up How To Become A Pure Mathematician and start on your reading.
Eventually - and by this I mean "in a year or two" - you want to be able to email the prof in your dept who shares your interest and say "Hey, I've read the foundational texts on xyz, what would you recommend next?" and from there develop a relationship that'll hopefully lead to some undergrad "research" and a glowing letter of recommendation in your final year.
The other, equally important thing is to be a likable, sociable person. Unless you're some kind of wunderkind, collaboration is the name of the game and it gives you a huge advantage over the smelly nerd that no-one really wants around.
e: also lol undergrad pure maths research hahahahaha. if you can read a contemporary research paper in most pure maths subfields by senior year, you're ahead of the game.
Ok, I had a similar trip, here's a few tips and tricks:
3)Overnight trains are fine. A little loud, a little bumpy but cheaper than a hotel for a night and you're not missing out on day travel time. I say they're worth it but you miss some countryside so just play it by ear.
Other than that, have fun good luck, I recommend Vagabonding by Ralph Potts. Lots of great advice.
http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180
From what I've heard, your best choice for an all-encompassing teach-yourself-linguistics book is the Language Files from Ohio State, which has a pretty big linguistics major.
If you want a more layman's introduction you can check out Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. The guy did a lecture at my school just yesterday, and he's quite good at explaining sociolinguistic concepts in everyday language. His current shtick is on analyzing language use. You can see a pretty cool video (an illustrated form of an excerpt from his current lecture) on Youtube.
If you want to go deeper, you might want to find book lists from a particular university. My university doesn't offer its lists publicly, but Ohio State does.
With a few exceptions (computational and certain sorts of applied linguistics like SLP), most linguistics graduate programs don't have specific technical expectations for students coming in. I'd just ask around. If you're picking a grad school, unless there's a compelling reason to stay close to home, you shouldn't be afraid to explore around the country. You'll end up getting paid pretty much the same amount anywhere if you're a linguistics grad student. My own school, Cornell University, has a lot of historical linguistics going on, especially Indo-Europeanist stuff, which you might be inclined to do as an anthropologist.
Finally, OCW has an abundance of linguistics courses available. Follow along with a few of those, although know that linguistics itself is a very diverse field that I can most closely analogize to biology. If you're studying pragmatics and sociolinguistics, you may do extremely well without ever knowing how to read a phonetic waveform. Just poke around and see what you like.
Do all that, and you'll be quite well prepared, and put a paper and a couple conferences under your belt as an undergraduate (at least in the Northeast, there are a few public undergraduate research conferences) and you should be no less prepared than your run-of-the-mill grad school-destined linguistics student.
My first instinct was to scream "OH GOD, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT." But I was once like you too, and I should know that wouldn't be helpful. So instead, I'll recommend that if you're going to choose this, you'd better get your head in the game. When I hear, "I'll work hard; I think it'll work itself out," that gets me worried. There's more to succeeding in grad school and beyond than just getting into the most prestigious school that you can and grinding away in lab, and I'd rather you realize and prepare for that now rather than at the end of your PhD like a lot of my former colleagues.
To start, these books may be helpful to you:
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/0374524777/
http://www.amazon.com/PhD-Not-Enough-Survival-Science-ebook/dp/B004EHZDE8/
I'm going to reiterate what randoguy_16 says below. Be careful when you choose a lab and PI. Google tells me a lot has been written about the subject in general, so I won't get into this long topic. But regarding employment and since your long term goal seems to be getting into industry, I think his specific advice is spot on. Again, I saw and am seeing a lot of my former colleagues trying to get non-postdoc jobs, with PI essentially saying, "oh, that's nice, good luck!" Most of PI's connections (and interest) is in academia. Now to be fair, I don't have much data on how common that attitude/situation is, but I'd be wary of it.
This is a super short reply, but I hope it helps you out. Good luck.
Hi, I have a degree in Philosophy and teach Philosophy/English to high schooler. The following advice and recommendations are what I give my students who are interested in philosophy. I would not recommend Kant as an introduction (not that he's bad, but he is difficult to understand). Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is a book that explains philosophical topics and questions through humor and uses jokes to illustrate the concepts. It is accessible and thought provoking. If you are interested in logic you might enjoy Logicomix. It is a graphic novel that gives a biographical narrative of Bertrand Russell, an English philosopher whose work is the basis of all modern logic. It is not a book about logic per se, but it does give a good introduction to what logic is and how it can be used. Also, Russell's book A History of Western Philosophy is a good place to start your education in philosophy. If you are interested in atheism, read Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. This book goes through the most common arguments for the existence of God, and debunks them using logic and reasoning. Good luck and read on!
Thanks, friend! To answer your question, I used to take long walks to relieve stress -- I did this for years before I ever started running -- and one day about a year ago I thought, "I wonder if I can run from here to (distant landmark)". I did it, and kept doing it, increasing the distance each time. I expected to feel winded, but instead I felt powerful. I'd had self esteem issues all my life & this was the first time I felt truly like I could accomplish anything. Around the same time, I started reading Born to Run and not only did it give me advice that would be essential to healthy running, it also cultivated a deep motivating passion (obsession, maybe) for running. Since then I have run regularly. I can be more specific about my training schedule if that would be helpful to you, just let me know!
/r/LearnJapanese
Best places to start are to learn the two main Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana. A good place to start with that is here.
Next, you need a grammar resource. Tae Kim is a good free online resource. You could also get a popular textbook like Genki.
Lastly, you need a resource for learning kanji, the complex characters adapted from Chinese that make up a lot of Japanese writing. The first two levels of WaniKani are free.
It takes a couple months of study before you really start to feel like you're making progress, but after a year or so a lot of easy reading material becomes approachable. There's also a huge and awesome community of people doing the same thing. Give it a try if you feel like it!
Hi there,
For all intents and purposes, for someone your level the following will be enough material to stick your teeth into for a while.
Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-Volumes/dp/0486409163
This is a monster book written by Kolmogorov, a famous probabilist and educator in maths. It will take you from very basic maths all the way to Topology, Analysis and Group Theory. It is however intended as an overview rather than an exhaustive textbook on all of the theorems, proofs and definitions you need to get to higher math.
For relearning foundations so that they're super strong I can only recommend:
Engineering Mathematics
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineering-Mathematics-K-Stroud/dp/1403942463
Engineering Mathematics is full of problems and each one is explained in detail. For getting your foundational, mechanical tools perfect, I'd recommend doing every problem in this book.
For low level problem solving I'd recommend going through the ENTIRE Art of Problem Solving curriculum (starting from Prealgebra).
https://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/list/aops-curriculum
You might learn a thing or two about thinking about mathematical objects in new ways (as an example. When Prealgebra teaches you to think about inverses it forces you to consider 1/x as an object in its own right rather than 1 divided by x and to prove things. Same thing with -x. This was eye opening for me when I was making the transition from mechanical to more proof based maths.)
If you just want to know about what's going on in higher math then you can make do with:
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809
I've never read it but as far as I understand it's a wonderful book that cherry picks the coolest ideas from higher maths and presents them in a readable form. May require some base level of math to understand
EDIT: Further down the Napkin Project by Evan Chen was recommended by /u/banksyb00mb00m (http://www.mit.edu/~evanchen/napkin.html) which I think is awesome (it is an introduction to lots of areas of advanced maths for International Mathematics Olympiad competitors or just High School kids that are really interested in maths) but should really be approached post getting a strong foundation.
The (now classic) book to read is Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D. by Robert Peters. I remember reading this in grad school but don't remember too many of the details. https://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/0374524777/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1519058671&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=grad+school+phd+guide+book
There are mixed opinions out there on The Professor Is In, so don't use that as your only source, but she has a lot of free information available on preparing for the job market, giving job talks, and interviews, etc. http://theprofessorisin.com/
Good luck! Play the long game. Try to have some fun. Take care of your body.
I definitely know how that goes as far as hating to waste money on shoes. I've always been really cheap about shoes, and if i'm going to spend 100$ on shoes, they better be the best ones in the world, and they better last a long time.
