Singularity on the Plane

Here's the new word dump:

And my word count is now up to 1090.

PS: The song soure for the file is in the title, but it is in 日本語.

Another set of words from a song:

Which brings my word count to 1057.

Another set of words from a song:

With this update, I think my word list is now above 1000. Not really sure though, didn't check it at home.

Found these links which seems to be a great Nihongo-learning resource:

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/: "This site explains Japanese grammar in a systematic step-by-step process and is released under the Creative Commons License. It was created as a resource for those who want to learn Japanese grammar 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."

At last I found a Japanese course that teaches the grammar bottom-up! I believe this slow but sure method will create a firm understanding when learning a language.

http://www.studyjapanese.org/:  Contains lots of lessons (traditional, not grammatically structured like the one above).

Another set of words from a song:

This brings my word count up to 974.

SIC is… painfully… slow… 

The only exam left is Combinatorics on Tuesday and Praktikum ARSI on an unknown date. Can't really relax since Combinatorics will be tough.

I've played around more with GTK# and managed to produce a program called WordFinder. Basically it searches for lines in a file that starts with a specified string. WordFinder uses incremental search so it's pretty cool to see it in action. Here's a still image:

(sorry for the word choice)

What's with the Japanese text in the UI? Well, you can easily query GTK# for a stock string (like "gtk-help") and GTK# will return a string based on the environment's language (my Window's default language is Japanese so GTK# returns "ヘルプ" (HERUPU)). Internationalization support is great in GTK#.

What's the use of WordFinder for me anyway? I use it to easily find words for making mnemonics. Suppose I want to create a mnemonic to easily memorize the meaning of "tatakau", which is "to fight". First I divide "tatakau" ito "TA", "TAKA", and "U". Then using WordFinder I can easily find words starting with "TA", "TAKA", and "U". Suppose I then choose these words:

TA-at
TAKA-bur
U-ang

The last step is to make a sentence(s) (preferably funny or weird) that links "TAat", "TAKAbur", "Uang", and "TO FIGHT". An example is:

"ada orang TAat dan orang TAKAbur bertemu di jalan (visualize it!). mereka sama-sama melihat Uang satu milyar tergeletak, so they FIGHT each other to claim the money (again, visualize it!)."

Using mnemonic like the one above is superior (harder to forget) than blindly repeating

"TATAKAU means TO FIGHT"
"TATAKAU means TO FIGHT"
"TATAKAU means TO FIGHT"
…

Creating good mnemonics requires creativity, so memorizing words won't be such a dull activity by integrating "mnemonic creation".

New memorized word from a song:

With this my memorized word count is 941.

It's test week so I won't devote a lot of my time for non-test stuffs.