Edit: Apparently I had nothing better to do than this evening, so here's a wall of text. Hope it's useful for you.

EditII: Didn't expect so many people to look at this, either.. so I'll say: this isn't an in depth zero-to-hero guide for Japanese, this is just a tidy gathering of the path I took to learn Japanese to my current level (minus a few textbooks), which is definitely still very far from fluent. I'm personally learning Japanese for its literature, and the vast majority of what I did was aimed at getting into books as fast as possible (cough Heisig cough) -- if you don't care about reading, I'll be the first to say that a lot of what's here might not be interesting to you. Google around and see if my suggestions fit your learning style or not. Japanese is weird in that there are literally resources for everything, so I'm sure there's something that fits you.

EditIII: Just wanted to link the DJTguide, a library of tons of resources organized into different skills and stuff. If you don't like my suggestions, I'd personally start here to find something else.

intro -- textbook stuff -- post-textbook stuff -- tutoring -- loose timeline

I have lived in Japan (for school) for two years, speaking nothing before I arrived (fully intended on going to Spain instead lol)...and am now somewhere between N2/N1, which is the level of fluency required to work with Japanese businesses/join a Japanese-conducted program. At this point no conversation is a problem, I can read modern literature for enjoyment (older stuff literally employed a partially different language and requires its own study), and follow movies/comedy shows/anime without subtitles if I'm pay attention.

I didn't try nearly as hard as I could have, so I honestly think you could reach my level of "fluency" if you make a religion of it -- a research student at my university came speaking nothing one year ago and now speaks notably better than I do across the board (on behalf of being forced to communicate with people for like 12 hours a day). Granted, you don't have the luxury of multiple Japanese people needing to communicate with you in order to do their job, and thus adjusting their language to your level to communicate with you all day every day... but I still think you can learn enough in a year to thoroughly enjoy yourself, at the very least.

Here's how I'd do that.

Textbook Stuff

1. Read The Kanji -- don't use this for kanji. Make a free account, use it to learn the Hiragana and Katakana (two of Japanese's three alphabet systems; 48 characters each and phonetic. One is for Japanese-origin words, the other is for loan words and other random things). It just throws flash cards at you with each of the symbols; you can probably commit them to memory in a few hours. It's okay if you forget a few or several or even most of them at first; you're going to see these things so often that they'll be impossible to forget before long. We're just shooting to prime your passive memory so that you'll see a word written, have your curiosity irked, and be able to work it out, connecting that forgotten information to more and more recent memories to help remember them. Plus, this is a model for your year as a whole -- contextually acquiring passive understanding that stretches your boundaries, then diving back inwards and working to solidify passive knowledge that has become useful for your current situation or will allow you to express something you want to express currently, into knowledge that gradually becomes active.
   
   
2. Buy Genki I, its workbook, Genki II, and its workbook. This will walk you from knowing absolutely no Japanese at the beginning of Genki I, and while mileage varies, I was personally able to make sense of ShiroKuma Cafe (see the link in the next section) upon completing Genki II. I'm currently taking the first "advanced" level Japanese course at my uni, meaning that I have had the opportunity to talk with other "advanced" (apostraphes meaning take with a grain of salt, looking at myself) learners about how they learned Japanese, and the Genki series is by and large the crowd favorite.
   
   
3. Buy Heisig, or you can probably find a version somewhere on the interwebs....... make an account at Kanji Koohii (a site where people work together progressing through Heisig, mainly by sharing the mneumonics they make for the kanji), and otherwise follow the instructions on Nihongo Shark's Blog. He suggests to completely put learning Japanese on hold till you finish the 2200 Kanji in this deck in 97 days, but I think that's ambitious as is, and eats too much of your year up. So I personally would say learn 15 a day, every day, until you finish -- that will have you finishing in around 5 months, you'll be on target with the 6 months I'm plotting out for Genki I + II even if you miss a few days. (see below).
   
   
4. Others might disagree and you can make up your own mind, but I personally think learning the Kanji is essential. They take time to learn at first, but repay you dividends later on when you accumulate vocabulary basically without thinking, passively, by reading or watching subtitled shows. Plus, any resource you'll use past the beginner stage will require kanji.. meaning if you don't learn them, you can't use these resources, and gimp yourself down the road. They're incredibly logical and like legos; the resources in #3 basically talk about the most efficient way to build things out of those legos (to help remember what each lego is). Also look into Moonwalks with Einstein if you'reinterested in memory in general. The thing about Kanji is that they unlock Japanese, as every single Kanji has a unique meaning, and Japanese words are basically simple definitions of themselves. Take fire extinguisher, for example: 消火器。It literally means extinguish-fire-utensil/tool. Good luck understanding a random word like that in any other language at first sight, but it's easy in Japanese, and the vast majority of Japanese words are exactly like this. Learning the Kanji allows you to take a word you've never seen before, instantly have a reliable guess as to what it means... and depending on your familiarity with the Kanji, maybe even how to read it. This happens to a lesser extent in conversation, also. Kanji are a new system of logic, but once you adjust to it, it's pure magic -- eventually, you sort of stop needing to study vocabulary, because you can just read and passive understand most any word (which you'll eventually work into your active vocabulary). I talk about "The First 2000 Words" in #5, and basically, words give you diminishing returns -- they're a lot of bang for your buck at first.. but past 6,000, 10,000, 20,000 ... learning 10 or 100 or even 1,000 new words might not give you noticeable improvement.
   
   
5. This anki deck is Genki in Example Sentences; pace your daily reviews so that you'll be going in time with your progression through chapters in the book. I really, really wanted to link you The Core 2k(the first 2000 most frequent words of Japanese) because I really liked it and the first 2000 words make up a significant majority of daily conversations (we repeat a lot of the same things over and over, the same bread and butter structures, laced and spiced with more rare nouns, then descriptive words, and the occasional verb)......... but I also think that context is the biggest key when it comes to language learning, and the 2k doesn't have that for you right now. It's eventually going to outpace your Kanji studies (if I'm recalling how I studied accurately), and more importantly, the word order does not follow Genki. You're going to be spending a lot of time with Genki for 6 months, the pace that I want you to complete these words in. You're already going to be stretched thin, so I guess I'm going to recommend you take that Genki deck and use it as a supplement to help you get more out of Genki -- it looks like it's going to take, on average, ~25 cards per day. I don't know if that's ideal, but then again, I stuck with Genki until I finished Genki (no other resources, began Hesig - also below - about 2/3 of the way through), and I began watching Shirokuma Cafe (below) immediately after Genki II, able to (at first, painfully) understand it... and I think I'm just a normal dude, if you're also a normal dude -- or, better, a better than average dude -- I guess Shirokuma should be good for you, too, after Genki II and this Genki Deck.

There's a good book called Take Your Eye Off the Ball: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look. I read the first edition, but I link the latest one I could find. It's the book I recommend to people if they want to learn about the nuts and bolts of football. And it's been my experience, the more you know about the sport you're watching the better the overall experience is.

Edit: Thank you for the gold anonymous redditor

This is a great question.

Quick background: My name is John Green. I write books, which currently sell really well, and also make videos with my brother that are very popular on YouTube. My brother and I also organize this huge annual charity project called The Project for Awesome, in which people donate money and then together as a community we decide which charities should receive the money. It's basically a huge exercise in crowdsourcing philanthropic prioritization. And we've also crowdfunded some of our projects, so this is a very interesting question to me!

First off, I agree with you that celebrities walk on thin ice when they start their own charities and then try to administer them, because those people are often very busy and also there are existing charities that are already really good at delivering services in many fields. But if a celebrity is running an effective organization, or partnering with an effective one, there are a lot of good reasons for that wealthy person to solicit donations:

1. It works. I personally donate a significant percentage of my money to charity, but I do so privately, because I think making a spectacle of your donations is weird and doesn't accomplish much. But I also ask people to donate to charity, especially during the Project for Awesome, because it works. We raised over $750,000 last year, and much of that money was raised because people wanted perks (signed posters, books, etc.) that you could only get from the Project for Awesome, and so we raised much more money than I could ever have donated on my own.
   
   
2. Many celebrities are not as wealthy as they seem. For decades, celebrity and wealth were more or less interchangable, but there's a reason that almost no celebrities can be found on lists of the 1,000 richest people in America: Celebrity is not as lucrative as it once was, and the vast majority of concentrated wealth in the United States goes to entrepreneurs, investors, and people work in finance. (A famous example of this is that 50 Cent's wealth is mostly due to his investment in Vitamin Water, not his platinum selling albums, but I think it's broadly true as well.) But celebrities do have a platform, and if they use that platform to encourage donations to worthy, well-run organizations, I think in the end we as a community end up giving more (and more effectively) than we would if celebrities were quiet about their philanthropic efforts and interests.
   
   
3. In the case of the kickstarters: First, I don't think Zach Braff had the money to finance a movie on his own. Movies are insanely expensive, and whatever money Zach Braff has made may have to support him for a very long time, because acting and writing are not like law or medicine: Your future income is not guaranteed, and usually goes down as you get older.
   
   But the biggest benefit to the kickstarter is that it convinces people in Hollywood that there are real people who really want to see the movie in question--want to see it so much that they'll PAY IN ADVANCE. It creates a community. The $2,000,000 or so after expenses Braff raised for his movie will only pay for a tiny portion of the actual film, but that community of people will be the most important evangelists for the movie if it's good. They'll be the people telling their friends to go see it on opening weekend. And that's very important for a film's commercial success.
   
   3a. My brother and I have done this with our educational program CrashCourse, which is partly funded by voluntary monthly subscriptions at subbable. I understand your argument that we could pay for Crash Course ourselves, but we couldn't pay for it ourselves for very long, because it's very expensive to make and even when educational video gets tens of millions of views a month, it just can't be made sustainable by advertising alone. We need it to be financially sustainable so it can grow and continue to be a thing for decades.
   
   3b. To me, asking (not requiring! just asking!) people to pay for something like Crash Course is similar to asking them to pay for a subscription to a magazine like The Economist. A lot of people are doing full-time work to create Crash Course, and while it (like The Economist) could theoretically be funded by a wealthy individual at least for a while, it's a more sustainable and probably higher-quality project if the audience funds it, because that makes the project responsive to the needs of the audience rather than responsive to the needs of the some billionaire.

A good starting point is the app LingoDeer and its Japanese practise sessions. The first course is free and has a ton of content. Its practise focuses on teaching kana, grammar and building up vocabulary with a variety of guessing games so it's a very natural and entertaining way of learning. This makes it better than a lot of the language apps out there since their main focus is usually flashcard learning and hard memorisation.

Beyond that, Tae Kim's Japanese grammar is considered by many to be a fantastic way to learn the language. It builds up the necessary fundamentals for learning the language in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view (which means you think in japanese rather than english).

If you want to get a textbook the Genki guides are considered by many to be the quintessial classroom learning book. Japanese for Busy People is also a good one if you don't have a lot of spare time.

Beyond that, watch Japanese tv without subtitles to get used to them speaking. Japanese Children's tv is a great way to go about it. Try watching something like Chi's Sweet Home without subtitles on. There's also Japanese dramas on Netflix where you can turn the subtitles off.

I have no idea if it’s an efficient method or not but I use The Kodansha kanji learner’s course.
I do 16 new kanji a day and I use the anki deck for the book to keep them in my memory. Whenever I flip a card, no matter the side, I write it down. Helps me remember better. I only try to remember the main On reading for each kanji and even then I don’t force it. If I can’t memorize it I don’t try that much harder. For the readings I just read a lot of texts and when I come across a word that uses a kanji I know I don’t know the reading of, that’s how I learn the readings. Eventually you become magically able to determine the reading for words even with kanji that have a lot of different pronunciations.

John Lott is the author of a few very interesting reads such as The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies and More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (Studies in Law and Economics)

I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.

Here's a short reading list you should look at:

The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.

Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.

I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.

It really enrages me the hoops I had to jump through to own just a fucking shotgun in my state. I don't have an issue with "common sense" gun laws if they were actually based on common sense. If you want to run a background check on me, fine, I don't think limiting violent offenders ability to buy guns is a massive infringement on my rights (i know some disagree)

My issues were:

A. The waiting period, especially since I was brought to a police station once for defending myself in a massive brawl that broke out at a bar, they were able to run a full background check on me in under 3 minutes, and that was because the computer was "being slow as usual"

B. A whole day wasted at a gun safety course I had to wait weeks for and pay hundreds of dollars where you learn nothing, then fire 4 shots at a target.

C. Then I had to file paperwork with my local police and be grilled and made to feel like a criminal for wanting to have a firearm. It's then up to him if he feels like issuing me a gun and I wait months to hear if my application is even denied, what the fuck!?

I was at a diner when a guy came in and shot his wife to death over an impending divorce, she was a waitress. He emptied the revolver in her in front of everyone and just sat down. He could have easily executed half the people in the place if he wanted to.

When I was 16, I met some girls at the beach with friends, long story short, everyone is off on their own having some fun within a couple hours, the girl I'm with apparently has a boyfriend, who is completely insane and jealous (probably because his girlfriend is fucking everyone) so he pulls up with a shotgun and starts threatening to kill me, her, himself, etc. Luckily I was able to stay cool and talk him down, convincing him that his girlfriend didn't cheat on him, nor was I interested, thankfully for me we had already been done and just sitting on a bench talking.

Anyway fuck anyone that says you'll never need a gun or anyone who tries to keep you from protecting yourself, also the best fact based book I've ever read on guns and that no leftist is able to argue with https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660

If you want to learn quite a bit about why exactly suburbs are depressing, read Suburban Nation by Duany et al.

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream https://www.amazon.com/dp/0865477507/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_wqA4ybMK9VQE4

Please, allow me to thank you by embedding every single, minute word in this sentence with something awesome.

This is what your looking for: https://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466245848&sr=8-1&keywords=take+your+eye+off+the+ball




It's a book called "Take Your Eye off the Ball", and it will comnpletely change football for you forever (in a good way)!

Born to Run - Read this book.

You may want to check out More Guns, Less Crime. Which, as the name suggests, sets out to show just that.

Of course, like any controversial book... it has its supporters and critics.

Comes with experience. It's probably the most complex team sport there is, with games being more chess matches than anything.

You can accelerate your learning by reading books like Take Your Eye off the Ball if you're really invested in learning more, but even something like getting into the Madden games can help a lot. Plenty of online resources as well for concepts and formations and whatnot.

While you'll learn plenty just by watching, without a bit of background on the fundamentals, a lot of stuff is gonna be lost on the average viewer.

Edit: I just read the rest of what you said and misunderstood. There are podcasts, ask about them in the Latin sub.

Check out /r/Latin.

Also, buy this: Lingua Latina per se Illustrata

Generally in order to enjoy stories they have to be written in a language that you understand. Judging by your spelling and grammar, I will assume you don't read or write English. As these stories are written in English, they may be difficult for you to enjoy. Hopefully this will help you enjoy Marvel.

This is the single biggest thing we can do to improve the economic viability of our cities and reduce the congestion of our roads.

I've linked to it a few times recently, but everybody doubting this should watch this 1990s-era presentation given by the architect/planner Andrés Duany. This is exactly the subject he has talked about for decades: that 'traditional neighbourhood development' is superior to North American suburban sprawl by every metric. For those who would like to read more, he has a very excellent book called Suburban Nation that is approachable to the layman.

These traditional neighbourhoods are not "inferior" to the suburbs (as some people have suggested in this thread already), and it doesn't have to mean skyrocketing housing prices. Look at some of the towns and neighbourhoods developed by DPZ (Andrés Duany's company), and "walk" around the town with StreetView (remember, these are all new developments, not old neighbourhoods):

• Seaside, Florida
  
• Habersham, SC
  
• Kentlands, MD
  
  These neighbourhoods are all a mix of detached homes, townhomes, and apartments (they're not a suburban mono-culture of only one type), and they're all walkable. Each has a commercial area within walking distance, and also has offices within walking distance. The density is much higher than a typical suburb, but yet there's still a sense of privacy in a detached home (if you want that), or higher density town-homes near the 'town centre' (if you prefer that, instead). But all of these communities, because of their walk-ability and bike-abilty, have significantly less congestion than a typical suburb. If you combine this with a transit stop within walking distance, known a transit-oriented development, then you get a highly effective and highly productive mixed-use area that requires significantly less tax and government subsidies than our suburbs require today.
  
  If you're still not convinced, there is an excellent US-based non-profit organization called Strong Towns that was created by an ex-traffic engineer, explicitly for the purpose of informing the public about how current North American suburbs and towns are not economically viable. That is, they do not have the tax base to cover their infrastructure, and 'cover this up' by what they call the Growth Ponzi Scheme.
  
  tl;dr: look at this image (from thecostofsprawl.com) and hopefully you will understand why this type of development is more economically viable.
  
  

Not to mention, BS != lying, according to at least one prominent academic.

It could very well be that BS is worse.

If I were hiring for this position and you had a strong resume, I would be nervous about your lack of domain knowledge -- but that's something that software engineers are expected to pick up! So I would go in with:

• I know my role (SWEng) and I'm excited to learn more about the sport ... that's normal in software engineering, and you can expect me to be up to speed by the start of the season.
  
  Now, you can also cram. Read this Wikipedia article to learn the names of the positions and formations. Make flash cards! Study hard! Then dive into any of the following books:
  
  
• Take Your Eye Off the Ball - how to watch the game to learn more than a casual fan does
  
• The Art of Smart Football - big-picture strategic writing about how coaches and QBs plan for games
  
  A reasonable bar for a non-casual fan would be to be able to answer questions like:
  
  
• (Casual / Bare minimum) Discuss the recent history of the team you're visiting, and the recent strengths and weaknesses of their division rivals.
  
• (Casual / Bare minimum) Explain the three choices that a coach has on fourth down, and discuss recent (>2005) changes in attitudes toward that decision.
  
• (Casual / Bare minimum) Explain why a "nickel" or "dime" defense is a reasonable choice against a "two-minute" offense.
  
• (Casual / Bare minimum) There are five offensive linemen, usually divided into three position names. Name the positions and the differences between their skills. Explain why having a good offensive line is critical.
  
• (Moderate) Describe the set of games that makes up a team's schedule. Can you, as a SWEng, quantify which games have the most impact on a team's playoff chances?
  
• (Moderate) Outline rule changes over the last 15-20 years surrounding the concept of the "extra point" including the 2-point conversion.
  
• (Moderate) If you analyze the play-by-play data, you might notice that when a QB has many negative-yardage plays it correlates with losing, but when a QB has exactly three negative yardage plays, it correlates strongly with winning. Why? How could you adjust your software to remove this weird bias in the data?
  
• (Moderate) The Ravens have two victories in the last ten years that were both secured by deliberate late-game safeties -- that is, giving up two points to the other team. Explain how and why that strategy worked, and why it isn't viable anymore.
  
• (Moderate) Explain how player salaries are determined. Explain what someone means when they say "he's on his rookie deal" or "we can't cut him because of the dead money" or "they tagged him". Explain, using examples from around the league, what makes someone a "franchise QB" and what the reasonable market value is for a better-than-average QB.
  
• (Advanced) Read this three-part study and then discuss how you, as a SW engineer, can help me (the GM) select the best offensive line talent.
  
• (Advanced) A few years ago, in a NE@IND night game, everyone assumed New England would spend the evening passing the ball. Why? They ended up running the ball instead, and winning. What unusual wrinkle did they add to their offense that made it effective?
  
  Also... if the team you're applying to is the Ravens, I'll be happy to help you get up to speed.

Everyone here should read this book to understand how US cities and suburbs have been screwed up by nonsensical government regulation (and by outsized influence of firefighters unions).

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream https://www.amazon.com/dp/0865477507/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_9t2dAbB2G9RVZ


Basically, the whole idea that you can/should design a city like SimCity where the government mandates certain areas as high density/low density commercial, residential, industrial, etc. makes no sense at all.

The unwalkability of newer cities are because of firefighters unions. The unions required that you needed to have a certain number of firefighters per fire truck. That meant that instead of being able to buy smaller, nimbler fire trucks that can navigate smaller streets, cities have to buy enormous trucks. In order for those trucks to move through the city quickly, the cities nedded to build very wide roads and it lead to all sorts of other consequences.

For those interested in a popular overview of the topic, I recommend Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It does a pretty good job of popular explanations of the theory, and talks about a lot of key people in the field.

This is pretty funny coming up right now, because I'm reading the book "Born to run" by Christopher McDougall. Fantastic read, and quite a revelation - apparently we were designed to run long distances, it's how our bodies evolved. And moreover, we're designed to run barefoot. Many runners have been discovering how running shoes actually cause injury rather than prevent it. The book's fascinating, and highly recommended - it's the story of how he tracked down a near-mythical tribe of super-runners in Mexico, who think nothing of running hundreds of miles at a stretch, wearing nothing but thin sandals.

I have no connection whatsoever to the author - I saw him interviewed on The Daily Show and went out to buy the book.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-18-2009/christopher-mcdougall
http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303/

Read Keep Your Eye off the Ball. Read The Essential Smart Football. Pay for NFL GamePass. Watch the Coach's Film (All-22). They've archives going back to 2011. It's especially helpful if you watch a game (or series of plays) you're already familiar with. Get pen and paper out and take notes. Watch what each player is doing, both before and after the snap, and be ready to rewind over and over and over and over.

There's a lot of good analysis on YouTube too, if you are a learn-by-watching type.

>Start here, on Brett Kollman's channel. He's a former NFL Network production assistant. Most of his videos are story heavy and analysis light, but that video is about how to watch film.
>
>Sam's Film Room, with Samuel Gold, a writer for the Athletic. Good for beginners. I think he started out at r/nfl.
>
>The QB School, with former Patriots QB, JT O'Sullivan. Focuses on quarterback play, both good and bad.
>
>Dan Orlovski's Twitter has a bunch of quick analysis videos, usually focusing on QB play.
>
>Peyton Manning's Detail is wonderful show, but is stuck behind a paywall at ESPN.com. There are two short videos free on YouTube. Resourceful people can find it elsewhere as well.
>
>Strong Opinion Sports, with Division III NCAA QB Zac Shomler. He has a lot of football video podcasts, but also a QB film analysis playlist.
>
>Baldy Breakdowns, with former Cowboys OLineman and current NFL Network analyst Brian Baldinger. No true focus, but has great insight into offensive line play.
>
>Gamepass Film Sessions. NFL Players and coaches analyze their own plays. The full version is on NFL Gamepass. I'm a particular fan of the one with Joe Thomas.
>
>Voch Lombardi. Focuses on talent evaluation and line play. Funny as fuck.
>
>The New England Patriots YouTube channel has Belichick Breakdown and Coffee with the Coach. Breakdown is the more analysis focused of the two.

If you're REALLY interested, the resources are out there. Good hunting.

Everytime someone asks this I always recommend this book: "Take Your Eye Off The Ball" ~ Pat Kirwan

Explains a bit of everything you could ever want to know.

I've stated before that I think that TRP goes beyond just seduction.

It's about living in a world that is not what we've been told it should be. This applies to women, relationships, college, careers, accumulation of wealth, travel, Life in general.

Women and relationships - We all know, it's pretty much all we talk about here.

College - The baby boomers told you to go to college if you didn't want to be flipping burgers... Then you went to college, got out, and there are no jobs. Then the baby boomers tell you that you're an entitled brat for refusing to flip burgers. The funny thing is that the people who told you to go to college didn't actually go to college, they started out flipping burgers, but they did it without the burden of debt.

Careers - If you spend the best years of your life sitting at a desk (and you don't make any women co-workers feel at all uncomfortable in any way), maybe one day you may be able to save up enough money to buy a red convertible sports car when you're bald, fat and middle aged, to compensate you for your unfulfilling life. After that you can save up and maybe afford a few years of lower-middle class leisure lifestyle while your body falls apart and you wait for death. Does that sound like a good deal?

Travel - Extended long-term world travel is the domain of the rich and all you can afford is short stints of two week vacations to to all-inclusive resorts before you have to trudge back to your cubical to resume the life you were trying to escape from.

Life in general - Go to work, be miserable, come home, buy something to make yourself feel better, get into debt, have to work harder, become more miserable, repeat. You have to do this because the only thing that can bring you a temporary sensation of satisfaction is some kind of material item. A newer, better item. If you lose an item you lose a part of yourself, because you are the things that you own.

-

I never went to college and I have zero debt. I don't have a 'career' per-se, but I do have marketable skills in web development and design, self taught. I work from time to time to get money which I then use to fund my travels (I'll be in Spain next week). Girls are occasional but enjoyable guests in my life. I own no material possessions other than a bag of clothes and this laptop. I practice meditation and try to incorporate awareness of the present moment into my life rather than dwelling on the past or the future.

If you're interested in learning about how long-term travel is well within your reach I'd highly recommend Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.

In terms of life/spiritual philosophy I recommend authors such as Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts

Writing and reading kind of come in the same package if you need to learn the Kanji. As Kiruwa said, spoken or written first doesn't have an answer because everybody is different. But here are some general suggestions...

1. Learn the Kana first and foremost. I can't stress how important this is, because the sooner you start learning Japanese in Japanese the better off you'll be later down the road. Learning the Kana is easy and can be done in anywhere between a day or 2 to a week. But really get Hiragana down with utmost haste.
   
   
2. Once you have a basis in reading the Kana, start up an Anki deck (or any Spaced Repetition System). If you search a bit, you should be able to find the Core2k and Core6k which are some great decks to work towards. I'm not too familiar with working with the Core decks, but I'm sure there's a lot of people here that are so ask around.
   
   
3. If you want to go the free route, Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide is an excellent free e-book on Japanese grammar. Their iPhone and iPad apps are excellent and work extremely well, too. This would be a good place to possibly start learning your way around Japanese grammar. If you want to go down the textbook route, I'd suggest the sort of tried-and-true Genki method. I use these textbooks in my Japanese University class and, while I'm not the biggest fan of them, they're pretty good textbooks for learning the material. Pick up Genki I, the Genki I Workbook, and the Genki Answer Key at your favorite online bookstore.
   
   
4. Once you've got a good foundation with the above three (in the case of my University class my professor started after the first semester, or 6 lessons into Genki) I'd say it's time to start learning some Kanji. If you're going down the self-studying route, I, like many others, highly recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. Start with Vol. 1 and don't use any other method of learning the Kanji. Use it in conjunction with Reviewing the Kanji site and you'll have a great foundation after a while of work.
   
   
5. Practice, practice, practice. That's all I can really say. Immerse yourself in the material, don't give up, and go for it. It's really hard work and incredibly daunting. I'm only a little more than a year into my studies and the further I get the more I realize I don't understand. That said, I keep pushing myself to see if I can't get a little further and when I look back to what I knew a year ago and what I know today, I couldn't possibly imagine even knowing this much. This isn't going to be a quick process, but years upon years of studying.
   
   But enough of the prep talk. Good luck and if you ever need help, /r/LearnJapanese is a great place to ask! :)
   
   *Of course, all opinions expressed here are my own and may or may not be conclusive for your learning.

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata and Wheelock's Latin are the go to books for learning.

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata is completely in Latin and makes you learn by reading.

Wheelock's is learning by studying grammar.

What I recommend is looking up "Learn Latin" on Youtube to study the basics of pronunciation and learning what you can from there. If you enjoy it, buy one of those books to dive deeper into the subject.

In this exact order:

1. Start with Suburban Nation by Duany, Zyberk, and Speck. It's super easy to read, totally skimmable, and has a lot of great graphics and diagrams that help explain things. It's not the deepest book out there, but it's the best place to start.
   
   
2. After that, try Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler. The author can be cranky and there are no diagrams, but he does a nice job of explaining how suburbia happened, why it made sense at the time, and why it's not so great anymore. Basically it's a primer on the key issue facing city planning today.
   
   
3. After them, you'll be ready for The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs. This is the bible of urbanism, the most important and influential book written about the form of cities since the invention of the car. But it's not as accessible as the first two, so I wouldn't start here.
   
   
4. Walkable City by Speck. This is the newest of the bunch, and provides the data to back up the claims from the previous 3.
   
   
5. Image of the City by Lynch. This one is a series of case studies that will teach you how to "read" how a city functions based on its form. The examples are all woefully obsolete, which is too bad, but still teaches you an important skill.

It's easier than you think:

http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180

More guns less crime.

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660

30 years of county-level data showing crime stats before and after Shall-issue laws passed. Critics can't disprove it no matter what control methods they use. It's in the 3rd edition which has been proving further that ccw laws and citizens carrying have a net benefit to society and the economy they reside in.

thank you all for your kind words, im truly flattered. Very motivated to keep on practicing <:


Btw I dont really have a fixed script for both capitals or lower case letters yet, im just copying whatever i find decent looking.


A while ago i found this image just browsing thru google:
https://i.gyazo.com/6e9fe4a6b9211273d79c900e1b8868c4.png
(source unknown to me) and thought they look pretty nice.

Also I just finished the Spencerian penmanship copybooks:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088062096X/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
They are great, some of the capitals letters are from there.
http://i.imgur.com/BLhSBni.jpg?1

Hope this is helpful<:

Not exactly what you asked for, but I got Keep Your Eyes Off the Ball off Amazon for just a few bucks a couple years ago, and it really helped me a lot with this very thing. The spiral bound "playbook edition" comes with a three hour DVD as well. The spiral version isn't dinky/flimsy so don't be scared.

Before that book, I never knew where I was supposed to be looking and missed out on a lot. Problem solved.

Edit to Add: There is an updated/newer version now, but Amazon reviewers are unclear about whether it has a DVD, if that matters to you--I think the book is pretty clear on its own.

Check out this book by Rolf Potts.

Its called Vagabonding and is all about cheap long-term travel around the world.

It was an inspiration for me, and I truly recommend you check it out if you're interested in traveling outside your comfort zone.

It's a quick read but is also filled with many helpful links and real-world examples of what to expect and how to make the most of travelling.

I dont know if this will help but here are some resources I use

Tae kim grammar guide is good for learning grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/writing
anki is really good for making flash cards or you can find pre made decks to study https://apps.ankiweb.net/
If you like reading you could try these https://bilingualmanga.com/
http://syosetu.com/
If you like anime use this, you can watch anime with japanese subs
https://animelon.com/
Also kanji is important to learn because you cant read japanese without them
I recommend remembering the kanji 1 https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=mp_s_a_1_1/135-4585020-0846068?ie=UTF8&qid=1542029781&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=remembering+the+kanji+1&dpPl=1&dpID=51QhUaQJRmL&ref=plSrch

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts is a pretty good guide on how to make long-term travel possible on a small budget.

Edit: First chapter is available here: http://www.vagabonding.net/excerpt/

There is a famous paper that almost uses that in its name. The paper is Does the flap of a Butterfly's wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas

This is why it is referred to as the Butterfly effect rather than, say, the Ant Effect or something like that.

If you're interested in the subject, and you want sort of a primer on the whole thing, I'd recommend http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453/ which is old enough to be at your local library for free as well

I'll refer to an example I've gleaned from James Gleick book on Chaos.