As far as minimalist running suggestions, i'd first suggest that before you even consider it to do your research, get educated, get interested, and then get started.
There is a plethora of research that's very convincing. when you have an hour or two to spare, spend some time and go on an internet journey... cruise through the sidebar over at /r/barefootrunning and read the links check out the harvard study on the subject. Google points against it also if you wish.
Born to run is a pretty interesting book. Its not strictly about minimalist running, but it has some good ideas about shoes in general, and running philosophy and science. Its writing isn't the best, and some of the facts are a bit questionable, but i really enjoyed reading it anyway, and it has a way of getting you really stoked about running.
I've always been skeptical of things, and im not much of a bandwagon hopper, but i stumbled across the idea one day while shopping for new running shoes, spent probably a week absorbing information, Became fascinated and convinced, then just took my shoes off and went for a run! Ive since picked up a pair of Merrell trail gloves, and have increased my speed and mileage considerably(after the transition period of course) and decreased my knee pain, and increased my enjoyment and interest in running tenfold.
GoTo mounts (counterintuitively) aren't useful until you're somewhat familiar with the sky, but they are absolutely fantastic when trying to share your views with a group.
I'll second the book recommendations above (I own TLAO, and borrowed Night watch). In my opinion, Nightwatch did a better job explaining the hardware, though they're both great.
After going out a few nights, if you enjoy it, I emplore you (and everyone else here for that matter) to pick up Sky and Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas. When you outgrow the beginner books, and get fed up picking random objects from the GoTo, this thing is absolutely brilliant.
In the past few months, I have taken up the hobby of learning Latin. I just ordered Wheetlock's and it should be here tomorrow so I can get into the real work of studying. I bought these 3, which seems to a common path.
Wheelock's Latin, 7th Edition
Workbook for Wheelock's Latin
Thirty-Eight Latin Stories Designed to Accompany Wheelock's Latin
$43 for all 3, which is a pretty good deal IMO.
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As for some free material online to get things kicked off, here are some links for you:
Latin Dictionary - good to look up words, has some lessons available.
Another Latin Dictionary site that has a pretty good basic lesson setup
Youtube:
Learn Latin - Gregory Myles Youtube channel - click on his channel and watch the few videos he has. Great intro to Latin.
A reading of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata - Good immersion type learning. A lot of people recommend the book as well.
A good starting point is the app LingoDeer and its Japanese practise sessions. The first course is free and has a ton of content. Its practise focuses on teaching kana, grammar and building up vocabulary with a variety of guessing games so it's a very natural and entertaining way of learning. This makes it better than a lot of the language apps out there since their main focus is usually flashcard learning and hard memorisation.
Beyond that, Tae Kim's Japanese grammar is considered by many to be a fantastic way to learn the language. It builds up the necessary fundamentals for learning the language in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view (which means you think in japanese rather than english).
If you want to get a textbook the Genki guides are considered by many to be the quintessial classroom learning book. Japanese for Busy People is also a good one if you don't have a lot of spare time.
Beyond that, watch Japanese tv without subtitles to get used to them speaking. Japanese Children's tv is a great way to go about it. Try watching something like Chi's Sweet Home without subtitles on. There's also Japanese dramas on Netflix where you can turn the subtitles off.
Don't make saving your entire life in your 20s. It's important, sure, but only in balance with everything else, namely travel. It all depends on the lifestyle you want to live when you're old. If you want to be in the millions when you retire, your life will be pretty dull when you're young if you're just making average money, but if you get serious (talk to a financial adviser) about your finances at a reasonable age when say you're 30... you'll have no problem being better off than most who don't. For me, in my late 20s, it's travel, travel, travel. I have a degree in finance, I have a great job right now, but I'm saving up to travel long-term (1+ years) throughout central and south america in just over a year, will possibly teach English abroad elsewhere afterward, namely India. With no real responsibilities I think it's important for Americans (specifically) to live entirely out of a pack on their back for a sustained period of time. No all-inclusive resorts. Go somewhere where your money goes far (most of Europe is expensive). Couchsurf, bring a hammock - no one cares if you set it up between 2 palm trees on the beach - hostels, locals; it forces you to meet people and figure out who you are and what you want to do with your life. You can try to go with a friend, but you will meet so many great people along the way that it's not entirely necessary. It's also extremely cheap to do. Read Vagabonding or The 4-Hour Work Week . But I am one who just can't make up my mind what I want to do in life. Honestly, I just want to climb rocks, but that's not exactly practical since I'm not Chris Sharma . I have some business ideas in the works but I'll probably end up going back to school so I can teach and have 3 months off in the summer, preferrably psychology or the psychology of religion. But I think I could also be content organic farming in my later days... or writing, I write a bunch, and plan to use the trip as the muse for a Karouac-esque tale. See so I have no clue. But that's the fun of it. Just shotgun your interests and figure it out. Love life. Go live it. Don't let anyone tell you you're crazy because your values are different. They will come around. Also, no soda - water, water, and coconut water.
I've stated before that I think that TRP goes beyond just seduction.
It's about living in a world that is not what we've been told it should be. This applies to women, relationships, college, careers, accumulation of wealth, travel, Life in general.
Women and relationships - We all know, it's pretty much all we talk about here.
College - The baby boomers told you to go to college if you didn't want to be flipping burgers... Then you went to college, got out, and there are no jobs. Then the baby boomers tell you that you're an entitled brat for refusing to flip burgers. The funny thing is that the people who told you to go to college didn't actually go to college, they started out flipping burgers, but they did it without the burden of debt.
Careers - If you spend the best years of your life sitting at a desk (and you don't make any women co-workers feel at all uncomfortable in any way), maybe one day you may be able to save up enough money to buy a red convertible sports car when you're bald, fat and middle aged, to compensate you for your unfulfilling life. After that you can save up and maybe afford a few years of lower-middle class leisure lifestyle while your body falls apart and you wait for death. Does that sound like a good deal?
Travel - Extended long-term world travel is the domain of the rich and all you can afford is short stints of two week vacations to to all-inclusive resorts before you have to trudge back to your cubical to resume the life you were trying to escape from.
Life in general - Go to work, be miserable, come home, buy something to make yourself feel better, get into debt, have to work harder, become more miserable, repeat. You have to do this because the only thing that can bring you a temporary sensation of satisfaction is some kind of material item. A newer, better item. If you lose an item you lose a part of yourself, because you are the things that you own.
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I never went to college and I have zero debt. I don't have a 'career' per-se, but I do have marketable skills in web development and design, self taught. I work from time to time to get money which I then use to fund my travels (I'll be in Spain next week). Girls are occasional but enjoyable guests in my life. I own no material possessions other than a bag of clothes and this laptop. I practice meditation and try to incorporate awareness of the present moment into my life rather than dwelling on the past or the future.
If you're interested in learning about how long-term travel is well within your reach I'd highly recommend Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.
In terms of life/spiritual philosophy I recommend authors such as Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts
Others have already mentioned it but join an astronomy club and download Stellarium. Here's a couple book suggestions:
Turn Left at Orion will get you familiar with some of the more interesting objects to look at in the night's sky. This is definitely a good place to start. You also want to pick up a star atlas to help you navigate the sky and find some of the dimmer objects in the sky. A favorite is Sky and Telescope's Pocket Star Atlas. Another favorite for new astronomers is Nightwatch which will educate you a bit more about astronomical bodies and the night sky.
Lol, I promise I never spent any nights weeping into my coursebook! The main online resource I use is the very excellent Vicarius interface for Whitaker's Words dictionary, which you can find here: http://vicarius.thomasleen.com
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I like reading so I used a lot of supplementary readers, and I would recommend doing that in addition to whatever your main textbook is. I have particularly enjoyed the LLPSI series, the first book of which is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Familia-Romana-Lingua-Latina-HansH/dp/1585104205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549409155&sr=8-1&keywords=familia+romana
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There are also some free online readers: search for Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles and Puer Romanus. Geoffrey Steadman has an annotated version of Fabulae Faciles here: https://geoffreysteadman.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ritchie-10mar17.pdf (his other annotated texts are good too!)
