Good books

So, Monday night I received a book that I ordered by recommendation from Stu Jay Raj. The book is Cracking the Chinese Puzzles by T. K. Ann. After making it rather quickly through the first few chapters, I started in on the parts where it presents the ideas, maybe you should say the mindset, of the characters. I actually am really enjoying this book. I think I need to go slow through it and think carefully about each character and Bushou in order to gain full benefit from the book. It seems like the writing system should be relatively simpler after I can learn most of these. I am excited about it, but it's still overwhelming when I am trying to do regular Chinese homework in addition to Uyghur.

I also would recommend the set of textbooks Integrated Chinese for anyone who is thinking of studying Mandarin. I hear that most textbooks concentrate on the Beijing dialect (eh) 兒話, which is kind of funny when we are doing traditional characters. I prefer the traditional characters because they seem to have a lot more `character' than the simplified. That also means that they have a lot more strokes to remember. It's okay though. It's manageable.

I have modified my learning plan for the languages a little. I haven't been keeping up on Uyghur so well. Getting this midterm finished should remove the mental block I have on just studying. I will try to finish it up today. I think I will try the 10,000 sentence method of continuing to study Uyghur rather than just memorizing vocabulary. I asked my teacher to provide me with all sorts of sentences from different contexts, so that should be helpful. Japanese is going OK. I'm getting to 100 Kanji this week (about 30 more to do by the end of the week). I noticed one interesting difference between the Chinese and Japanese characters.

Special:

(Mandarin):

專

(japanese):

専