He refers to some older work on simulation where data had to be inputted by hand. Those simulations would sometimes crash, and you'd have to re-input the values of the variables for whatever point of the simulation you were at. Sometimes, to save time, they would round off the last digit of the decimals, because life is too short for this shit, and because why would changing a parameter by 0.0001 have any noticeable effect? The results would change a lot, sometimes drastically, from these small roundings.

to quote from one of the earlier linked references:

In the 1960s the weather scientist Edward Lorenz observed that minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve-variable computer weather model could result in grossly divergent weather patterns:

Two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states … If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible….In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent.

Such sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that the further one goes into the future the more inaccurate predictions become. Systems that are sensitive to initial conditions and bounded are said to be chaotic.

As to the other specifics of your question, you'd need an atmospheric science guy for that ... I'm more of Straight Earth Sci.

https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

If you're new to football then I couldn't recommend this book more. Once you get a basics for the rules and general flow of the game, this will take your knowledge of schemes and ability to see the on-field strategic battle in real-time to an entirely new level. Even longtime NFL fans should read it if they haven't as everyone can still learn more.



https://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696

While these are all incredibly important books that outline the major chronological achievements in philosophy, I don't think that starting with ancient philosophy and working your way up is always the best move. Some of ancient philosophy is drawn out and can be intimidating to someone who's never read philosophy before, and reading whole books can be a daunting process. These are all books that would be necessary to read if one were getting a degree in philosophy, but OP is just interested in learning more on a casual level. I would recommend starting with an overview of modern problems of philosophy, like Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. If OP is interested in learning more about specific philosophers I always found that The History of Western Philosophy is a good place to start. And of course the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will always have more.

2-3 years is plenty of time to "learn" japanese. There are a lot of people here who reached N2 on the JLPT in 3 years or less. There a lot of people who have also reached "basic" fluency as they call it, in 1.5-2 years(AJATT/MIA). There are lots of start guides out there, all which can work very well. There is one right here on this subreddit that is a sticky at the top of the page. You could also try NukeMarines SGJL. A lot of people also like AJATT / MIA as it seems to be the most effective way to learn Japanese quickly (but this requires a lot of time each day that most people aren't willing, or cant commit).

Pretty much all of them start the same way though, by learning Hiragana and Katakana (which are the basic writing systems). Some systems also suggest learning some or all of the kanji in the beginning as well. Many will also say to start immersing with native japanese material early on too (aka watch anime/dramas without subtitles in japanese)

From there you want some type of learning resource for grammar. Many here suggest Genki 1&2 if you have some cash and like textbooks. Other systems will tell you to use free online resources like Tae Kim or Wasabi-JP. All of them seem to work.

From there a lot of paths split as to what you should do and at this point you can kind of choose what you like. If you liked the textbook route than you can move onto an intermediate text book like Toriba. Many say learning from sentences is the way to go though. This can either be done with a pre-made deck like the Core 2/6/10K anki deck. Some people say make your own sentence deck by "mining" native Japanese material for i+1 sentences. AJATT/MIA has even recently suggested using the JLPT Tango books for sentences as they are already pretty much in i+1 format.

Here are a bunch of links to what I am talking about:
anki (awesome FREE flash card app): https://ankiweb.net/about

SGJL (method + resources): https://community.memrise.com/t/course-forum-suggested-guide-for-japanese-literacy-sgjl-course-series/1100

AJATT ("intense" method): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PdPOxiWWuU

Genki (grammar & vocab): https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401 (who knows you might be able to find this free somewhere on the internet as a pdf too...)

Tae Kim (grammar): http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

Wasabi-JP(grammar): https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/wasabis-online-japanese-grammar-reference/

DJT (overall great resources just look at it...):https://djtguide.neocities.org/

And most people seem to be convinced FBI data is flawless and absolutely correct in all regards. Hogwash, I was saying this for years - any statistical data on complex issues such as this is completely and utterly useless without a solid study for its interpretation.

Inconsistencies and straight faults with FBI statistics aren't news, if you did any research on the gun control figures. I always recommend "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws", it explains in detail why and how the data ends up being incorrect or interpreted incorrectly, when interpretation is done without detailed understanding of data collection methods used. The book is also available on Torrent networks if it's too expensive for you, just make sure to get the recent edition, it contains more accurate (corrected) info.

Has he read Animal Liberation yet?

i remember reading about it in Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. The argument is that humans are so well adapted to long-distance running because of the way humans have hunted animals long in the past -- that is, tracking them down over many hours or even days, until the animals couldn't run any further. The tortoise and the hare, essentially.

edit: shit, i thought you were responding to the comment above that. nevermind.

double edit: and this has already been discussed.

I would definitely recommend Remembering the Kanji along with Anki for spaced repetition flashcards. It helped me with Chinese.

Edit: changed link to latest version of RTK.

That area will develop really quickly, I imagine. Especially as nearby Boston Landing takes off in the next few months (they're building 1100 housing units, plus restaurants and retail, plus fun activities like bowling, ice skating's already happening, plus office space, plus a hotel). It's all near the new 1A train station (which opens later this month, and YES, that is the same cost as the T. It'll take you to South Station in 10 minutes) and there's lot of frequent bus activity that takes you to Harvard Square in 10 minutes.

Continuum's also getting a grocery - Trader Joe's. That'll help.

All this stuff is like.. in between actual neighborhoods of Harvard, Lower Allston and Brighton. It'll fill up, I 100% assure you.

It's expensive but if noone rents/buys, they'll drop the prices until they do. I imagine a lot of Int'l Harvard Students will go there first.

Just as an FYI, any housing project approved by the city has to have a certain percentage of apartments be 'affordable housing units'. Mixed income areas are good for development because you diversify customer's competing for resources. It's nice to have options, like a Whole Foods and a Market Basket, ya know?

If you're interested in city planning, I'd highly recommend reading Suburban Nation by Jeff Speck. Or googling some of his youtube lectures. Very eye opening.

Or the videos by James Kunstler - like 'The Tragedy of the Suburbs'. REALLY interesting take.

Take Your Eye Off The Ball is pretty much the go to literature on this.

The decision is up to you, and your final choice should pertain to your situation/interests, but if you do choose to learn Japanese, then I can give you some pointers:

Learning Material

Start by learning Hiragana and Katakana. This should take you 2 weeks tops. You can learn it through apps like Dr. Moku (apple and android), and practice with Drag-n-Drop.
After that, use the Genki textbooks I and II (make sure that it's the 2nd edition, which has more features added to it), which are the most popular by far within the Japanese learning community.
Japan Times, the company behind the books, also made some pretty neat apps to side with the book. Available for apple and android. There's also a workbook, which is a bit of a drag to buy after buying two $50 textbooks, so I uploaded the PDFs here.


Supplement your studies with Anki SRS (Spaced-repetition-system), which is essentially virtual flash cards.
There's also Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which is pretty good as a reference, but not so much a sole learning material. His website is another good reference resource.


Please realize that it's okay to forget words and grammar points, and you're definitely going to have to revisit some of them along the way.




I should probably mention Kanji. Kanji are characters imported from China during the 5th century, although many have divulged from their modern Chinese equivalent. Genki I+II will teach you 317 kanji (image for scale (sorry for bad quality!!)), and Tobira (the textbook I'm about to mention) will teach you another. There are officially 2136 "Jouyou Kanji", or kanji used in everyday life (e.g. a newspaper). Some people use Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which I wouldn't recommend since it only teaches you the meaning (which it sometimes lies about), and doesn't even teach the reading or any words that use it. I'd recommend learning words and then the kanji that they use. That way you're getting more bang for your buck. While I personally don't use WaniKani to learn kanji, I have used it in the past, and it's really good. Sleek interface, gets the job done, forums for questions. All the good stuff you'd expect out of a kanji learning site. The first couple of lessons are free, and then it's something like $8/month. Despite WaniKani and all its greatness, the creator behind it (named Koichi) also made an "online Japanese textbook" called Tofugu, which I definitely wouldn't recommend. It waaaay too much around the bush, and half of it is just "motivational talk" (which I'm pretty sure is just trying to get you inspired for a night or two, pull out your wallet, pay for a lifetime subscription, and then give up once you get to the 〜ます forms).


Edit: I also feel the need to mention that, despite what pop culture might tell you, only a tiny portion of kanji are truly pictograph (e.g. 川 (river), 山 (mountain), 人 (person), and 大 (big)). The more conceptual ones have almost no tie to their actual meanings, which is why kanji teaching resources that use mnemonics fall apart pretty quickly. After being written with a chisel on turtle shells (called "oracle bone script"), imported to Japan 1500+ years ago, written 1,000,000s of times from people in prefectures miles away, and reformed numerous times, almost all of them lost their original pictographic quality. Just take a look at 働, 色, and 起. What do you think those mean? The answer is: to work, color, and to get up (in the sense of waking up).

Edit 2: Learn the stroke order for the kanji, since it makes them much easier to break down in the long run. For that matter, learn the radicals, or parts, of the kanji. There's a list here.


To clear up any more misconceptions, Japanese is not like Chinese in the sense that a character alone can be a verb. The kanji "起" doesn't mean "to wake up" on its own; only when you add the "き" and "る" hiragana does it turn into the verb. This is called "おくりがな" (okurigana). There are also many different readings for each character, unlike Chinese where there's usually only one or two. For example, the character "日" (day, sun) can be read ひ (or び), にち, or じつ. One kind of reading is called 音読み (onyomi), literally meaning "sound reading" because when the Japanese came into contact with the Chinese, they didn't yet have a writing system (their language was called "和語" (lit. "native Japanese language"). So, they "borrowed" their characters and transcribed the Chinese pronunciation based on their phonetic system. The other kind of reading is called 訓読み (kunyomi), which literally means "riverside reading". This type of reading is native to Japan and was prescribed to the kanji that corresponded with the meaning. On the more extreme side, some kanji can have 10+ readings. Don't sweat it though (心配ないよ！), as you'll learn all of these different readings through context in your vocabulary.

Now to bridge the gap between "beginner"-ish to "intermediate"-ish, use Tobira (which literally means "bridge"). The book assumes you to have a certain level of knowledge, some of which might overlap with Genki and other words/grammar that you may have to look up. It's an uphill battle, but you'll come out triumphant in the end.


On a side note, I'd recommend Jisho.org as your go-to online dictionary, even if some of the example sentences are riddled with errors. "Imiwa?" is a great Jp<->Eng dictionary for android and iOS. If you're really serious, then get "Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary".
Also check out /r/learnjapanese. There's a lot of great questions/resource links on there, and you can ask any questions you might have.


Duolingo has opened up alpha testers for its Japanese course as well. I'm so-so on the quality of Duolingo, since it doesn't even really teach you grammar, but just in case.

There are a lot of great resources posted up on the Kanji Koohii forums, which is where I found ヨミちゃん for Google Chrome.


To go further, read 4chan's /int/ guide.
Oh, and in case you didn't know, stay away from Rosetta Stone!!

Native Material

After Genki II, give a go at よつばと！ (Yotsuba!), a simple children's manga with furigana, which is kana above the kanji (intended for little kids). There's quite a bit of slang in it, and almost always uses the casual form. Even in a simple manga like Yotsuba, there will still be words and advanced grammatical constructs you haven't even touched yet. You can get the "Yotsuba Learning Pack", which consists of an Anki deck and vocabulary list here.


You can practice speaking with native speakers on a wonderful app called HelloTalk (available for apple and android). It's pretty great.


There's also iTalki, where you can write journal entries in your target language (so you can do this for Italian too) and have them be corrected by native speakers. You can also correct journal entries in English.

About the JLPT

The "Japanese Language Proficiency Test [Number X]", commonly referred to as "JLPT N[X]", is the standard Japanese test. N1 (Number 1) is the highest and most advanced, while N5 is the most basic. You can see how ready you are for each one here. Honestly, N5 and N4 are so easy, they're really not worth the money you have to pay to take it. N3 is a good warm up to N2. Passing N2 will look pretty damn good on any business related Japanese job. I wouldn't worry about these tests until a good way into your studies.

Conclusion

While Japanese might not be the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (far from it, it in fact), and quite daunting due to the scores of kanji you're required to learn, the rewards are numerous. For one thing, you get 130,000,000 more people to converse with on this planet. You're also opened up to the world of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese cartoons), and the original language of the haiku (俳句). Not only that, but you're also introduced to the literature world Haruki Murakami and other such Japanese writers. Most importantly, you should enjoy it. After all, nobody who doesn't enjoy learning something gets very far into it. If you ever feel incredibly discouraged, take a break for as long as you need. Revisit the material when you feel ready. Never study something if it pains you to do so. PM me if you have any more questions.

If you're just starting out, I'd probably recommend the Genki series, or Tae Kim's excellent Guide to Japanese Grammar (free online).

The book OP has is very useful and you can learn a lot from it, but it's specifically made to help folks study for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). You lose a lot of the foundational stuff if you go straight for the JLPT materials, I'd argue.

I believe what you are describing is technically called bullshit. https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

Some tips for those considering a trip there:

Always take taxis rather than tuktuks whenever possible, and make sure they use the meter. If they give you a hard time, walk on to another. It won't take long to find one who will comply.

When in the more populous, touristy places, avoid eye contact with anyone you don't intend to spend money with. The tuktuk drivers, touts, etc will flock to you if you look at them or respond in any way. It feels rude, but ignore them completely.

Read these 2 books: Vagabonding by Rolf Potts and The World Awaits by Paul Otteson.

Spend a lot of time on travelfish.org and the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Forum before you go. Lots of great advice and information there.

Learn a little of the language. Even "thank you" will do wonders.

I have credibility issues with the organization you're citing from. While their "About" page is explicitly neutral (and that's genuinely admirable) every other inch of the webpage is taken up by mainstream conservative talking points. The books they want you to buy are: The War on Guns, More Guns Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns etc.

Their website seems determined to make the case that Europe suffers an equal share of gun violence with things like:

>UPDATE: CPRC Original Research: Of cases of at least 15 murders, all but two of the 25 worst mass public shootings, 59 of the worst 66, occurred outside the United States

>UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe

It really wants to hold up stats like Finland's one mass shooting to create their higher murder rate per million than the US, while trying to downplay more obvious facts like America's 350+ mass shootings last year alone. Also, if you go by CPRC's numbers, they estimate American mass shootings at a much more conservative 3 per year. Like they've only recorded 54 mass shootings since 1998.

Seriously. Check it out for yourself below or maybe click here if you don't want random files on your computer.

IF YOU CLICK ON THIS IT WILL DOWNLOAD A SPREADSHEET.

Do you see a pattern?

There seems to be a conscious effort to present a false consensus on gun violence. I don't know what the truth is but it's a lot more mixed opinion than this.

> There is no evidence that armed citizens equates to less crime

Actually, there is : https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660/

This is probably the number 1 book on data on gun control and crime rate correlation. I've only read excerpts of it and I'm not looking to debate anyone, but there is no better data out there that I can find. If anyone is a fan of Frekonomics, I can tell you the data and research in this book is leagues better and more comprehensive.

There was another paper about how burglary rate in london rose after they practically banned guns, because thieves know owner won't have gun. There was also another paper on how gun crime in austrilia went down after gun confiscation. Anyway, people should do their own research about this.

> There is no evidence that armed citizens equates to less crime. Just as there is no evidence that unarmed citizens means less or more crime either.

If, like you said, there is no evidence of gun ownership vs crime rate, wouldn't it be very concerning that we're legislating so much without data? Why push for gun control or ownership when there is no data to support its effectiveness? Anyway, that book is the best data I found, would appreciate if anyone can point to better research.

Saul Alinsky. Not to be an "ass", but just to give the correct info.
https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Radicals-Practical-Primer-Realistic/dp/0679721134

Spencerian, though they've made some variations to make it their own.

[My wife got me some books for Christmas last year] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/088062096X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526597551&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=spencerian+penmanship+theory+book+plus+five+copybooks&dpPl=1&dpID=51Q0SSR5udL&ref=plSrch), and I like them a lot. The sentences from the workbooks feel like 19th century propaganda, and are a lot of fun to write.

Pretty much everyone will tell you that is nearly impossible to accurately gauge. It depends on how much you study each day, what materials you have to help you, how good you are absorbing the information, etc.

I feel that if you have enough time to absorb around 20 vocab a day (not as hard as it sounds, some days I try for around 50) for the first few months (then cut it down a bit as you go, as the grammar you are covering becomes more involved), and practice 1-3 grammar points a day (depending on their complexity/involvement), and avoid kanji for the first month, then start slowly (5 a day, not learning more until you know the current and it's associated vocab), using this book:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568365268/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

I feel like you could read random sentences of a very simple manga within 6-12 months. These numbers are all arbitrary, as it all depends on your motivation and ability to truly absorb and retain all the information.

I can give you a list of materials that I find essential, and I think anyone that used them would recommend them as well:

A general textbook like Yookoso or Genki. I use Yookoso myself, but have heard little bad about either. You can skip this if you are good about learning what you need to focus on next on your own, or if you have someone else guiding your studies, but they are not that expensive, and I would recommend both levels of Genki or Yookoso.

https://www.amazon.com/Yookoso-Invitation-Contemporary-Japanese-Third/dp/0072408154/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496923360&sr=1-1&keywords=yookoso

Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (once you learn the majority of it, they have a second and third level of this book [intermediate/advanced])

https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=4789004546&pd_rd_r=MARVSJ4E1JD75N4JANKK&pd_rd_w=supQ1&pd_rd_wg=oQkTv&psc=1&refRID=MARVSJ4E1JD75N4JANKK

501 Japanese Verbs. Fantastic for learning conjugations, and checking yourself while you practice them each day.

https://www.amazon.com/501-Japanese-Verbs-Verb/dp/0764137492/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496923311&sr=1-1&keywords=501+japanese+verbs

The Learner's Kanji Dictionary. This will help you look up any Kanji you do not know, and does not have Furigana. It gives you stroke order, Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, and tons of vocab combinations for each Kanji. It is tricky learning how to look up Kanji by radicals, but you only need to learn it once. You can learn Kanji from this, but it would be a terrible idea, as it is a dictionary, and not organized in a way that will help you retain anything.

https://www.amazon.com/Learners-Japanese-Kanji-Dictionary-Bilingual/dp/080483556X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1496923666&sr=8-3&keywords=kanji+dictionary

Lastly that Kanji book I linked earlier. Many will tell you it is silly to not learn Kanji right away as you learn the vocab, but it takes a lot longer, most modern texts have Furigana (the hiragana characters of how to pronounce the Kanji) for all the Kanji, and Kanji do not help for listening or speaking skills anyways.

I do feel that learning the Kanji from the get-go is far better for vocab retention, but you will pick up vocab so much more slowly. You can pick up Kanji later, once you can actually understand some basic Japanese and are much more motivated to continue your studies.

I listed the materials I recommend in the recommended order (minus the Kanji book listed early on, which I recommend last). Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions.

Edit: Also, learn the kana first. Both Hiragana and Katakana. There is no excuse not to, they are invaluable. I would go so far as to say do not even bother starting vocab until you are comfortable enough to sound out a word written in kana in your head without a reference. Does not matter if it takes you a while, you will see them every day, and you will get used to them. Bare minimum, write the entirety of both every morning and night, and whenever you find yourself bored throughout the day.

As always, others will argue this, but again, there is no excuse not to learn it. Most good learning resources will use it anyways. They are very easy to learn.

Much cheaper on Amazon UK.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1568365268/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_BcIOCb1W9SMQX

If you're a new fan (like me) then this one I would say is definitely worth it to get a better understanding of the nitty gritty that goes on during games.

Apart from that, I have seen numerous recommendations for Fan Notes (That I haven't read yet) as a good intro to football culture at large. This is currently on my reading list (About 3rd at the moment).

Here is a list of books by NFL's Chris Weaselling that you might find useful. I hope that is a useful enough introduction, and happy reading.

Keep your eye off the ball NFL edition is good

Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look https://www.amazon.com/dp/1629371696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i.vWAbRA5EMJN

Also the art of smart football

The Art of Smart Football https://www.amazon.com/dp/069244825X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_qawWAb8X0RP9W

Peter Singer is amazing. I remember having a 2-week breakdown and existential crisis when I read Animal Liberation. I just didn't know how to handle and accept the mind-blowingly immense suffering happening every second; I couldn't figure out how to go about my life with that fact existing. How could I simply turn my back on that fact, and not fight it every second? How could I possibly forget those animals and go about my life as if it weren't true?

Ultimately I had to make the conscious choice to forget. I could only do what I could do - become vegan, evangelize, be an advocate, protest, boycott, take part in everyday activism. But beyond that, what can I do for the billions of animals suffering unimaginable horrors every second?

There are facts and images seared into my brain that I cannot and never will forget - pigs snouts being sliced off and salt rubbed in the wound, cats being boiled alive in cages, raccoon dogs skinned alive and thrown in a pile of agony, animals caught in unbearable suffering in steel traps, others anally/vaginally/orally electrocuted to death for their furs, pigs boiled alive, chickens trampled and pecked to death in too-small to move cages, cows beaten and prodded to walk on broken legs, the heartbroken wail of a pig or cow whose baby is stolen away, male chicks ground up alive... I have SEEN these things. And it is unbearable.

I think these things should be shown to everybody. How anybody could bite into the flesh of a chicken after that is beyond me.

Edit: for those who may be interested in learning more:

• Earthlings: https://vimeo.com/209647801
  
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer: https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069884
  
• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer: https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306
  
• Empty Cages by Tom Reagan: https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Cages-Facing-Challenge-Animal/dp/0742549933
  
• Dominion is supposed to be good, but I haven't seen it: https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/how-to-watch-vegan-documentary-dominion
  
  I can't remember the other videos I've watched, and frankly, I can't deal with finding them right now. But they're on Youtube, or at least they were a few years ago.
  
  ​

There's a little book called On Bullshit by a moral philosopher who contemplated the prevalence of bullshit in the modern world. It was one of my favorite little reads of the last few decades.

I'd imagine Frankfurt would have a field day with reddit.

Might I recommend Remembering the Kanji by Heisig? Couple it with an Anki deck from here (I recommend this one or any that includes the stories), and it becomes almost trivial.

Ridiculously effective for long-term memory as well.

Get this

For future reference, /r/askphilosophy exists for these kinds of questions.

Now, if you're looking for something more narrative that will allow you to get your feet wet, you have a few different options.

Sophie's World is really quite enjoyable, though I suppose its intended audience is probably younger than yourself.

If you're looking for something more mature, you might try philosophical fiction like Camus' The Stranger or Sartre's Nausea. Both are a great way to get into something philosophical without having to worry too much about terminology or technical language.

If you're looking for something more analytic (logic, phil math, phil science, etc.), you might try something like Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. It's a pretty good read and it's short.

If you're looking for a general introduction to philosophy, something more mature than Sophie's World but focused on the history of philosophy as opposed to a particular area, you might want to look at something like Russell's The History of Western Philosophy. If you do get more involved in philosophy, you'll discover that the book has its flaws, and Russell was wrong about several of the philosophers that he discusses, but it's a good introduction to the history of philosophy that is easily accessible if you have the time to sit down and read it.

In terms of which one's are more fun to read, I'd say the philosophical fiction and Sophie's World are at the top, as the other two books are a bit more dry, but if you're looking for something substantive and not too technical, then all of these might serve your purposes.

I hope that helped in some way, and in future, if you have any philosophy related questions, don't hesitate to ask over in /r/askphilosophy.

The book I always recommend people start out with is Sophie's World, not because it's the most in-depth, but because it's the most accessible for a newcomer. It's also the most entertaining I've read. If you want something more in-depth, Russell's History of Western Philosophy is generally this subreddit's big recommendation, although I personally wouldn't say it's a great starting point. His reading of some thinkers is not great, and he's not quite as good at dumbing down certain ideas to an introductory level.

A good summary of philosophy will help you for a couple reasons. One, it will give you enough information to find out what thinkers and ideas interest you. If you're interested in a particular question or thinker, then that's obviously where you should go. Philosophy of religion? Logic? Aesthetics and art? Language? There's plenty written on all these topics, but it can be a bit overwhelming to try and just attack all of philosophy at once. Like any other field, there will be parts of it that click with you, and parts that don't really seem all that appealing. Find your niche, and pursue it. In addition to giving you an idea of where to go, a good overview will put ideas in context. Understanding Augustine and Aquinas will make more sense if you know that they're working with a foundation of the Greek thought of Plato and Aristotle. Descartes wrote his meditations during the enlightenment, and was a major contributor to much of the emphasis on reason that defined that era. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard's existentialist ideas become more powerful when you realize they're critiquing and challenging the technicality of Kant and Hegel. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum, and while you can't be expected to know all the details of everything, your niche area of interest will make more sense if you understand it's context.

As for easier texts that I'd recommend trying out (once you find an area of interest), here's a few that are pretty important and also fairly accessible. These are texts that are generally read by all philosophy students, due to their importance, but if you're just into this for personal interest, you can pick and choose a bit. Still, these are important works, so they'll be very good to read anyways.

Plato - Apology: not terribly dense, but an accessible text in which Socrates basically defends his pursuing philosophical thought. I'd recommend this as an accessible introduction that will get you to feel like philosophy matters; think of it as pump-up music before a big game.

Plato - The Republic: this is arguably Plato's most important work. In it, he talks about the nature of men, politics, education and art.

Aristotle - Nichomachean Ethics: a text that deals with leading a life in accordance with virtue. Aristotle's style is a bit dry and technical, but he's also very important.

Augustine - On Free Choice of the Will: a dialogue similar to Plato's in which Augustine argues that the existence of God does not conflict with man having free will.

Aquinas - Selected Excerpts: he wrote a lot, so you don't wanna try reading a whole one of his works. This selects his key ideas and puts them in bite-sized chunks. He's a big Christian thinker, arguing for the existence and goodness of God and related theological concepts.

Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy: Descartes uses reason to prove he exists, along with some other things. Pretty easy to read, although it sparked a revolution in thought, making epistemology a central problem of philosophy.

Kant - Grounding for Metaphysics of Morals: one of his easier works, but it's still one of the more technical works I'm recommending, in which Kant demonstrates that morals are a priori.

Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling: one of my favorite books, Kierkegaard writes about the nature of faith using the story of Abraham and Isaac as his starting point. A huge critic of Kant's obsession with pure reason, he is generally considered to be the first existential thinker.

Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil: Nietzsche is one of the more controversial thinkers in history. Also a critic of Kant, he is one of the most profound critics of religion. This book is one of his more important, in which he talks about his problems of religion, the culture around him, and at times points us in the direction he wants us to go. Know that he doesn't write in a terribly direct manner, so if you choose to read him, come here for assistance. He's a bit different to read, and can be challenging if you're not ready.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and having a good reference to help you along will be very helpful.

Start with a good algorithms book like Introduction to algorithms. You'll also want a good discrete math text. Concrete Mathematics is one that I like, but there are several great alternatives. If you are learning new math, pick up The Princeton Companion To Mathematics, which is a great reference to have around if you find yourself with a gap in your knowledge. Not a seminal text in theoretical CS, but certain to expand your mind, is Purely functional data structures.

On the practice side, pick up a copy of The C programming language. Not only is K&R a classic text, and a great read, it really set the tone for the way that programming has been taught and learned ever since. I also highly recommend Elements of Programming.

Also, since you mention Papadimitriou, take a look at Logicomix.

This was briefly talked about in Born To Run - a fantastic book if you haven't read it. Lots of details about ultra running, barefooting and just awesomeness.

Seriously? Born to Run. Apparently once you get done reading it you are 100%, without-a-doubt convinced that humans specifically evolved to run long distances. So convinced that you run out and buy the first pair of VFFs you encounter.

I've read the Lieberman and Bramble's paper. It's a fantastic account of all the adaptations humans have amassed to become bipedal runners. These things shouldn't be surprising though. One would expect any arboreal animal to adopt similar enhancements as they move into a ground-based lifestyle. Their hypothesis is intriguing, but it falls quite short. Essentially it's a just so story, just like the aquatic ape hypothesis.

I'm not an anthropologist, so I don't personally have a concrete response to L&B. However, Pickering and Bunn do and they make a pretty good case against PR while shooting down L&B's idea.

Anyway, the fact remains that there is no evidence for early hominids engaging in this behavior. And there probably never will be. Personally, I think the idea of running a marathon, where there is a 50/50 chance that you may not eat after you're done and then have to try again sounds incredibly stupid in a primeval environment and discounts the eons of other eating and foraging habits early hominids would have known about. Also, even if there was a 100% success rate with PR, I'm still not convinced it is an optimal foraging habit, given that there are other options available.

You wouldn't be doing much mathematics if you stuck to writing about those topics.

You could take a look at The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (or some other source that contains a lot of mathematics), find a topic that piques your interest (even if initially you don't understand much about it), try to figure out as much as you can about it (you could ask questions on this subreddit), and then try to write an introduction to it at the level of your fellow students.

Not a textbook per se, but I'll go with the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It's a coherent (and surprisingly accessible) overview of just about all of pure math.

For some physics :
Penrose - Road to Reality

Gleick - Chaos

Some math/philosophy :
Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Anything early by Dawkins if you want to avoid the atheist stuff though his latest is good too.

Anything by Robert Wright for the evolution of human morality.

Pinker for language and the Mind.

Matt Ridley for more biology.

Se até 2003, quando se entrava na primeira delegacia de polícia que encontrasse e rapidamente saia com um documento autorizando o porte de sua arma. Por que não era uma carnificina como argumentam que seria se liberassem o porte?


A mas o estatuto salvou vidas...
A resposta pra essa falácia esta aqui.

Sugiro ver os seguintes dado:

No Brasil, após a entrada em vigor do Estatuto do Desarmamento, os números de homicídios praticados com armas de fogo chegaram aos mais altos níveis da história, levando em consideração o crescimento populacional.

No Texas, quando se compara o perfil dos cidadãos que têm porte de arma com aqueles que não têm, observa-se que quem porta armas tem 7,6 vezes menos chances de cometer um crime.

O caso da Inglaterra é bastante emblemático. Assim como no Brasil, com a entrada em vigor do 1997 Firearms Act, lei que proibia o cidadão de portar armas, o país se tornou uma região fértil para a criminalidade.

De acordo com KERRY & LOVETT (2009), a Inglaterra (e o País de Gales) tem o maior número de estupros da Europa. A partir de 1997, ano de entrada em vigor da legislação contra a liberdade de acesso às armas o aumento de casos cresce a números nunca antes vistos.

Em 1959 a Índia começava a controlar armas. Nas décadas seguintes o número de homicídios bateu recorde sucessivos, até 1987.

WRIGHT & ROSSI por meio de questionário analisaram a relação entre os condenados e as armas.

Entre os muitos dados descobertos destaca-se este: 57% dos entrevistados disseram ter mais medo de um cidadão armado do que da polícia. Quase 90% deles acreditam também que um criminoso “habilidoso” deve descobrir se a vítima está armada ou não, antes de realizar o crime.