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And when you want something more advanced, there's an absolute shitload of classical texts with facing-page translations available here: https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus/
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Have fun!
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Check out this book before you apply/commit to a program. I know it's not that helpful for someone to throw a book at you when you asked a question, but I think it's pretty useful for someone considering entering a PhD program.
One other quick piece of advice I'd give is to forego choosing a lab that does the sexiest research in lieu of a lab that
A. Is a fun place to be with good people around you
B. Has a PI that cares about what is best for YOU first and foremost, even if it is different from a traditional academic career.
C. Has projects that involve day-to-day activities that you'd actually enjoy doing (working on nobel-winning work that's really boring and monotonous is still boring and monotonous)
D. Has stability in funding for the entirety of your PhD
I had a similar request to yours, except I wanted to go beyond Calculus to get a broad survey of mathematical topics, using a ground up approach. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is exceptional, I can't recommend it enough! It covers all the topics you wish your mathematics teachers had instilled in you, all within a comprehensive & comprehensible form. It has been years since I studied math. I've long since forgotten a majority of what I was taught but, I can still easily progress in this book and I feel like I finally understand many of the ideas that were impenetrable before.
I'm not alone in my positive review. You'll note that people have been heaping praise onto this volume on Amazon and in more formal book reviews as well.
In my experience, taking lessons will help, but there is no quick fix.
I got back into the game about 2 years ago, and started taking lessons. They improved my swing, slowly but surely. I bought a few books and kept working at it. Progress was slow and frustrating at times when I would backslide, but there was progress for sure.
I eventually hit a wall with my first instructor though. I tried a few more guys, and even a lesson with robogolf, but none of it clicked. I would still recommend a robogolf lesson if you have one around you, for someone trying to find the basics of a swing its very helpful analysis.
What finally did click for me was going back to the books and really understanding the swing. Its a chain reaction of things, and if you dont understand that chain and set yourself up for success at each step then you wont every have a consistent repeatable swing. The two books that helped me the most are:
Ben Hogan's Five Lessons:
https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972
Hank Haney's Essentials of the Swing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470407484/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1
I'm glad you enjoyed my comment. I definitely agree with you about this sub. There seems to be something inherently inspirational about traveling and I think that it has to do with the fact that, often, the decision to drop everything and travel is such a personal one and often comes from some type of larger perspective about what life means.
Have fun on your travels!
If you're looking for a great traveling book - Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel was the best that I found.
https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180
Really shows you that it's all about a person's the perspective and life priorities. If you want to make a life of traveling, it really isn't that difficult - no matter how much money you make.
Read this book: Ben Hogan’s 5 Fundamentals of Golf
Then once you get the right clubs, start practicing with a purpose. Try to get to the driving range at least once a week even if you just hit a small bucket. Work on a specific part of your game with every range session (grip, posture, specific club, putting, chipping, etc). Don’t just go and hit balls randomly. Muscle memory is key.
Try to play at least 9 holes once a week too. I love the post-work 9 holes myself. Take it seriously, but not too seriously, and enjoy the process. Good luck!
Edit: I also agree with getting an instructor. You get what you pay for in a coach too. You don’t need to see them every week. Take a couple lessons and work on everything your coach tells you. When you feel comfortable with those improvements, see you coach again for your next focus.
I'm taking a Latin III this year and this is our sorta finale for the Latin program.
The other question is very tricky.
Hope I helped!
Although I would love to say "read Kant" or "read Wittgenstein" or "read Sartre" or "start with Plato" I don't think you would get a really good start to reading philosophy because sometimes they can get a little complicated.
I think the best way to get introduced to Philosophy is to learn a little bit about a bunch of philosophers and their philosophies.
So seeing that you are 16, there is a great book that was written called "Sophie's World" http://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World/dp/0297858815 It's a novel about a girl around your age who studies philosophy but it touches upon almost every major philosopher and it's not too harsh of a read. The plot is ok and the dialogue is miserable but I think it gives a good sampling of the major philosophers that is on a reading level for your age.
If you want a great book touching upon the major philosophers - there's always Bertrand Russell's "The History of Western Philosophy"http://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1343832717&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=bertrand+russell+history+of+western+philosophy The reading level is more advanced than Sophie's World but you get a very in depth perspective of the major philosophers from a major philosopher.
And then again, you can try to read a philosophical writing. If you're going to try that, I think Plato is an easy beginning along with Descartes.
Always start with learning hiragana and katakana. These are a handful of phonetic symbols that you will need to read basically anything. The guides below will cover them, but just make sure it's the first thing you do.
Tae Kim's guide starts at the basics and then continues with grammar. It's very much based on a "casual first" principle where it starts informal and builds up to formal speech, unlike most textbooks that focus on the latter. You could also check out the pdf version if you find that more comfortable.
Speaking of informal, you might like Namasensei's videos. This is how I made a start years ago. His handwriting is terrible, but it's a very motivational way to learn your hiragana and katakana.
A popular tool for learning vocabulary is Anki with a Core 2k/6k vocab deck. I found a guide here, but I haven't checked if this particular one is up to date. Anki is a flashcard program, and that vocab deck contains the 6000 most frequently used words in Japanese. You can build up your vocab knowledge daily, and get reviews on words you've had before. There's also a mobile app (free on android, paid on iphone), which is really convenient if you commute a lot.
If you like textbooks, possibly the most commonly used are Minna no Nihongo and Genki. I have no experience with these myself, so I can't really comment on them. Apparently the Minna no Nihongo book I linked expects you to know hiragana and katakana before you even dive in, so be aware of that.
For reading practice, look for children's books or simple manga. These texts usually have furigana, which basically means that all the complex characters (kanji) have little hiragana on top that show you how to read them. It's going to make your life a lot easier when you're just starting out.
Another website to keep in mind is Jisho, which will help you look up kanji by piecing them together. Useful if furigana aren't present, which is the case for most advanced texts. Kanji are a huge roadblock for a lot of people, but don't be intimidated by them.
The only thing I can't really help you with is listening practice. I have tried watching some TV shows, but it's often very fast and hard to follow. Anime is fine, as long as you're aware that it's not always exactly realistic.
In summary:
> The idea that the mind is in some way non-physical.
The mind is a product and an element of the physical brain. It may not be concretely tangible (i.e., you can't hold a mind), but that does not mean it is not a part of the physical universe. Physics explains the mind quite well, actually. The neurons in our brain are developed in compliance to the laws of physics and biology, the neurochemicals in our brain are physical substances, and the electric currents in our brains that communicate signals between neurons operate in compliance to the laws of physics.
Evolution also provides insight into the development of consciousness. While, sure, humans are the only terrestrial species with advanced enough consciousness to develop religious and philosophical ideas, we know now that many animals have forms of consciousness and proto-consciousness like what we would expect if humans evolved consciousness from simple origins. The mind is perfectly explainable through naturalistic sciences, and our naturalistic model of human consciousness makes predictions that are falsifiable.
I'd suggest reading Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works. Here's a talk he gave on the book. I'd also suggest his The Stuff of Thought, The Language Instinct, and The Blank Slate.
I'd also suggest Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. While it's main thrust is to show how science can inform morality, it offers some pretty decent layperson explanation of consciousness, and it is written by an accomplished neuroscientist (whatever your opinion on his religious works may be). His pamphlet-esque Free Will also covers some good ground here.
> All able-bodied humans are born with the ability to learn language.
Not at all true. You can be able-bodied and learning disabled. There was a nonverbal autistic student at my middle school years ago who ran track. Trivial point, but still incorrect.
> I would argue humans also have a Spiritual Acquisition Device.
I would argue that this argument is SAD. (pun; sorry.)
You're positing a massively complex hypothetical neurological infrastructure to link human brains to a divine alternate universe or dimension that has never been shown to exist. Not only has this neural uplink never been observed, but it is entirely unnecessary, as neuroscientists and psychologists have a perfectly functional, testable model of consciousness without it. You're adding a new element to that model that is functionally redundant and untestable. Occam's Razor would trim away your entire posited element out of extraneousness and convolution.
