First an explication: a few weeks ago I had a revelation that computational linguistics is the field for me. So, I found the best book I could on the subject, which seems to be Manning and Schuetze's Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (FSNLP). Just reading the introduction on Google Books was enough to convince me to drop some hard cash. The writing is brilliant. I'm only through Chapter One, but it's already worth it.
So I've spent the past few days in Seoul, and I can't help but pay attention to the written language, especially after an engaging conversation on the subject last night. Going in knowing little to nothing about Korean, a few things struck me in particular about the writing.
While learning sentences in Chinese that introduce new grammatical concepts, I find it useful to draw lines between words to show their grammatical interrelationship (not to mention drawing brackets around the words, already a non-trivial task given the lack of spaces in Zhongwen). In the course of drawing these lines, I found myself breaking the words out of their ordinary position in the sentence so as to make the drawing of the syntax tree of interconnected words more natural.
I've been heavy into language acquisition the last three years. I'll just quickly share the books and other learning resources that have helped me the most, leaving out the rest.
Last year I had the opportunity to travel to Sweden for a week. Finding out a few weeks ahead of time, I started studying Swedish. By the time I flew there, I had studied less than 9 hours total. However, I found that I was able to understand a great deal, and even communicate with people in basic situations. I will give a few examples, with translations in German and English for comparison.
Ever since doing research on sunglint at the Stevens' Light and Life Lab I've been fascinated by the simplest thing: wavy water surfaces. A favorite summertime activity of mine is to sit by a lake and watch the waves on the water's surface. Now, different people of different backgrounds and inclinations may see different things when they look at the water. I will explain here what I see, how I see it, and what thoughts the sight kindles for me.
In the penultimate lecture of his Financial Markets course, entitled "Option Markets", Schiller discusses several important facets of financial options. I found his discussion of option pricing to be most intriguing, kindling thoughts relating to the physics of diffusion. Here I dump a few ideas I had on the subject, and hopefully I'll be able to flesh them out later on, either after doing some more research or with the help of someone knowledgeable in the subject (anyone?). My comments on diffusion are very rough, because I never studied that in school for some reason. Anyhow, here goes.
Can you see what's wrong with this picture?
As with natural languages, most of the tools are poor, most of the methods are ineffective, and the books unreadable. Successful language learners gather quality resources and use proven references. The same applies to programming. Here I organize programming into four application areas with my recommended resources for each.
For some time I have fretted over which Asian language to learn. Japanese appeals to me for its sweet sound, and because I take interest in Japanese artwork (particularly the video games and animated films) that they have produced. However, I have rarely met Japanese-speaking people. Chinese is much more utilitarian. Just the sheer number of Chinese speakers and China's recent economic success ensures that any student of Chinese will have ample opportunity to practice. For this reason, I have chosen to study Chinese.