Considerando que utiliza-se a polícia ostensiva como forma de inibir o crime, o estudo aponta que uma sociedade armada pode ter mais efeito nessa variável que milhares de viaturas nas ruas.

KLECK & GERTZ (1995) procuraram entender melhor como as pessoas utilizavam as armas para defesa.

Uma das descobertas de seu estudo foi o fato de que na esmagadora maioria das vezes em que uma arma é utilizada para proteger alguém, nenhum disparo é efetuado.

Em outras palavras, não existe notificação policial, não há manchete de jornal e, não fosse por uma pesquisa como esta, ninguém ficaria sabendo.

O Ministério da Justiça dos Estados Unidos tem um dos estudos mais importantes do mundo sobre o estupro e as reações de suas vítimas.

Entre vários dados que corroboram a hipótese de que vale a pena reagir a um estupro, o mais expressivo é este: Em apenas 3% dos casos, quando a vítima está armada, seja com uma arma de fogo ou com uma faca, o estupro é consumado.

Aconteceu na Nova Zelândia o mesmo que já vimos em vários outros países. Em 1983 os neozelandeses começavam o seu controle de armas.

Nos anos subsequentes o número de estupros cresceu exponencialmente, de acordo com os dados do próprio governo.

Em 1983 a Nova Zelândia criava sua primeira lei de controle de armas. Os neozelandeses acreditavam que era preciso controlar as armas para evitar que os criminosos tivessem acesso a elas.

Nos anos seguintes a esta primeira legislação, os crimes violentos aumentaram a níveis inéditos.

Os políticos da Nova Zelândia, contudo, ainda não haviam aprendido a lição. Em 1992 promulgaram mais uma lei, que tornava ainda mais restrito o acesso a armas, em especial a armas longas semiautomáticas, como o Ar-15.

Os crimes passaram então a crescer em uma taxa ainda mais alta, conforme apontam os dados fornecidos pelo Ministério da Justiça da Nova Zelândia.

É possível inferir, que as restrições a armas – não importa de que natureza – não apenas não ajudam a coibir os crimes como podem fornecer um fator “protetor” aos criminosos, encorajando a prática dos delitos.

A análise criteriosa dos dados de acidentes, homicídios, suicídios e uso defensivo de armas de fogo, nos mostra que para cada caso de morte, 13 vidas são salvas com a utilização desta ferramenta.

Os dados em questão referem-se aos Estados Unidos, o país com maior número de armas por habitante do mundo

De acordo com LOTT & LANDES, leis que permitem o porte de armas tendem a reduzir: a) número de mortos em homicídios em massa; b) número de feridos nesses incidentes e, c) os próprios homicídios em massa ou tiroteios.

Desde 2003, ano da entrada em vigor do Estatuto do Desarmamento, os gastos reais (corrigidos pela inflação) com segurança pública crescem ano após ano. Ainda assim, todos os indicadores de crimes violentos apenas aumentam.

O estudo suíço denominado “Small Arms Survey” fornece rica fonte de informação sobre armas em todo o mundo.

Os dados levantados em Genebra, corroboram a hipótese de que existe uma tendência de que países com mais armas em poder do povo tenham índices menores de violência.

No Brasil, com uma das legislações mais restritivas do planeta sobre armas de fogo, chegamos ao patamar do país mais violento do mundo, sendo que aproximadamente 90% dos crimes são cometidos com armas de fogo.

No Canadá, com 30 armas para cada 100 habitantes, e uma legislação relativamente liberal, as armas de fogo – de fácil aquisição – raramente são utilizadas em crimes.

Em 1994, os Estados Unidos editaram a chamada “Federal Assault Weapons Ban”, uma restrição a determinados tipos de armas, criados na fértil imaginação dos desarmamentistas.

Como sempre, a desculpa era de que “ninguém precisava de um fuzil de assalto” e, como sempre, os resultados foram catastróficos.

GIUS (2014) examinou alguns efeitos das restrições de armas de assalto e uma das conclusões foi o aumento de 19,3% na taxa de homicídios.

Você já deve ter visto um desarmamentista tentando se aproveitar dos incautos, ao esbravejar freneticamente o suposto enorme perigo das armas em relação as crianças.

Primeiro, eles tentam fazê-los acreditar que armas causam acidentes e, sem demora, logo se lembram de incidentes extraordinários em que algum maluco armado invadiu uma escola e começou a atirar.

Mas o que a ciência e a estatística têm a dizer sobre isso? Será que o terrorismo em que se especializaram os desarmamentistas tem algum fundamento?

Além de o índice de acidentes com armas de fogo ser muito inferior a outras situações mais banais, como afogamento, choque elétrico, sufocação, quedas e envenenamentos, quando analisamos os dados estadunidenses de 1993 a 2011, notamos que enquanto a disponibilidade de armas de fogo – incluídos fuzis, pistolas, espingardas e revólveres – aumenta, o número de crianças mortas por armas de fogo decresce sistematicamente.

Mais uma vez, quem defende o desarmamento não consegue sustentar seus argumentos frente a dados simples.



No defesa.org na parte de Estatística e Ciência tem todo o compilado. Se quiser mais a fundo vai ter que buscar os estudos.

De livros recomendo:

Mentiram Para Mim Sobre o Desarmamento

Preconceito Contra As Armas

More Guns, Less Crime

E as palestra e debates do Bene Barbosa

That book you linked is only going to teach him Kanji, not vocabulary and grammar. A well respected first step would be the Genki series. There are 2 series and both series have a main textbook and a workbook.

Genki I (second edition) http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449110193&sr=1-1&keywords=genki

Genki I Workbook (Second Edition) http://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449110193&sr=1-2&keywords=genki

• Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, Pars I: Familia Romana
  
• Wheelock's Latin

Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, Pars I: Familia Romana is quite good. It teaches Latin completely in Latin. There are online exercises for this at http://wyomingcatholic.net/WCCLatin.htm

Have no fear of learning more Latin than you need. After all, if you want to read the Vulgate, you'll probably also want to read papal encyclicals, conciliar documents, untranslated patristic texts, etc., not to mention secular authors like Cicero and Vergil. I recommend studying by immersion with Hans Ørberg's reader Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. Do all the exercises. Build up to reading unadapted excerpts from classical authors in part II. Then approach the Vulgate.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book and this book.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a really good resource for understanding the broad landscape of what's currently big in math research. It goes into great detail about the history of different branches, biographies of famous mathematicians, small summaries of key concepts, and applications in the modern world. The list price is close to $80, but there might be other ways of finding a copy (wink).

http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809

This might be more than you want, but check out http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809

For clarification, this smacks of bullshit in the technical sense of the term, which is probably why it is being down-voted. But you framed this as a logical response; so, my rejoinder will be in kind:

The fact that your relationship with your wife did not work out despite having allegedly started as an infatuation illustrates that infatuation with someone is an insufficient condition for achieving a state of happy commitment. The collective testimony of human experience has also shown that infatuation is not a necessary condition for this desired state of affairs; there are all sorts of people who have wound up in happily committed relationships without having first passed through a stage of infatuation. But if infatuation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for achieving a happily committed relationship, then it is logically of no consequence whatsoever for that project.

Still with me?

The various respondents are arguing that your articulated feelings towards your coworker bear a family resemblance to infatuation. If they are correct, then your feelings towards your coworker ironically need to be bracketed--as in, literally set aside from your processing of your options--in order for you to make the decision about your future soundly. On the other hand, in order to demonstrate that these respondents are incorrect in this assessment, you will need to show why your feelings towards your coworker go well beyond infatuation to something far more substantial.

It will be extremely difficult for you to establish the aforementioned demonstration given the ways you have already described the points of attraction between you and your coworker, e.g. bonding over memes seems juvenile to the majority of us who are responding, the high level of excitement and nervousness you posses with respect to communicating with your coworker suggests emotional infidelity / unwise boundary crossing, etc. Absent this demonstration, you have no good reason to pursue a relationship with your coworker on the basis you articulated in your comment here--and this is without even considering the ramifications with respect to your wife and child.

This part of your initial submission is interesting:

> I eventually agreed to try to work it out with her and to try to fix our problems, not wanting to lose everything. Her conservative father talked to me in private, and shockingly told me that he understood exactly how I felt because he had the same situation and that I should go with my heart and that I need to make a decision (as opposed to murdering me for hurting his daughter so badly). Tonight, my wife left again and said that I need to decide between my coworker and her and to tell her my decision. And here I am now.

Your wife is right. Follow through with all those small decisions of commitment culminating in your marriage right up to the one you articulated at the top of this paragraph: Try to work it out with your wife, and try to fix your collective problems. It may suck, but it will suck nowhere near as much as the alternative with which you're toying--an alternative that is not just a poor idea based on people's opinions but one that is logically indefensible given all of the above.

You probably know that the etymology of the term "husband" refers to a man who is a "house dweller." The connotation of the term comes out more fully in its verbal form, where "husbandry" refers to the management of one's household.

Do this.

Build, lead, and defend your house to the death. The support you're receiving from wife, your father-in-law, the substantial majority of respondents, and (according to your story) even your coworker to that end should be more than encouraging--it should make you want to kick some freaking ass for your family. Perhaps the way things have played out so far for you mitigate against that. Perhaps being "behind" your wife's pace in college and financially beholden to your in-laws makes you feel emasculated, among other things. The way to deal with this is to manage your freaking house, not burn it down.

Holler if you want more input; meanwhile, all the best...

r/digitalnomad

You've earned the gift every lurker on that sub, myself included, dreams of. Sure, you may still need to work, but you can work from anywhere with a half decent internet connection. Travel, experience the world in a way most people aren't fortunate enough to be able to. Hop on Airbnb, type in a destination you've always wanted to go to, and set your dates for the entire month of May. You've hit the jackpot, congratulations. Vagabonding is a great book on the topic. Rolf Potts' other book, Marco Polo Didn't Go There is also a phenomenal read.

r/onebag if you want to get extra obnoxious (in a good way!) about how little you own.

r/vandwellers if you want to travel the US in a van.

I think it's a kinda poor way to learn kanji on it's own, but for kana and general vocabulary it's fine. It's a good supplement to use in conjunction with other resources.

For kanji a friend of mine recommended Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. His method is working the best for me.

Suburban development 🎉

For those interested, this book gives a very easy-to-read overview on American city planning: https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865477507. It’s tough to read living here, though, because after reading it you’ll definitely be bothered by so many things you never noticed before.

I loved this set to learn with, thought you'd appreciate
Spencerian Penmanship (Theory Book plus five copybooks) https://www.amazon.com/dp/088062096X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_k4dLAbNN3JY0M

Why not a lovely Spencerian letter? It doesn't have to be the ornate kind written with a dip pen, that'll take too long to learn. But you can simply buy a cheap fountain pen, fill it with a nice colored ink, and practice writing in a nice monoline script (ignore all the shadings). You can also consider business handwriting and spruce it up with a bit of fancy capitals. Lessons are free at the iampeth website although if you are serious you can buy these copybooks, fill up all the pages and voila.. instant pants dropping love letter.

Very cool. What definition of 'bullshit' are you using? I use Frankfurt's whenever it comes up.

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

I've figured it out... I think Uber very intentionally makes statements that, while misleading, cannot be shown to be outright lies. Let's break this one down.

• "…price cuts incentivizes riders to take more trips, more often."
  True.
  
  
• "...resulting in greater earnings for our partners."
  Possibly true in aggregate if "earnings" just means fares taken in, as opposed to actual profit.
  
  
• "…this price change will ultimately increase drivers’ average hourly revenue."
  Plausible. However, what normal people and companies care about isn't revenue – it's profit. Past a certain point (long since past in most US UberX markets), "partner" profits decline significantly despite increased revenue.
  
  So, if Uber made these statements under penalty of perjury in a court, they'd probably be safe. But they're also calculated to mislead and total bullshit.
  
  Randomly, for those interested in a moral philosophical consideration of making statements like these, I recommended the delightful On Bullshit by Prof. Henry Frankfurt. http://www.amazon.com/On-Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946
  

You can be middle class or poor and do that.

http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180/

There are many different approaches to learning Kanji that people will advocate. Some of the most popular include

• Learning common Kanji and vocab words that use them (The back chapters of Genki)
  
  
• Brute force kanji without using radicals (Various kanji books)
  
  
• Learning radicals and then Kanji comprised of those via mnemonics (Heisig)
  
  
  • Subset: Learn vocab words for each kanji in addition to mnemonics and radicals (Kodansha)
    
    Or you can take the independent approach: As you come across words you don't know, learn the kanji and that word at the same time. Look up the stroke order for kanji as you come across them and don't worry about systematically learning every 常用 kanji.
    
    What works best will depend on your learning style. I've briefly tried each of these methods. What I recommend to people now is Kodansha. Here's the basic process for how I learn 8 kanji every day:
    
    

1. First review the last 8 kanji I learned by seeing if I can remember the mnemonics. Try to draw them by hand. If I remember the vocab words I might write them down too, but I usually just review vocab using anki.
   
   
2. Go through 4 kanji and their mnemonics. Write each one at least once to get a feel for the stroke order. Go through the next 4 in the same way.
   
   
3. Add all the vocab that Kodansha recommends memorizing to my custom anki deck. (There is a community anki deck but I prefer to do it in my own style.)
   
   
4. Briefly look over the 8 kanji I learned today and the 8 I learned yesterday again.
   
   You can choose any number of kanji to do each day, just don't overload yourself with something ridiculous like 100 per day. Basically the way this method works is you learn each kanji via its radical components and you learn the multiple pronunciations or meanings by memorizing applicable vocabulary.
   
   I review the kanji from days farther back than yesterday using a kanji application on my phone that allows me to make custom kanji lists and practice drawing them. Again a different method might work better for you, this is just how I choose to do it. I could go through my specific problems with each of the other methods if you'd like but I think this post is long enough as it is.
   
   Resources referenced:
   
   Kodansha
   
   Android Kanji Study app
   
   Anki
   
   Community Kodansha Deck
   
   And the other kanji book I used a long time ago:
   
   Heisig

This is the latest edition of Remembering the Kanji
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921

And here you can find the RTK deck for Anki https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/japanese

Check out Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig.

Learning kanji by radicals is a good way of doing things, but for most everyone, an additional layer of abstraction is required to memorize things well. That is to say, creating stories or mnemonics using these radicals is an effective way to learn kanji.

There's been a lot of discussion on Remembering the Kanji and similar programs such as the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, so I'd check that out.

/r/LearnJapanese

Best places to start are to learn the two main Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana. A good place to start with that is here.

Next, you need a grammar resource. Tae Kim is a good free online resource. You could also get a popular textbook like Genki.

Lastly, you need a resource for learning kanji, the complex characters adapted from Chinese that make up a lot of Japanese writing. The first two levels of WaniKani are free.

It takes a couple months of study before you really start to feel like you're making progress, but after a year or so a lot of easy reading material becomes approachable. There's also a huge and awesome community of people doing the same thing. Give it a try if you feel like it!

You should probably just use Genki

It is possible to learn Japanese using only the internet and free sources, but it certainly makes things more difficult. The advantage of using a standardized textbook and traditional learning methods is that you get a solid foundation, both in the sense that it gets you started on the right foot, but also in that it teaches you what sort of things you need to learn in the first place.

I highly recommend you try getting and using Genki. See if it is available from your local library, for example.

Yes, it is possible to learn Japanese using just free resources found on the internet.

These days, everything you could possibly want for learning Japanese exists on the internet right now.

If you learn how to use Anki (the best and most popular free flashcard program) you can get SRS flashcards without paying for a fancy website. TextFugu's free lessons will get you started with using Anki while at the same time teach you hiragana and katakana (the two syllabaries used in Japanese).

If you use Tae Kim's grammar guide and other online sources, you technically don't need a textbook. Imabi is another website similar to Tae Kim that people like. Duolingo might even be worth your time, assuming you utilize the discussion forums and that community to make sure you understand the grammar which is poorly taught by the app.

If you use HelloTalk, iTalki, and HiNative you can interact with Japanese people who'll help correct your compositions, and that could potentially lead to language exchange friendships where you Skype and practice conversation.

You can find free reading material online for practice, both by nature of the entire Japanese internet being at your fingertips, but also due to free websites like NHK Easy News and Watanoc.

You can assess your skills without ever paying for a standardized test by using the J-Cat.

You can find communities of fellow learners here on /r/LearnJapanese (we've got some good guides in the sidebar, btw), on the Japanese Language Stack Exchange, and /jp/'s Daily Japanese Thread (they've got a good guide for getting started over there).

I'm gonna say it... Born to Run. It's the one fitness related book that actually got me hyped, long term, for running. I may not be able to do an ultra, but I'm for once taking running seriously and have found I can already do things I didn't think were possible for my body. I feel stronger and happier, and it's thanks to that book for inspiring me to run. Not to mention, I don't get knee pain or shin splints anymore once I learned about the whole forefoot strike thing (though I still wear real sneakers).

EDIT: added link.

It's actually a quote from "Rules for Radicals". It's a must read for just about any politician worth his or her salt. It's basically a political warfare manual. Read that, "The Prince", "On War" and "The art of war" and you will have a pretty good understanding of what they are actually doing up there. There are several other books I'd recommend if you really want an understanding, but those are a good start.

Here's a site with some data saying among other things that Concealed Carry permit holders are about 5 times less likely to kill someone than the average citizen.

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/12/foghorn/ny-times-uses-deceptive-statistics-to-promote-anti-gun-agenda-again/

So just carrying isn't going to make you more dangerous. Sure you'll probably never need it, but it may save your life or the lives of others, so you might as well be prepared. Here's a list of some of the cases you never hear about where mass shooters were stopped by armed citizens.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/10-potential-mass-shootings-that-were-stopped-by-someone-wit

The NRA has a great column called Armed Citizen where they report a few noted examples of guns doing good every month. It might be good to mention that a gun is no good to you if you can't get to it in time. Even if you are at home with the gun relatively close by, during a home invasion, the gun isn't going to do you any good upstairs in the safe when you are being beaten up in the entry way.

http://www.nrapublications.org/index.php/11012/armed-citizen-17/

Also people aren't the only problems that a firearm can solve. Dogs can attack people. So do wild animals. The lady in this case was lucky, but having a pistol on hand might have helped her drive the bear off without getting scratched up so badly.

http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/boston-north/Grafton-New-Hampshire-woman-attacked-by-bear/15135080#!bB2aVN

There's also a great book called, More Guns Less Crime, that is chock full of studies on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660

Why don't you try a book that helps you learn Kanji and Vocabulary associated with those Kanji?

I recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

There are also memrise quizzes to drill yourself on what you learned:
http://www.memrise.com/course/196282/the-kodansha-kanji-learners-course/

"こんにちは" is the right way to write Konnichiwa. What were you trying to say with the second part, mainly "多町"?

Good luck!

I advice you to get a copy of Hans Ørberg's "Lingva Latina - Familia Romana". It has an ascending difficulty level, and you can get used to read Latin again with the easier chapters and learn more with the later and thus harder chapters. You can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410539390&sr=8-1&keywords=lingua+latina

Good luck in learning more Latin!
Vale,
Tor

I'm not sure if you're asking how to do the more advanced stuff that /u/kapule910 did, or if you're looking to get started. If it's the latter, be sure to check out the Spencerian Penmanship Theorybook - https://www.amazon.com/Spencerian-Penmanship-Theory-Book-copybooks/dp/088062096X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527000026&sr=8-1&keywords=spencerian+penmanship+theory+book+plus+five+copybooks

It was written by Spencer's children/pupils and provides an excellent introduction to the style, along with practice books / exercises. A bit old school, but I think that adds to the charm. =o)

For my high school we had to take 3 years of Latin. We used Memrise for Latin vocabulary and the book Lingua Latina. I reccomend this book because it is subtly super Catholic and there are many books that help understand. It goes over all necessary Latin grammar which combined with Memrise helped me a lot to learn Latin.

https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205

https://www.memrise.com/course/252632/lingua-latina-pars-i-familia-romana/

Find a copy of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. Libraries sometimes have copies, or you might be able to find a cheap, used copy. Even better if you can get the audio with it. It is a good, intuitive way to introduce you to the language, and makes learning basic declensions a bit more fun, because you are following along with a story, instead of just rote memorizing tables.

If you just want to learn it to read it, there's no better combination than Wheelock's Latin and Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. Wheelock gives you the grammar, and reading Orberg will improve your reading speed and comprehension by leaps and bounds.

Small correction, but I think you mean "Take Your Eye off the Ball"

https://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536642049&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=Keep+Your+Eye+Off+the+Ball+2.0

Pat Kirwan's Take your eye off the ball is amazing.

Worth every penny.

>Going by that definition, I would say that this guy has more passive, partial muscle contraction than this guy. By that metric, I would say that there is definitely such as thing as too much muscle tone.

Surely you're not serious.

>But there is a common range of athletic feats that people can expect to encounter every day. Lifting heavy things, moving heavy things constantly over a long period of time, being able to move your body for a long amount of time, etc. You're not going to need to move your body 26.2 miles very often, and you're not going to need to lift 300lb objects for a short amount of time very often. But a construction worker may spend all day moving 20lb objects. A guido may need to be able to move many different muscles very fast for 30 seconds if someone hits on his girl. That same guido many need to move his legs very fast if that someone ends up being a lot bigger than him.

Nothing in there is context independent.

People have made arguments about pop-science-evolutionary-based-fitness and the need for extreme long distance steady state cardio (Born to run, etc, etc). You can try to break down things into fundamental principles (see Crossfit and/or Movnat). You can center your arguments about hypothetical lifestyles (construction works swinging a hammer, etc). Regardless of any of these arguments you can't isolate any absolute metric of athleticism that would span what most people would consider to be athletics.

Start by reading this.

The first two books that come to mind are The Story of Philosophy by William Durant, and A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. I've never read the Russell book personally, but I've heard great things about it (plus, its got a great cover).

Reading: Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf I've always been all arms in my swing, but want to (need to) bring my game in the next level.

Hit a new indoor spot this past weekend and Jesus does that make a difference.

Using a shitty old banged up Wilson driver (still haven't pulled the trigger on my Cobra F7) and bringing rotation into it, I was hitting 240-270yds reliably and straight, which is about 30 yards better than my best drives. Felt great too.

Can't wait to get comfortable with it and pair it with a new driver and some decent soft balls and really drive the green.

Time for you to go read this: Rules for radicals

I heard good things about Princeton Companion, but I have never read it.

Apparently 'On Bullshit' is real, lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541544822&sr=8-1&keywords=on+bullshit

As for the episode, yes, it was very lackluster, but those games do look like garbage, even for the time, there were much better options, as the Nerd pointed out.

Overall impressions: AVGN has clearly run its course, and needs to be retired. But all of us here know that.

The Road by Jack London

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

I HIGHLY recommend this book.

Read this book: Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865477507

Looking over those, this seems like the best choice.

https://www.amazon.de/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&keywords=genki&qid=1574368671&sr=8-1
Is this fine?

I would add to /u/AlwaysUnite list Peter Singer's Animal Liberation - https://smile.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306

Know that the first version was written in 1975...

I know I must be missing some, but these are all that I can think of at the moment.

Fiction:

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

White Noise by Don Delilo

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DFW

Infinite Jest by DFW

Of these, you can't go wrong with Infinite Jest and the Collected Fictions of Borges. His Dark Materials is an easy and classic read, probably the lightest fare on this list.

Non-Fiction:

The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy

Chaos by James Gleick

How to be Gay by David Halperin

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Secret Historian by Justin Spring

Of these, Secret Historian was definitely the most interesting, though How to be Gay was a good intro to queer theory.

+++

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660

That may be in this instance, but persistence hunting is absolutely a real practice. Check out groups like the Tarahumara who run 120 miles in one session. For more information and an awesome read, check out Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, who went to Mexico to learn how the Tarahumara could run so far, especially barefoot, without "much" difficulty.

The classic (and quite convincing) book on this topic is Peter Singer's Animal Liberation.

Since nobody's going to read a book someone suggests on reddit, here's a very short argument to think buying meat to eat is often unethical:

1. It's wrong to inflict pain and suffering on non-human animals for pleasure. For instance, it's wrong to give a puppy a swift kick to the ribs because it would be funny.
   
2. It's wrong to pay other people to inflict pain and suffering on non-human animals for pleasure. Paying someone else to kick the puppy isn't okay, for instance.
   
3. Much of the meat we eat comes from animals that have undergone pain and suffering because they were raised in rather unhappy conditions.
   
4. Therefore it's wrong to buy much of the meat we eat.
   
   There are some additional ethical reasons for not eating much (or any) meat - you might think it's wrong not just to inflict pain and suffering on non-human animals but also to kill them if they're not sick (maybe it would be wrong to give the puppy a lethal injection, for instance), or that it's wrong to support the environmentally damaging meat industry, or it's wrong to use calories to raise non-humans animals for meat when humans are starving.

For anyone interested in learning more about this line of thinking, Singer's book Animal Liberation is fantastic.

What you are trying to do has been done by John Lott, including normalizing for gun laws, crime laws, demographics, urban vs. rural, etc.

His methodologies (which he covers in detail) may help you with your analysis.

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (Studies in Law and Economics)

Also take a look at Crime Prevention Research Center and Gunfacts.info

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X/

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/

https://www.amazon.com/Gunfight-Battle-Over-Right-America/dp/0393345831

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Guns-Liberals-Second-Amendment/dp/1610391691/

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660/

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Second-Amendment-Documentary-Commentaries/dp/0962366439

https://www.amazon.com/Armed-America-Remarkable-Became-American/dp/1595552847

https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Bear-Arms-Origins-Anglo-American/dp/0674893077

https://www.amazon.com/Targeting-Guns-Firearms-Control-Institutions/dp/0202305694

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Amendment-Biography-Michael-Waldman/dp/147674744X

Not astonishing at all to anyone who studied the issue. For a summary of relevant research from someone studying the data for decades, see

​

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660

​

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

> How can all of you instantly turn on anyone who isn't doing exactly what you think is right?

Because if its wrong, its wrong.

That DOJ memo is wrong.

I don't tolerate putting up with bullshit for the sake of compromise, and Mueller trotting out that DOJ memo was bullshit.

"We have compromised on this less smelly bullshit" is not a good compromise, its still just bullshit.

Ralph Potts' "Vagabonding" is pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0812992180

YES TOTALLY WORTH!
Khatzumoto : AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com
Khatzumoto learned to be fluent in Japanese in 18 months. He did this through complete immersion. He would listen to Japanese every single day even if he didn't understand most of it at first. Learning is all about TIME. He learned how to read and write fluently by going over many sentences through SRS(Spaced Repitition System). As for Kanji, he recommends the Heisig method which I myself found extremely helpful and have a much easier time learning Kanji. If you don't want to purchase you can find a torrent very easily.

Explanation in video bits:

Watching Japanese videos without subtitles

4 stages of listening

You'll suck at it less as time goes on

I do highly recommend watching all 3 parts of the videos as there is a lot more information in them.


READ THESE:

10,000 Hours of Listening Comprehension

10,000 Sentences


Additional Sources I use for Learning 日本語:

Anki Deck for Sentences

Grammar: imabi.net

Dictionary: tangorin.com

Learning at first is overwhelming but definitely will get easier over time. But that's the thing, you have to give it a chance.

Listen to me right now. Listen to me good.

Remembering the Kanji is probably one of the best ways to achieve what you're talking about. However, according to the introduction of the book, it will hurt you to read it alongside a Japanese course or in conjunction with other Kanji-memorizing methods. So just dedicate a few weeks to learning the 2,200 Kanji this books teaches. It claims that you can do it in 4-6 weeks if you're dedicated enough. Highly recommended.

Edit: Oh, and then there is a second and third volume which help with pronunciation of Kanji and introduce you to advanced Kanji, respectively. But even mastering the first volume puts you at a great advantage to learning Japanese.

Hey! Good to see someone interested in East Asian languages! The CJKV writing system normally throws a lot of people off.

CJK Writing System

I wrote a short little rant a while back on how the characters are constructed that you might want to read.

There are methods of learning the characters that make use of their structure. Heisig's RtK and RtH books (Amazon link) are the most well known books I think. Fansites such as Reviewing the Kanji and Reviewing the Hanzi also exist which you might want to take a look at.

Not sure if you like RtK? Here's the sampler. See if you like it after learning 276 characters~

Chinese-Specific

The only thing headache inducing about any Chinese dialect is the writing system and tones.

Note that though we call them "dialects", it is a matter of politics as most of them are mutually unintelligible. A Cantonese or Mandarin speaker is unlikely to understand a Hokkien speaker at all, for example.

Written chinese, on the other hand, is in Mandarin and only in Mandarin -- the other dialects do not have writing systems. Well... the notable exception is Written Cantonese, but that's can be seen as a variant of standard written chinese.

Oh! There are have two variants of the standard writing system: Simplified and Traditional. I had learnt the former in school, and I can read the latter after learning about the simplification process, so just pick one and stick with it.

I personally find Mandarin grammar to quite simple. This might be because it's an isolating language.

• Zhongwen.com -- I love the way he arranges related characters together in a tree.
  
• nciku.cn -- Online Chinese Dictionary
  
• Unfortunately I don't have that many online Chinese resources, and the physical ones I have are hard to obtain here in the UK.
  
• Reviewing the Hanzi has a nice list.
  
  Japanese-Specific
  
  Japanese folk have an easier time with Chinese characters. While 6000 Hanzi is roughly college-level (I think?) in Chinese, 6000 Kanji in Japanese is probably more-than-you-need-to-know-ever. There is a Kanji Aptitude Test which is pretty much the only reason one would learn that many.
  
  However, Japanese also have two syllabaries you'll need to know (~50 syllables each). These are phonetic, so they shouldn't pose much of a challenge; most who learn Japanese learn both of them in one or two weeks.
  
  Essential:
  
  
• Denshi Jisho -- Online Japanese dictionary (Basically WWWJDIC with a pretty interface)
  
  Beginner resources:
  
  
• TextFugu - An Online Textbook
  
• Tae Kim - Another Online Textbook, slightly more well-known. Free, unlike TextFugu.
  
• I would also strongly recommend grabbing Remembering the Kanji as soon as possible.
  
• Genki -- Textbook. Some will say to avoid this completely, but just for starting off I don't think it's /that/ bad. Get rid of it once you're past the beginner stage though.
  
  Books to get:
  
  
• Writing - Remembering the Kanji and Remembering the Kana
  
• Speaking / Listening - Shadowing Book 1, Shadowing Book 2
  
• Grammar - Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar
  
• Grammar - Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication
  
• Yes, I recommend both books.
  