Definitely long term travel. It could probably help you grow more as a person than a semester of a graduate program.
What is your experience with statistics and what are you looking to do with it? There are excellent online modules (I've heard anyway, my stats knowledge came from school) that you can definitely utilize while working at your own pace (even at work during downtime). R is the statistics program/language that is currently most well respected in the statistics community, and it's free. R isn't even really taught in a lot of academic programs as far as I know, all the people I know who are proficient in it taught themselves.
edit: This is a great book about long term travel, he's also done some podcasts https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1541349629&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=rolf+potts
/r/learnjapanese's Getting Started Guide
> ###Online Guides
>
> Luckily for the modern language learner, the internet is full of free resources for study. When using them, however, make sure that you are using a credible source. One extremely popular and quality guide is Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese. Written, and even available through Amazon, as a book, Tae Kim’s Guide covers everything you need to know to get started learning Japanese.
>
> Another great choice is Pomax's Introduction to Japanese.
>
> If you’d like to follow a different path, you can follow the subsections below.
>
>
> ###Textbooks
>
> If you’re interested in a more traditional form of study, you may be looking for a recommendation of a textbook. In /r/LearnJapanese, the most commonly recommended textbook series is Genki. Currently available in its second edition, the Genki consists of two textbooks (GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese and Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese II) with companion workbooks. The books and associated media are designed to be used to help in learning speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, with additional segments for cultural information. These textbooks are commonly used in college and university settings and cover the first two years of study at a common pace.
>
> These books are available for purchase from many sources, such as Amazon.com (Amazon.com Purchase Links: Genki I | Genki I Workbook | Genki II | Genki II Workbook ) and traditional brick-and-mortar resellers.
>
> Additional choices for textbooks, such as the Nakama series, can be found on the Resources page of the wiki.
Top score is a 1600, lowest score is a 400. Theres 3 sections (Math, Reading, & Writing/Language) and an optional essay (max score is a 24). The average score is a 1060, most colleges are okay with just about anything between an 1100-1300, though more selective colleges will have an average of 1350, and top colleges usually have an average of 1520 or so.
Practice is always the best way to prepare: The Official SAT Study Guide is the most realistic practice you're going to get. It includes 8 full-length tests (though you can get those for free on the CollegeBoard website) and review of all the topics on the test.
I'm going to be taking the June SAT tomorrow and I've been using Erica L Meltzer's Grammar and Reading Guides (which are worshiped on this subreddit, for good reason), as well as the QAS Released Tests on this subreddit (scroll down and you'll see "Prep Materials" on the right-hand side. They're real tests!)
One thing that helps is identifying my mistakes and reviewing them, making sure they don't happen again the next time I practice. Typically a (responsible) person will begin preparing for the SAT about 3 months in advance, and they'll take the test about 3 times.
I hope this helps!
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Erica Meltzer: https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Reader-3rd-Complete-Reading/dp/0997517875/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3QJ7NNDCFZME1YAVRHE4
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https://www.amazon.com/4th-Ultimate-Guide-SAT-Grammar/dp/0997517867/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2/143-3214858-8357969?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0997517867&pd_rd_r=a2f63509-83e3-11e9-b0f3-5fc5494b71c2&pd_rd_w=5Oxt6&pd_rd_wg=XSG76&pf_rd_p=a2006322-0bc0-4db9-a08e-d168c18ce6f0&pf_rd_r=961V20KBVK1215JA12QN&psc=1&refRID=961V20KBVK1215JA12QN
If you're a beginner, those are some good resources to start with for reading, including Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. For Kanji, I'm using "Remembering the Kanji" by Heisig. Japanese Skype partners or using HelloTalk is great if you're looking to have a conversational partner with. Your Chinese background will definitely help with your Kanji, so that's great.
Keep in mind about payout, though. It doesn't make practical sense to study intermediate or advanced levels of a foreign language if you're not going to be working or living there for an extended amount of time (e.g., spending three years to study advanced Spanish for a month long vacation in Mexico makes zero sense sans personal enjoyment).
Best of luck on your never-ending adventure of learning.
If you really, really start feeling uncomfortable with kanji, like I did, RTK can help.
It's controversial on this subreddit for a number of reasons:
The pros:
The biggest, most important part of this book, to me, is the fact that it shows you that kanji aren't impossible to learn. Challenging, definitely. Difficult, definitely. But not in the SLIGHTEST impossible.
At my current rate, it'll take me about 5 and a half months to finish it up. The average time is 3-6 months, and it can be faster or slower depending on how comfortable you are with it. I try to do at least 15 a day. But sometimes, I have no time and skip it, and other times, I have excess time and will do up to 30. No matter what and no matter how many, it's always easy to remember. Just remember you aren't actually learning Japanese; you're merely making ACTUAL learning of Japanese potentially easier.
As strange as it may sound, the best thing that happened to me was acquiring a fountain pen.
Initially, I purchased the Spencerian Penmanship Copybooks and I found that basic repetition of simple strokes really helped to make myself aware of my hand and finger movements. The books helped me to, more than anything else, sit down in once place for an hour or so and simply focus on the techniques of writing. It got me familiar with practicing writing.
This is where the fountain pen comes in. I practiced my writing with a fountain pen, and the way the nub works and the weight of the pen made me very conscious of my every movement. Looking at my fountain pen writing, I was convinced that my handwriting hadn't improved. Yet when I set down my fountain pen and took up a normal ballpoint, the difference was easily noticeable; writing with a ballpoint pen was suddenly so easy. That was when I realized how my writing had improved.
Hope this helps, and best of luck in school!
tldr; Repetition and practice, coupled with a fountain pen.
If you're a new fan (like me) then this one I would say is definitely worth it to get a better understanding of the nitty gritty that goes on during games.
Apart from that, I have seen numerous recommendations for Fan Notes (That I haven't read yet) as a good intro to football culture at large. This is currently on my reading list (About 3rd at the moment).
Here is a list of books by NFL's Chris Weaselling that you might find useful. I hope that is a useful enough introduction, and happy reading.
Certainly, if you're not used to going barefoot, you can easily hurt yourself when making the transition.
I'd like to make the case that there is a continuum extending from (1) a very primitive totally barefoot society, through (2) a long period of human development when "shoes" consisted of very primitive foot coverings, (3) a long time when shoes were visually similar to modern shoes, but not "scientifically" designed with human anatomy in mind, to (4) today, where arch support is common, and Nike even sells shoes with microchips embedded in them.
Somewhere in that continuum is probably the optimally healthy range. I contend it is stage (2).
Millions and millions of years ago, our forefathers ate nothing but raw food, because they didn't know how to use fire. That was perfectly fine, then, when other aspects of their mental, physical, and social makeup allowed them to be successful living that way.
But when man conquered fire, and learned to cook, human anatomy changed. Human jaws became smaller, making it possible for large brains to develop, without killing mothers in childbirth.
That's still probably the optimal stage to be at, in terms of diet. Modern diets blew past that, and our bodies haven't really adapted to all the sugar and fat we shovel into them.
In "Born to Run", Christopher McDougall makes the case that the reason so many runners get injured, is because modern shoes offer too much support, and the dozens of muscles, tendons, and ligaments in our feet don't get the kind of varied exercise that we evolved for. Not only walking and jogging, but jumping, sprinting, fleeing danger in any direction, as quick as possible. Then those weakened tissues are easily injured.
But it's probably been a long, long time since our forebears did all this completely barefoot. We probably don't have the proper skin thickness to propulsive force ratio to avoid lacerations anymore. Instead, I contend that our feet are at the "adapted to early technology" stage in our development, the same way that our jaw to brain-case ratio reflects that we are optimally adapted to eating a cooked food diet - an adaptation which is dependent upon the cultural transmission of a learned technology. Why would it be any less astonishing for feet? Perhaps the best foot covering is a sturdy wrapping, made of breathable plant or animal material, such as dried fibers or animal skins.
