this ran in the weekly newspaper for my university, interviewed me about being the only white person studying in the general program and a few other things about my life. the university has over 600,000 students and i think most of them get this in the mail every week.

click the image to download the full [...]

there are often similarities between numbers, due in part to the fact that thousands of years ago numbers were the main thing that different populations needed to communicate for trade purposes. i would love to read more on the similarities between numbers across the world, but have been thinking about the following one lately.
in sanskrit, [...]

i’m back to studying sanskrit again, this time taking a class at ramkhamheng which is finally forcing me to memorize things that i used to just look up in charts. the thing about the course is that it uses a pronunciation system based on the thai alphabet instead of the commonly used devanagari. i’m not [...]

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 [...]

last post in the series on thai idioms, this one translates คำสุภาษิต which my dictionary translates to mean proverb. i made one change to the previous post, thanks art for pointing it out. it’s interesting to see which animals are used in proverbs from different countries … in english we use foxes (clever as a [...]

i made a few corrections to the last post on idioms (thanks pueng and wan) and added in one more that i was having trouble translating properly (thanks pank). this next group is คำพังเพย which my dictionary translates to mean either axioms or proverbs. again, feel free to comment on my translations … and if [...]

i’ve run this blog for over three years now, starting when i first went off to india. i did go through a year of thinking i was a neoluddite and didn’t really post much, but other than that i have posted regularly. when i left for india this most recent time, i decided to do [...]