  Mixed collection of Online Resources:
  
  
• Reading material - A list I posted a while back
  
• Listening material - Another list, though Koohii has a better one
  
• On Japanese flashcards
  
• Random learning resources from Koohii

I think the issue is more generally about economic opportunities and where employers are locating these days. I always wonder what people do for work in these smaller rural towns, and how I'd conceivably make a living if I decided to move there. Besides tradeswork, healthcare, government, some manufacturing and agriculture, what else is there really? We're urbanizing at a clip, both nationally and globally, and employers are increasingly relocating to urban centers where the talent is. There seems to be more opportunity in urban areas, with rural towns feeling like they're hollowed out leaving older folks on social security and younger folks in the rural poverty trap. I would honestly like to move to more rural environs to be closer to nature, but can't help but feel that's not where our economy is heading. Rural living has a lot more of an environmental impact, as well, with the car-dependency and the costs of transporting all those goods/services to more rural areas.

Sprawling suburbia is among the most environmentally and financially unsustainable movements in recent history. It is a sad, identity-less landscape that is actually really terrible over a number of different indicators. Highly recommend reading this short book to learn more about why suburbia ain't it.

Excellent. Thanks.

Here are the Amazon links for those books for anyone interested.

• The High Cost of Free Parking (Paper book only)
  
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile (Kindle and paper book)
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Paper book only)
  
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Kindle and paper book)
  
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (Kindle and paper book)
  
• The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (Kindle and paper book)
  
• $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better (Kindle and paper book)

Thanks, glad to see people are taking the time to read it. IMO, there's a reason why city-states were the basic structure of settlement for centuries.

Here's some additional reading if you're so inclined:

Suburban Nation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865477507/ref=oh_o01_s00_i00_details

The Wealth of Cities: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738201340/ref=oh_o06_s00_i00_details

Crabgrass Frontier: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195049837/ref=oh_o05_s00_i00_details

Green Metropolis (great look at the environmental aspects of sprawl from a non-traditional viewpoint. Gotta love any green stuff that rips into the sierra club) : http://www.amazon.com/Green-Metropolis-Smaller-Driving-Sustainability/dp/B002YNS422/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333550929&sr=8-1

If you want to learn the language most on here will probably reccomend Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. There's a lot of other options as well and I'm sure others will recommend them. Personally, I went the more traditional route (Wheelock's and Writing Latin, then working through a reader and finally just going through Virgil, Livy, etc.) and am currently going through LLPSI for the first time myself, so I can't really preach it's benefits yet haha.

For the Mantras why don't you post them, if you can, and someone might help you out!

There's a book called Reading Medieval Latin by Keith Sidwell in which he goes into the cultural & historical context of that particular variation of Latin. However it starts at an intermediate level & does assume you already know basic Latin.

So I suggest to get up to the level expected in this book, read it's predecessor Reading Latin by Keith Sidwell or read Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina Per Se Illvstrata

Ditch that garbage app and dive into the easy, comfortable, inexpensive old-world wholesomeness that is the Lingua Latina series.

The best part is Hans Ørberg will never delete your account because you don't have one

You want books to learn Latin and Greek, but you don't want books that are written for the purpose of teaching Latin and Greek?

I'm going to throw a textbook at you anyway, but you might like it:

Familia Romana: https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205

Get the Exercitia too: https://www.amazon.com/Exercitia-Latina-Exercises-Familia-Romana/dp/1585102121

This book. Take Your Eye Off the Ball, by Pat Kirwin.

https://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503432953&sr=8-1&keywords=pat+kirwan

I run barefoot whenever possible. It's a WHOLE other experience! Read Born to Run by Chris McDougall (http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303) to get the full scoop, or see Barefoot Ted's blog (http://barefootted.com/) for the hard-core enthusiast community.

Yes. He's primarily an author, with his latest book being The Fault in Our Stars.

Read it.

A reasonable, polite comment, with unfortunately, nonsensical equivocations. Sorry, no, the Tea Party movement was not plagued with violence, looting and riots. Disruptive town halls, by attending and then shouting? Sure. But that's where the comparison ends.

The other, left-leaning groups you listed have been plagued by violence, rioting, and looting. There are literally playbooks, written by Left-wingers, about how to sow violent, chaos in order to foment "change". Enjoy this lunacy for an example: https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Radicals-Practical-Primer-Realistic/dp/0679721134

The comparison here is not even close. While I agree with you that painting with a broad brush does not do realistic service in describing nuanced ideologies; the fact the Left is absolutely involved in more violent protests is undeniable. Unless of course you think Bush brought down the towers... ... ... and then I guess, anything goes. Baltimore was clearly a Koch brother plant /s. Come on, man.

I like Szekeres's A Course in Modern Mathematical Physics for referencing intro-grad-level material. It covers abstract linear algebra, differential geometry, measure theory, functional analysis, and Lie algebras, and teaches you some physics along the way.

More generally, the best "breadth" book on advanced mathematics is Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Gowers et al. and its slightly underachieving younger brother of a companion text, Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics by Higham et al.. You won't properly learn advanced mathematics this way, but you'll get the bird's-eye view of modern research programs and the math underlying them.

If you want a more algebraic take on Szekeres's program to teach physicists all the math they need to know, check out Evan Chen's Napkin project, which is intended to introduce advanced undergrads (it's perfectly fine for grad students too) to a wide variety of advanced mathematics on the algebra side of things.

Since you're doing probability and statistics, check out Wasserman's All of Statistics and Knill's Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes for good, concise references for intro-grad-level material.

I will second what /u/Ovationification said, though. I didn't really learn anything with the above books, I just use them occasionally for reference or to think about pedagogy.

Someone requests a guide and the response is there is no one comprehensive compendium? (a) Learn to fucking read - OP's not asking for a comprehensive compendium. (b) There are comprehensive compendiums of many, much more general subjects than "people of North East India" (eg. mathematics, history of the fucking world).

TLDR: STFU

Certainly, if you're not used to going barefoot, you can easily hurt yourself when making the transition.

I'd like to make the case that there is a continuum extending from (1) a very primitive totally barefoot society, through (2) a long period of human development when "shoes" consisted of very primitive foot coverings, (3) a long time when shoes were visually similar to modern shoes, but not "scientifically" designed with human anatomy in mind, to (4) today, where arch support is common, and Nike even sells shoes with microchips embedded in them.

Somewhere in that continuum is probably the optimally healthy range. I contend it is stage (2).

Millions and millions of years ago, our forefathers ate nothing but raw food, because they didn't know how to use fire. That was perfectly fine, then, when other aspects of their mental, physical, and social makeup allowed them to be successful living that way.

But when man conquered fire, and learned to cook, human anatomy changed. Human jaws became smaller, making it possible for large brains to develop, without killing mothers in childbirth.

That's still probably the optimal stage to be at, in terms of diet. Modern diets blew past that, and our bodies haven't really adapted to all the sugar and fat we shovel into them.

In "Born to Run", Christopher McDougall makes the case that the reason so many runners get injured, is because modern shoes offer too much support, and the dozens of muscles, tendons, and ligaments in our feet don't get the kind of varied exercise that we evolved for. Not only walking and jogging, but jumping, sprinting, fleeing danger in any direction, as quick as possible. Then those weakened tissues are easily injured.

But it's probably been a long, long time since our forebears did all this completely barefoot. We probably don't have the proper skin thickness to propulsive force ratio to avoid lacerations anymore. Instead, I contend that our feet are at the "adapted to early technology" stage in our development, the same way that our jaw to brain-case ratio reflects that we are optimally adapted to eating a cooked food diet - an adaptation which is dependent upon the cultural transmission of a learned technology. Why would it be any less astonishing for feet? Perhaps the best foot covering is a sturdy wrapping, made of breathable plant or animal material, such as dried fibers or animal skins.

I agree that you're likely to get injured running around like that, if you're used to arch support. It might take time to adapt. There are a lot of people in this world who never have to learn to adapt, because they've been running around without arch support all their lives. And I doubt that they have the foot and leg problems of people in the developed world, just as they have less incidence of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

There has actually been a lot of research into this topic recently, and a really interesting theory is some what cinematically put forward in the recent book "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen". I highly recommend this book to anyone even casually interested in running, history, the limits of the human body, etc. The story reads like a combination of "Into Thin Air" and "Gun, Germs, & Steel" (available on audible, if you sign up PM me for a referral).


TDLR of the book is this; current research shows that shoes and more specifically a "heel-strike" may be the cause of many running injuires as they significantly alter the strike pattern (and subsequent stride follow up).


Many modern elite runners, even those sponsored by Nike, such as Stanford's Track and Field team are now including barefoot running as a part of their training. One huge proponent of barefoot running, featured in the book, is Barefoot Ted. Check out his site for an brief overview of the latest science and "science" (Note- Ted is a barefoot dirty hippie :)).


For those who don't run, may barefoot runners don't actually run barefoot- they use thin second skin type products that provide protection from glass/butts/Hepatitis that don't significantly alter your stride. Ted has got a bunch in his store.


I met a ballerina at the gym yesterday barefoot running and we talked about the book and her experience. I wouldn't personally run barefoot at the gym on the treadmill, but what ever. If you're in Cincy and want to go for a job with me, hit me up.



(ps- I suck at running but love it)

No, but I have this textbook:

here!

>I don’t regret having one, just extremely ashamed of being sexual and communicating it to girls and also showing it to the world. Attracting girls’ attention and whatnot isn’t very hard but progressing things to dating, holding hands and eventually sex is impossible. I can’t even call them or message them on Facebook or Whatsapp because I just feel like an idiot for doing so. Making a move in clubs and bars is also difficult although I once got close to leaving with a girl but she didn't want to. I got made fun of a lot growing up for not having a girlfriend and this made me feel like i do not deserve one. It doesn't matter if I've got the green light to go ahead I just feel really ashamed do it. Even something like looking at a fit girl wearing a short skirt makes me feel bad for checking her out and that I shouldn’t be doing it.


I know what you mean. I've been there myself, but even when I was there I was entirely self-aware of my shame and I was skeptical of the validity of my emotional reactions; I realized they were ingrained. Being aware of your emotional reactions allows you to be emotionally proactive. Your sex-negative problem is mostly an emotional issue, and not much else, right? I've been there. I wouldn't doubt that you are also decent looking and have both latent and actualized social skills. Most intelligent introverts have a lot of potential to be who they want to be because they know themselves more deeply than others. You must use your introverted nature to your advantage and recognize the differences in others and yourself. In all honesty, there are an infinite number of unwritten rules; everyone's abstract/emotional logic is different. Many of them are foundational and predictable, however; including yours and mine. Like anything else, being emotionally predictable is not a black/white issue. It is a grey area, and you have to balance your reliability with creativity.


Being made fun of for not having a girlfriend is just as sexist as being made fun of for not having a boyfriend; gender equal too. Were you ever shamed for not having a boyfriend? It's clearly a matter of groupthink and extroverted style; not for everyone. Dating relationships, for extroverts especially, are often attention-getting and showy. They wear their relationships like trophies won. Usually introverts prefer a more private relationship because they have less social desire and are often shamed because of it. Introverts are “themselves” more often in private. Extroverts are “themselves” more often in public. There is no shame deserved either way, regardless of popular opinion. Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses, and you should try to introject some of the traits that you enjoy in others; regardless of type. That is how you become balanced.


>I’m receiving counselling from a pastor who advocates the whole “no sex before marriage” thing and believes that people should only date to get married and sex is only for making kids which is stupid IMO because I do not plan on getting married anytime soon.


Counseling from a Catholic pastor? Watch out, that is one of the most notorious sex-negative societies out there. They own the abstinence-only charade while they parade horribles. Marriage is not the answer to anything; it is an institution of the state. Anything else attached is sentimental.


If you haven't already, I recommend doing an in-depth study of animal sexual behaviors; especially the most intelligent animals. All animals have sex for pleasure, but some animals are only driven to have sex at certain times of the year; humans are on a 24/7 system.


>I’ve tried the no fap route and gotten very high days counts but that hasn’t really helped me at all.


Sexual frustration doesn't help anyone. If you are mindful, then you can use your libido to further your goals, but it is not an all-cure.


>Got any sources to help overcome sex-negative perspectives? I’m interested in recreational sex not baby making sex.


Absolutely. I recommend starting with actual sex science and learning about male and female psychology and neurology. Then work your way into reading about sex culture. You should also study developmental psychology as you will probably need the clinical context in order to objectively self-evaluate your childhood influences; it is necessary for self-therapy. The best therapy will always be self-therapy; no one will ever know you better than yourself.


Evolutionary Science and Morals Philosophy:

The Selfish Gene

The Moral Landscape

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do?


Sex Psychology, Science, and Neurology:

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

The Female Brain

The Male Brain

Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love

What Do Women Want

Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)

Sex: The world's favorite pastime fully revealed


Behavioral Psychology and Abstract Economics:

How Pleasure Works

Freakonomics

Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking

Thinking Fast And Slow

We Are All Weird


Developmental Psychology:

Nurture Shock

Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts That Run Our Lives


Empathy Building:


Half The Sky

The House On Mango Street

Me Before You

The Fault In Our Stars

Also check out James Hollis' Understanding The Psychology of Men lecture if you can find it.



Movies: XXY, Tom Boy, Dogtooth, Shame, Secretary, Nymphomaniac, Juno, Beautiful Creatures, and The Man From Earth.



All of these things are related, but it is up to you to make the connections; pick and choose which material suits your interests best. These are the things that came to mind first, and they have all influenced my perspectives.

> They ask every person who calls if they’re with Postmates.

Postmates claims that, "drivers are trained to identify themselves when they call."

https://www.eater.com/2015/7/31/9074491/postmates-delivery-problems

Rules for Radicals encourages people to, "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

It's the standard, "Hey, guys. Yeah, the other side is going all Alinsky/Rules for Radicals and kicking ass. But you shouldn't match their tone and fight back, because that would be actually using the 2nd Liberal Art and Science that masons esteem so much. Instead, you should be uncontroversial, ineffective, and Lose With Dignity^TM ."

Masonry has pledged to not interfere with my relationship with God, my country, my neighbors, my family, or myself.

The instant masonic leadership attempts to tell membership how they may participate in government and politics, they are in violation of their masonic vows to the membership.

I really like your point about everything having to be about you. I'm almost half way through Rules for Radicals and I can't support it enough. I think OP may be having issues with preconceptions about certain words or ideas. A word from Alinsky.

> "Even the word politics itself, which Webster says is "the science and art of government," is generally viewed in a context of corruption. Ironically, the dictionary synonyms are "discreet; providing, diplomatic, wise."


> "The same discolorations attach to other words prevalent in the language of politics, words like power, self-interest, compromise, and conflict. They become twisted and warped, viewed as evil. Nowhere is the prevailing political illiteracy more clearly revealed than in these typical interpretations of words. "

He goes on to shed those words in a positive light and I can't recommend his book enough. I really like when OP said

> "Its all fucking fake."

He's slowly realize life's a game and most people don't even realize they're playing. We have the rules now just do it

Hi there,

For all intents and purposes, for someone your level the following will be enough material to stick your teeth into for a while.

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-Volumes/dp/0486409163

This is a monster book written by Kolmogorov, a famous probabilist and educator in maths. It will take you from very basic maths all the way to Topology, Analysis and Group Theory. It is however intended as an overview rather than an exhaustive textbook on all of the theorems, proofs and definitions you need to get to higher math.

For relearning foundations so that they're super strong I can only recommend:

Engineering Mathematics
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineering-Mathematics-K-Stroud/dp/1403942463

Engineering Mathematics is full of problems and each one is explained in detail. For getting your foundational, mechanical tools perfect, I'd recommend doing every problem in this book.

For low level problem solving I'd recommend going through the ENTIRE Art of Problem Solving curriculum (starting from Prealgebra).
https://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/list/aops-curriculum

You might learn a thing or two about thinking about mathematical objects in new ways (as an example. When Prealgebra teaches you to think about inverses it forces you to consider 1/x as an object in its own right rather than 1 divided by x and to prove things. Same thing with -x. This was eye opening for me when I was making the transition from mechanical to more proof based maths.)


If you just want to know about what's going on in higher math then you can make do with:
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809

I've never read it but as far as I understand it's a wonderful book that cherry picks the coolest ideas from higher maths and presents them in a readable form. May require some base level of math to understand

EDIT: Further down the Napkin Project by Evan Chen was recommended by /u/banksyb00mb00m (http://www.mit.edu/~evanchen/napkin.html) which I think is awesome (it is an introduction to lots of areas of advanced maths for International Mathematics Olympiad competitors or just High School kids that are really interested in maths) but should really be approached post getting a strong foundation.

While it's not on the bleeding edge, the Princeton Companion gives a good overview of recent mathematics.

I found them on Amazon for $20

Spencerian Penmanship (Theory Book plus five copybooks) https://www.amazon.com/dp/088062096X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_C3yOzb2XG2CRJ

As strange as it may sound, the best thing that happened to me was acquiring a fountain pen.

Initially, I purchased the Spencerian Penmanship Copybooks and I found that basic repetition of simple strokes really helped to make myself aware of my hand and finger movements. The books helped me to, more than anything else, sit down in once place for an hour or so and simply focus on the techniques of writing. It got me familiar with practicing writing.

This is where the fountain pen comes in. I practiced my writing with a fountain pen, and the way the nub works and the weight of the pen made me very conscious of my every movement. Looking at my fountain pen writing, I was convinced that my handwriting hadn't improved. Yet when I set down my fountain pen and took up a normal ballpoint, the difference was easily noticeable; writing with a ballpoint pen was suddenly so easy. That was when I realized how my writing had improved.

Hope this helps, and best of luck in school!

tldr; Repetition and practice, coupled with a fountain pen.

I also highly recommend KKLC. You can read the introduction with Amazon's Look Inside! function which really explains the methodology. It takes the best of other existing methods and wraps them up into one. You learn mnemonics for each character, you don't need to study graphemes because they are introduced as the course goes on, and it contains selected vocabulary that represent common compounds with the primary on and kun yomi readings for each character. Vocabulary is, after all, the way to learn readings. Pair the book with a SRS system like Anki (and there is already a deck for KKLC), and you've got an excellent method that you can work through at your own pace. I personally have been trying to average 15-20 characters a day so that I can finish before the end of the year. Some days I'll do up to 50 though.

HERE is why I would recommend WaniKani over KKLC: If you want a system that is all in one, that will give you progress markers, and will hold your hand throughout the process. I'll be the first to admit kanji study is rather tedious, and I think doing KKLC independently requires a lot of dedication. So if you aren't ready to commit to that, you can start with wani kani. I don't want to comment on it because I never used it, but I don't like that it locks you off from further content until you reach a certain level of mastery with the current stuff... I'd rather learn vocab through reading and not be forced to memorize words out of context to advance.

you should really check out this book

Familia Romana by Hans Ørberg is the one that I see recommended the most often around here. It takes a more immersive approach to learning Latin where you jump right in and start reading rather than focusing on grammar tables right off the bat. The Exercitia and Latine Disco books go with it.

Hi! It's great that you want to learn Latin yourself - I was in a similar position not long ago, and can share my experience. Firstly, it's not going to be very easy, but it will be a lot of fun - learning Latin will teach you a lot about linguistics, history, and even English.

It seems to be a consensus at /r/latin that Wheelock's, while being a good textbook, teaches to translate, not to read. It focuses on rote memorization of grammar. Lingua Latina, on the other hand, focuses on reading comprehension and is considered by /r/latin users to be a superior learning method. It's based on the natural method: it is written completely in Latin, beginning with very simple phrases which speaker of any European language can understand, and slowly progresses further. To give you an idea, its first sentence is "Rōma in Italiā est". You can understand it easily, and you've already learned 4 words!

While Lingua Latina is a great textbook, I would advise getting some supplements to augment your studying process. All of them can be bought on amazon, or acquired by other means if you wish to cut your costs. Excercitia Latina, which follow Lingua Latina chapter by chapter, will give you enough practice to get a firm grip on each chapter's material. I would recommend not just filling the gaps in, but writing whole exercises out in a separate notebook - making the mechanical memory help you memorize words and grammatical structures. Latine Disco and Neumann's companion are useful companions, which will help you understand grammar introduced in each chapter of Lingua Latina (you only need one of them).

Finally, memorizing words is necessary with any language, and Latin is no exception. Some students find Lingua Latina's method to be sufficient for spaced repetition of new words, but it wasn't enough for me. I used anki, a spaced repetition software based on flashcards, to study words. There is a Lingua Latina deck available for anki, divided into chapters: thus you can easily add words into your flashcard pool after completing every LL chapter.

I hope this helps! If you'll have any questions on the material, redditors on /r/latin are very nice and are always willing to help.
Good luck with your studies!

Valē, amīce!

One interesting textbook is Lingua Latina per se illustrata, which is designed to introduce Latin to a novice learner solely by immersion. I didn't find it myself until well after I learned Latin, but from what I could tell, it would be a good way to pick up the basics

Got a PM asking about books, might as well share what I've read/enjoyed:

Most people recommend Pat Kirwan's Take Your Eye Off the Ball. Some bits of it can be simplistic, but based off what you told me it should be a good read. It basically breaks down each position group chapter by chapter, and has some extra details about coaching, front offices, scouting, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472878540&sr=8-1&keywords=take+your+eye+off+the+ball

Next I'd put SI's Blood, Sweat, and Chalk. It's a great balance between storytelling and technical detail. It basically chronicles significant advances in tactics on offense and defense over the decades. For example, offensive chapters start with the single wing, then goes on to the wing T, wishbone/flexbone, Air Croyell, west coast offense, spread, etc. (and many more)

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Chalk-Ultimate-Football/dp/1603200614/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472878672&sr=8-1&keywords=blood%2C+sweat+and+chalk

Lastly I'd recommend Chris B Browns two books (and his blog) - The Essential Smart Football and The Art of Smart Football. These are similar to Blood, Sweat, and Chalk but more detailed and less about story. Still great reads.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=chris+b+brown

For web reading, I loved Matt Bowen's Football 101 series on BleacherReport.com. Unfortunately he works for ESPN now, but he has two years worth of excellent beginner articles on B-R.com He breaks down tons of big picture concepts which can really help fill in details.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2024638-nfl-101-introducing-the-basic-route-combinations

I would recommend, in order:

Take Your Eye Off the Ball by Pat Kirwan

The Essential Smart Football by Chris Brown

The Art of Smart Football by Chris Brown

Blood, Sweat, and Chalk by Tim Layden

For the most basic and easy to understand introduction, I highly suggest the book Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look by Pat Kirwan.

Youtube channels -

Samuel Gold

Brett Kollmann like /u/browntown6969 pointed out as well

Blog -

Smart Football (also his books) along with the other blogs linked to on that website

All of those are really great and helped me when I first starting learning about football on a deeper level.

Read one of my favorite books, Take your eye off the ball

This book is amazing. It taught me almost everything when I read the first version. I was so into it I read it in one sitting.

This may be just what you're looking for

Peter Singer's Animal Liberation did for the animal rights movement what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environmental movement.

https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306

Gleick's Chaos: The Making of a New Science is one of my favorite popular science books ever. Highly recommended.

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

>the scientific method can be used to predict the effect of an intervention regarding climate change

Wow, okay. Rule #1: the scientific method does not predict anything. The method is used to test theories, either very grand and general (Newton's Three Laws) or very small and specific ("X in the presence of Y will correlate more to Z than without.").

Rule #2: theory does not "tell the future," it only predicts things within scope. Speaking of Newton: for a long time, physicists and astronomers had no idea why unpredictable perturbations appeared in planetary orbits, or why their equations became unmanageably large. Then, an entire branch of mathematics, hinted at for hundreds of years, was developed that explained exactly how unpredictable something would be.

Your expectation that climatology will ever be a predictive science in blocks of time of less than 10,000 years strikes me as absurdly optimistic.

Pick up a book. Don't worry. Its not very mathy and way easy to read.

It's not a proof, but I always considered the equation yielding the Mandelbrot set to be elegant, and its result visually beautiful.

Here's a good explanation that assumes very little starting knowledge.

Chaos by James Gleick is a fantastic narrative of the history and personalities of fractal geometry and chaos theory. It's the book that got me interested, before I knew any higher math, in the eighties when it was a bestseller.

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

My first suggestion was the stick mentioned below, but he may already have one.

If you live in a cold weather area, a good pair of running tights might be good. A lot of runners frown at under armour but their tights are perfect for cold running.

A lot of others have suggested socks, those would be good.

They say $80, but you can find these headphones for $60 at best buy or someplace like that. They're great for if you are really sweaty like me, or if you run in the rain very often.

Compression Running Socks are a great functional gift, too.

You might just go check out the local running shop in town. Most of them have shirts that they sell with a local flavor. There is a place here in charlotte called run for your life that has some funny shirts, and when I was in Chi, Fleet Feet always had good ones, too. You might get an idea for another gift, too. If you live in a big city, Fleet Feet is a great place to start.

Born to Run is a great read, too.

I left off a GPS watch because if he is into tri's, the waterproof ones can get quite expensive, and most likely he already has one. If he happens to not have one, and you wanted to think about it, this is the best investment I ever made as a runner, but it isn't waterproof.

I hope this helps!

You might enjoy skimming through the Princeton Companion to Mathematics (amazon, princeton, maa review, wikipedia), which gives an overview of the main areas of mathematics.

Baia baia... el periódico Excelsior era el último lugar en el que esperaba leer una referencia al filósofo Harry G. Frankfurt y a su ensayo sobre el bullshit.

Para los interesados, Frankfurt escribió un ensayo corto (vendido en Amazon México como un mini-libro de 60 páginas con pasta dura de la buena) llamado On Bullshit en el que se hace la distinción filosófica entre el significado del término bullshit y su diferencia con la mentira promedio. Si les interesa profundizar en la distinción que menciona Leo Zuckermann, recomiendo el libro (cuesta menos de 100 pesos, se lee de un solo golpe en una hora y media máximo, y hasta ayuda a inflar tu número de libros leídos al año):

https://www.amazon.com.mx/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

Ninja Edit: Estoy descubriendo que también está disponible en español en paquete con otro escrito acerca de la verdad, pero sale mas caro:

https://www.amazon.com.mx/Sobre-charlataner%C3%ADa-Bullshit-verdad-ebook/dp/B00E5NP3DM/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

Tell her it's from the other Frankfurt School.

This isn't new though, it's a common tip in many travel books, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts is one And that's from 2002, theres a website that it talks about on it that does the same thing. I forget what it's called, I got it for my sister last year.

Edit: ridiculous late night mistakes, book title and link

Here is a book on vagabonding. Pretty much how to long term travel in very much a way this guy did. Its an inspiring read.

> What should I do?

You should use a kanji learning method that has you learn radicals (smaller parts of kanji) first, and then teaches you kanji that you can make out of them. One of the oldest popular versions of this method is Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. It teaches you a story and English word to associate with each kanji, which makes learning vocabulary easier in the future.

KanjiDamage takes a similar approach, but uses mnemonics that are a bit more crass. Unlike Remembering the Kanji, KanjiDamage also gives you vocabulary to associate with kanji.

Either of these methods should be paired with regular use of an SRS system. Anki is free, highly customizable, and popular, but is has a steep learning curve. Most people find it worth the effort to learn how to use it. If you search around there are other alternatives, but none of them as widely used as Anki. You could also just make traditional flash cards.

Or, if you're like me and you're too busy (read:lazy) to get books, make flashcards, manage anki decks, etc, you can just buy WaniKani. WaniKani is free to try for the first two "levels". It is pretty much the approach I explained before, except that it's done all the hard work for you. Also, unlike Remembering the Kanji, WaniKani teaches you vocabulary as you learn kanji.

Hey, I also love and studied human geography as my undergrad and then went into urban planning for a master's degree. Since you've still got time in high school, I strongly recommend some good books to see if it interests you more (you'll see that actual urban planning isn't like a Sim City game). Don't worry these books are written in easy language so you don't need a university education to appreciate them.

For a general overview of urban planning and why it might interest you, you should check out The Purpose of Planning. It is a British-based book but the concepts are the same (I'm assuming you are American).

For an overview of the current issues/topics within urban planning, I really recommend Walkable City. Another older book by the same author is Suburban Nation if you are curious but Walkable City is a lot more recent.

I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but Suburban Nation is a layman readable discussion of suburban sprawl vs "New Urbanism"/smart growth, which would likely give you some insights into why cities like Portland and Austin are designed the way they are.

http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865477507/

Yeah it is. Buying it on Amazon Japan is cheaper than Amazon US I'm pretty sure. Here's a link for it: http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401/

If you've never ordered from Amazon Japan before, here's a guide: http://cdn.halcyonrealms.com/japan/how-to-order-from-amazon-japan-a-detailed-buying-guide/

Honestly I don't understand much written japanese but I've been self studying using the internet and I have signed up for beginners japanese classes in my university next semester (they use Genki which I plan on buying this month and start early) and I have also been listening to the Pimsleur Japanese I lessons (and of course copious amounts of Anime).

I think you would be better off with the 2nd editions. I met one of the authors and he told me that they changed some things after some feedback on the first edition. He gave a talk at my school but I don't remember any of the examples.

The GENKI I is about 15 dollar used but I would make sure that it is the 2nd edition.

GENKI II is about 40 dollars

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014436

Possibly better on Abe

Genki I

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=21808789441&searchurl=kn%3Dgenki%2B2nd%26sortby%3D17%26ds%3D20

Genki II

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22386775654&searchurl=kn%3Dgenki%2B2nd%26sortby%3D17%26ds%3D20

There's a massive step between being able to read/write hiragana/katakana, and being able to write/read Japanese. I'm not saying you shouldn't get a penpal, but don't be too disappointed when it's almost entirely English to start.

That said, I'd say you should look into ordering a textbook on basic grammar. My university didn't use these, but I hear that Genki series is extremely popular with beginning learners. Try checking that out!

No, ho un maestro (3h/settimana), ma buona parte del lavoro è soprattutto calligrafia e memorizzazione: di fatto si potrebbe anche fare da autodidatta immagino. Il testo che usiamo è questo


https://www.amazon.it/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

accompagnato da


https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/478901441X


Entrambi si trovano facilmente in PDF se vi interessa!

You should really read the sidebar. There's an FAQ with a lot of stuff specifically designed for absolute beginners like you. Regardless...

Genki: An integrated course in elementary Japanese is what I used when I started, and it's what I like to recommend to people. It has two volumes. You can find the first one here on Amazon, or you can just pirate it if you don't have the money to spend or want to try it out first. Finding out where to pirate it is up to you.

No matter what textbook you choose, you should take a look at Tae Kim's free guide. It's a very good guide to basic and intermediate grammar. It is a little lacking in some explanations and practice exercises, however, so I usually recommend it as a supplement to a normal textbook.

Teaching yourself Japanese all the way to fluency is entirely possible, by the way! I've never stepped foot in a classroom, and while I would never call myself fluent, after four years, I'm good enough at the language to watch Japanese TV without subtitles and read Japanese books.

There are excellent logical, empirical, ethical reasons not to eat meat. It's not necessary in order to get adequate protein (in the 1st world, at least) - we have easy access to beans, eggs, cheese, milk, tofu, etc - and buying meat demonstrably causes unnecessary suffering for animals.

Especially considering that atheists tend to understand that there really is no difference between humans and animals (we're all cousins; it's just a matter of degree), you'd think we'd be more sympathetic.

Our campus atheist group is actually hosting a presentation about the Ethics of Vegetarianism next semester. I'd recommend checking out some of arguments made by atheist, ethics professor, and vegan Peter Singer in his book "Animal Liberation" before going along the lines of this argument.

http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319611589&sr=1-1

This is great great and pretty accessible book on chaos theory if anyone's interested: https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

No cause and effect was proven:

> There are some limitations to this kind of research, notably that they do not determine cause-and-effect: whether a state has fewer gun deaths because of the law, said Adam Winkler, a University of California Los Angeles law professor and second amendment expert. Other demographic characteristics -- such as education level, marital stability, rural or urban -- might explain the fewer gun deaths in a particular state. Setting that caveat aside, Winkler said Obama’s statement is true.

> ...

> The problem is, however, that this is an overly general statement. The research doesn’t prove a universal cause-and-effect relationship between gun laws and fewer gun deaths; it might just be a correlation. Some laws are more effective than others, and other cultural, demographic or socioeconomic factors might be the driving force behind the number of gun deaths in different states.

This study by John Lott Jr. analysed the cause and effect of firearm regulations on crime. If you have an open mind, then you should give it a read.

It seems to me that most opposition (but not all) to firearms takes one or more of the following forms:

1. Lack of knowledge: Many anti-gun protestors lack context, operational knowledge, and historical foundations of why the United States has the 2nd Amendment. Consequently, this leads to statements like "fully semi-automatic" or "sole purpose is to kill." This ignorance, while not malicious in intent, leads to uninformed assumptions and recommendations which sometimes achieve the opposite of what was intended. It can also ignore the evidence that shows that violence as a whole has been reducing for decades, much higher risks from other criminal (or daily) activities, and the fact that defensive use of firearms absolutely eclipses illegal use. This ignorance is magnified based on US media which seeks controversy and has its own biases and ignorance blindspots.
   
   
2. Disagreement on the effectiveness as a bulwark against tyranny: Many in opposition either believe that an armed civilian populace would either be unable to resist the government should it become tyrannical, don't believe the government could ever become tyrannical, or believe that such a risk to be so minimal as not worth protecting against.
   
3. Lack of compatible values: This may be the toughest bridge to cross. Some don't morally agree with the usage of firearms in any context. Like their pro-liberty 2A counterparts, arguments can quickly spiral into emotionally charged exchanges because people feel that disagreement is an assault on their core beliefs and values. This is often summed up by anti-gun crowd stating, "Some liberty must be curtailed for the safety and security of all" and the pro-liberty folks saying, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
   
   So - where do we start? I would suggest that people who want to better understand the 2A folks read, "More Guns, Less Crime" by John Lott. It's not that I would expect you'll come away from it with your opinions changed. Rather, it should give you some understanding of why people support civilian ownership of firearms for defensive usage. Additionally, I think given that the majority of the world does not enjoy the enshrined freedoms Americans have within the Constitution, they would have an even harder time understanding why some Americans feel that the 2nd Amendment is the guarantee for all of them. I don't have a solution on how to share that experience other than to talk to those people who can rationally entertain tough questions on it.
   
   
   Suffice to say, I think Destin and Matt did an extraordinarily evenhanded approach to the topic with the care and attention that they've given to many subjects. They were not there to be cultural warriors or to setup a debate. I think they were just sharing their thoughts and ideas on what continues to be a challenging topic of the day.
   

Years ago I found a good saying to combat my envy was to tell myself, "REMEMBER! You're best is someone else's worst." Sure it's depressing but it is also truth. However it's part of my philosophy.

If you enjoy it, so do others, disregard how others practice their art, do what makes you feel good.

Don't be discouraged.

The odds are that you shouldn't be alive, therefor be willing to die for a cause you feel strongly about.

Die for a cause is not the same as killing for one.

A life with no direction sits on the couch.

God didn't bring you into this world, nor did he guide you.

One's brain is the most powerful and least understood organ of the human body. Remember that it was built for even weight distribution for bipedal motion. And with a gain in brain mass came a gain in reasoning. Source

Evolution is key to not only species survival but one's own survial.

Adapt and overcome.

Be human, be an animal, disregard things you feel trapped in.

*You can always escape.

GOD DAMN YOU BE BULLET POINTS YOU CUNT FUCK. fucking non effect problem i am having.

My experience with the Vibram FiveFingers has been somewhat mixed. I decided to buy a pair after reading Born To Run because I'd had some nagging issues with knee and hip pain that I thought might be correctable by strengthening those under-used leg muscles and tweaking my stride.

What I've noticed is that the FiveFingers have more or less helped to solve the knee issues (I used to wear a brace, but have been able to abandon it), but have somewhat aggravated the hip issues. And the truth is that while they do have benefits, for me their appeal is somewhat limited. A couple of miles in the FiveFingers leaves me a lot more sore the next day than a much longer run in my ASICS (not injury sore, but the kind of full-body sluggishness that comes the day after a good long run), and indeed I find running any distance longer than two miles to be a challenge, just because as you grow fatigued, it's more difficult to maintain good form. Say what you will about traditional running shoes, but they are more forgiving as you grow tired. Blistering is also a much bigger problem, although I've more or less become the kind of person who ignores the various festering foot sores and toenail bruises that seem to come part and parcel with a 40+ mile/week runner.

Obviously, I'm still working up mileage on the FiveFingers, but even still, I don't think they'll really ever function in anything more than a small niche for me--do my long run, change shoes, and then do a 1 or 2 mile cooldown in the FiveFingers to strengthen muscles and focus on my stride. I'm OK with that, though, because that is more or less why I bought them.

Read a book written by that same guy called "Born to Run":

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303

It's fascinating.

Most people will point to the debate on cholesterol to counter your dad's advice. I'll make my point about that first... I'm new to the camp that believes dietary cholesterol doesn't have a strong correlation to your cholesterol levels. Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Gary-Taubes/dp/1400040787 if you want to really get into the debate.

Ok, my second point. Your dad may be right that it isn't healthy in general. Most research shows that reducing calorie intake is the best way to extend your life. Eating little isn't fun and it doesn't get you laid ;) I'm eating a coconut milk ice cream sandwich as I type this.

Finally, go read "Born to Run". http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265305197&sr=1-1

Then go back to your dad and have a meaningful conversation. He is just looking out for you. Just because your cholesterol isn't necessarily going to go up doesn't mean that it is good for you to consume a lot of food.

Your choice bud. Man, I'm going on too much...

Yes, this is some advanced grade A butthurt. I'd recommend an immediate trip to the ER.

Btw, here's something you might want to look into buying: https://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

His success's what?

For those wondering how this was made:

1. The raw terrain is created using WorldPainter. That isn't grass; it's two shades of stained, hardened clay.
   
   
2. The large, customized trees are manually placed in using MCEdit. These trees are originally created by LetsLente and are available for download for use in your projects [here]
   (http://www.planetminecraft.com/project/native-trees-of-europe-template-repository-1779952/).
   
   
3. In ZBrush, a 3D model (the giant head) is sculpted or edited before being exported as an OBJ file.
   
   
4. That OBJ is run through Binvox to convert it to a schematic file.
   
   
5. The Schematic file is checked using ViewVox.
   
   
6. The final Schematic file is imported and posed in the WorldPainter-made World using MCEdit. It is then changed from default stone into Quartz.
   
   
7. For the first time, the world file is opened in vanilla Minecraft. Here the terrain is adjusted, with the small houses being built, the caves dug, and the waterfalls added. Smaller trees are bonemealed into existence along the ground, or hand built on the model. The model is also retrofitted to better fit it's surroundings. In my case, I needed to almost completely destroy and rebuild the nose.
   
   
8. The world is opened up using Chunky, excellent software built for rendering Minecraft worlds. The chunks that are visible from where the camera is are selected for rendering.
   
   
9. In Chunky, the render is set up. Light-colored blocks (like Quartz and Sand) have trouble rendering in Chunky under the default setup, so the sun's brightness, the photo gamma, and many other features are adjusted. The sun is also moved to where it best compliments the build. The sky is actually an image called a "Skymap" and there are many available online.
   
   
10. The scene is rendered, a process which can be very time-consuming for the computer based on the complexity of the lighting. While the scene is being rendered, it might be a good idea to leave your computer and read a book. I suggest Ready Player One by Ernest Cline or The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. ^^^DFTBA!
    
    
11. The image, now completely rendered, is imported into Photoshop. Here adjustments are made to the color of the photo. I find the David Nanchin actions to be helpful for this sort of thing, though I never run them full-strength. I also add in a water splash at the base of the water fall, and remove some pesky leaves that floated too far from their trees.
    
    
12. The final image is exported from Photoshop and is ready to be seen by the lovely people of /r/Minecraft.
    
    In Conclusion:
    
    These kinds of renders do take time. A user commented:
    
    > Pretty Certain you just imported a 3D model of a head using Binvox..
    
    And that's absolutely correct. However, that doesn't mean this kind of thing is simple to create! Certainly, this wouldn't be what it is without the help of external software- but the use of that software doesn't mean it can't be respected as a build. Don't say I just imported it-- it took a lot of work!
    
    TL;DR: I used a lotta software and it took a lotta time.

I like Bertrand Russel's A History of Western Philosophy

For "where to start" with books, see this FAQ post, from r/askphilosophyFAQ. There are Introductory anthologies, like these. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is something I read at about that age, and it was great (with some caveats).

There are also anthologies for Chinese & Indian Philosophy, or introductions to Chinese & Indian Philosophy; or an intro anthology to World Philosophy.

This encyclopedia is fun.

If I'm not mistaken this is the draft of his article for the PCM.

This is a compilation of what I gathered from reading on the internet about self-learning higher maths, I haven't come close to reading all this books or watching all this lectures, still I hope it helps you.

General Stuff:
The books here deal with large parts of mathematics and are good to guide you through it all, but I recommend supplementing them with other books.

1. Mathematics: A very Short Introduction : A very good book, but also very short book about mathematics by Timothy Gowers, a Field medalist and overall awesome guy, gives you a feelling for what math is all about.
   
   
2. Concepts of Modern Mathematics: A really interesting book by Ian Stewart, it has more topics than the last book, it is also bigger though less formal than Gower's book. A gem.
   
   
3. What is Mathematics?: A classic that has aged well, it's more textbook like compared to the others, which is good because the best way to learn mathematics is by doing it. Read it.
   
   
4. An Infinitely Large Napkin: This is the most modern book in this list, it delves into a huge number of areas in mathematics and I don't think it should be read as a standalone, rather it should guide you through your studies.
   
   
5. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics: A humongous book detailing many areas of mathematics, its history and some interesting essays. Another book that should be read through your life.
   
   
6. Mathematical Discussions: Gowers taking a look at many interesting points along some mathematical fields.
   
   
7. Technion Linear Algebra Course - The first 14 lectures: Gets you wet in a few branches of maths.
   
   Linear Algebra: An extremelly versatile branch of Mathematics that can be applied to almost anything, also the first "real math" class in most universities.
   
   
8. Linear Algebra Done Right: A pretty nice book to learn from, not as computational heavy as other Linear Algebra texts.
   
   
9. Linear Algebra: A book with a rather different approach compared to LADR, if you have time it would be interesting to use both. Also it delves into more topics than LADR.
   
   
10. Calculus Vol II : Apostols' beautiful book, deals with a lot of lin algebra and complements the other 2 books by having many exercises. Also it doubles as a advanced calculus book.
    
    
11. Khan Academy: Has a nice beginning LinAlg course.
    
    
12. Technion Linear Algebra Course: A really good linear algebra course, teaches it in a marvelous mathy way, instead of the engineering-driven things you find online.
    
    
13. 3Blue1Brown's Essence of Linear Algebra: Extra material, useful to get more intuition, beautifully done.
    
    Calculus: The first mathematics course in most Colleges, deals with how functions change and has many applications, besides it's a doorway to Analysis.
    
    
14. Calculus: Tom Apostol's Calculus is a rigor-heavy book with an unorthodox order of topics and many exercises, so it is a baptism by fire. Really worth it if you have the time and energy to finish. It covers single variable and some multi-variable.
    
    
15. Calculus: Spivak's Calculus is also rigor-heavy by Calculus books standards, also worth it.
    
    
16. Calculus Vol II : Apostols' beautiful book, deals with many topics, finishing up the multivariable part, teaching a bunch of linalg and adding probability to the mix in the end.
    
    
17. MIT OCW: Many good lectures, including one course on single variable and another in multivariable calculus.
    
    Real Analysis: More formalized calculus and math in general, one of the building blocks of modern mathematics.
    
    
18. Principle of Mathematical Analysis: Rudin's classic, still used by many. Has pretty much everything you will need to dive in.
    
    
19. Analysis I and Analysis II: Two marvelous books by Terence Tao, more problem-solving oriented.
    
    
20. Harvey Mudd's Analysis lectures: Some of the few lectures on Real Analysis you can find online.
    
    Abstract Algebra: One of the most important, and in my opinion fun, subjects in mathematics. Deals with algebraic structures, which are roughly sets with operations and properties of this operations.
    
    
21. Abstract Algebra: Dummit and Foote's book, recommended by many and used in lots of courses, is pretty much an encyclopedia, containing many facts and theorems about structures.
    
    
22. Harvard's Abstract Algebra Course: A great course on Abstract Algebra that uses D&F as its textbook, really worth your time.
    
    
23. Algebra: Chapter 0: I haven't used this book yet, though from what I gathered it is both a category theory book and an Algebra book, or rather it is a very different way of teaching Algebra. Many say it's worth it, others (half-jokingly I guess?) accuse it of being abstract nonsense. Probably better used after learning from the D&F and Harvard's course.
    
    There are many other beautiful fields in math full of online resources, like Number Theory and Combinatorics, that I would like to put recommendations here, but it is quite late where I live and I learned those in weirder ways (through olympiad classes and problems), so I don't think I can help you with them, still you should do some research on this sub to get good recommendations on this topics and use the General books as guides.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is essentially a really general dictionary for most topics in known math. Entries vary from one half-page to three or four pages long, covering definitions, theories, and sometimes deeper understanding of certain subjects. I believe each entry is also personally written by a professional in the field.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Seriously. This book is amazing. It gives a high-level overview every major branch of mathematics.

It's the best tool I've found for rapidly expanding the breadth of one's mathematical knowledge. A good starting point to find what really interests you.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/088062096X/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_awdo_t1_ywAlCbABBX12S

Get to it!

Spencerian Penmanship (Theory Book plus five copybooks) https://www.amazon.com/dp/088062096X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_ln96yb338H3W5

I stumbled upon them on Amazon. I swear they weren't there a couple of weeks ago. Ended up being a total impulse purchase for me. Here is the link:

http://www.amazon.com/Spencerian-Penmanship-Theory-Book-copybooks/dp/088062096X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374076983&sr=8-1&keywords=spencerian

I think your handwriting looks fine, but if you are wanting cursive, I could recommend the Spencerian penmanship (theory book plus five copybooks) I own these books, and I love them. It's a system based on ovals, and meant for speed, due to the 52° slant. I have linked below, both the UK link to buy them, and a US link.

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Book-Copybooks-Spencerian-Penmanship/dp/088062096X

US: https://www.amazon.com/Spencerian-Penmanship-Theory-Book-copybooks/dp/088062096X

Most people are going to recommend you use some sort of SRS (spaced repetition system) to effectively learn the vast amounts of information you need to memorize. Many recommend Anki (it's my preferred flash card/srs app) but there are others out there. Here's the link to the manual (https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#introduction). It obviously explains Anki specific functionality, but it describes the use and purpose of an SRS system and why it's proven to be effective for memorizing information.

As for learning Kanji, this is the most challenging part of learning Japanese. You're gonna want to use some structured learning material which will help you understand what radicals are and how the factor into building individual Kanji. I personally use James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" and its sister learning site Koohii (https://kanji.koohii.com/study) to create mnemonics for the Kanji and learn to memorize them. I then make my own flashcards in Anki and practice them when they come up on the app.

I've seen others recommend Kodansha (https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268), but I've never used it so I can't speak to its quality. From what I've heard though it might honestly be preferred to Heisig's stuff cause his mnemonics can seem pretty strange or outdated (which is why I get most of mine from the top upvoted ones on koohii).

You're gonna want an english to japanese dictionary. For that I use jisho (https://jisho.org/). You can search for words in english, romanji, kana, and kanji and you'll find definitions, related words, pronunciations etc. It's incredibly helpful.

I don't know about a discord server but I'd be interested in something like that as well.

It takes a lot of time and dedication, and for most people the payoff will only be achieved after years of learning, but it's definitely doable, and learning can be very fun in and of itself. There's a very satisfying feeling to go from looking at Japanese and seeing it as alien characters, to being able to read a sentence that once just looked like scribbles.

I'm not fluent, but the kanji resource that I like best is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course; I feel that it does the best job of anything that I've seen in terms of explaining similar kanji and how to tell them apart. There is a decent number of pages available in the Look Inside preview, so maybe browse through and see if any of the explanations for similar kanji early on (木 vs. 本, 休 vs. 体, 牛 vs. 午, 北 vs. 比, 刀 vs. 刃) click with you?

Any of the basic primers (with the exception of the Oxford Latin Course) are probably fine, though Wheelock's is the time-tested standard for many Classics programs. However, once you get beyond the first few units, I would warmly recommend something like the Lingua Latina series, which not only is written entirely in Latin (with a graded difficulty curve as you advance), but also gives a nice in-situ introduction to Roman family life, civic institutions, etc.

Really, the major problem for any Latin student—or student of any language, really—is gaining proficiency in the language via an inventory of vocabulary, grammatical structures, idioms, etc. With a purely textual language like Latin, one can't easily use daily conversation (or 'immersion' in the current pedagogical lingo) as a means of reinforcement, and thus reading great quantities of text is the only way to improve one's comprehension. Since the bulk of extant Latin literature is 'high' literature, attempting to read even so-called 'easy' authors such as Caesar can be incredibly frustrating to a novice, as even these authors were writing in a style that was the result of years of intensive rhetorical schooling. The canned readings in Wheelock's are okay, but none are longer than a few pages, at the most. The Lingua Latina books can help supplement one's reading, particularly with the graded difficulty approach that they are designed around.

A final bit of advice: memorize everything. You will never, never achieve any degree of proficiency with the language if you don't work at it; I recommend (and regularly use) a flashcard program (Anki in my case) for vocab, forms, names, whatever. You simply can't half-ass this aspect. Most student's trouble when learning Latin is the result of imperfectly knowing a) the vocab, and b) grammatical endings, constructions, etc. Despite its reputation and popular sentiment to the contrary, Latin is not any 'harder' or more complex than English or whatever other language one might be native to. Remember that at one time all manner of people learned and spoke Latin: slaves, foreigners, statesman, plebs, etc. You can do it, but you have to put in the time. Be patient with it, work at it, and you will be rewarded. Good luck!

Neither of these are online, but they're both good for independent study:

• Latin by the Dowling Method
  
• Lingua Latina per se Illustrata I
  
• The Great Courses: Latin 101

Reading, writing, speaking, or a combination of the above? Why are you studying Japanese? How advanced do you want to be?

I'm currently learning some Japanese through self-study because of overseas work. Here's where I started:

• Hiragana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
  
• Katakana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/
  
• Basic Conversational Japanese: GENKI | Japanese for Busy People
  
• Other tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfCc00zmPZI

While not a strictly historical book, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a good one to have handy for all sorts of light mathematical reading and has a pretty extensive section on mathematicians.

If you really want to get a feel for what (pure) mathematics is and how it all interrelates, you should read the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. This book is kind of like wikipedia for pure math, though extremely well written (and by prominent mathematicians). I think the best audience for the book are undergraduate students in math, but anyone really interested in learning what "real" mathematics is about should enjoy it.

I think I mostly agree with you. There are plenty of things I find maddening about this topic that are all variations on oversimplification:

• The inability to acknowledge that your personal experience is just that. Just because you would never xyz doesn’t make it unreasonable or unfathomable for someone else to. What might seem completely irrational to you could be perfectly natural to me. It does not make me wrong or you right. It means I’m not you and haven’t lived your life.
  
  
• Reducing the “characters” to black and white caricatures. No one is all bad or all good and not every act has to have meaning ascribed to it. OMG Adnan’s room was messy! OMG he lied about his sexual escapades! OMG he stole from the collection plate! None of these things have jack shit to do with the murder or indicate anything about his character. Likewise, the need to make him pure and good and dismiss anything shitty about him is equally annoying. I don’t think he was a malevolent psycho OR a golden child. He struck me as a typical teen, arrogant and insecure at the same time. Emotionally immature. Rebellious. I think it just scares some people to believe that a typical teenager is capable of murder. Others can’t accept that one can go through life being a perfectly normal person who commits a single terrible act.
  
  On that note, all the reverence for Hae is also bullshit. She was also a normal teenager, not a saint. That doesn’t make her murder any less tragic and certainly doesn’t mean she deserved it. Acknowledging her humanity isn’t disrespectful. These aren’t “characters,” they are people. This isn’t a story, this is life.
  
  
• Sometimes you just don’t know. It’s ok. No matter how many files you have read, how many pictures you have seen, how many posts you have written and read, how many episodes of Undisclosed you have listened to, you still know a lot less than you think you do.
  
  With all that being said, where you fall on this case is all about what information you choose to believe and what you choose to discard. You have to simplify to some extent, otherwise you'd never be able to come to a decision (exhibit A: me). I understand that. The problem is most people don't acknowledge that they are oversimplifying (although they really love to point it out when someone else is), and can't see that there are other ways to simplify.
  
  I got this book yesterday at the book festival and I think it is a must-read for Serial subbers.

Tout ce qu'il te faut, dans les proportions qu'il te faut, est là-dedans : https://www.amazon.fr/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509966599&sr=8-1&keywords=vagabonding

I'm glad you enjoyed my comment. I definitely agree with you about this sub. There seems to be something inherently inspirational about traveling and I think that it has to do with the fact that, often, the decision to drop everything and travel is such a personal one and often comes from some type of larger perspective about what life means.

Have fun on your travels!

If you're looking for a great traveling book - Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel was the best that I found.

https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180

Really shows you that it's all about a person's the perspective and life priorities. If you want to make a life of traveling, it really isn't that difficult - no matter how much money you make.

It's actually a system described in the book Remembering the Kanji. But of course you can use software to help with it (e.g. Anki).

Personally, I don't think a full repeal to all of the residential zoning is the best practice. A full repeal would likely only increase land values
(here's a good explainer as to how that can happen). I do believe they need to be loosened significantly. At the rate this city is growing, it needs to have all of the tools necessary to help increase density and banning thing such as having both an ADU and DADU on single family lots and requiring their sizes to be such that they cannot accommodate families is a bad thing. Duplexes and triplexes also should be legal in single family zones. These allowances also should be paired with strategic rezones that allow for some sort of corner market/commerce zone within a 5-10 minute walkshed of every house in SFZs in order to make it reasonable for people in SFZs to live without a car in these now densified neighborhoods.


In regards to more reading: are you looking for more reading regarding Seattle zoning law exclusively or are you looking for reading recommendations that follow an urbanist bent? For Seattle specific stuff, The Urbanist and Seattle Transit Blog post a lot regarding land use in the city. If you are looking for books that talk about general city planning the gold standard is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I personally really enjoyed Walkable City, Suburban Nation, and Happy City.

Andres Duany is an authority in American urban planning that has strongly influenced my perspectives on all of this. He co-authored one book that explains how we got into this mess (Suburban Nation), and another that gives a good overview of what we should do to fix it (Smart Growth Manual). The first is full of good, hard facts and data to back up the claims he makes in the book. Both can be purchased for about $25 on Amazon.

A Jacksonville, Florida newspaper also did a very good comparison of exactly how cheap a streetcar system could be constructed (The Little Rock River Rail) with the bloated inefficiencies that stemmed from the overenthusiastic plans for a tram in Jacksonville (that still hasn't been built).

This site offers a continuation of the debate using the same two examples

Here's a list of rail transit systems in the US if you want to compare and contrast. I figured you might find it interesting.

Houston is a good example of what happens when we fail to distinguish 'good' growth from 'bad' growth. I always joke about how suburban Houston follows a template of a Kroger, and HEB, a Walgreens and Super Target that seems to be stamped onto the landscape at every major intersection. Its hard to imagine converting the mess into more urban communities, but if we use these clusters of commercial development to anchor higher-density residential growth along the edges that are tied together with designated pedestrian and public transit corridors, we will free up large quantities of land to further intensify development when parking areas are no longer needed and when big-box stores reach the ends of their life cycles (which usually top off at about 25 to 30 years). Remember that most commercial growth in suburban areas is, more or less, disposable. We can use this to our advantage to allow redevelopment to take place in an orderly and incremental manner.

The development of pedestrian corridors is not as expensive and complicated as you would think. The biggest problems are the single-use development patterns and the meandering streets that developers use to create a sense of depth to the subdivisions. In suburban areas, the house located behind yours may be over a mile away by road. The good thing about pedestrian corridors is that they don't really require large rights of way and they can be squeezed into areas where roads can't be (between houses). Geographically, most homes in the suburbs really aren't that far away from activity centers (as I like to call them), but the collector/distributor road systems employed can turn that short trek into a very time-consuming ordeal. If pedestrian corridors could offer a sort of short-cut to these, the time required to walk somewhere could compete with the time required to drive there. Once you get people moving on their feet, you'll really start to see changes to the landscape.

Within suburbia, I think the areas in close proximity to activity centers will enjoy the best chances for survival in the future. I think that the rest of the periphery will turn into less-desirable and low-income areas. But the saving grace in all of this is that household sizes in poor areas are usually larger than those in more affluent areas, so my prediction is that density in suburban areas may actually increase with an influx of poor people being pushed out from gentrifying inner-city neighborhoods. And since the reliance on public transportation would be carried with them, I think an increase in transit use in suburban areas would follow as well. So in the end, the urban shake-up may actually have the unintended consequence of dramatically improving the efficiency of the suburban landscape, but that's just my opinion.

Because this is such a HUGE topic, check out my other posts on this thread for some additional ways we could further modify these areas to make public transit and pedestrianism more viable. Sorry it took me so long to respond to your post. Let me know if you want me to clarify anything further.

Blame Chevron / Peoplesoft for building sprawling campus headquarters out in San Ramon / Pleasanton.

But the answer isn't that simple. SF in the late 70's was becoming increasingly a hellhole of shit and piss, and with rising rents large companies sought to build their headquarters sideways, rather than vertically since they were much easier to manage and easy to get to with the new highways being built (I-680, I-580, etc).

Suburban Nation has a section on the sprawl in the east bay:

https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865477507

Sigh, land use planning is my profession. May I suggest some light reading to get you started? Real urban non-car centric cities (like New York, as opposed to Dallas or Denver) are what I'm talking about, mind you. I'm guessing you're a suburban american? So this might help :

Suburban Nation

Then take the time to compare the per capita energy consumption, CO2 emissions and other indicators of a real city to that of it's surrounding suburbs and rural area. You'll understand then.

Or you could also sign up for an urban planning, landscape architecture, urban design or land planning university degree and study this better.

Right now I'm making my way through The Princeton Companion to Mathematics and it's a very good overview of all the different mathematical fields, going through what they work on and examples of how it's done.

This might also be some use to you: The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Incredibly comprehensive math encyclopedia.

I’ll assume you weren’t being condescending.

You seem to think bullshitting isn’t as bad and I’m somehow a Trump apologist. On the contrary, I’d rather a person care to know truth and lie to me, than a person not care about truth at all.

If you care to, there is an awesome book called “On Bullshit” that helped me understand how Trump acts. And to my surprise it was written in 2005. Takes 45 minutes to read, fun read.

On Bullshit https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691122946/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_uEwYAbK4JT48S

Not affiliated in any way. Buy it wherever you want :)

In his book "On Bullshit" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946/ ) Harry Frankfurt makes the important distinction between liars and bullshitters.

A liar is interested in deception, and therefore is concerned about the quality of his lie.

A bullshitter will say anything, as long as it sounds like a response.

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

> Wow, your attitude is pretty toxic.

Naah, I just don't have a whole lot of patience for bullshit.

>"A good design is one that performs a function efficiently and effectively. If someone claims that something is a bad design, and yet (i) it works well, efficiently and effectively, and (ii) that person can not demonstrate a better design that still performs all of the original functions, then we can dismiss the claim that that object is badly designed"

Stupid question: Why are you so all-fired determined to shoehorn you gotta be able to work up a better design into your criteria for determining whether or not a given Design is bad? Seems to me that if we can recognize the function (or functions) of a given Design, we can justifiably infer something about the quality of that Design just from observations of how well or poorly it performs that function (those functions), without being able to Design something better. Likewise, from observations of the operational characteristics of the Design, plus known qualities of the materials and suchlike from which the Design was manufactured; for instance, if we know the standard operating temperature of a given Design, and we observe that the Design includes parts whose melting point is at or below that standard operating temperature; I think we can justifiably infer something about the quality of that Design, regardless of our ability, or lack thereof, to improve on that Design. And so on, and so forth.

> By the way, when you're talking about not knowing how a calculator is designed, weren't you the person who argued that you can't tell if something is designed or not unless you know how it was manufactured?

No. I argued that if you want to make a scientifically valid inference that some arbitrary whatever-it-is is Designed, you need to work up a testable hypothesis of Manufacture, and you need to, you know, test that hypothesis. Not the same thing at all.

I also acknowledged, in an earlier comment, that In the mundane business of day-to-day life, "it looks Designed to me" is good enough. Because in most cases, something that looks Designed is Designed. But in the mundane business of day-to-day life, it sure looks like the Sun moves across the sky, doesn't it? When, in fact, real science tells us that what's really happening is that the Sun is pretty much staying where it is, and the Earth's rotation is what makes it look like the Sun is what's doing the moving. So there's an obvious chasm between What It Looks Like and What's Actually True.

By the way, I don't demand that every inference one makes in day-to-day life must necessarily be scientifically valid. But you ID-pushers? You ID-pushers absolutely do make noise about how your alleged Design inferences are scientifically valid. So, I'ma gonna be a real hardass about the blatant lack of scientific validity in the Design inferences made by ID-pushers.

>Does this mean that you can't tell if a calculator is designed or not?

I, in common with the vast majority of all human beings, have a store of just a whoooole friggin' lot of background information about Designed thingies whose Designers are human beings. Designed thingies whose Designers are anything other than human beings… not so much. Given that background information, which includes a number of relevant facts, not least the relevant fact that calculators are Designed by human beings, I think I am rationally justified in concluding, at least on a tentative basis, that any random calculator I see is, in fact, Designed. If there were some particular calculator that I wanted to be more certain of its Designed nature than I can infer from my store of background information about human Designs, I would form a hypothesis of how that particular calculator was Manufactured, and I'd test that hypothesis of Manufacture.

Now, that background information about human-produced Designs… is not necessarily relevant to Designs produced by Designers who are not human beings. And I'ma go out on a limb here to declare that if Life On Earth was Designed, that Designer was not, in fact, a human being. Ergo, any intuitions about human-produced Design should not be considered reliably applicable to Life On Earth.

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt.

Go vagabonding. You, a backpack, a bit of cash, no plans.

You'll have enough stories for a lifetime, and you'll live the fantasy of women who obsess over cute, glossy, travel pics on social media (~99%).

I don't think a two week vacation is going to cut it. If that's the case, read this and start thinking about it.

Also, your SO and family probably do not want you to be miserable. People can tell and life is way too short to pretend to be happy.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, Yvon Chouinard's book that's kind of about building the business that is the Patagonia we know today, but is a lot more about his philosophies and ideologies and how we can all be better and do better for our planet.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. A fairly short book that's not some abstract ideas or a story about traveling the world (that's Marco Polo Didn't Go There, which is also fantastic), but an actual how to book on doing it. It helped me, and has helped people I've given the book to, understand that extensive travel isn't just for the ultra wealthy, it is easy to do and achievable for everyone if you make travel your priority.

Will start by throwing a few into the ring:

The Beach by Alex Garland - While its plot is certainly limited with regard to imitability, it offers a very interesting perspective on the types of people you meet in the more interesting places you'll travel.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts - A quintessential nonfiction guide for anyone who's considering traveling long term. It's preachy in places, but it'll fire you up to get moving.

Off the Rails in Phnom Penh by Amit Gilboa - You'll see this one being sold by street children in Phnom Penh often, but it's not too hard to find a copy anywhere else. A really great, enjoyable view of expat life in Phnom Penh.

Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac - On the Road is, of course, the standard American road novel, and Jack's most famous, but the Dharma Bums offers a really unique perspective on travel - that of a spiritual nature.

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner - Another highly enjoyable read by an author who travels to the world's most purported "happy" countries. Great take on the subject area.

In the spirit of Chris Ryan I'll recommend the book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, if you're in the mood for non-fiction.

As a traveller/tourist, I've always tried to stay AWAY from tourist areas, haha. I have friends who go to the Bahamas, for example, and won't leave their resort/casino. My personal best experiences have been in the local communities; you tend to stand-out more (obviously), but people are more curiouse than malicious towards you.

Of course, though, do your homework! Go to traveller's forums, read books, do your research.
May I also recommend this book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

It all depends on how you study Japanese. If you're having trouble remembering the kanji, then read Heisig's RTK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0/262-8139763-4834749?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=6VVZW2W0DBRRN4KG8RS2

This is a book I always recommend for people learning Kanji. It breaks down the primitives and from there, it teaches you how to write the Kanji as well as giving little stories to remember them.

If you have trouble remembering his stories, make up your own! Or take a page from other people's stories from this website: https://hochanh.github.io/rtk/rtk1-v6/index.html

Although I can't read Kanji properly (the On and Kun readings), I can still identify Kanji pretty easily. I've been able to remember roughly 400 kanji. By which I mean, I can actually write the kanji with ease, like a japanese person, if you give me the word.

My goal is to remember the Kanji and then learn how to read and speak japanese properly. (So I can finally play DGS! =D)

Edit & PS: But please remember, that RTK doesn't have the readings. It only has the meaning of the Kanji. So don't rely on it to learn Japanese, but rather use it as a supplement to your studying.

RTK + Anki are amazing. My Kanji recognition is significantly better than my speaking or listening now.

> I'm gonna make you insta-wet, despite you got those ugly bits! Watch! /wand_wiggles!

...

I might have noticed that too. I may or may not have made very sexual stories, too. :D

EDIT:

You need this book boo.

Now excuse me while I faint =)

The best method for learning Kanji is a system by James Heisig in Remembering The Kanji.

It's a little atypical—book 1 is meaning only and book 2 is pronunciation—but if you stick with the method it's quite incredible. At my peak I was learning ~100/day with excellent retention.

And then it's just drill drill drill like everyone says. But when drilling focus on writing. Production is harder than recognition as a rule so that's what you should focus on.

I use an excellent flash card app called Anki which has desktop and mobile versions. It's pricey on mobile if I recall correctly but worthwhile. It's got a bit of a learning curve but definitely worth the investment. And you'll find lots of shared decks, including if memory serves, one based on the Heisig books. (Although there is definitely value in building your own yourself.)

I'm on iOS and you can add the Chinese Traditional Handwriting IME in "Keyboards" which allows you to practice your writing. It's not great for general Japanese input, but for Kanji practice it gets the job done. I'm sure there's something similar for Android.

Good luck!

Edit:fixed my mangled link

Kanji Learners Course https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/ref=zg_bs_684266011_13?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=7NBC5EM3NTCN9SJE8ZFP

Remembering the Kanji https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=zg_bs_684266011_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=7NBC5EM3NTCN9SJE8ZFP

IMO KLC is a better version of RTK.

Genki I: https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/

RTK1: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/

There's actually a book series that made memorizing characters really easy. I'm learning Japanese, and with it I was able to commit 2000 kanji to memory in a bit over a month. It doesn't go over readings at all, but you can at least write everything without issue.

And Chinese grammar is great, it takes all those things like conjugation and irregular verbs and noun genders and just laughs at them

EDIT:

Books I used was this for Japanese

Chinese equivalent

There's a couple decent reference books you could get him (Remembering the Kanji comes to mind) but don't worry about things that might be 'handy' because half the time they're not worth it. Tickets too - you don't want to give him anything time/date-specific, after all.

I say just take him out for dinner somewhere nice that he almost certainly won't get to enjoy while he's in Japan. Decent BBQ, for example.

It just stuff I've picked up over the years since moving to Atlanta. I've always wondered why things are the way they are especially when they're different than the way I'm told they are. When I first moved to metro Atlanta, I lived in Dunwoody for a couple of months and everyone I met told me to never ride MARTA and that I should avoid going inside the perimeter as much as possible because "those people" live down there. But when I would use MARTA or go into the city, everything seemed ok. So I started reading books and doing research online to understand how the city and the suburbs came to be the way they are. One thing is for sure, it wasn't because this is what the people wanted most.

If you're interested in learning more, I suggest the book 'Suburban Nation'. There are thousands of books out there on city planning and suburbs but many of them are academic so not a lot of fun to read.

If you live in Atlanta or Fulton County, you can check it out at these branches: Central Library, Buckhead Branch, Georgia Hill Branch, Hapeville Branch, Kirkwood Branch, Ponce de Leon Branch, Roswell Regional, Sandy Springs Regional, and Stewart-Lakewood Branch

Amazon listing for the book: http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865477507/

May want to check out /r/handwriting for tips.

However, I recently got the Spencerian books after they were recommended on here a few times.

There are also a few good online resources were you can download practice sheets and whatnot. It may come down to what style you are wanting to learn.

Glad you got something out of the story.

That story from Discover is great. There was book called "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall that is a longer version of this story. He actually runs an ultra with the Tarahumara. It is a fantastic read.

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303

It probably has to do with persistence hunts.

Humans have extremely large glutes in comparison with the rest of our physiology, and that of other animals except for those known to be serious runners (horses, canids, cheetahs). The larger the glute, the better the runner, evolutionarily speaking. If this was one of the primary modes of attaining food (which is a growing theory of human evolution), then that would explain your penchant for voluminous gluteus maximi.

For further information, check out the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.

I believe he is talked about in "Born To Run" Good book too.

If the people on /r/GetMotivated love to run I highly recommend this book, it's all about different races and just the general love of running.

My husband is currently reading the "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" by Christopher McDougall and was telling me how the Tarahumara Indians constantly use the chia to help with their endurance running. Is the Chia something you can find at a grocery store? What is the consistency? Do you cook with it or eat it raw?

I recently read the book Born to Run that discusses barefoot running and specifically focuses on a tribe of ultra-distance runners in Mexico. It was a decent read.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall

So after surgery - the next day, and for a week - it hurt A LOT. But the number one thing to recovery is get off your ass and get moving. So I was out of bed two days after surgery (one day after I came home). I just walked around at first. I got up and walked several times a day and it hurt a lot, but the doc assured me that yes, it will hurt and yes, keep doing it. After a week I showed up at physical therapy and they were awesome. I learned some good exercises and stretches. I went there three times a week for a month. After that month I started swimming laps at George Mason's Manassas campus pool (Freedom Center). I swam and worked out in the gym for 4 months before running outside. During those 4 months I ran a little on the treadmill but not a lot (a mile or so). I was still heel striking (I don't learn real quick)...

I will skip the story of the other surgery (disc removal and spinal fusion) that I had in my neck two or three years later, but the recovery was even faster because I was experienced in the pain and the benefit of getting up and moving early.

After the second surgery, I read Born to Run and bought some Vibram 5 Fingers. After two months of more PT and recovery I started running on my "toes" (forefoot really) and haven't looked back.

Here's a pic of me in Nov, 2008 (on the left) and me May, 2012 (on the right). That's about 30 lbs of fat gone.

I'm reading a book right now called Born to Run, about ultramarathons (about 100 miles). The book says that more women than men are able to compete at these distances at all-most men drop out of the race after 30 or so miles, while most female competitors are able to actually finish. In terms of speed, men are still faster.

However, the book focuses on a native tribe known for their incredible endurance running abilities, and not on average men. One section describes a 100 mile race, won by one of these natives. The second place finisher (with time of 18 hours, less than half an hour shy of the victor) was female. http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303

By "footwork" I am assuming you are talking about the high art of placing one foot in front of the other without falling down too often. I believe this is sadly neglected.

I'd recommend ["Born To Run" by Christopher McDougall.] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307266303) You'll be thinking about running -- and walking -- in a whole new light.

People who wear minimalist shoes (or go barefoot) talk about technique all the time.

https://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

stop playing and you can buy this book for less than one month's subscription

Here, hope this helps.

For you, my friend.

Sweet Black fucking Sabbath kid, do us all a favor and please go buy this immediately.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470546646/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1420366178&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40

I'd give [The Fault In Our Stars] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Fault-Stars-John-Green/dp/0525478817) by John Green a try. It's a love story, but it also tackles death as a major theme.

I'd start with Bertrand Russell's book "A History of Western Philosphy" which is basically a Whitmans sampler for Western thought - after reading it you should have a pretty good idea of which philosphers you want to do a "deep dive" on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy

You can a used copy from Amazon for $6
http://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581

Hi, I have a degree in Philosophy and teach Philosophy/English to high schooler. The following advice and recommendations are what I give my students who are interested in philosophy. I would not recommend Kant as an introduction (not that he's bad, but he is difficult to understand). Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is a book that explains philosophical topics and questions through humor and uses jokes to illustrate the concepts. It is accessible and thought provoking. If you are interested in logic you might enjoy Logicomix. It is a graphic novel that gives a biographical narrative of Bertrand Russell, an English philosopher whose work is the basis of all modern logic. It is not a book about logic per se, but it does give a good introduction to what logic is and how it can be used. Also, Russell's book A History of Western Philosophy is a good place to start your education in philosophy. If you are interested in atheism, read Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. This book goes through the most common arguments for the existence of God, and debunks them using logic and reasoning. Good luck and read on!

Although I would love to say "read Kant" or "read Wittgenstein" or "read Sartre" or "start with Plato" I don't think you would get a really good start to reading philosophy because sometimes they can get a little complicated.

I think the best way to get introduced to Philosophy is to learn a little bit about a bunch of philosophers and their philosophies.

So seeing that you are 16, there is a great book that was written called "Sophie's World" http://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World/dp/0297858815 It's a novel about a girl around your age who studies philosophy but it touches upon almost every major philosopher and it's not too harsh of a read. The plot is ok and the dialogue is miserable but I think it gives a good sampling of the major philosophers that is on a reading level for your age.

If you want a great book touching upon the major philosophers - there's always Bertrand Russell's "The History of Western Philosophy"http://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343832717&sr=1-1&keywords=bertrand+russell+history+of+western+philosophy The reading level is more advanced than Sophie's World but you get a very in depth perspective of the major philosophers from a major philosopher.

And then again, you can try to read a philosophical writing. If you're going to try that, I think Plato is an easy beginning along with Descartes.

That's a very interesting looking link, but I think BennyG02 was talking about an audiobook of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.

Speaking of that book, I listened to a fair amount of that (and read the other parts), and I do think it's quite good. The thing is that it contains a lot of Russell's own opinions and criticisms of the views he describes, probably more than one might expect a general "history of" book to have. But, IIRC, Russell didn't have any pretense of it being otherwise: he wasn't really trying to make "just another history of philosophy book".

from David C. Moses's amazon review of Russell's History of Western Philosophy

>Despite this book's well-deserved status as a classic work, it has some major flaws that a reader should keep in mind, all stemming from Russell's intolerance of viewpoints different from his own... Russell has no tolerance for systems of thought that do not conform to his preferences for democracy, atheism, pacifism, and social liberalism. So... Nietzsche is depicted as a warmonger... Russell's book is a great place to start, but to get a fair treatment of thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche, it should be supplemented with material such as the chapters on those thinkers in Strauss and Cropsey's "History of Political Philosophy."

In my experience, taking lessons will help, but there is no quick fix.

I got back into the game about 2 years ago, and started taking lessons. They improved my swing, slowly but surely. I bought a few books and kept working at it. Progress was slow and frustrating at times when I would backslide, but there was progress for sure.

I eventually hit a wall with my first instructor though. I tried a few more guys, and even a lesson with robogolf, but none of it clicked. I would still recommend a robogolf lesson if you have one around you, for someone trying to find the basics of a swing its very helpful analysis.

What finally did click for me was going back to the books and really understanding the swing. Its a chain reaction of things, and if you dont understand that chain and set yourself up for success at each step then you wont every have a consistent repeatable swing. The two books that helped me the most are:

Ben Hogan's Five Lessons:
https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972

Hank Haney's Essentials of the Swing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470407484/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Check this out: Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf Booklegger https://www.amazon.com/dp/0671612972/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_4IZ-zbXWHF1Z2

Best book i ever read. Will teach you a ton about form and consistency.

Honestly, I had a huge slice issue until this year when I actually started trying to fix it instead of playing into it.

Grip was stage one (don't go too strong, that causes a whole new set of slicing issues potentially), backswing check points have been stage 2 (face angle at parallel, club angle at the top, wrist at the top). Ive hit quite well on the range lately since I havent been able to get out due to weather, but with my lesson saturday I'm hoping to get out the next weekend.

If you need something to read:

https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972

If you need people to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFHZHhZaH7Rc_FOMIzUziJA - great resource on club face, swing path, and face to path

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNk5S5zjcX9iyOmbK2AzdVA - just really good resource for later tinkering

Looks good for 2 weeks. Maybe a touch closer to the ball while standing a little taller at address. Shorter swing and fire down and through.

Read this on the beach: https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972

Read this book if you have the time. Worth it and will assist in grip issues. https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492457995&sr=8-1&keywords=ben+hogan+5+fundamentals+of+golf

Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf

https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Hogans-Five-Lessons-Fundamentals/dp/0671612972

How so? Have we not had notable fake hate crimes of late? Does Jussie Smollett not ring a bell? I'm not saying there is no racism or racist's KKK white nationalist ubar nazis out there. Hell there is even a hand book on doing such a thing as this, so unless I see video of a nazi placing the sicker there I'm on the fence. What I can say is who ever did it is an ass hole either way.

hate to pull this out but: http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Radicals-Practical-Primer-Realistic/dp/0679721134
they are pissed #gamergate is not falling to their tactics and even co-opting them!
it's glorious watching these people crash and burn!

Note: links are to amazon though any library or used book will do.

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

On War by Von Clausewitz

Influence by Robert Cialdini

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Improving Performance: How to Manage the Whitespace in the Organization Chart by Geary Rummler

Books by Edward T. Hall

Books by Edward Tufte


Books by Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action by Donald Schön

let me know if you want more....

I had a similar request to yours, except I wanted to go beyond Calculus to get a broad survey of mathematical topics, using a ground up approach. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is exceptional, I can't recommend it enough! It covers all the topics you wish your mathematics teachers had instilled in you, all within a comprehensive & comprehensible form. It has been years since I studied math. I've long since forgotten a majority of what I was taught but, I can still easily progress in this book and I feel like I finally understand many of the ideas that were impenetrable before.

I'm not alone in my positive review. You'll note that people have been heaping praise onto this volume on Amazon and in more formal book reviews as well.

Working your way through a beginning discrete math class is kind of an overview of the history of math. But here are some stand-alone books on it. Writing quality varies.

The World of Mathematics

A History of Mathematical Notation. Warning: his style is painful.

Journey Through Genius

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. A reference book, but useful.

> I'm not looking for a book to help me become a set theory pro, I'm literally just looking for a book that will give me some challenging, enjoyable bedtime reading.

Are you sure that you want to read a book on axiomatic set theory or are you happy with any math subject and it's just that set theory is the only one that comes to your mind?

In the latter case, I would recommend Mathematics and its history by John Stillwell for bedtime reading (and it does have a bit of set theory, too). Also, the The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is highly recommended.

And in any case, the mathematics section of your local library provides more low cost bedtime reading than I could ever note here. :-)

The closest thing I know of to what you're asking for is the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It is over a thousand pages long.

You will never be able to obtain complete mastery over mathematics as a whole, certainly not in just one year. People spend their entire careers on tiny sub-areas of a single topic within mathematics.

However, if your goal is to attend college and study physics, you actually don't need anything like this. Instead, what you need to do is look up the physics program at the college you want to attend, see what level of mathematics they expect you to know coming in, and then use something like Khan Academy to work up to that level.

http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809

5.4 lbs of math goodness.

I'm not sure what you're seeing, but this is the link to Genki.

Pick up a grammar guide. Genki is the go-to for textbooks, or you could use a free online resource like Tae Kim or Wasabi.

If you're in college, see if they offer Japanese classes. If not, you could try to self-study with Japanese textbooks. The one I took in college used the Genki textbooks, so you could try with that.

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401

There's also a workbook that you can buy to test yourself on how well you learned the material. I don't know if it comes with an answer sheet though :S

In my own opinion, grammar is the most important part of any textbook. How well a book explains a grammar point determines how well I like the book. There are 3 major areas of grammar that I look for: verb modification, particle usage, and how well the book explains 関係節 (using a verb/sentence to modify a noun: "The chair that he sat in")

I've looked at a few textbooks:

Yookoso (which has, apparently changed its cover...) is a sort of intense, high-density textbook that makes it a bit hard to look up grammar points. However, it is well written and has a lot of practice. It also only requires 2 books to "get the job done". The grammar explanations are short and don't really explain away the confusion, but it's FULL of practice. There isn't much translation in the book, so if you have a question... your screwed (unless you have a teacher with you). However, you probably won't have many questions while reading because the sentences kind of stay mundane.

This book gets a 4 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": It explains it, gives good examples and practice, but the explanations are lacking depth. Good for learning the basics, bad for learning the specifics.

Nakama isn't really anything special.

Adventures in Japanese is a series of books that I'm using on my website to teach Japanese a little bit. However, I only chose this textbook because it is the book being used by the local high school, so my students are using it. The book isn't bad, but it teaches a lot of things that really don't need to be taught. Also, some of their explanations/translations are... less than accurate? -- I find myself saying "yes, this is right, but... Really it's this" too much to recommend this book. There is also a stunning lack of practice/guidance. It's NOT a self-study book, you NEED a teacher for it. The workbook for this book is nice, however, and would probably be good practice. The grammar points taught in this book are easily-referenceable.

This book gets a 4 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": Similar to Yookoso, however the practice is lacking. It's a textbook and a workbook rolled into one.

Ima! is a book that I kind of detest. When using it to teach, I found myself having to make my own materials in order to get the point across. It's a thin book without hardly any grammar explanations.

This book gets a 1 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice". I hated using this book. A lot. It was just a glorified workbook.

Genki seemed pretty decent as far as a textbook went. It had plenty of practice, the grammar points were short, concise, and easy-to-reference. I would use it as a textbook in the future.

This book gets a 4.5 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": Great explanations and easily referenceable. It seems like a pretty good buy.

Japanese the Spoken Language is my bible. The grammar points are in-depth, effective, and incredibly well thought-out. If you want to know exactly how to use a grammar point, this textbook is the one you want. It is JAM-PACKED with practice that can be done completely solo. It also comes with audio cds that are worth a damn. When I want to know the difference between ～て、～たら、～れば、and ～すると, you can expect a great amount of explanation. The practice sentences in this book aren't just mundane sentences, either: the authors intentionally use weird examples in order to show the student the true meaning of a grammar point. That is, it doesn't just use "one-sentence examples", it uses "entire conversation contexts, and then weird 'breaks the rules' verbs to highlight how the grammar works"

HOWEVER- the language is dated - this book was written in the 80s (earlier?) and has never been updated; it uses a weird romanization system (zi = じ, tu = つ, ti = ち); is intended to teach the SPOKEN language (get Japanese: the WRITTEN language to learn how to write); and the grammar explanations are almost TOO long and convoluted (long and convoluted, but extremely insightful and specific).

This book gets a 5 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice". However, the grammar is SO well-explained that you might be a little confused trying to read it.

-------------

To teach the language, I would use Genki or Yookoso to get people off the ground, then move into JSL. Then the student should be more than ready to self-study and translate native materials.

I really liked Genki as a textbook. Teaches you grammar, vocab, and hiragana/katakana/kanji assuming no starting knowledge. Definitely recommend getting the workbook that goes with it for practice.

On the other side of the coin, anime can have its place in language study. So, to answer your question, check out http://kitsunekko.net where you can find Japanese subtitles for many shows. They're of course written in Japanese, so be sure to study your kana and kanji.

But don't expect that to be enough to learn the language. Language learning needs lots of practice interacting with others. It's also more difficult to learn the grammar rules from passive listening.

I'd recommend looking for a place that holds Japanese lessons in your area. One possibility if you have the time are universities or community colleges, where you may be able to sit in on classes for no credit, for a small fee (which is called auditing). My old university charges $50 for non-students, which is pretty cheap for a several month-long language course. Other universities may be cheaper or more expensive. Granted, the class times might be difficult if you're still in K-12 or working.

If you can't find any classes, at least invest in some proper course books. The universities I studied at used either Minna no Nihongo (main book in Japanese only, need the English, or your native language, supplement), Genki (starts out all in English/romaji, and gradually introduces kana and kanji), or one other I don't recall the name of. For supplementals, I had found the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar set useful. A good electronic dictionary is helpful as well, which will give you many example sentences. http://jisho.org is so/so as well, and free.

Good luck!

In regards to the cost it will be cheaper to order it from Japan, here is the textbook and the workbook it should be about £50 for both including shipping.

The first thing I'd recommend doing is learning ひらがな(Hiragana). Hiragana is one of the three alphabet systems in Japanese. It's made up of 46 separate characters and is used primarily for native words and grammar. You need to be able to read hiragana to actually start learning Japanese. This may seem like it's super hard but it's not actually that bad. I recommend printing worksheets and writing them by hand to start with. After that I'd recommend using flash cards or online/mobile testing programs to drill them in. Hiragana will allow you to read and pronounce most Japanese text (though there are exceptions for particles which you'll learn later on).

I would recommend getting a textbook: Genki is often recommended and you can either buy it on Amazon or find a digital copy floating around somewhere. After that you just need to start working through the textbook. Somewhere in this process you should also pick Katakana, which is used for foreign words mainly. This can be learned in the same way you did Hiragana.

The hardest part about learning Japanese is definitely kanji. Kanji are the (mostly) Chinese characters used for words in Japanese. There are thousands of them and this is where a lot of learners burn out. The important part is to take them slowly and I'd recommend not starting kanji for a little bit anyways just because it's a little overwhelming. That being said, I'd recommend learning kanji with vocabulary. There are flash card sets meant for this using Anki, a flash card program. You don't have to worry about that for a while, though.

This may seem overwhelming at first, but all new languages are, especially one as far from English as Japanese is. The important thing is to take it slow at first so you don't burn yourself out. Languages are learned over long periods of time, not overnight and that's important to keep in mind. Just set yourself a small goal to start and work on completing that, the rest will come in time.

 

Here are some resources you might find helpful:

• Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese - really good resource for explaining grammar, has lots of examples
  
• Jisho.org - Japanese -> English and Kanji dictionary
  
• Pretty much everything here
  
• /r/LearnJapanese - Good for questions and finding resources
  
   
  
  Well, that's all the procrastination I think I can handle from writing this right now. Ending up being a lot longer than I thought it would be. Hope it helps you find where to start. Feel free to ask any questions and message me for help anytime. Good luck with your goals and happy New Years!
  
  がんばって！(Good luck)
  

Amazon Japan

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401

http://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/wiki/index

http://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/wiki/index#wiki_faq

http://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/wiki/index#wiki_language_learning_resources

http://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/wiki/index#wiki_japanese

Textbook part 1 This is the main textbook that you need, includes the mp3 cd.

Optional workbook part 1 Extra practice for the textbook.

Textbook part 2 You move onto this book when finished with part 1, also has a cd

Optional workbook pt 2 extra practice that accompanies the second part

These are all the 2nd ed.

Yeah I've viewed that wiki before and done research I guess I'm just stupid. And it's more so that I can only afford 1 thing so I want to make absolutely sure that it's the right thing for me. From what I'm getting, get a Genki book because it teaches you a lot more? The question then is...

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401/ this one or https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ this one? Or are they both necessary? Both the same thing? etc.

They both say second edition which is kinda throwing me off I guess.

I am not sure if this answer your question but you are looking for this workbook (Genki I Workbook - 2000). I own both, I can confirm.

The second edition of the workbook is from 2011.

Becoming Vegan: http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Vegan-Complete-Adopting-Plant-Based/dp/1570671036

Vegan for Life: http://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Life-Everything-Healthy-Plant-Based/dp/0738214930/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311656144&sr=1-1

Animal Liberation: http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311656159&sr=1-1

Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: http://www.amazon.com/Terrorists-Freedom-Fighters-Reflections-Liberation/dp/159056054X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311656159&sr=1-3

Three big ones that immediately come to mind:

• The China Study
  
  
• Animal Liberation
  
  
• Vegan with a Vengance

May I recommend an excellent book, Animal Liberation by Peter Singer which addresses all of your points in a way that is far more intellectually honest than is possible via a comment debate on reddit.

This is one I'm familiar with: Chaos: Making a New Science https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113453/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_FsTKxb9B7A0QR

No.

Sure could simulate a bunch of possibilities, but that will just give you a distribution of possibilities. i.e. "Up, down, or sideways".

> Could someone bother to explain the possibilities?

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660

You may want to brush up on your Google-fu and read what you submit. This story that you linked to is about a police officer who shot the homeowner instead of the criminal.

Otherwise you failed to show that somebody is more likely to have their gun taken from them than being able to use it in a self-defense situation (you'll noticed I posted collections of stories, you have two). Of course numbers of stories really aren't important here so I also submit a research book with cited sources that demonstrate having more lawful gun owners does decrease violent crime. If you would like to submit research material showing your side of the story that would help support your argument. I'll also submit another link for you to read supporting my side of the argument (when Florida introduced right to carry laws their violent crime went noticeably down).

If you are seriously interested in understanding why, I suggest you visit guncite.com (specifically this page about defensive gun uses).

Or check out the book "More Guns Less Crime"

Academically and intellectually, it does make sense. It took me many many many years to accept this conclusion against emotion and what you think of as common sense.

I found the Spencerian copybooks helped me a great deal.

At first, though, they were a hindrance - I tried to start with the first page, fill it up completely, move on to the next, fill it completely, and so on - after a few days, I quit calligraphy altogether for several months because it was just too painfully tedious.

When I went back to it, I would do one line per page and move on to the next page, until I felt like I had to stop for the night. I'd then repeat the same pages each night, abandoning a page when I felt like I was reproducing it well enough.

Spencerian Penmanship (Theory Book plus five copybooks) https://www.amazon.com/dp/088062096X/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_zHecub01E9Y97

Spencerian Penmanship (Theory Book plus five copybooks) https://www.amazon.com/dp/088062096X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_bGgxCbYTZS889

The book mentioned in that article is currently out of print. However Amazon does have it, though it's a bit out of my price range at $2,691.46

Though I'm planning on picking up a copy of the Spencerian Penmanship books later this month once I get caught up on bills.

You are so awesome! I wish I could partake in this activity but I am just starting now! ( Spencerian theory book is on it's way!) I cant wait to get started and one day be able to join all of you here at /r/calligraphy! :D

While I was using Genki I've used KKLC at the same time, no regrets, I even did the "same Kanji" that i found in both sources, now I'm working in digest Genki by it workbooks, and now to proceed on Tobira.

日本語がペラペラのため頑張って

Kodansha KLC is the most serious and quality resource for kanji, and starts right at your level (assuming you can read kana). As an alternative to Anki, try Memrise. It has KLC decks.

Well as far as etymology goes, you can't beat the Henshall text (most recent version here): https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Japanese-Kanji-Understanding/dp/4805311703/

But if you actually want to learn Kanji I recommend using KLC: https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/

This has a lot of Anki and Memrize decks to help you study.

Holy hell.... I got it for $37.44 CAD last June, and now it's being sold for over $500 https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1568365268/ref=pe_3034960_233709270_TE_item

On amazon the dimensions are listed as 15.3 x 3.5 x 22.9 cm
https://www.amazon.ca/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

Wow that's really cheap for 720 pages 33 Cdn.

I'd suggest Kodansha for kanji learning, as the Genki I and II books don't really supply you with an adequate amount of kanji imo.

There are plenty of good resources out there, so there's no one best option. So, try what you can, see what jives with you, and then stick with it.

Anyway, here are the resources I used and liked:

1. Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course. I haven't tried RTK, but I went with this one because I liked the approach. It orders the Kanji taking into account frequency, but also introducing "graphemes" one at a time, and the mnemonics were mostly etymologically accurate. Both it and RTK include all the Jouyou kanji, but KKLC includes a few more (total 2,300) by adding in some common non-Jouyou kanji that are still handy to know.
   
   I used this to quickly go through all the important kanji and their meanings. I neglected readings, but I think it was worth it, since now I can recognize characters more confidently, and pick up readings in context with vocabulary.
   
   Unfortunately it's currently unavailable via Amazon, but the item listing lets you preview the book. Use that to see if you like it. Alternatively, see if you can find it at a local bookstore so you can page through it (I bought mine at Barnes & Noble), or check your local library (which may be able to order it if you ask for it). You can also use those methods to preview other books, like RTK.
   
   
2. KanjiStudy. It's an app for Android (and iPhone, but last I checked, that version is considerably behind). Great for quizzes and writing practice, and it supports grouping the kanji by whatever order you want, be it KKLC, RTK, Japanese grade levels, etc. $10 and super worth it (again, at least on Android), but you can try it for free to access the kana, radicals, and one "level" of Kanji for each learning order. The only think it's missing is a spaced repetition system, but that's coming eventually.
   
   
3. WaniKani. I like it as a convenient supplement to keep me studying kanji regularly. You can get many of the same features with an Anki deck, so it's up to you if it's worth the convenience, style, and audio samples. The mnemonics have improved, but are still way too goofy for me, but that's what I have KKLC for anyway. There's a free trial, so it's worth checking out. Plus the people running the site and the community seem cool. Also, it includes vocabulary, which is nice, and has an API to integrate with other apps, like BunPro and SatoriReader, which can add a little value.

I used it up until about level 8 I think. I liked it and the items that I leveled to mastered/enlightened (as they call it) are definitely in my brain.

However I'm cheap and for the cost of 4ish months of WK (it's like $8/Mo for non beta testers now right?) I just decided to pick up The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course.

This book paired with HouHou is effectively the same thing as WK. Of course you do need to be a little more motivated because you need to add the items to HouHou yourself. I think this is also pretty cool because, for example, I recently switched the language on the weather site I use to Japanese. I've thrown all the new weather terms I've encountered so far along with their Kanji into HouHou.

In the interest of fairness: A major drawback of HouHou is the lack of any app/online review. I've resorted to using Teamviewer to connect to my PC in order to do reviews remotely. WK (and I think Anki) certainly does not have this problem; there is even a pretty good app for WK afaik.

If you're interested, I pretty much do what this guy does (except he uses Anki) and I feel like I've been making as much progress as I did with WK.

Edit: I'd like to add that with WK I never bothered with stroke order or writing any of the kanji at all. Since I've switched to this new approach I've started writing out each kanji ~10 times (sometimes more if it looks really similar to another one I already know etc etc) and I feel like this has helped me remember them immensely YMMV.

Lingua Latina: Familia Romana is one of my favorite books.

If you're trying to find some sort of "natural method" to learning Latin I reccommend Lingua Latina. The audio recordings can also be helpful if you decide to get them but they aren't necessary.

Lingua latina per se illustrata.

Learn using the natural method.

Sounds like you're interested in classical Latin. Starting there is a good idea, as church Latin tends to be simpler than classical Latin, meaning if you can read classical Latin, you'll have no trouble reading church Latin. I would recommend Lingua Latina. It is 100% in Latin, but starts off very simply and slowly introduces grammar and new words, so that by the time you finish the book you can read in Latin reasonably fluently. If you have experience in learning languages or speak another Romance language, you may be able to get by with just this book, but if not a traditonal grammar like Wheelock's Latin would be a good supplement. The benefit of Lingua Latina is that it teaches you to read in Latin, not painfully translate it. If you're goal is to be able to read texts for pleasure, this is a must.

Yes basically writing a text in German without any explanatory notes. It just came to my mind since your approach is so heavy on cognates so students should be able to understand a text made up of those cognates and half cognates.

​

You can preview some pages of the book on Amazon, maybe it will help clarify what I mean: Amazon link

In college I used Keller and Russel's Learn to Read Latin and didn't have any luck with it.

A few years later I picked up Lingua Latina, (and its supporting materials), and did a LOT better. The latter uses an immersion based method where you try to figure out what's going on based on cognates. Over time you pick up conjugation and declension pretty naturally instead of trying to memorize tables.

There are supporting materials with classical vs ecclesiastical pronunciation which you might find helpful as well.

Edit: Check out the Amazon preview I linked, it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

I'm taking a Latin III this year and this is our sorta finale for the Latin program.

The other question is very tricky.

1. It's taken me three years to get the point I am now and I wouldn't even call myself super qualified. We're all getting by with a lot of help from our teacher. And the rate I've been working at has been anything but steady. So that being said, I'd say anywhere from 1-3 years of learning.
   
   
2. It's very dependent on the book you have. I personally recommend Hans Orberg's [Lingua Latina] (http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367455675&sr=8-1&keywords=Lingua+Latina) and its [companion] (http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-College-Companion-Vocabulary/dp/1585101915/ref=pd_sim_b_3). The first one is written entirely in Latin; it's meant to teach Latin in a totally immersive way, by bypassing your native language and getting you to connect Latin vocabulary with images and ideas. I guess you don't technically need the companion but it's helpful when grammar concepts get more complex so I'd recommend it.
   
   
3. We jumped into Ovid after chapter 26ish, but I'd recommend at least finishing the book. Also, I hear Orberg's second book is a great bridge between the teaching style of Latin he writes and the poetry of Ancient Rome.
   
   
4. One more thing, take your time. By the time you're finished with each chapter, reading it should be as easy as reading in English. I think its recommended that you read them 7 times before moving on. It'll be dull at first but the repetition only reinforces it more.
   
   Hope I helped!

To ease into it I would suggest Lingua Latina, it's a book designed to teach through totally immersion. You'll probably find the first few chapters ridiculously easy, but further on will probably be about your previous level. There are multiple of books with multiple levels of reading capabilities. Here's a link to it https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/1585104205/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523538313&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=lingua+latina&dpPl=1&dpID=41i2-gtD%2BlL&ref=plSrch.

I've been reading Take Your Eye Off the Ball. It's definitely NFL-focused, but really gives a lot of insight into the things going on that we don't normally look at during the plays--specifically O-Line and D-Line gamesmanship and QBs reading coverage and pressure pre-snap. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through it, but I'd recommend it so far.

> "Take your eye off the ball" is a great book for learning about the game, positions, systems, the draft, training and everything else.

I've heard this said as well but haven't bought it ever -- amazon us link is here...

I picked up a copy of Take Your Eye Off the Ball, and I'm learning how to make reports so I can apply some of it to the playoffs. Just the DVD alone has opened my eyes tremendously!


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1629371696/ref=cm_sw_r_other_awd_rvZJwb1AVSST5

I don't believe there is a 2017 version -- there is the old First Edition and the newer second edition. It is available on amazon for a reasonable price -- to my knowledge there is no legal pdf download.

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401

i suggest this book. it comes with a cd for you to follow along in.

best advice is for you to just be able to stay consistent enough for just one semester to be able to make it to a face-to-face class at a community college somewhere. (~350 a class depending on your residency. hopefully you live somewhere close to a comm college)

our japanese teacher who was also japanese with a phd in linguistics taught from this book and it was great.

I think you meant you know some Hiragana instead of kanji. You'll need to know all 50 of them before you can read anything. Worry about kanji later. Learning with a textbook is more effective. I recommend the Genki textbook. http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y You can also search for "beginner Japanese" videos on Youtube.

This is what my program used. It's pretty good.

More than likely the light novels (7 and 8) will be officially translated by the time you're able to read the untranslated version.

If you still want to learn Japanese though, my best advice is to search around on your own and see what works for you. What I've found works for me has been:

Free Stuff:

First memorize Hirigana and Katakana (Japanese has three alphabets - Hirigana, Katakana (for loan words), and Kanji. Hirigana and Katakana are close to the English alphabet while Kanji is more like pictograms (for example, eye <3 u)). Write them in the margins of notes your taking, buy a set of post-it notes and write down the hirigana and katakana tables every hour or so, and you'll learn it in a few days Certainly less than a week.

For kanji, wanikani (https://www.wanikani.com/dashboard) is a good idea to get started on early (it's slow going at least at first, but a nice review tool - learn the kanji and example phrases on your own if it's too slow). (edit: Actually $10 per month after the first three levels (~1 month to complete first three levels). edit 2: There's a coupon for 50% off forever floating around though.)

Other than that, there are pdfs of the textbook Genki I (link to amazon) floating around (or you could pay $80ish for the textbook and workbook). This is the textbook the majority of people use, and it's basically your standard textbook. The stories of Mary and Takashi are awesome though and pretty fun to follow.

Learning a language requires you to learn a whole host of new grammar rules (Japanese has a good chunk with no equivalent in English) and thousands upon thousands of vocabulary. Tae Kim's Grammar Guide is typically pointed to for those who want to learn the grammar quickly, or have a resource to look at as you encounter new grammar.

Youtube videos. Puni-Puni, and others are quick to watch and really good review.

Watch anime, read manga! It's either very low-cost, or free, and exposes you to the language. You can hear or read the grammar structures your learning about, or see kanji in action. Likely since most are geared towards japanese middle-school-age to high-school-age students you won't be able to understand the vast majority of what you read or hear (without subtitles or translations), but you'll be able to get the gist of it. Here's a youtube channel that takes a sentence or two from currently-airing or recent anime and breaks it down. Also, here's a newer subreddit doing somewhat the same thing.

Lower cost stuff:

I used the workbook "Japanese Tutor" to get from the beginner to intermediate stage. It's $20 but was a very nice way to work my way through the beginner stage to intermediate.

Japanese Graded Readers is a great way to practice reading. They're kind of like scholastic books you would find at book fairs in elementary school. They don't use complex sentence structure or complex words (or complex kanji in japanese's case), and are designed for foreign language learners (so the topics are more adult, less "The dog ran. The cat ate. The bug couldn't swim."). I recommend you start at Level 1 since Level 0 is more about learning odd vocab. You can understand Level 1 books in about 2-3 weeks if you spend around 2 hours each day studying. You get 5 books (15-25 pages each - which is just enough so you don't get tired ever so slowly reading them) for $30.

High cost stuff:

Rosetta Stone is a nice way to learn vocabulary and practice hearing the language, but it's costly at $170-$200 (for all 3 levels - 150 hours). If you have a friend who can loan it to you to try out (or split the cost with) it's a really nice tool since it teaches vocabulary of objects you see in daily life, and you'll be able to look around your house or city and have a word for a good chunk of things.

Hehe, おうえんする = verb for to cheer. おうえんしているよ = I am cheering you on

Edit : P.s. if you wanna get a japanese book get this : http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401, it's what I learned from, theres multiple volumes and this is the first one

Edit 2: おうえん*

It is a Japanese textbook, used for learning elementary-type Japanese and further.

Thank you so much! Is this what I’m looking for along with getting the workbook? Also since this is completely self-study, would I need the answer key that is shown below “customers who bought this item also bought”? https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401

I got this and worked all the way through it. It was very good.

http://www.amazon.com/Spencerian-Penmanship-Theory-Book-copybooks/dp/088062096X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1462298862&sr=8-2&keywords=spencerian

I'm now working on Michael Sull's American Cursive Handwriting in the link previously posted here. I'm REALLY getting a lot out of that, but note that "American Cursive Handwriting" book is NOT Spencerian. That's the one he's currently mostly pushing on his site. But he does have a lot of other Spencerian books and resources on the site.

Are you looking for block printing (Tech diagrams/schematics/spec sketches). Or more fancy writing? The things that are encouraged for readability on documents for emergency communications (I do red cross disaster and am a crisis manager for a telco). Block print in small caps. So what I did to help is to get some graph paper and practice ~20m 3x/week. As you practice this you will notice that certain letters look really good to you. Highlight these and the next time out try to make your letter look like the one that you highlighted. If you are looking for cursive improvement there are handbooks/workbooks. I have used spencerian penmanship books.

I’ve been slowly making my way through these books. I’ll practice a letter a bit and then integrate it into my daily writing to the best of my ability :)

For Copperplate

For Spencerian


For Cursive basics(The content is good, but the paper isn't great for FPs, so you will probably need to use a Fine nib)

I thinks its just a case of writing a page of each letter, taking your time to form the letters correctly. And then doing the same with words etc until you can slowly get faster and faster.


Also I would say spend an evening of two on form, how to hold the pen, and some exercises to help you get the hang of the different movements that all letters are made from. I found these books really helpful, although I did end up changing some of the letters to speed up my handwriting.

I bought the mott media reprint of the original Spencerian workbooks off of Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088062096X It's rather old-fashioned, but it'll get you the basics and you can adapt it to regular use without much effort. Spencerian was originally supposed to be efficient, and with practice, you're supposed to be able to write it at a pretty good speed while still having it be easy to read.

I picked up spencerian. Its nice but very slow. Properly practiced, most cursive are faster to write than print. Part of the reason they exist. Though spencerian, super slow. Will improve with muscle memory though.

If you need something faster, business script could be what you need.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/088062096X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1487481437&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=spencerian+handwriting

I have been working through that with a flex pen. Very rewarding but its kinda weird to re learn to write at 32, but like you my hand writing was always crap.

From that book i learned i missed many fundamentals they simply did not teach. Oh well.

I've been using this Spencerian theory and workbook set and it's helped me immensely. Pretty cheap too.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/088062096X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1421211841&sr=8-1&dpPl=1&dpID=51Q0SSR5udL&ref=plSrch&pi=AC_SY200_QL40

The main benefit is that you learn kanji in a systematic way. They teach you to take kanji apart into their components and are structured so that you don't learn new kanji without being familiar with the components.

Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course has a pretty good breakdown of each character along with a simple etymological explanation of how it was formed and a few example words. It's excellent for using with Anki and there is a pre-made deck for this.

Wanikani, however, is a self-contained online SRS platform with a paid subscription model. It teaches you first the components, then kanji that are made of these components and then words that are made of these kanji. It's divided into 60 levels and you have to complete each level before you can go on to the next (as it's an SRS), so it takes at least over a year to complete it.

As for whether to use either of them, you'd have to decide for yourself. WK has first 3 levels free at an accelerated pace and KKLC has a preview on Amazon, so you could check them out for yourself:

https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

https://www.wanikani.com

Can't really say for an actual order between all of the books but you should learn hiragana and katakana before doing anything else (it's not so intimidating to do), and you can probably go on to use Genki 1 then Genki 2 after that.

That said you did pick several well recommended books so assuming you can get a study plan going (and stick with it) you should be on a good footing.

As far as other recommended resources, I've heard (but not tried it myself) Tobira mentioned as a good way of moving on after finishing Genki. For Kanji and (to a lesser extent) vocab you could also use Anki (free) or Wanikani (subscription / one off payment), or if you prefer textbooks KKLC.

I can't match 20-30 per day, but I was able to manage learning 8 kanji a day from the Kanji Learner's Course (that's how many kanji appear on two pages). They mostly stuck because the book has a solid system for remembering kanji meanings, and the vocabulary words always use the earlier kanji so you keep reviewing them as you go along. I also looked up sentences on jisho.org for practice.

The book tries to guide you toward more reading practice after kanji #1200, and away from just cramming more kanji. By that point I was sort of addicted to the book, and it was easier to keep using it than do real reading in the wild. But there's a balance.

Does the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course teach kanji using radicals?

I prefer learning with radicals and have been using wanikani to do so, but 10 levels in my hands can't keep up due to weak hands due to an injury a few years back.

Has anyone tried this textbook, and can vouch for how effective it is?

repost but didn't get any answers in the last thread.

Hey, friend. Can I please have a link to where you bought Kodansha from?

EDIT: [Sorry, found it] (https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268) further down in this thread for anyone looking for it!

If you can't read hiragana and katakana, find an app for that and learn them right away (really doesn't take long).

You'll want some way to study grammar, and while a textbook like Genki is probably best, Human Japanese or Tae Kim's Guide are good options that I really like.

You'll also probably want a way to learn Kanji, in which case I would pick up a copy of the Kodansha Kanji Learners Course and the Anki app plus related decks. If you want to stay entirely on mobile and don't mind monthly fees, try out WaniKani.

As for vocab, Anki with one of the "Core" vocab decks would be a good start.

Nice! That's a promising start.

I'll tell you what I wish I'd known when I first started:

---
Know that the more you expose yourself to it, the better you'll get. The less you see, the more it will slip away. Studying every day is the key to success.

Once you've got Romaji completely out of the picture (it's a terrible crutch), try to add as much Kanji as you reasonably can. If you're really serious about the language, start looking into Kanji vocab building sooner than later. (Don't learn isolated Kanji 1-by-1, you'll never know how to read them when you see them in words if you do that.) Learning the core ~2,000 for genuine literacy sounds daunting, but the sooner you start, the sooner you can get there.

The starter's guide in the sidebar here recommends either WaniKani or Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course to tackle it. I started WaniKani about 2 months ago, and it's taken me through ~400 Kanji and ~1,150 vocab terms so far. If I had started a year earlier, I'd have learned all its 2k Kanji and 6k vocab by now!

Here you go mate:

book: https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

decks: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/Kodansha

http://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

There's the book on Amazon. You can click "Look inside" and see the book for yourself. Not sure where you looked for samples at.

Just buy it?
https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/

And if you use that method I recommend these books as well:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JK29T2/

Personally I use WaniKani because I like the way it works, but I also have KKLC as a backup incase WK gets too freaky with the mnemonics and radicals.

Certo! Il fatto che conosci hiragana e katakana è un'ottima cosa, visto che in questo modo puoi partire già da subito. Io ho seguito gli (ottimi) consigli di r/learnjapanese e ho quindi acquistato il libro che praticamente tutti consigliano: genki (2 volumi che vengono 50€ ciascuno su Amazon). Unica pecca è che esiste solo in inglese, Ma il livello di inglese è ragionevolmente basso e, personalmente, mi ci sto trovando bene. Purtroppo genki non è abbastanza per imparare anche i kanji, per cui ho acquistato il "kodansha kanji learner's course", il quale utilizza un inglese un po' più "avanzato" e del quale ancora non ti posso ancora dire nulla, dato che per impegni non sono riuscito ancora a iniziarlo. Comunque una volta completati i due genki dovresti essere all'incirca al livello del JLPT N4, per cui in grado di leggere o manga semplici (con scrittura furigana, se non hai ancora iniziato uno studio approfondito dei kanji) oppure giochi come どうぶつの森 (conosciuto in Italia come animal's crossing). Come bonus ti lascio questa lista, sempre di giochi che utilizzano un giapponese semplice, per quando avrai completato i due genki. Scusa per essermi dilungato così tanto, spero di esserti stato d'aiuto!

Most Latin learners will recommend you Lingua Latina per se Illustrata with a latin dictionary, online or not. Wikipedia's fine too. It's one of the best ways out there to learn it to a comfortable level, because it gives you true immersion in the language. There's no English past the cover. And then you can practice on random texts you find on the internet, the book should give you a nice idea of Latin grammar and common words, nice enough to keep going on your own without help but a dictionary.

If you speak a Western European language, Latin will be probably be far more familiar to you in terms of vocabulary, word roots, and even common phrases. It's also a lot easier to "see" it in daily life, since it uses the same alphabet and is the root of every Romance language. Grammatically Greek and Latin have a lot in common, so if you become proficient in Latin then Greek grammar will be - I won't lie and say easy, but at least a lot more manageable.

In addition, there's just so much written in Latin since it was/is such a prestigious language in the West. I read that about 75% of Latin literature was written after 500 AD, and that includes medieval drinking songs, Issac Newton's physics, and every university motto everywhere ever. You'll have a lot to practice with!

EDIT: I hear lots of good things about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustra, although I use an old copy of Wheelock's because it has lots of grammar and resources and I'm a masochist. Maybe join us at r/latin/ or r/languagelearning/

To learn Latin, I always suggest Wheelock--I think the fourth edition was new when I studied Latin, so I can't swear by the 7th edition, but it probably hasn't changed too much. Others frequently advocate for LLPSI because it's closer to immersion (the way most modern languages are taught) than grammar-first (Wheelock's and my preferred method). Obviously you'd need more than just the first volume of LLPSI, but that's where you'd start.

As for Latin resources, the Latin Library has a ton of free texts, including the Latin Fathers. At least some of them are OCR scans, though, so be aware that there may be typos here and there.

For Ancient Greek... I learned with Groton, which tries to be the Wheelock of Greek, but doesn't do as well. Every time someone asks this on r/AncientGreek, there's never a consensus on the best textbook.

Once you understand how the language works, you can start reading texts without translation, as long as you have a dictionary handy. My recommendation is that you always try to figure out each word yourself before turning to other resources, but if you get really stuck, you can use parsers (Whitaker's Words for just Latin, Perseus has parsers for both). Perseus also has a lot of texts available, both original language and public domain translations, and the code for their database is open-source. Even if you don't use their parsers, Perseus has Liddell & Scott (the Liddell-Scott-Jones "Great Scott"/"LSJ" and the "Middle Liddell" sizes), Slater, and Autenrieth dictionaries for Greek and the Lewis & Short (as well as its abbreviated Elementary Lewis) dictionary for Latin.

If you're flush with cash, the Loeb Classical Library has, I would like to say, almost everything in Greek and Latin side-by-side with translations. It's an easy way to read and study the classics without first learning the languages (or while you learn the languages). If you have access to an academic library, you can usually find/access them without having to buy them. Now that I work far from academia, I just have to lament sadly that I can't afford it. (Before I get too old, maybe I'll buy an individual license for the digital version.)

As for Church Fathers in general, like I mentioned above, many Latin Fathers are available for free, and most (not quite all, I don't think) Church Fathers are available for free in translation. The Greek texts are harder to come by, mostly because they aren't collected in one quick place that I'm aware of (except perhaps sites like Perseus).

Trying to find free resources can be a challenge because university presses are behind most publications of classical texts, which means (1) they get to copyright the texts because of their translation, critical apparatus, or editing, and (2) those copyrights last a long time when assigned to an institution instead of a person, especially when they keep refreshing them with new "editions" that barely change.

Thanks. Did you mean Hans Orberg (this one http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205)?

Lingua Latina. (Also see the reviews for the edition without the illustrations.)

I just do it for fun, I've got no real Latin qualifications. I've learned a lot from hanging around this subreddit and from the Lingua Latina per se Illustrata books, the Perseus Digital Library, and Wiktionary.

Acquiring a language takes time. There is no shortcut. Reading the book once or just a few times is NOT enough. A single book like [Familia Romana] (https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-per-Illustrata-Pars/dp/1585104205) would normally take 2-3 years (300-400 hours of classes, homework etc) in a classroom setting. So, if you do the math, you should spend about 10 hours on each chapter! If you intend to spend all that time 'just reading' that would boil down to reading each chapter 20-60 times depending on your reading speed. You'd probably have acquired the Latin by then, yes. I would however prefer a bit more variation.
E.g. read aloud, record and play back. Read Colloquia Personarum, recording one part with pauses and then speak the other part, then switch roles. Also read Fabellae Latinae. They all cover the same ground as the main book. Do the Exercitia Latina and note that each exercise is in fact a summary of (part of) the chapter, which you could just re-read as such... now combine 2 of those to create a larger overall summary... then, using these as models, try to write a summary by yourself. Keep re-reading everything. As long as you are working with the chapter's text for 10 hours...

As a Latin student, I'm obviously biased, but you should choose Latin. Latin is a really fun language, and it's really not that difficult. Since you've studied Russian, you already have a background in declined languages, and your Spanish will help with the vocab. English will help too, regardless of the fact that it's a Germanic language.

If you pick Latin, look into Wheelock's Latin. I use this book, and I think it does a really good job of explaining everything. It's also loaded with examples and practice work, and has a nice answer key in the back if you get stuck. Since it's a course "based on ancient authors," many of the passages are excerpts or adaptations from authors like Cicero or Caesar. It teaches you about Roman history and culture in addition to the language, which I think is nice.

I've also heard plenty of good things about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, but I haven't used it very extensively.

There's also the Perseus Latin Word Study Tool, which is really helpful. They also have a Greek version, if you decide to go with Greek.

Wiktionary can be useful as well, as it gives full declensions or conjugations for tons of Latin words.

If you progress to a high enough level, you can read the news and tons of ancient authors in Latin.

Also, if you study Latin, we can be language twins. :P

Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look https://www.amazon.com/dp/1629371696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_mfpDybGTMBM85

You can start there and once you're finished with it I can send you some more resources.

The speed of the game and athletic ability of the players goes up 10-fold.

NFL defenses are fast. D-linemen and edge rushers get to the QBs quickly. DBs cover the field better. Offensive schemes are usually more complex and most successful college QBs simply can't adapt.

Although I have a home team that I root for I love watching any good team play. Unless it's your thing I wouldn't get caught up in any of the drama which is what most mainstream media headlines will contain. It ruins it for me.

• I found a couple of books that helped me: Take your Eye off the Ball and The Essential Smart Football
  
• I'd highly recommend against going to r/NFL unless you want memes and sh1tposting. I can only handle it in small doses. There is an occasional good analysis but you've got to wade through a lot of garbage to find it.

This book by the late Dr. Z is one of the best football books I've read. I also like Take Your Eye Off the Ball.

This book really helped me.

EDIT: Here's the UK link

These are some books I bought a few months back as a recommendation from someone on this sub and they're fantastic.

[Take Your Eye off the Ball 2.0] (http://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Eye-Off-Ball/dp/1629371696/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1453326704&sr=8-4&keywords=smart+football)

[The Art of Smart Football] (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Smart-Football-Chris-Brown/dp/069244825X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453326704&sr=8-1&keywords=smart+football)

[The Essential Smart Football] (http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Smart-Football-Chris-Brown/dp/1470125595/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1453326704&sr=8-2&keywords=smart+football)

Yeah, thanks, seems so This comes out to about £26 (then add conversion, shipping, etc) so still much less than £70!

Katakana above all else. If you decide you hate everything and don't want to learn any more, or you've gotten distracted and run out of time to study, at the very very least, learn katakana.

Yes, you should learn hiragana as well, and a few of the most important kanji, and basic survival phrases, but.... If all else fails, cram those katakana in on the flight.

Beyond that, the First Grade Joyo Kanji (of which there's only 100 really simple ones) are probably the most essential.

I'd grab Lonely Planet's Japanese Phrasebook. Even if you're planning on learning the language with a textbook (go with Genki, imo), the LP phrasebook is invaluable for your first few months in the country.

First, learn how to read these. I would recommend getting Genki, to teach you basic grammar and vocab. There is probably a downloadable version somewhere.

I use Anki for mostly vocab. You can download packs here. I also use Tae Kim's site and iOS app for advanced grammar.

That's the first edition, and while not a lot is different between the two I definitely recommend getting the second edition as it comes with the CD and prices for the first edition individual CDs are criminal. The workbook and answerkey also help.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Genki-Second-Edition-Integrated-Elementary/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411588323&sr=8-1&keywords=genki

I also have some social anxiety, but I think what helps me is that I have a teacher I can talk about my interests with easily. I had a teacher closer to when I started learning and the lessons weren't nearly as enjoyable and I'd try to look for excuses to cancel them. Now I look forward to them and don't feel nearly as nervous about making mistakes (which happen often, my speaking is pretty bad).

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411604386&sr=8-1&keywords=genki

Yeah those are the ones! They might be cheaper on amazon.co.jp even after shipping, they were for me:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394474799&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1RG7R56CW6E23F9J9BV9

If you can directly import from Amazon Japan, the prices aren't that bad. They are currently ￥3,780 each for the textbooks, ￥1,728 each for the workbooks, and ￥864 for the answer key (note these prices have tax included so if you are ordering and shipping them outside Japan they may remove the tax--I paid ￥3,500, ￥1,600, and ￥800).

Links:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014436

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/4789014444

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014479

Genki, a textbook for English-speaking Japanese learners, has an infamous character called Mary-san, who's a huge asshole. I believe there was a Tanaka-kun in there somewhere as well.

Sounds like a cool idea, maybe we could set up an IRC channel, or something? I've started going through this book by /u/capitafk 's suggestion over at /r/SakuraGakuin. I've done the first 2-3 lessons, and it's been great so far, though I'm still slow when reading kana and I can't necessarily write that well...

Precisa ser um curso ou só um material com uma estrutura linear basta? Se você vai virar autodidata de qualquer jeito e a grana ta curta talvez seja melhor já ir começando. Dá para aprender japônes de graça na internet, o que muda é a qualidade do material e o tempo toma para te levar um certo nível.

Tem o Genki que é um dos livros mais usados para aprendizado de japonês. A estrutura dele é extremamente linear, bem fácil de entender e os capitulos iniciais são bem intuitivos para quem esta começando. A ideia é você tentar achar esse livro de graça na web (ho ho ho), dai ver os primeiros capitulos para ver se tem compatibilidade com o livro.

Como duas pessoas já mencionaram aqui, também tem a Misa-sensei e Nama-sensei . Uma é super fofa que explica grámatica de básica até avançada com vários exemplos e o outro é um bêbado(no bom sentido) que usa mais comédia para explicar os básicos. O nama é mais fácil de assitir mas ele tem vários problemas como: letra horrível, errar as ordens de kana e meio hit-or-miss com o jeito que ensina.

Esses são os caminhos mais lineares que têm. Porém, se você mudar de ideia e quiser ir para autodidata desde do começo, sugiro ler o guia do /int/ que te dá objetivos claros que precisam ser atingidos. Se você quer algo mais direto que o Genki (sem história, mais grámatica) , tem o guia do Tam Kim que é bem direto ao ponto. O Tam Kim é de graça, ao contrário do Genki, então pode ser uma boa alternativa se não quiser pegar o livro por outros meios.

Quando você começa a ser autoditada estudando uma língua aparece vários métodos estranho que você não tem certeza ou não. Um canal que pode falar mais desses métodos é o Matt vs. Japan. Esse cara perdeu boa parte da vida dele usando métodos extremos para aprender japônes e nos vídeos ele fala o que funciona ou não. Algumas coisas dele são muito extremas, mas sobre métodos de aprender kanji e spaced repetition system(SRS) são bem interessantes e realmente funcionam.

De qualquer jeito, você vai ter que aprender usar o Anki, seja para decks pré-feitos ou preparar ou seus próprios (decks próprios são sempre melhores que pré-feitos). Não há uma sombra de dúvida que o Anki é o instrumento mais forte para se aprender japônes ( e qualquer língua). Ele entra no SRS que eu mencionei anteriormente. Pra você ter uma ideia tem pessoas que estudam sem material/livros, só através de input (animes/videos/filmes) e Anki.

Para output(conversação), você vai precisar: ou procurar algo em RJ que tenha grupos de conversas em japônes, ou vai ter que achar pessoas na internet (o que é mais fácil). Tem vários aplicativos que te conectam com nativos, assim como canais de discord onde treinam japônes/inglês.

If you are okay with spending some money you can buy Genki Volume 1 textbook (Amazon page). It's the basics of the grammar and reading. If you don't want to spend money then duolingo (link) is a good site for learning Japanese. Though I personally don't like it as much as just taking a class and learning from a textbook

I started off with DuoLingo for the same reason, and while it was helpful to learn the Hiragana and some basic things, I personally found myself dissatisfied with the teaching style, and started taking a college course. I found that the book, combined with other self study (like music, anime, reading and deciphering comments on youtube, and trying to read untranslated hentai), was very helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401 This link has the book that I have, though you might be able to find a free PDF if you look hard enough. There's a workbook companion book with it for review.

It teaches mostly polite forms of speaking, which you should almost always use if you're planning on attempting to speak to anyone that's Japanese, unless you know them very well. Just a heads-up.


Edit: It's also best to have a study buddy to practice conversations with, and to correct each-other's mistakes. So grab another weeb and try to learn alongside them!