I agree that you're likely to get injured running around like that, if you're used to arch support. It might take time to adapt. There are a lot of people in this world who never have to learn to adapt, because they've been running around without arch support all their lives. And I doubt that they have the foot and leg problems of people in the developed world, just as they have less incidence of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
If i were to suggest you getting new clubs they are going to have to be beginner ones like Taylor Made Burners. Those clubs are forgiving and are for people who are fairly new to the game. The ones your teammates sounds like they are talking about are blade type clubs or just other clubs in general for people who shoot decent scores. Having said that if you already have clubs i would stick with them until you can shoot a lower score. I would suggest going to the range a few times a week and playing at least one round per week. A lot of people will set a goal on this sub reddit of shooting a certain score and then they will buy themselves irons. Shooting 110-120 isnt obviously the best but honestly the average golfer shoots around 110. I woul say maybe if you can get down to breaking 100 or around there i would see why you couldnt look for some new clubs, HEck you can buy used ones for pretty cheap as well. MY current training schedule has me on the range 2-3 days a week and playing a round on sat and sometimes second on Sunday(depending how my sat night goes). As far as a book... ive heard this one is pretty good from a few people. THE MODERN FUNDAMENTALS OF GOLF
Hello everyone! I've always been lazy about it and put off learning but I want to get serious about it. So starting today I'm going to do daily studying.
I don't have much money IRL due to illnesses hindering me having a strong income, so I'm currently using memrise's free course titled "Japanese 1". I'm probably going to try to milk all the free courses for what they're worth. Is this a decent strategy / will I learn properly? Or should I go to a different website?
Also, I'm putting some money aside to order this book - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568365268/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;psc=1
Is it worth it or is there better stuff out there? Thanks!
No problem... thanks for the reply!
So a little over a month ago (after I made that last post), I bought a copy of The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, and it's absolutely awesome. If you can get your hands on a copy, I'd definitely recommend it.
Basically, the book lists 2300 basic kanji... and for each one, it gives the meanings, the readings, a few example compounds, and - most importantly - a useful note on how to remember the character. For example, with the kanji 作 (as in つくる, "to make"), the book recommends viewing the right radical (乍) as a hacksaw, and the radical on the left as a person - thus, a person using a hacksaw to make something. That might not be the true etymology, but it's still a good way to remember the kanji. Some of the suggestions are a bit of a stretch (and kind of hilarious)... but I figure, as long as it helps me with memorization, then why not?
I was starting to go crazy trying to come up with mnemonics to help me remember kanji, so this book has been a huge help (and time-saver) for me.
> I'll never meet a guy that will love me back. There's no one that's remotely interested in me. I'm too awkward. Even if I did find a guy, he'd probably leave me anyway.
I lived in SF for a long time and I can tell you that people of all stripes and levels of awkwardness find love, I saw it all the time.
The people at Pixar say things get better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a4MR8oI_B8
As for your parents, people find comfort in having scapegoats and people who are followers tend to listen to leaders who are happy to supply scapegoats - in the past (US) it was the Irish, Italians, Chinese, Polish, etc nowadays for rednecks it is the immigrants, for flag wavers it is ISIS, for Mormons it is the gays. One way to think of these people is morally immature and easily lead astray by the authority figures they rely on to tune their moral compass. You have to be the bigger man. In this case, yes they are torturing you but it is because they think it is what they are supposed to do. Success is your best revenge.
As far as jobs or education here is a secret - being a middle manager or something is not necessarily more rewarding than being a barista. Honor and fulfillment come from how you conduct your life and how you treat others. Chop wood, carry water there is much to be said for humility and simplicity. You can learn more for free from the best schools in the world on iTunes University than you could at BYU.
https://diyscholar.wordpress.com/guide-to-itunesu/
"Do not let yourself be guided by the authority of the sacred texts, nor by simple logic, nor by appearance or opinion, nor even by the teachings of your master; when you know in yourself that something is bad, then give it up, and accept the good and follow it." -Buddha
You are stuck in a place where people live in a very small bubble and they all believe it is real, it is not and there are many amazing and fulfilling things out there that you should try out before you kill yourself. Here are just three books with alternative ideas about spirituality, philosophy and jobs - you can stop living live exclusively from the POV of the Mormon bubble without letting anyone else know that you are doing it - for now while you are still in prison, once you are out you can be your own man.
http://www.amazon.com/Chop-Wood-Carry-Water-Fulfillment/dp/0874772095
http://www.amazon.com/Wabi-Sabi-Artists-Designers-Poets-Philosophers/dp/0981484603
http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180
Sounds like you're interested in classical Latin. Starting there is a good idea, as church Latin tends to be simpler than classical Latin, meaning if you can read classical Latin, you'll have no trouble reading church Latin. I would recommend Lingua Latina. It is 100% in Latin, but starts off very simply and slowly introduces grammar and new words, so that by the time you finish the book you can read in Latin reasonably fluently. If you have experience in learning languages or speak another Romance language, you may be able to get by with just this book, but if not a traditonal grammar like Wheelock's Latin would be a good supplement. The benefit of Lingua Latina is that it teaches you to read in Latin, not painfully translate it. If you're goal is to be able to read texts for pleasure, this is a must.
Sounds like you are into some interesting stuff! I'm a math PhD student. One of the most useful things I did to prepare for grad school was to read this book. Seriously, you can't start reading it soon enough, as it helps you set the stage for grad school even before you get there. It's a great book.
As for programming, I'd recommend MatLab, Fortran 77 or Fortran 90/95, and C++.
Also, every summer, try to work for a lab, such as a national physics lab or (ITER in a few years, since you are interested in plasma). You will get payed a lot of money, and you will work with some of the best researchers in the world. Talk to your professors and look online to see if you can find a way to spend your summer doing lab work.
I have personally only used Meltzer's english book, CP's english book, and CP's math book and can vouch that all of these are amazing, but others on this sub also recommend other books. Here is a list of many of them. I hope they serve you well :] (Edit: I apologize for how huge this post is, lol)
English
https://www.amazon.com/4th-Ultimate-Guide-SAT-Grammar/dp/0997517867/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1519610454&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=erica+meltzer+sat+writing
https://www.amazon.com/College-Pandas-SAT-Writing-Advanced/dp/0989496430/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1519610514&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=college+panda+writing&amp;dpID=41iRh%252BJb19L&amp;preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&amp;dpSrc=srch
Reading
https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Reader-3rd-Complete-Reading/dp/0997517875/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1519610443&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=erica+meltzer+sat+reading&amp;dpID=51cR4Uh0YBL&amp;preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&amp;dpSrc=srch
Math
https://www.amazon.com/College-Pandas-SAT-Math-Advanced/dp/0989496422/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1519610506&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=college+panda+math
https://www.amazon.com/Dr-John-Chungs-Math-Fourth/dp/197452602X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1519610536&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=dr+chungs+sat+math&amp;dpID=51gqq9mu0XL&amp;preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&amp;dpSrc=srch
>But what exactly does a linguist do
If you mean job-wise, this here shows some of the different kinds of trouble you can get into as a linguist.
If you mean what kinds of things you can study, the school I go to requires classes in 4 core areas of study: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax (I think most universities probably have a similar requirement.). From there you can then take advanced topics in those areas or in other areas like sociolinguistics, areal linguistics, language acquisition.
The program I'm doing is focused in language documentation, so that involves learning how to go out to the field (or wherever you find a consultant) and make records of languages with little to no description. This includes gathering material to write up descriptions that can range from simple overviews of the phonology or the morphology of the language to writing a whole grammar of the language (like this one).
>why did you choose this for studying
I've just been interested in foreign languages for as long as I can remember. Trying to figure out how they work the way they do is just an extension of that for me. I really like syntax and historical/comparative, and also just learning how other languages express things.
Wikipedia is actually a pretty good place to start learning about the subject. The Language Instinct is pretty good and The Unfolding of Language is really good to see how languages can change over time.
