Musings

delete your twitter or similar social media account, including mastodon. buy a low end mobile phone and install only essential apps on it. Your favorite tiktok or douyin do not fall into the category of “essential”. setup a rss reader and only follow updates from authors you think are worth listening to. you need to become the chief editor of your own daily newspaper. if you don’t curate your own timeline, it will be outsouced to an algorithm, whose ultimate goal is to glue your eyeballs at the screen for as long as possible....

This sounds very conterintuitive: For second language learners, reading popular smut books (such as Fifty Shades of Grey) may be better than reading high brow books (such as 1984 or David Copperfield), which is especially true for novice English readers. The reasons I hold grudge against reading classics for language learning are multifolds. The most obvious one being: The vocabularies and expressions used in classical novels are oftentimes dated. If you were to converse with others in the style of Chales Dickens, your English will come off as archaic if not utterly confusing....

There is one important trait of the human race that distinguishes itself from other species: We can keep working on a task in a consistent way for a very long time. That’s how the highest skyscraper in your city gets build. That’s how your favorite author finishes his/her fiction series. The same goes for language learning. A Second language can not be mastered in a short time. It is a marathon, not a sprint....

There are tons of youtubers out there promoting techniques to improve your memory. They claim their method can help you read books faster and recall every nitty-gritty details of the book like you just took a mental screenshot of the book. Being a good sceptic as I am, I don’t buy any of them. Rather than being a curse, forgetting things is actually a key function of a human brain that we need to cherish....

Different people tackle the language learning problem with different approaches. Some people favor rote memorization, some go to the route of immersion and binge watch every TV show on Netflix with or without subtitles, some believe in the power of capitalism and pay others to teach them. After struggling with English learning myself for years, I come to accept the impossibility of acchieving a native level of fluency. Allow me to explain....

This may sound very controversial for the uninitiated: To master a foreign language, you need to to keep you mouth shut (especially at your beginner level) and focus on getting a huge amount of input into your brain cells first. Let me explain. I don’t know about you, but I started my English learning journey since I was a little kid but it was not until when I graduated from college and came across Stephen Krashen’s second language acquision theory one day, however, did my command of this language start to get better....

James Clear’s Atomic Habit is a wonderful book which can truly guide you to develop good habits while at the same time get rid of the bad ones. But for foreign language learners, if you are truly ambitious, by ambitious I mean you want to reach a native-fluency level, putting in half an hour each day won’t be enough. Use the same analogy as James Clear, puting in your saving account 1 dollar each day might accumulates to a decent amount of money in the long run, but you won’t die a millionare with investment of that scale....

In the past, Flaubert implied, idiots had had no clue as to what the carbon structure of diamonds was. Their shallowness had been entirely and reliably evident. But now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he still was an idiot- a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about....

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. – George Orwell 最近做起了語言醫生，觀察到中文使用的兩個病症：信息模糊以及混淆概念。 使用模糊的語言，通常傳遞模棱兩可的信息，比如「地球可能是園的，也可能是方的，但是具體問題要具體分析， 不能一概而論」，又比如前些時間的「既要全面清零，又要精準防控」。 混淆概念的典型案例是：經常使用「單位」來指代「公司」。 大學剛畢業時我在一家公司實習，一個同事接完電話開玩笑說：對方問我是哪個單位的，我好久沒聽到單位這個詞了，有點蒙，一個電話穿越了幾十年，尋思着口袋裏的糧票不夠點外賣了。 以後在朋友圈發「我們能夠三年不感染病毒，都是國家在保護我們，現在國家的保護沒有了」之類的言論之前，最好先搞清楚國家和政府的區別。

A few quotes from some books I read recently: The Luddites are among history’s more misunderstood protagonists. Their quarrel was not with the machines themeselves, even though they wrecked quite a few of them; they were opposed to the fact that so few owned the machines. It was the social arrangement not the technology they objected to. – Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism...