One of the first delightful surprises I had while living in Korea was learning that the Korean equivalent of ‘what’s up?’ is ‘밥 먹었어요?’, which translates to either ‘have you eaten?’ or ‘have you had any rice?’. It’s been decades since the tiger economies went hungry, but this linguistic fossil remains from an age when […]
Category: Language Learning
A Bookish Review of 2017
Counting books I’m currently in the middle of I have read 75 books this year. A few of these are children’s books in Russian and German so if we subtract those out it’s ~70. This includes three trilogies (Ramez Naam’s ‘Nexus’, Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘Jean Le Flambeur’, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Mars’), and one pentagy (George […]
Critique My Russian!
One of my ancillary goals for 2016 is to learn some Russian. I haven’t set any specific objectives because, next to my day job and The STEMpunk project Russian is a very minor pursuit. It would be cool, however, to maybe record a five minute conversation with a native speaker near the end of the year […]
