1. BTW, posted reviews of Kappa and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders to my blog.

2. Have also as a result of Tari’s post gotten a goodreads account.

The jpg is supposed to dynamically update. So far I have only those two books.

3. I was considering joining library thing, but although someone I know (Meril) is an early adopter on that service (people there seem somewhat odd. Several people asked her to review… the Tale of Genji? I just don’t understand why people would clamor for that to be reviewed, because it’s not as if there’s a lack of opinions on the work), I wanted to be able to store an unlimited number of books for free. If I can break two hundred, my decision will be rational. XD In any event, I don’t really need to be recommended new books by a search engine. I have lots of people who are willing to rec to me.

A post argues that in the U.S., Chinese language courses overly emphasize hanzi. I found someone linking to this post saying that he thought the anecdote rather proved the opposite, that maybe the problem was that rather than too much hanzi, there was too little. In any event, I have to say that after three years of college Japanese, I think I did know more than 500 characters, and that you probably need to know much more to reach an equivalent level in Chinese, but this was because I studied outside of the classroom. Also, for students in a third year course to be moderately fluent for speaking and functional for literacy, when dealing with a language like Chinese, seems to be normal.  It only appears strange in this instance because these students had experience in Chinese before beginning the university courses.

IMHO there just are limitations to how much speaking/listening improvement can occur in a classroom setting, because improvements in this area seem to be mostly dependent on time spent speaking and listening. Personally, I think if a student wants to live or study in a foreign country, literacy is important, because otherwise they’ll be unable to read signs or fill out forms. They’ll be unable to read newspapers or books. It will be difficult for them to build vocabulary, because they are cut off from this method of learning new words.

I’m continuing to modify my wordpress, and I discovered this plugin that lets the viewer pick which themes they want to see and use! Themes in wordpress are like different layouts. So far I have about ten of them, some of which are quite cool, so check them out. To navigate between themes, use the dropdown menu named theme viewer.

Actually, aside from being oh so cool, this plugin does have a use:  if you favor an eye-bleeding theme, your users can switch to a more sedate one. IIRC there are other plugins in wordpress which allow users to make the type larger and to perform even more customizations.

Amazingly, there is much controversy about the permanent account sale and the continual lack of clarification of what is acceptable on LJ, which is interesting as in the past there never was any clarification of what was allowed or not anyhow. If you look at LJ’s TOS, doesn’t it seem like they give, and have always given themselves, a wide ability to remove content on extremely vague grounds, without obligating themselves to do it? It has never been, to my mind, a question of “free speech,” because LJ has already implied in the TOS that they are willing to boot content above and beyond what is legally unacceptable in the US; that is, in the US, unlike in many European countries, IIRC, racially and ethnically “objectionable” and “offensive” content is legal. So it seems that LJ has always operated by some vague measure of community standard. IANAL, but having looked at other TOSs, it seems to me that you can say that content that is not illegal in the US is prohibited on one’s webservice, even if it is free speech in the US without jeopardizing one’s common carrier status. For example, I have seen many webhosts ban pornographic material, even though it is legal in the US to have an adult site, and to sell pr0n. The problem is that what’s allowed and what’s not is just vague, as are the mechanisms of enforcement. (For example, I’d say a large proportion of fandom is in violation of TOS for copyrighted material in their icons/mp3 sharing/whatever, but LJ isn’t going to do anything about it unless they receive a legit DMCA complaint.

Well, I’m not getting a permanent account because a) I don’t really have much use for the features, and b) I don’t really know whether LJ will be around that long and c) I’d rather spend the money on my own website. On the other hand, I wouldn’t really say that people who buy permanent accounts lose all leverage over LJ: people who buy perm. accounts tend to be heavy LJ users, and thus providers of content/social interaction. Since they’re not paying to use the LJ software, but to use the LJ server, content and social interaction are a major draw of the site, and these are provided by other users, not by LJ itself. So, I think by commenting and posting, you’re providing value to LJ, which encourages others to keep using the service. How many people have said that they’ll stop using LJ if their friends (you) go elsewhere?