Reading for Learning

I've read several accounts by people who place an emphasis on reading in the target language as soon as possible.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb
http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/fr1abs.html

http://www.language-learning-tips.com/17_Schliemanns_method.htm

Shanghaihua Materials

http://www.mandmx.com/category/shanghaihua/page/2/

Language Study Method Resources

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/
- a blog from a man who taught himself Japanese while he was in
university. If you look around the site he covers the things he did
which he feels made his efforts as successful as they were. One of the
big things I got from him was to focus on phrases.

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation-pubsdate.aspx
- the Second Language Aquisition researcher in New Zealand. He writes
about studies he has done about effective language teaching
methodologies. The second link are his publications. I haven't managed
to get any of his books yet.

There is a book by Barry Farber called How to Learn Any Language. I've
read it a couple of times, but the public library doesn't have it and
I don't have a copy. He is very big on flash cards and learning in
your hidden moments. He says he always keeps some flash cards with him
and studies in line, or on the bus, or whenever he has a spare moment.

http://www.thelinguist.com/en/en/book-contents/

http://watchtolearnchinese.com/

Mandarin Chinese Learning Resources

Here are the Mandarin/Language study resources I've found:

http://www.chinesepod.com
- There are over 1000 lessons at different levels. Based in
Shanghai, so I suspect it is Shanghai flavoured Mandarin.

http://www.slow-chinese.com/ - Spoken Mandarin at a slower rate of speech.

http://www.greatwallchinese.cn/
- a spinoff from the Confucious Institute. Do NOT purchase this product. Like the Confucious Institute site, it is badly organized and difficult to understand. Also, although it is quite new, don't buy the printed materials. They used Flash 7 and you will be unable to run the included CDs on any recent installation of Flash. Tech support is limited. They only support IE. There is limited material available on the site once you get in. No explanation of what you are trying to learn. For example, in the first unit of level 3, they are trying to teach the difference between you4 and zai4, two ways of indicating repetition (of saying 'again'). To teach the difference between the two, there is 2 example sentences, one with you4 and one with zai4. That is it. No explanation, no other examples, nothing. You are far better off with purchasing content from another site such as ChinesePod. They have better explanations (if you like explanations) and huge amounts of example sentences (if you prefer to learn by induction.)

http://popupchinese.com/
- this is a pretty new site, I think about 6 - 8 months old. You can
get a trial subscription to try it out. It seems to be very similar in
design to ChinesePod, but more focused on written work, and not as
much support on the site. Based in Beijing.

http://www.chineseclass101.com/
- This site is even newer. It's a partnership of PopupChinese and
another company. It's progressional based. ChinesePod and PopupChinese
produce lessons at different levels and you can learn them in any
order. This site seems to focus on a gradual progression of lessons.
Based in New York, with hosts from various places.

http://www.confuciusinstitute.net/resource/index.htm
- has a variety of videos, and possibly other material that I haven't found yet.

http://www.chineselearnonline.com/
- seems to be progressional audio lessons. Based in Taiwan.

http://www.cslpod.com/English/Lessons/home.aspx
- More podcasts. It looks very similar to ChinesePod or PopupChinese.

http://www.activechinese.com/
- on line learning materials, level based instruction. Has various streams, professional vs student, which affect the topics studied and the vocabulary learned. I have not yet tried it.

http://www.hanyu.com.cn/en/tvstastion.aspx
- Chinese Online Contemporary Chinese

http://www.imandarinpod.com/hoola/

http://www.im.tv/vlog/Personal/298597/2559661
- videos in Chinese.

http://ellenschinese.podomatic.com/

http://vsearch.cctv.com/

http://www.bcc.com.tw/
- BBC in Mandarin

http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/

http://www.clavisinica.com/annotator.html
- annotates Chinese characters with pinyin.

http://www.clavisinica.com/voices.html
- written stories with assocaited MP3s.

http://watchtolearnchinese.com/
- videos

http://www.michaelturton.com/Taiwan/teach_index.html

http://www.zhongwengreen.com/

http://www.zhongwenred.com/

http://www.xuehanyuonline.com/

http://www.zhongwenblue.com/

http://www.worldlearnerchinese.com/

http://www.chineselingq.com/

http://english.cctv.com/program/TravelinChinese_new/01/index.shtml

http://english.cri.cn/08chinese/index.htm

Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition

Author: Stephen D. Krashen

First published in 1982. That is getting close to 30 years ago. I'd love to read something more recent and see how his ideas have changed or evolved.

He distinguishes between language learning and language acquisition. Language learning is a conscious process of grammar study, vocabulary memorization and drills. Language acquisition is a subconscious process of internalizing comprehensible input.

Comprehensible input is really the big thing I took away from this book. He theorizes that we do not need to spend our time practicing grammar and memorizing vocabulary, and that these things are not really helpful to the process of speaking a language most of the time. He believes that is is the quantity of comprehensible input that determines our language ability.

JAAS -> AD Configuration

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ldapsearch command line access to AD server

ldapsearch -x -h  -b "OU=Users,OU=Vancouver,DC=Jokers,DC=com" -Duser@joker.com -W

Weirdly, the DN for AD looks like an e-mail address. What can I say? I don't know why this works, but this works. AD does not (by default) allow anonymous browsing, so you must authenticate (-D and -W) to list the info AD is storing.

This command is really useful for troubleshooting AD problems when you are trying to configure an app to authenticate against an AD server and you are not exactly sure of the settings. This utility allows you to quickly test different settings until you find something working.