I did my master's degree thesis on this when I graduated from university -specifically, my topic was "The evolution of language in homo sapiens". Most of what I posting here is from research papers that I read at the time; but I also read a lot of books on the topic. I highly recommend Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind for information about Kanzi, How Monkeys see the World for information about vervet monkeys, and Steven Pinker's excellent book The Language Instinct for an overview of some of the best science dealing with human language. I basically agree with Pinker's view (and indicentally, the view that ecaward posted a little higher) that primates and some other animals are capable of communicating with symbols; but that the real power of language lies in our ability to recombine symbols through syntax and so alter the meaning, and this escapes primates: it's a uniquely human evolutionary adaptation.
My list:
thank you all for your kind words, im truly flattered. Very motivated to keep on practicing <:
Btw I dont really have a fixed script for both capitals or lower case letters yet, im just copying whatever i find decent looking.
A while ago i found this image just browsing thru google:
https://i.gyazo.com/6e9fe4a6b9211273d79c900e1b8868c4.png
(source unknown to me) and thought they look pretty nice.
Also I just finished the Spencerian penmanship copybooks:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088062096X/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1
They are great, some of the capitals letters are from there.
http://i.imgur.com/BLhSBni.jpg?1
Hope this is helpful<:
This is a great question, but it's so complex and there's so much going on, I'm not sure if it can be sufficiently answered in an ELI5 thread. If you're interesting in the topic of language in general (which, imho is extremely fascinating), I highly recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. It's a very accessible book and, at the very least, would make anyone appreciate how awesome the human's ability to communicate really is.
Do you have a local university where you can audit a summer class? I recommend doing that if you can, and also you can ask your professor recommendations.
Force yourself to learn Hiragana and Katakana in 1 week or so and get that over with quickly. Do not go easy on yourself and move on from reading the Romanized pronunciations. There are flash card apps you can use as well, my preferred is called Anki. I live in Japan and still use it as there are flash card decks for everything, and especially since it's on my phone (free on android, paid on iphone).
Find a language partner if possible. There are also online Skype services.
For now though, I recommend either of the first two books, and the third. My organization's Japanese language advisor prefers Minna no Nihongo, because he thinks the Genki series uses too much English. But I first learned in the states during college and still feel that Genki 1 & 2 were great introductory books. The third book is from my language advisor's preferred Japanese Language Proficiency Test prepbook series:
Genki
[Minna no Nihongo] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/4883196038/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1522710731&amp;sr=8-1&amp;pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&amp;keywords=minna+no+nihongo+1&amp;dpPl=1&amp;dpID=41T4AzzZhzL&amp;ref=plSrch)
[Nihongo So Matome N5] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/486639076X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1522710835&amp;sr=8-1&amp;pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&amp;keywords=nihongo+sou+matome+n5&amp;dpPl=1&amp;dpID=51HKNmOKvfL&amp;ref=plSrch)
Learn how to count, along with the basic various counter words (ex: the first 10 days of the month are special words, 10 people, 10 things, etc)
Learn "すみません sumimasen" for "I'm sorry / excuse me / thank you" (sometimes). Use this especially if you need someone's attention or want to ask a question.
"arigatou(gozaimasu/gozaimashita)" = thank you
Toire wa doko desu ka? =
Where's the bathroom?
男 "otoko" = man
女 "onna" = woman
Also check out /r/movingtojapan /r/japanlife
Blessings on you
I like Szekeres's A Course in Modern Mathematical Physics for referencing intro-grad-level material. It covers abstract linear algebra, differential geometry, measure theory, functional analysis, and Lie algebras, and teaches you some physics along the way.
More generally, the best "breadth" book on advanced mathematics is Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Gowers et al. and its slightly underachieving younger brother of a companion text, Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics by Higham et al.. You won't properly learn advanced mathematics this way, but you'll get the bird's-eye view of modern research programs and the math underlying them.
If you want a more algebraic take on Szekeres's program to teach physicists all the math they need to know, check out Evan Chen's Napkin project, which is intended to introduce advanced undergrads (it's perfectly fine for grad students too) to a wide variety of advanced mathematics on the algebra side of things.
Since you're doing probability and statistics, check out Wasserman's All of Statistics and Knill's Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes for good, concise references for intro-grad-level material.
I will second what /u/Ovationification said, though. I didn't really learn anything with the above books, I just use them occasionally for reference or to think about pedagogy.
On the other side of the coin, anime can have its place in language study. So, to answer your question, check out http://kitsunekko.net where you can find Japanese subtitles for many shows. They're of course written in Japanese, so be sure to study your kana and kanji.
But don't expect that to be enough to learn the language. Language learning needs lots of practice interacting with others. It's also more difficult to learn the grammar rules from passive listening.
I'd recommend looking for a place that holds Japanese lessons in your area. One possibility if you have the time are universities or community colleges, where you may be able to sit in on classes for no credit, for a small fee (which is called auditing). My old university charges $50 for non-students, which is pretty cheap for a several month-long language course. Other universities may be cheaper or more expensive. Granted, the class times might be difficult if you're still in K-12 or working.
If you can't find any classes, at least invest in some proper course books. The universities I studied at used either Minna no Nihongo (main book in Japanese only, need the English, or your native language, supplement), Genki (starts out all in English/romaji, and gradually introduces kana and kanji), or one other I don't recall the name of. For supplementals, I had found the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar set useful. A good electronic dictionary is helpful as well, which will give you many example sentences. http://jisho.org is so/so as well, and free.
Good luck!
I find that science history and biography gives a good understanding of scientific methods, and when written for the lay-person, doesn't get so bogged down in technical jargon.
Here are a few of my favorites:
(Also check out his biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman)
And here are a few on my to read list:
I hope that helps.
I think the word, "great teacher" is a little like the word "genius". It shouldn't be thrown around too often, as they're so completely rare. When I think of great teaching I think of a couple of teachers at my school that are amazing.
I could say much much more on the subject, I'm sure.
Rick Shiels is a PGA coach that posts a lot of content on Youtube. He did a complete swing guide that is a very good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG1vJJAceYM&amp;list=PLKnkfgDBi62mkWMNmNipPUUep6vcj8nYm
Check out Ben Hogan's book called The Five Lessons. It is pretty much the beginner's bible as it sets you up with the fundamentals: https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972
Don't be afraid to ask your buddy LOADS of questions. If he did paid lessons at some point, you are getting all that information for free. Take advantage of it.
Don't worry about "new technology" in the newer clubs. A set of irons from 10 years ago will be just fine. Get a putter you like and feel comfortable with. Possibly don't even think about swinging a driver until you are able to consistently make good contact with irons/hybrids/woods.
Out of college, my sister got a job with Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in Garmisch, Germany.
It's a Department of Defense resort for troops- so she gets awesome benefits, and will be able to retire with pension after 20 years. And they paid for her flight.
http://www.edelweisslodgeandresort.com/employment
Not sure if that helps though. Good luck.
I've also heard that the book Vagabonding by Rolf Potts is pretty useful in this type of situation.
http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1417675510&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=vagabonding
Nightwatch is a pretty good book for beginner level that I find is better for those that don't have a telescope or binoculars. Helps give you the basics.
Turn Left At Orion is another good book for beginners, but it is better if you have a telescope or pair of binoculars to get the full use out of this book. It is probably the most detailed beginner book IMO.
Sky and Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas is a very good star map to use, though it is only that.......star maps. So it is good to use once you learned the basics.
Well there are a lot of useful links in this /r/math post (check the comments, too).
In addition to Khan Academy, there's MIT OCW, Paul's Math Notes, and PatrickJMT. There's also the Art of Problem Solving books.
But really, you don't need to watch calculus videos if you're going to take classes this summer. Your time might be better spent doing the exercises on Khan Academy to make sure there aren't gaps in your knowledge.
I highly recommend books by James Gleick, specifically Chaos, Genius, Isaac Newton, and The Information. Also, Polya's How to Solve It, GEB (join us in /r/geb!), and GH Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. Here are some lists of popular math books.
You might find this collection of links on efficient study habits helpful.
>What do you mean by fringe beliefs?
