Ok, it’s really not that hard to grock.

in studying foreign languages, i’ve often wondered about learning words based on usage frequency. if your goal is to get up and running with basic conversation, then memorizing the most commonly used 300-500 words would probably be easiest. it would obviously leave lots of gaps, but you would probably have enough of a foundation to understand most conversations and then figure out the rest based on context.

wiktionary has created lists of most commonly used words (sorted by language) based on the subtitles from movies and tv shows. i guess that would mean it would apply to the spoken forms of language more than the written ones, but would seem like a good way to decide which words to learn

ohh, this reminds me …. i’m into week three of the new school term, taking spanish, sanskrit, japanese and an introduction to thai literature.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

i spent the week before last down in phuket with larry and ray from san francisco (well monterey for now, sf soon). it was the first time i had left bangkok since the new year, and it was super nice to be able to chill and not let my day be run by a clock. every time i leave the city, it does a good job of reminding me how much i love being back here. the countryside or beach is nice and all, but i feed off the energy of the city much more. it’s much more inspiring to be surrounded by traffic, concrete, malls and millions of people than it is to be in the middle of nowhere.

that being said, i shot some great photographs with my medium-format pinhole camera and with my panoramic camera. i’m still sorting through most of the negatives, these two are my favorites so far.

i’ve been invited to show two collages from the my series “how to know god (homage to christopher isherwood)” as a part of a group show this friday in bangkok. the focus of the show is for four senior photography students from chulalongkorn university to show their work along with their professor, and they wanted to ask a guest to show work along with them.

i will be showing the following two pieces, the first as a 1m x 1m lightbox and the second as a 30”x12” lambda print. click on any of the images (including the flyer image at the top) for a full size version. if you are in town and free on friday, please come. it should be a lot of fun.

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