Japanese Lesson 1 part 2

In this part of the lesson we went over the different alphabets for lack of a better term, of Japanese.
Hiragana:

• Used as the "alphabet" of the "Alphabet" (ie. Kanji)
• sounding out and understanding the more difficult Kanji
• Words without Kanji
• Suffixes
• Particles
• Verb and Adjective inflections

Katakana

• Has the same sounds as Hiragana
• Used for foreign words 
• Scientific words
• Onomatopoeia
• Emphasis (italics)
• Food often

Kanji

• Chinese characters repurposed for Japanese
• Make up the bulk of the language vocab (needing 2000+ to read Japanese)
• Each character has multiple pronunciations
• Can be Noun, Adjective or Verb

I didn't really have any trouble with the Chapter and the way this is written just sweeps me along for the ride so I don't really notice that I'm working hard. I think its going to take some work to get them straight in my head for their purposes but they aren't that difficult, honestly I'll just quiz myself for a while and keep writing it down so I get the correlations correct. So all in all not really having a hard with this at all so far and being fairly entertained. If only my other classes were as entertaining and snarky as this I'd be happy.

Rails Lesson 1

Rails Lessons with Jayson

So as I've been learning Ruby on Rails I have encountered a few different ways of studying and learning to program. Learning Rails with my mentor Jayson allows me to ask questions from the inane through as advanced as I can imagine and get answers worth asking the questions. While this approach is pretty much the most difficult I can think of, I am learning things that I can't learn from books about programing and the career. I can also get very well thought out answers to questions I hardly knew how to ask. I can't even express how helpful and amazing this is for me, cogent answers!

Today was the second actual lesson though he has been tutoring me for a couple of months. I had a particularly bad experience last week with a coding study group and that stimulated a change of plans. To bridge the gap of my knowledge and to make learning more relevant to where I am he started developing lessons on his own to find my weaknesses and teach me the main points I was unable to find elsewhere, (example: learning Terminal, the Mac base program). While I am still studying Rails though books I am getting an advanced/supplementary education on the side as well. At the moment we are meeting x2 a week for long brain bending sessions of complete and utter world reorientation. 

Today was a redo of the last lesson for the problem set he made, for more practice and an advanced understanding of functions, expressions and classes as well as format for calling functions. Last week's lecture was on loops specifically "for" and "while". 

• "For" is a loop that continues as long as there are objects to run through the loop and reacts as those objects are available. They come out in order. Most common type of loop.
• "While" loops run as long as a condition is true and don't require an object. This is the most general type of loop. 

These can be mutated into one another, written as a different type of loop.

Today's lecture was on Expressions and types of Literal Expressions. I have notes of these for my notebook, making me very happy that I grabbed that new heavier paper and another pen this weekend.

Homework:

Come up with other methods for the Venue class and implement them within the class.

Japanese Intro

So, Nick and I are starting a round of Japanese and this is a review of that event.

Goals

1. Learn Japanese with Nick so he has someone to talk to and I get Nick time.
2. Study Japanese in addition to all the other things I am working on.
3. Clean my study area.
4. When I sit at my desk I study.
5. Mon. and Thur. at 5 I study with Nick.
6. Create a study Blog (heheh already had one from when I was studying Accounting, but this is still a good idea even though previously I sucked at keeping up with it.


This is devoted to #6; I am creating a section for my Japanese class to chronicle my studies. So far in this first lesson we've been using TextFugu's free section for our experiment. This website is well, well put together as a class so far. There is a lot of educational theory at the beginning to prep people for what they are getting themselves into. Since I already have Chinese experience I understand with greater depth how incredibly relevant that is. So we'll see how it goes.