Well, anti-semitism isn't that rare, but it's not mainstream. It's less common yet to talk to somebody who unapologetically identifies with it, much less is willing to leave a religion for it.
I suggest you get this book: http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Religions-Plus-Huston-Smith/dp/0061660183
A local library should have it if you can't afford it. It's a good, scholarly but sympathetic look at the major religions in the world.
Many religions may give you solace for this personal hell of yours, but do remember that each demands much of you, often quite similar things.
I'm off to bed for the night. I'd welcome any more details you're willing to share, by PM or otherwise. Cheers.
My classes start on the 4th. :) I've bought most of my textbooks already but I really need this Japanese workbook for my intro Japanese course. I moved it from my books list to my main list so its easy to find if you end up picking me. :) This is a really great contest and even if I don't win I think it's fantastic that you're willing to help people get their hands on much needed textbooks. <3
I feel like I post this every time someone posts about management, but I really mean it. I wish I had read and followed nearly every word of advice in Teach Like a Champion. I attribute all of my success in managing student behavior to this book. It changed my life (very dramatic, but really made me happier day-to-day).
As expected, my N5 didn't go well for me, as I only seriously started practicing like a few days ago. Although, listening part went well (or so I think) for me, as I'm watching Japanese stuff on a regular basis for ~7 years now.
In any case, I'm more determined now. I'm following KLC book, KLC Anki deck, JLPT N5 Vocabulary Anki deck, and An Introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar, & Language. Also, I have Making Sense of Japanese but haven't started reading it yet.
I tried Memrise too but didn't go well for me. I found Anki better. Now just have to devote some time off Anki to study grammar too.
Hope this helps, and all the best!
Listen to me right now. Listen to me good.
Remembering the Kanji is probably one of the best ways to achieve what you're talking about. However, according to the introduction of the book, it will hurt you to read it alongside a Japanese course or in conjunction with other Kanji-memorizing methods. So just dedicate a few weeks to learning the 2,200 Kanji this books teaches. It claims that you can do it in 4-6 weeks if you're dedicated enough. Highly recommended.
Edit: Oh, and then there is a second and third volume which help with pronunciation of Kanji and introduce you to advanced Kanji, respectively. But even mastering the first volume puts you at a great advantage to learning Japanese.
xizar answered already, but KLC, Kanji Learner's Course, is a book by Andrew Conning that presents the kanji in an order that prioritizes both useful to building up future kanji vocabulary as well as usefulness to the student of Japanese. All kanji from the Joyo list are included, as well as kanji popular in names or that are expected to be added to the Joyo list. Each new kanji also has a mnemonic story that helps a student remember the kanji. I really do suggest checking it out if you are looking around for a kanji resource, it's worth far more that what you pay for it.
Check out Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". Learn the kana, know stroke order, pronunciation, etc, but realize they are not a substitute for kanji. You need both to be able to do anything besides read children's books and play really old video games.
Get yourself an SRS (Spaced Repetition Software). Basically really intelligent flash cards. The software tells you when to review them so you don't waste time reviewing what you already know. I recommend Anki, but Surusu also has a large number of users. Both are free.
Check All Japanese All the Time. The author, Khatzumoto, tends to take things to extremes, and he verges off into personal developement a lot. If you stick to the Table of Contents I just linked to and take everything he says with a few grains of salt you'll be fine. A more moderate, more Spanish-focused view can be found on Spanish Only.
YES TOTALLY WORTH!
Khatzumoto : AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com
Khatzumoto learned to be fluent in Japanese in 18 months. He did this through complete immersion. He would listen to Japanese every single day even if he didn't understand most of it at first. Learning is all about TIME. He learned how to read and write fluently by going over many sentences through SRS(Spaced Repitition System). As for Kanji, he recommends the Heisig method which I myself found extremely helpful and have a much easier time learning Kanji. If you don't want to purchase you can find a torrent very easily.
Explanation in video bits:
Watching Japanese videos without subtitles
4 stages of listening
You'll suck at it less as time goes on
I do highly recommend watching all 3 parts of the videos as there is a lot more information in them.
READ THESE:
10,000 Hours of Listening Comprehension
10,000 Sentences
Additional Sources I use for Learning 日本語:
Anki Deck for Sentences
Grammar: imabi.net
Dictionary: tangorin.com
Learning at first is overwhelming but definitely will get easier over time. But that's the thing, you have to give it a chance.
Reading: Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf I've always been all arms in my swing, but want to (need to) bring my game in the next level.
Hit a new indoor spot this past weekend and Jesus does that make a difference.
Using a shitty old banged up Wilson driver (still haven't pulled the trigger on my Cobra F7) and bringing rotation into it, I was hitting 240-270yds reliably and straight, which is about 30 yards better than my best drives. Felt great too.
Can't wait to get comfortable with it and pair it with a new driver and some decent soft balls and really drive the green.
This is the first book I've read by Rachel Aaron, but as it happens I have read her writing help book (2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love - also available on Kindle Unlimited) and quite liked her style. In fact I wonder now why I didn't pick up any of her other books at the time ...
Anyway! This book is a solid urban fantasy story, low on the romance and high on the morbid humor. Although it is the first in a series, it does not end on a cliffhanger.
Honestly, I had a huge slice issue until this year when I actually started trying to fix it instead of playing into it.
Grip was stage one (don't go too strong, that causes a whole new set of slicing issues potentially), backswing check points have been stage 2 (face angle at parallel, club angle at the top, wrist at the top). Ive hit quite well on the range lately since I havent been able to get out due to weather, but with my lesson saturday I'm hoping to get out the next weekend.
If you need something to read:
https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972
If you need people to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFHZHhZaH7Rc_FOMIzUziJA - great resource on club face, swing path, and face to path
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNk5S5zjcX9iyOmbK2AzdVA - just really good resource for later tinkering
That looks like an awesome book, I'll definitely get it. Thanks! In exchange, for any traveler, I highly recommend Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, and also the website Travelfish which was indispensable when I spent a month in Thailand, and it's great for SE Asia in general.
I've never used Japanese for Dummies, so I don't know how far it takes you and how well it allows you to transition to more advanced learning materials. As has already been mentioned, the easiest method is to exhaust all the grammar your current book can teach. The most popular alternatives to JfD are Genki and Japanese from Zero. If you asked anyone who studied Japanese for a while, if they used either book or at least heard about them, they'll most likely say yes. On top of that, it's easy to build up on your knowledge after you finished the textbook. After Genki 1, you can use Genki 2 and after you finished that as well you'll be quite good at Japanese.
If you want to practise natural speaking and writing, I'd recommend to take a look at an app called HelloTalk. It basically lets you chat with native speakers of a language of your choice for free. It might feel like it's still a little too early to try that but when I look back at how I learnt Japanese, I wish that I would have used that app much, much sooner. It's never to early to start speaking/ writing!
I would have to strongly caution against both Bill Bryson and Bragg's The Adventure of English. I like Bryson as much as the next guy--he's super easy to read--but PumpkinCrook's on the money with this one. As for Bragg... oof, what can I say? I read it before I had ever taken a Linguistics course and even then it bothered the hell out of me. The style is unscholarly to a fault and it's also mind-numbingly anglocentric (didn't you know that English is the most versatile and resilient language?!). It's fine, I guess, but you could do so much better.
I'd recommend The Origins and Development of the English Language or The Stories of English. The former is more of a textbook; and the latter is daunting in its size, I know, but it's so lovingly done that you can't fault him--with both books, you can more or less hop around according to your fancies.
