I hate loose ends, so I just deleted my two other blogs: Cantonese Language and Guide to Manglish. Neither of them were going anywhere, so I don’t think it’s a great loss. On the off-chance you were looking for them, you’ll now know where they’ve gone.
I want to/intend to create more learning materials for Cantonese in the future, but I don’t have the time at the moment. (Plus, my Cantonese isn’t… well-established enough yet to create a really useful course, although I have a comprehensive method mapped out mentally. It [my Canto] needs to metaphorically boil a while longer before being safe for metaphorical consumption.)
In other news: my 書面語 Anki deck tells me I can now read 2705 Hanzi (Cantonese pronunciations]; my 國語 deck says I can read 844 Hanzi using Mandarin pronunciations. These numbers are underestimates of what I actually know because 1) 廣東語 and songs are separated into separate decks (and so characters learnt there are not included) and 2) I don’t add every single character I learn to an Anki deck – but every day brings me a little closer to no longer having to constantly trawl through dictionaries.
Laters!
~E
…but clearly I haven’t been writing very much either recently – I have semi-purposefully neglected to get the Internet at the place where I’m staying in Hong Kong. This has been a real boost for my Cantonese inasmuch as there are now waaaaaay fewer ways for me to get distracted. Blog writing (in English) and blog reading (in English) then is classed as a distraction.
Whilst in my Internet-free bubble though, I’ve nearly finished the Anki deck I was working on and I’ll be uploading it sometime soon – it’s built off of the 3500-character Taiwan deck, and now includes Cantonese pronunciations for each character as well as their Cangjie codes. Furthermore, in general, elements of the character are also searchable: for example, you could find 漸 by typing 水十十中, or 水, or 十田十, or even 竹一中 (corresponding to the water, car and axe elements respectively).
Each character has multiple keywords, of which one will be in bold type, which I feel overcomes a problem of Heisig’s one-keyword method (inasmuch as the actual meaning of the character is more clear).
Anyway, I’m having a pretty good time in Hong Kong and there’s plenty to write about… maybe I’ll start writing properly again at some point if I get a bit more time.
In the meantime then… best of luck to everyone else studying hard! Gambatte!
As I mentioned a couple posts back, I’ll be moving house/country shortly and changing jobs. I’ve got a few posts lined up for the interim but I might not be around to respond to comments immediately.
Looking back, I realise I’ve done diddly-squat on the music side of things recently. The main reason for this was that I had to take a forced sabbatical (the house I was living in of the summer was, how to say, insecure), but it’s not improved my playing at all.
However, I did recently join a concert band recently playing my flute. (Flute rather than saxophone because there’s only one realistic choice when your sole method of transport is a bicycle.) This was good fun and was a nice reminder of how playing music is very much a social occupation; I haven’t played in groups as much as perhaps I should, so it was a great experience. I’m sorry to be leaving it so soon!
Onto language: the poll on Cangjie input is strongly suggesting I should go down the freebie route – so, at some unspecified point in the medium-term future I’ll publish a free Anki deck based on the Taiwan Grades 1-8 deck already available. It’ll feature Cantonese readings for all characters, input codes, meanings in English (possibly Chinese too) and Heisig-style ordering. And, once I’ve checked out copyright restrictions on Heisig keywords, mnemonic stories too.
There’s been no progress either on determining the most common ~1000 HKSCS characters – I’m thinking of maybe Googling each one in turn and ranking them based on the number of results may be the way to go. Other suggestions are still welcome and I’d be delighted if there was a pre-made list kicking around somewhere.
Also, for you Cantonese learners out there, J40 has virtually single-handedly put together a free offline Cantonese dictionary. I’ve been using it for a few days on Ubuntu and it’s great – check it out here.
Finally, thanks to y’all for reading my ramblings 
- E
I had a puncture three days ago. I was six or seven miles from my house, it was 8pm (so no bike shops open) and it was raining torrentially.
Walking back gave me a lot of time to think (two hours, in fact) – I kinda realised that all this writing (in English) was just a way of procrastinating from other tasks. I’ve started timing how long writing each post takes up too – it’s more than I thought and it’s time I could more productively spend learning Cantonese.
So for starters, no procrastinating Guide to Manglish – at least not for a while – and that’s just fine. I might do a post on it in here once in a while though. Thousand Mile Journey? Also ripe for a scale-back. Maybe a post a fortnight or something.
At least I’ll have more to say when I write about my Cantonese progress 
I know I’ve drifted away from writing specifically about language and music recently; it’s mostly because there are only a finite number of things to say on the subject of how best to learn a language or an instrument (at least not without extensive plagiarisation).
First thing’s first – I will keep doing posts on language and music – but perhaps not in quite the same way. On the Cantonese front, amongst other things, I figured it might be nice to review and/or share some films, music and TVB shows, just in case anyone’s stuck for entertainment. I might also do a post on typing using Cangjie if anyone’s interested (took a while to figure out, and so will probably also take a long time to write up!). For music… there’s not much I can say that can top the tips on Neil’s blog, so I’m not going to try too hard (although I’m not going to ditch writing about the sax altogether!).
What I do want to write about more is learning in general – especially on things like education for the masses, its role in modern society, and how it might be improved. This may necessarily overlap with other things less related to learning, but I’ll try not to drift too far off-topic!
Finally: thanks for reading, commenting here and writing other fine blogs! I’ve learnt a lot while keeping this blog from other people (that I wouldn’t have otherwise) – I think it’s great that blogging is a two-way process
- Eldon
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