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499677957&sr=8-1&keywords=genki
Is a great starter as a book.
You also have http://www.imabi.net/beginnersi.htm if you rather start online (and free) It's very extensive and the guy is really a nerd about the language but imho it's a bit blunt for beginners.
http://www.textfugu.com/ is online and beginner friendly but I find it quite verbose (maybe you wont). First "season" is free so go check it out as the WK team has done a nice job there too.
頑張って

(sorry, for some reason I only got the notification of your reply now)

Yes, the cheap one is the workbook. A workbook is an optional book that only contains exercises, it won't teach you japanese. It's useful, but if it's up to you to buy it or not. What you need is the textbook, which is the book that actually teaches you stuff (vocab, grammar).

This one is the textbook and this one is the workbook.

Always start with learning hiragana and katakana. These are a handful of phonetic symbols that you will need to read basically anything. The guides below will cover them, but just make sure it's the first thing you do.

Tae Kim's guide starts at the basics and then continues with grammar. It's very much based on a "casual first" principle where it starts informal and builds up to formal speech, unlike most textbooks that focus on the latter. You could also check out the pdf version if you find that more comfortable.

Speaking of informal, you might like Namasensei's videos. This is how I made a start years ago. His handwriting is terrible, but it's a very motivational way to learn your hiragana and katakana.

A popular tool for learning vocabulary is Anki with a Core 2k/6k vocab deck. I found a guide here, but I haven't checked if this particular one is up to date. Anki is a flashcard program, and that vocab deck contains the 6000 most frequently used words in Japanese. You can build up your vocab knowledge daily, and get reviews on words you've had before. There's also a mobile app (free on android, paid on iphone), which is really convenient if you commute a lot.

If you like textbooks, possibly the most commonly used are Minna no Nihongo and Genki. I have no experience with these myself, so I can't really comment on them. Apparently the Minna no Nihongo book I linked expects you to know hiragana and katakana before you even dive in, so be aware of that.

For reading practice, look for children's books or simple manga. These texts usually have furigana, which basically means that all the complex characters (kanji) have little hiragana on top that show you how to read them. It's going to make your life a lot easier when you're just starting out.

Another website to keep in mind is Jisho, which will help you look up kanji by piecing them together. Useful if furigana aren't present, which is the case for most advanced texts. Kanji are a huge roadblock for a lot of people, but don't be intimidated by them.

The only thing I can't really help you with is listening practice. I have tried watching some TV shows, but it's often very fast and hard to follow. Anime is fine, as long as you're aware that it's not always exactly realistic.

In summary:

• Learn hiragana and katakana first
  
• Build up your grammar and vocabulary
  
• Find material to practice reading and listening, appropriate for your current level of grammar/vocabulary

I accidentally bought the Genki 1 workbook thinking it was the textbook; I'm guessing it won't be much help without the textbook? Also, is this the textbook I'd need?

Don't worry about the N# levels, they really don't indicate your skill at all. Many people have studied for those tests specifically and had no skill in Japanese other than those tests, and still managed to pass N5. It doesn't test you for anything other than reading.

For learning hiragana and katakana, you can do that over the weekend and the kanji you can learn in two or three months. Personally I'm doing 50 a day. You should look in to a tool called Anki, and some books. Specifically, Teach Yourself Complete Japanese, Colloquial Japanese and GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. Send me a PM and I'll see what I can do for sending you some E-book versions of those books.

For Kanji, check out Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. There's a shared deck for it on Anki. I changed the particular deck available on Anki so the kanji is on the front, and the meaning and the story are on the back. It doesn't teach you the meanings of the kanji, which I believe is a good thing; you should learn the readings of the kanji from the context in certain words. I'm currently learning 50 new kanji a day with Anki + doing my reviews.

That's the first book I considered but right now it is not available on Canadian Amazon with Amazon Prime

and it is a bit out of my price range as a high school student

/r/LearnJapanese if you haven't found it already. I am trying to learn as well!

To be more specific, the FAQ is a great place to start. I am using a textbook called Genki along with a flashcard program called Anki for vocab memorization.

Start by learning Hiragana and Katakana, then you can start to learn vocabulary. I'm obviously not going to claim this is the best method, as learning a language is a unique process for everyone. Good luck!

Lots of studying.

If you want to get started, you'll need to learn Hiragana and Katakana before anything else. The demo of Human Japanese will teach you Hiragana, and Anki flashcards will help with Katakana. From there, move on to Genki, and maybe supplement that with Anki and a Genki vocab deck.

It's not that difficult. You just gotta keep at it and never stop.

Hello, does anyone know where I can buy a Genki I textbook?

I tried asking at fullybooked and apparently it costs 10k for a special order. The one at national bookstore simply stated that they don't have one (which I doubt, since she was busy chatting with her worker).

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401

This is the textbook you want.

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345338134&sr=8-1&keywords=genki

It's costly, but it's easy to get for free if you know what I mean, very good textbook

We all have that phase. I recommend the Genki series if you are serious about starting to study Japanese. It's what they use in beginner university courses.

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

It's a little pricy, but worth the money in my opinion. I bought mine 10 years ago.

You need the textbook itself, as well as the workbook. Scans of the answer key are among the first results on Google when you search "Genki answer key". There's nothing else you need, though pencil and paper will probably be helpful. I also recommend checking out Anki, which is a flashcard program that will help you memorize vocabulary.

> Can anyone give me some advice, as well as any websites/books that I can read up on to improve in my understanding of the language?

The book Genki 1 is often recommended.

四/よん/yon = 4
Try https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imiwa/id288499125?mt=8 if you have iOS. I'm not sure if Imiwa is on Android, this app serves as a dictionary.

Also checkout the 1st Genki textbook and workbook, they are used by schools all over the US and my professor teaches from it daily.

Textbook: GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (English and Japanese Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/4789014401/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gxGPCbTNRWJB9

Workbook: Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese Workbook I [Second Edition] (Japanese Edition) (Japanese and English Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/478901441X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GxGPCbQEZBF16

I started with Duolingo as well and it wasn't a great start. These books will help further your Japanese learning. I've been studying for two years starting in August, they really work.

r/learnjapanese is also a great place to check for viable resources besides the ones I mentioned.
Good luck! 頑張って！

This is the correct Genki book to get for studying correct?

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427604537&sr=8-1&keywords=Genki

I've never used Japanese for Dummies, so I don't know how far it takes you and how well it allows you to transition to more advanced learning materials. As has already been mentioned, the easiest method is to exhaust all the grammar your current book can teach. The most popular alternatives to JfD are Genki and Japanese from Zero. If you asked anyone who studied Japanese for a while, if they used either book or at least heard about them, they'll most likely say yes. On top of that, it's easy to build up on your knowledge after you finished the textbook. After Genki 1, you can use Genki 2 and after you finished that as well you'll be quite good at Japanese.

If you want to practise natural speaking and writing, I'd recommend to take a look at an app called HelloTalk. It basically lets you chat with native speakers of a language of your choice for free. It might feel like it's still a little too early to try that but when I look back at how I learnt Japanese, I wish that I would have used that app much, much sooner. It's never to early to start speaking/ writing!

This is the best way I've found outside of classes.

First of all pick up a copy of Genki I and Genki II, really good textbook to learn Japanese Grammer and basic Kanji.

Here's a link: Genki I

Next I'd head over to /r/LearnJapanese to get some more resources and find someone to talk, italki is also a great way to find a teacher, a proper J-teacher, prices range quite a bit.

And next read everything you can in JP, change your phone language and learn kanji EVERY DAY.

If you're anything like me, I would wager that you're not focusing because your curriculum is painfully slow.

I got my Japanese degree from Indiana University, and in first-year Japanese (two semesters, 5 credit hours each) we went through the entire first Genki. By the second year, we were already on Genki II.

If you're still learning this level of Japanese at the 200 level in college, I'd really recommend you jump into something more intensive--provided you have enthusiasm about learning the language. I study my best when the curriculum is too difficult. I study hard, and I fail. But ultimately I learn more failing at difficult curriculum than I do exceeding at boring curriculum.

My absolute top recommendation for learning Japanese is the Kanzen Master series levels 2 and 3, but those seem to be out of print. It looks like you can purchase the "New Kanzen Master series", but they only publish starting from JLPT level 3 and lower, which is more difficult than the old JLPT level 3.

It can be quite confusing! Firstly I did a lot of looking around and unless there is a seller on ebay/amazon UK selling a second hand copy cheap, I found it was cheapest to order it new from amazon.co.jp

http://imgur.com/ZiYfwrh

http://imgur.com/visBrmu

Here's the link to 2nd edition Genki 1 textbook (all you really need, but the workbook is at the bottom of the page too)
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/aw/d/4789014401/ref=s9_bbs_awgw_d6_g14_i1/375-3555975-0547058?pi=SL115&aid=aw_gw_jp&apid=154199649&arc=1201&arid=1MAW3KEVFNH08PQBG3X1&asn=center-4&pf_rd_i=aw_gw&pf_rd_m=AN1VRQENFRJN5&pf_rd_p=154199649&pf_rd_r=1MAW3KEVFNH08PQBG3X1&pf_rd_s=center-4&pf_rd_t=1201

There should be a button somewhere to view the site in English.

(sorry about the formatting, on my phone)

Try learning some verbal japanese?

https://nihongoshark.com/japanese-greetings/

​

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4789014401/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0

​

Also, take her to a japanese bookstore or the japanese books section in a library?

plus this:

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/howto/

​

Along with anime - start with miyazaki's "howl's moving castle" or "kiki's delivery service".

Remembering the Kanji is very popular: amazon


As well as Genki: amazon

Then there is the Human Japanese app: http://www.humanjapanese.com/home.html

Or the Anki app: http://ankisrs.net/

And then sites like:
http://www.memrise.com/ time based flash cards
http://lang-8.com/ correspondence with people that are also trying to learn your language.

I don't know. I am a beginner myself, but these are a good start as far as I am concerned.

the 2 apps I use are Kanjibox and Imiwa. Both are for IOS.

Kanjibox is a quiz type of app that teaches the kanji characters based on the JLPT certification levels. If you don't have IOS there is an internet based version here.

Imiwa is just a really extensive english - japanese dictionary.

If you are looking for a textbook, this and this are a couple of the more well regarded ones. This is another book for learning just the kanji.

Good luck

its never too late to start

It's in the "customers also buy..." section. Linky.

IIRC, the text doesn't have the input sections (though it does have some exercises I think - it's been a while). The workbook is intended to be where most of the exercises are. Did you get the CD with the text?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/478901441X/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1510270538&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=genki&dpPl=1&dpID=51cdvoP7fPL&ref=plSrch if you're referring to this one, I'm not sure why it says Japanese edition in the title. In the description it does say Japanese/English. There is a few full Japanese pages at the beginning, which is like the introduction, but there's the english version after it. This book is surely both in Japanese and English as it is meant for english speakers to learn Japanese.

Reminds me of [this book.] (https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946)

I would recommend 'On Bullshit' by Harry Frankfurt. Great book, philosophically based, and dealing with human communications.

Actually, according to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300299667&sr=8-1 , bullshit refers to things a person says that make him/her look better regardless of the truth of said statements. So bullshit may or may not be erroneous; the truth of bullshit is irrelevant. And, the intent is not malicious per se, but it could be if being malicious helped portray the speaker in a positive light, which is the only purpose of bullshit.

The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:

• God: A Human History
  
• Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith
  
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
  
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  
• Occult America
  
• When Prophecy Fails
  
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
  
• Cosmos
  
• Norse Mythology
  
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
  
• Misquoting Jesus
  
• On Bullshit
  
• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
  
• Why People Believe Weird Things
  
  Plus a bunch of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, and others. There are way too many. And all the fiction books I want to read too! It's not that I didn't read books before, but my faith transition has sparked an intense desire to study and learn far greater than I ever experienced before.

On Bullshit.
It's not lying, its just... bullishit.
I would call this more philosophy than psychology.

A little discussion of Frankfurt's [bullshit] (http://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=) might be appropriate here.

You will not get an appropriate response from denizens here, I suggest that you read this book instead; that way, you will not be buggered into further derision.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.

I recently read Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, it was pretty interesting.

It's about traveling not a story about travelling though. If you travel a lot you may have already experienced some of what he talks about.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel It isn't fiction... but I can't think of anything else more inspiring to world travel.

Definitely long term travel. It could probably help you grow more as a person than a semester of a graduate program.
What is your experience with statistics and what are you looking to do with it? There are excellent online modules (I've heard anyway, my stats knowledge came from school) that you can definitely utilize while working at your own pace (even at work during downtime). R is the statistics program/language that is currently most well respected in the statistics community, and it's free. R isn't even really taught in a lot of academic programs as far as I know, all the people I know who are proficient in it taught themselves.

edit: This is a great book about long term travel, he's also done some podcasts https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541349629&sr=8-1&keywords=rolf+potts

you should read Vagabonding.
The book is not long and it has everything you ever need to know. It was eye opener for me :D

Could everyone add a quote from the book they're reading? A good quote could draw my interest. Helps me find new stuff to read!

As for myself, I'm currently on Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Here are a couple of quotes from said book:

"We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what."

"In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal— not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way."

Good book on this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180

> I'll never meet a guy that will love me back. There's no one that's remotely interested in me. I'm too awkward. Even if I did find a guy, he'd probably leave me anyway.

I lived in SF for a long time and I can tell you that people of all stripes and levels of awkwardness find love, I saw it all the time.

The people at Pixar say things get better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a4MR8oI_B8

As for your parents, people find comfort in having scapegoats and people who are followers tend to listen to leaders who are happy to supply scapegoats - in the past (US) it was the Irish, Italians, Chinese, Polish, etc nowadays for rednecks it is the immigrants, for flag wavers it is ISIS, for Mormons it is the gays. One way to think of these people is morally immature and easily lead astray by the authority figures they rely on to tune their moral compass. You have to be the bigger man. In this case, yes they are torturing you but it is because they think it is what they are supposed to do. Success is your best revenge.

As far as jobs or education here is a secret - being a middle manager or something is not necessarily more rewarding than being a barista. Honor and fulfillment come from how you conduct your life and how you treat others. Chop wood, carry water there is much to be said for humility and simplicity. You can learn more for free from the best schools in the world on iTunes University than you could at BYU.
https://diyscholar.wordpress.com/guide-to-itunesu/

"Do not let yourself be guided by the authority of the sacred texts, nor by simple logic, nor by appearance or opinion, nor even by the teachings of your master; when you know in yourself that something is bad, then give it up, and accept the good and follow it." -Buddha

You are stuck in a place where people live in a very small bubble and they all believe it is real, it is not and there are many amazing and fulfilling things out there that you should try out before you kill yourself. Here are just three books with alternative ideas about spirituality, philosophy and jobs - you can stop living live exclusively from the POV of the Mormon bubble without letting anyone else know that you are doing it - for now while you are still in prison, once you are out you can be your own man.

http://www.amazon.com/Chop-Wood-Carry-Water-Fulfillment/dp/0874772095
http://www.amazon.com/Wabi-Sabi-Artists-Designers-Poets-Philosophers/dp/0981484603
http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180

Here's something I read in Rolf Pott's Vagabonding that's so obvious, but most of us don't think about: there are people living frugal, yet comfortable, lives almost everywhere in the world. When you visit the place, if you adopt some of the local practices of frugality, your trip suddenly becomes a lot cheaper than you would have imagined when you were thinking of yourself as just a typical a tourist.

The main cost of world travel is the airfare for getting to the place. Once you reach there, you can do as the locals do (who are usually poorer than the average American) and have yourself a frugal trip, without sacrificing the awesome experiences of world traveling.

The book also goes on to say that as a world traveler, you can travel cheap and save your money for an occasional splurge on something unique, than waste it on routine stuff like staying in expensive tourist hotels and eating in tourist restaurants all the time.

I highly recommend that book.

Why hello there good sir!

May I recommend "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide To The World of Travel"?

Ok, I had a similar trip, here's a few tips and tricks:

1. Take a normal sized backpack like a school backpack. No flags, try not to look too American. Use a small zipper lock. Have your passport and credit cards in a money belt under your clothes. Carry a front pocket wallet.
   
   
2. ATMs will generally give you a better exchange rate. Traveler's cards are good too. Airport exchanges are usually worst
   
   3)Overnight trains are fine. A little loud, a little bumpy but cheaper than a hotel for a night and you're not missing out on day travel time. I say they're worth it but you miss some countryside so just play it by ear.
   
   
3. Try not to plan day by day too much. You'll know when it's time to leave.
   
   
4. Learn a couple key phrases. If you're honest and genuine people will take the time to communicate with you.
   
   Other than that, have fun good luck, I recommend Vagabonding by Ralph Potts. Lots of great advice.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180

Not sure if this has been posted, but I found this book to be one of tremendous inspiration for my travels.

>Wish I could work my ass off for 2 years straight on Vyvanse and earn enough money to "chill" for 6 months and unravel my mind or something.

You may enjoy this blog: Mister Money Mustache which talks about how to do exactly this thing. Also Timothy Ferris' book The Four Hour Work Week. Ooo also: Vagabonding by Ralph Potts is even more precisely what you are looking for.

In short there are a lot of ways to live and if you think of a "weird" way to do it, chances are someone else has too and written a book or blog about it.

Read this book if you haven't already.

Read Vagabonding

Great resource for the whole 'drop my current life to start a new one' mentality, even though it involves mainly travelling the world, not setting up shop somewhere.

Look for Vagabonding in Google, there's a fair amount of stuff on the subject.

This is a book on the topic I've only heard good things about.

The basics are: Get the very best backpack you can (try it on first), carefully think about what you really need in terms of clothing (consider the climate you want to be in), at least learn a bit of the language of where you want to be and then look for some hobo-tips on how to avoid most stab-wounds (also, try to look like a tourist instead of a hobo).

Dumpster-diving can also help greatly as it means less money is needed for food.

Absolutely! Check it out if you haven't. I got mine for like 8 bucks on Amazon!

My list:

• Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel - travel, see the world, experience new things
  
• How to Win Friends and Influence People - make friends, enjoy people
  
• Starting Strength - get fit, look good
  
• Esquire The Handbook of Style: A Man's Guide to Looking Good - dress well, look good
  
• The 4-Hour Workweek - work on your own terms

Get this book http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0812992180. I wish I would have read this book before I went to Thailand.

Not a website, but I will always recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. There's a sample (Pdf) if you want to try before you buy.

If Kanji is an issue try the Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig and get the Anki deck to go with it.

​

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542637329&sr=8-1&keywords=remember+the+kanji

The best way to learn a language is to interact with it as much as you can in every way you can. Yes, you can and probably should spend some time seriously studying from a good resource like tae kim's complete japanese guide(the whole thing is free), but you won't want to do that all the time for all of your free time. Get some Japanese books, manga, tv shows(this is one way to watch the region-locked Japanese Netflix) video games, listen to Japanese music, listen to podcasts in japanese. (You will want to find things with both japanese speaking & japanese text - subtitles are not good for learning!).

Kanji is a difficult hurdle, and there are a few popular ways to tackle it (this is by no means a comprehensive list):

• Heisig's Remember the Kanji book
  
  
• Anki is a flashcard program with spaced repetition, and it is useful both by itself or with a RTK deck. There's also good vocab decks. Anki is completely free.
  
• Wanikani is kind of like Heisig's RTK and Anki glued together and glossed over with a fresh shade of paint. I've never used it but it looks good.
  
  Well hopefully that helps. My personal take on learning kanji is to just learn it as you go from new vocab you acquire. Finding things like games or manga with furigana is very helpful as you can just search for that character in Jisho and all of a sudden you have its basic meaning, on/kun readings and most importantly, its stroke order.

It's like asking how long it will take to reach 1-dan, it varies so much depending on time commitment, motivation, personal ability and method. I'd expect it would take at least a couple years, though there are examples of people becoming somewhat fluent in 6 months, so anything is possible.

As for the best approach, you'll find lots of opinions. I think people are generally bad at remembering what it was like when they started learning and knew nothing, so all those "here's how I'd do it if I started all over again" are not always the best advice but I'll try to give you my version of it anyway:

• Start with a generic "learn Japanese" method, those won't take you very far but you have to start somewhere. Your first goals should be to get a feeling for how Japanese works, basic grammar, a few basic words and most importantly learn to read and write hiragana and katakana (the phonetic system used in Japanese writing). I recommend the Japanese in Mangaland series of books, but any other decent beginner method will do.
  
  
• In parallel get the JapanesePod101 podcasts. Those really helped me a lot, as I would listen to them every day and build listening ability. They start from the very beginning too. Continue listening to them, especially during the next step for motivation.
  
  
• Now this is going to be controversial but after doing introductory material for some time, if you're really committed to learning Japanese and be efficient at it, you have to bite the bullet and learn the Kanji (Chinese characters): all 2000+ of them that are in common use. Fortunately that isn't that hard if you use the Heisig method, you can use the Kanji Koohii website to manage the flashcards you'll use for memorization. It's a bit controversial because with this method you're learning the Kanji in isolation without learning how they are actually used in Japanese. It's still 100% worth it. This turbo-charged my Japanese learning like nothing else before. It took me 3 months to go through the book and learn all the characters. Once you're familiar with the characters, it's 10 times easier to learn vocabulary, even if your goal is to listen to shogi commentary, it's still the best way of doing that in my opinion (plus you'll be able to read shogi books eventually)
  
  
• Once you're done with the kanji you need to start building vocabulary, using your new kanji knowledge, it will be much more efficient, as you learn vocabulary, you learn how to write them using kanji you already know and as a consequence learn how those kanji are pronounced and used. This is why this method works so well. For vocabulary I recommend using the Anki flashcard software, you can download pre-made decks of vocabulary. Look for Core 2k, 6k and 10k which are a set of most common words complete with example sentences and audio, there are alternative but I think those are the best lists. A few thousands words plus shogi specific vocabulary should be enough to get a decent understanding of shogi programs.
  
  Anyway this isn't everything, you need to continue with more grammar, practice, and so on while doing that, but this is the gist of what I wish I knew when I got started. I guess it can seem a bit overwhelming but just get started and go one step at a time...
  
  Also you'll need this: Dictionary :)

Hey!

For learning the Jouyou kanji, I used James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji volume 1 (and volume 3 for an extra ~1000 kanji). It requires a bit of re-thinking how one should go about learning these things:

Usually when learning kanji, people go in grade order, learning the English meaning of the kanji and memorizing all of the possible readings (for some kanji, you'll have two pronunciations -- for others, you can surpass 10 different pronunciations). I feel that this method is ridiculously inefficient, and Heisig agrees. With RtK1+3, you completely ignore the readings, learning only to write and recognize the kanji, as well as their English meanings. On top of that, you don't learn them in grade order, but rather in the order of the elements that make up those kanji (for example, these are taught to you in order: 口→日→刀→召→昭 ...and so on). Instead of being given a bunch of unrelated complex characters, you're given the building blocks, and then shown how to create the more complex kanji by being able to see them as just their individual parts (for example, 鬱, despite its 29-stroke-count, is super easy when you break it down).

As for actually remembering the kanji you learn, check out Reviewing the Kanji, a free web-based SRS specifically for use with Heisig's books.

A common argument against RtK is the fact that readings are totally disregarded; after all, you can't read Japanese if you can't read the kanji, right?? Of course. But the way we've usually gone about learning them isn't all that great. That's not to say it hasn't worked -- people have used it to success before -- but it's slow, inefficient, and prone to failure. Instead, once I'm able to write and recognize a good 2000+ kanji and can read ひらがな/カタカナ, I've got the ability to use everything I need to learn readings: a dictionary. When you're reading and you come across a word you don't know (say, 竜巻), simply look it up in the dictionary. The dictionary will have the reading right there for you (たつまき!).

Traditionally, people would look at 何 and memorize that it can be read なに, なん, て, が... and probably some more that I don't know. Then do this for every kanji they learn -- memorizing these lists of sounds. My thought is, though, even when you know all of the pronunciations for something... you still don't know which of those readings to use in a new word (the 何 in 如何体... the answer may surprise you!). So you're gonna have to look up the word; heck, you'll probably be looking it up anyway because you don't know the word! If that's the case, why not forget about memorizing these contextless sets of sounds and just look up words as they come? In that way, you naturally begin to pick up how kanji are read, in context.

Sorry for the novel of a comment, but I hope it makes sense. Getting through the kanji can seem like a huge, daunting task, and it takes longer than one might want, but if definitely doesn't take as long as one might fear! Find a pace that works for you -- I went through the first ~300 or so kanji of RtK1 at about 30 a day, but then bumped it down to 10 a day for the remainder of it and RtK3, and it was a glorious pace. Slow? Maybe. But I was making real, consistent progress, and it feels huge to reach the finish line. :) Hope this helps! Have fun!

It's listed as companion here. The Amazon page for the most up to date RTK even mentions "Updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the Japanese government in 2010 as "general-use" kanji".

All of the 2010 additions are listed here, and you can see companion is 侶. 朋 doesn't even appear anywhere on this list.

Please don't do it. Serious.

Anime characters have a very distinct speech pattern, and you do not want to speak a language like their cartoon character. Trying to learn Japanese from anime is flawed from first principle; you will get endless shit from native speakers if this is the route you choose to learn the language.

It's kinda like how some Japanese learn English by listening to Elvis Presly songs. Just don't.

It sounds like you're new to the process, so I suggest you pay /r/LearnJapanese a visit. They are a great community, and you'll learn about what you have to learn in order to master the language.

Other resources:

Heisig's Remembering the Kana. A fantastic way to learn the basic alphabet. You want to start reading Kana and stop reading romanization as soon as possible, and this can help you do it literally over a weekend.

Remembering the Kanji by the same author is the next obvious step. Much more tedious, but that's the thing with Kanji. You sit down, shut up, and learn it. This book makes it as painless as possible.

With that said, trying to memorize a lot of information is a solved problem in human psychology; this means there are softwares implementing proven techniques that will help you do it. I highly recommend Anki.

Finally, if you want a glimpse at the grammar, there's a fantastic guide over at Amaterasu translation.

Good luck, have fun!

(Full disclosure: I'm essentially a n00bie at the process myself. I tried to learn the language too, but it's on shelf right now due to other stuffs in my life. I do not know Japanese.)

You're young. You'll have a much easier time learning Japanese if you start now.

http://ankisrs.net/

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0824831640

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0824835921

You know, I don't really track such things on reddit so much, but the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) is sort of a hub for these things.

For years I didn't really have words or terms to go with my sentiment regarding our built environments, but reading first Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Death of the American Dream and then ["The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Environment] (https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250) were wonderfully informative and encompassing on the topic.

Check out James Howard Kunstler's TED talk, you'll probably laugh and feel sad in equal parts.

It's incredible how wide reaching the effects are of our built environment, and in the United States, it's mostly negative.

honestly if that intrigues you, you should really read Suburban Nation. it's a fantastic book.

I recommend having a look on this one.

Theory Book & Five Copybooks (Spencerian Penmanship)

I'm a big fan of barefoot running, but since it's hard to actually run barefoot, check out http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/.


Here's a NYtimes article about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/business/30shoe.html?_r=1

But mostly I'd recommend googling for your information. Born to Run is a great book about the greatest ultramarathoners of them all, the Tarahumara.


Here's an interesting factoid: The more money you spend on your shoes (therefore more cushioning, fancier technology) the more likely you are to injure yourself.


You have to start out slow, since your arches are weak and your feet aren't used to it, but since I started doing it, I haven't had a single joint injury, or shin splints, or anything else. Muscles still get sore and after a while my feet hurt, but before, my joints were always giving me trouble and I'd get injured constantly and have to stop for weeks while I recovered. Just doesn't happen anymore.

Doesn't look very Scandinavian to me. I suspect Grete Waitz might have skewed your impression of us Norsemen.

For a real people made for running, check out the Tarahumara, a native Mexican people. With widely dispersed settlements, these people developed a tradition of long-distance running up to 435 miles (700 km) in one session, over a period of two days through their homeland of rough canyon country, for intervillage communication and transportation. An awesome book about them came out a few years back

Persistance hunting and distance running is the subject of many anthropological papers and popular books, like Born to Run.

Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307266303/

Those stress fractures you're facing could be preventable.

Born To Run A runner asks the question, "Why am I experiencing all this pain when I run?" He explores a Mexican tribe, the Tarahumara who run anywhere from 30 to 100+ miles a day. The story provides a large amount of background about running, inspires people to run(everyone in my household runs now), and has really intense race sections.

You clearly have poor grammar and English.

Your is a pronoun that means belonging to or associated with any person in general. If I were speaking about myself, I would have said “my people.”

I’ve [linked] (https://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646) you an English Grammar for Dummies book to help you with your ineptitude.

Sure, blame it on autocorrect.

Also, it's too ugly, not to ugly.

http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

You need this: https://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

And some anger management lessons as well.

I hadn't realized that language just ceased to evolve when you last learned it.

Did you know that yolo is now a word in the dictionary?

Did you know that you can end sentences in prepositions? Eg. "Where you at?"

The "are" is understood by the way. Something you're having trouble grasping.

Did you know that the word "literally" also has an informal definition, used to create emphasis on a subject?

You can check out all this cool new info here!

http://www.dictionary.com/

https://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646

Book for $8.98

Movie for 7.99

AND! Scarf for $2.69

Equals $19.66 :)

You're absolutely stunning, are you aware? Benedict agrees

Snow, snow, go away (for serious)

1. I do indeed!
   
   
2. My mom takes great care of my family. She saw us all safely through living in Guatemala, Israel, Nigeria, and India (which is no small feat!) Now that we're back in the States she works part-time and still makes sure my 16-year-old sister and 7-year-old brother are doing well, and long-distance mothers me now that I'm at college. One of the little things I really appreciate about her: she puts a lot of emphasis on us sitting down as a family for dinner. It means a lot to me.
   
   
3. I would love to own The Lover's Dictionary or The Fault In Our Stars. Your pick! :)
   
   
4. Hey Bean! That's such a cute nickname and a fun way to remember your mom. My mom calls me Belle.

Can I opt for a book that's going to be turned into a movie??

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Fault-Stars-John-Green/dp/0525478817/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1AMJZKZKZ9OLU&coliid=I1NO2QARUZIXAW


popcorn

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

I need to read a lot of teen lit for my job, so the most recent good book I've read is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

While I can't recommend anything similar to your preferred writing style, there are several book association sites out there (that you've probably heard of but I'll include anyways, just in case) like Novelist, Shelfari, LibraryThing, Goodreads, and, of course, Amazon.

Finding a good book can be such a wonderful experience. Best of luck with your next set.

21

Favourite so far is The Fault in our Stars by John Green.

Indeed, it comes from a book "The Fault of Our Stars"

Have you ever read any of John Green's work?

Looking for Alaska

Paper Town

The Fault in Our Stars

ED can suck a dick!

I'm sorry you've been struggling! Hugs for a strong and recovery. I can relate to what you're going through.

Something about my life/? I'm pregnant! I'm having a boy this winter. I'm so excited.

I REALLY want this book: The Fault in Our Stars, and if I win, a used copy would be totally acceptable, and actually preferred because I like books with a previous life in them. The last used book I got on Amazon had some peculiar notecards inside.