As for general background, I'd second Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It's over 15 years old by now and assuredly outdated, but it reads so easily and you learn so much (without devolving into the sloppiness of Bryson or Blagg!) that I must recommend it almost with affection.
everyone is saying your swing is flat, but not really giving you advice with how to fix it: i'll try. first thing i noticed is you're standing too far away from the ball (this shows up more in the driver than the 8-iron). i had this problem last year, and my instructor said the arms should just hang down in a natural position. when you put a club in your hands, then you address the ball and you should be at a proper distance away from the ball (trust me it's tough getting used to standing that close, but worth it). i also had an issue with swaying my hips from back to front instead of rotating them around my spine. i believe this was caused by my standing too far away from the ball; along with too wide of a stance. from the front driver angle, it's kind of hard to see if you are doing the same, but it looks like you do on your down swing and through impact; i think can also bring your feet together a little (shoulder width apart). about rotating vs swaying was something my instructor said that really clicked (finally!) with me was a quote from (Ben Hogan's book)[http://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972]. he says "imagine you are hitting a shot inside a barrel." basically if you are in a barrel that is as wide as your hips and you have to swing, you will rotate your hips as you cannot sway back and forth. from there, work on your take away ... set down an alignment rod and take the club back on the shot line. this should help you improve your flatness if you incorporate what i've already mentioned. i hope this helps a little, and i hope you get to your goal to be scratch. cheers
Huston Smith. He was the biggest influence in my walk back to faith. He was so passionate about teaching the world about religion; it was truly inspiring. His book, The World's Religions, is a wonderful primer for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of their own faith and the faiths of the world.
It's not a proof, but I always considered the equation yielding the Mandelbrot set to be elegant, and its result visually beautiful.
Here's a good explanation that assumes very little starting knowledge.
Chaos by James Gleick is a fantastic narrative of the history and personalities of fractal geometry and chaos theory. It's the book that got me interested, before I knew any higher math, in the eighties when it was a bestseller.
I know I must be missing some, but these are all that I can think of at the moment.
Fiction:
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
White Noise by Don Delilo
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DFW
Infinite Jest by DFW
Of these, you can't go wrong with Infinite Jest and the Collected Fictions of Borges. His Dark Materials is an easy and classic read, probably the lightest fare on this list.
Non-Fiction:
The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy
Chaos by James Gleick
How to be Gay by David Halperin
Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
Secret Historian by Justin Spring
Of these, Secret Historian was definitely the most interesting, though How to be Gay was a good intro to queer theory.
Seriously? Born to Run. Apparently once you get done reading it you are 100%, without-a-doubt convinced that humans specifically evolved to run long distances. So convinced that you run out and buy the first pair of VFFs you encounter.
I've read the Lieberman and Bramble's paper. It's a fantastic account of all the adaptations humans have amassed to become bipedal runners. These things shouldn't be surprising though. One would expect any arboreal animal to adopt similar enhancements as they move into a ground-based lifestyle. Their hypothesis is intriguing, but it falls quite short. Essentially it's a just so story, just like the aquatic ape hypothesis.
I'm not an anthropologist, so I don't personally have a concrete response to L&B. However, Pickering and Bunn do and they make a pretty good case against PR while shooting down L&B's idea.
Anyway, the fact remains that there is no evidence for early hominids engaging in this behavior. And there probably never will be. Personally, I think the idea of running a marathon, where there is a 50/50 chance that you may not eat after you're done and then have to try again sounds incredibly stupid in a primeval environment and discounts the eons of other eating and foraging habits early hominids would have known about. Also, even if there was a 100% success rate with PR, I'm still not convinced it is an optimal foraging habit, given that there are other options available.
Thanks for the reply! Are these the Genki books you're referring to?
Offhand I'd put myself as an Intermediate-Beginner. Kana is no problem, but I only have around 60 or so Kanji under my belt, and my vocab/verbal was about the level to get me though typical everyday conversations, albeit with some groping around with very basic and bad grammar to make myself understood when I don't know how to say something. One of the bigger points is just that I haven't been speaking / listening to it for the last 4 years.
Is Nikkei this website?
I guess I would want to get a lot of math / physics / mechanical vocab so I can describe results from stress tests and failure loads and so on. I'm not aiming to have easy, flowing conversation skills in 2 months or anything, but if I can understand most of what the other engineers are saying, and make myself understood quickly at least, I'd be satisfied.
Yeah, I haven't set myself up for success very well; all of my blocked-off self-study time ended up getting eaten up with business trips and late nights in the lab, and then the transfer date got set recently.
I've been hoping to find an outside tutor / course if for no other reason than to have some time that I know couldn't get sucked into work-time, but you may be right; setting some focused time each day to work on vocab could be my best bet.
In college I used Keller and Russel's Learn to Read Latin and didn't have any luck with it.
A few years later I picked up Lingua Latina, (and its supporting materials), and did a LOT better. The latter uses an immersion based method where you try to figure out what's going on based on cognates. Over time you pick up conjugation and declension pretty naturally instead of trying to memorize tables.
There are supporting materials with classical vs ecclesiastical pronunciation which you might find helpful as well.
Edit: Check out the Amazon preview I linked, it should give you a good idea of what to expect.
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, Yvon Chouinard's book that's kind of about building the business that is the Patagonia we know today, but is a lot more about his philosophies and ideologies and how we can all be better and do better for our planet.
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. A fairly short book that's not some abstract ideas or a story about traveling the world (that's Marco Polo Didn't Go There, which is also fantastic), but an actual how to book on doing it. It helped me, and has helped people I've given the book to, understand that extensive travel isn't just for the ultra wealthy, it is easy to do and achievable for everyone if you make travel your priority.
I bought the mott media reprint of the original Spencerian workbooks off of Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088062096X It's rather old-fashioned, but it'll get you the basics and you can adapt it to regular use without much effort. Spencerian was originally supposed to be efficient, and with practice, you're supposed to be able to write it at a pretty good speed while still having it be easy to read.
Do you want to become a theist (start believing in one or more gods) or just find a community and set of rituals? I think you can have either one without the other, depending on what your goals are. There are things like the Unitarian church as well as Sunday Assembly (essentially church for atheists).
For me personally, I didn't feel like I had found purpose in life until after I became an atheist and had to discover for myself what I found important in life. Having a family also helps provide purpose :)
That all said, I really enjoyed the textbook we used in my World Religions course in college (note, I linked to the "smile" version of the Amazon link, which is a small way you can have 'purpose' by having Amazon contribute a portion of a purchase price to a charity of your choice)
I think it's a kinda poor way to learn kanji on it's own, but for kana and general vocabulary it's fine. It's a good supplement to use in conjunction with other resources.
For kanji a friend of mine recommended Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. His method is working the best for me.
I don't bother much with KDP select anymore, as the changes in Amazon's affiliate program has made free giveaways less appealing to book bloggers; their affiliate codes don't bring in the cash anymore.
Unfortunately even if you're not in it for the money a steady production schedule is the only way to keep visible. Amazon heavily weights its search results towards new releases. If it takes you a year to publish another book, well, by the time that year has past your first book has been hidden in search obscurity for 10 months.
There are only really two things I can suggest.
Anyway, good luck.
I have the same scope and I use the Telrad as well as the 8x50 included with the scope.
If you can't see any constellations with the naked eye, and you don't plan on doing to darker sites, then the Telrad won't be very useful to you. If the constellations are visible but you can't make out what ones they are, the best advice I can give you is to purchase a star chart like this and use it in conjunction with monthly star charts you can print off. those will help you identify the major constellations visible to you on that particular night and the Telrad can help you move from star to star until you find what you need.
I picked up spencerian. Its nice but very slow. Properly practiced, most cursive are faster to write than print. Part of the reason they exist. Though spencerian, super slow. Will improve with muscle memory though.
If you need something faster, business script could be what you need.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/088062096X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1487481437&amp;sr=8-3&amp;pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&amp;keywords=spencerian+handwriting
I have been working through that with a flex pen. Very rewarding but its kinda weird to re learn to write at 32, but like you my hand writing was always crap.
From that book i learned i missed many fundamentals they simply did not teach. Oh well.
I'm not fluent, but the kanji resource that I like best is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course; I feel that it does the best job of anything that I've seen in terms of explaining similar kanji and how to tell them apart. There is a decent number of pages available in the Look Inside preview, so maybe browse through and see if any of the explanations for similar kanji early on (木 vs. 本, 休 vs. 体, 牛 vs. 午, 北 vs. 比, 刀 vs. 刃) click with you?