Monday I dashed out of the apartment, almost sure to get to work late, only to find out that it was a national holiday 8)
It has happened before, although at one point I learned to check the calendar looking forward to vacations. However, given the current situation, I’m not sure I’m really looking forward to much vacations (need to get work done !), so I let that one slip.
It was for the best anyway.. 50 meters into the way, I see the usual two neighbors that bring out the Japanese flag for the holiday.. a call the office to make sure nobody is there.. and then, straight to Shibuya, where I bought a couple of books (one on kanji, the other with exercises, aimed at some standard language test which I may take one day).
Bought the books, I went to a cafe nearby, the famous Segafredo of Shibuya. Cafes are actually nice, something that is almost unheard of in the Italian culture, where people mostly take they coffee standing up and chatting about soccer. Funny how Segafredo and Lavazza, possibly the largest coffee brands in Italy, have their cafe chains in Japan, but not in Italy.. where even Starbucks is unknown.
For once was nice to be out early in the morning, actually outside, not inside the office. I worked a bit around the math in the Penrose book (onto complex numbers now), then started looking at the kanji book (Decoding Kanji). I’m still only at page 27, but I’ve appreciated what I read so far. The book actually tries to make sense of the radicals composing kanji characters, and gives hints to have a good idea of how a kanji can possibly be read (the single biggest problem with kanji, really !).
I don’t expect this book to be the final and only source for kanji learning, but, as usual, it will have some contribution.
Speaking of contributions, a while ago I bought Who is Fourier?:A Mathematical Adventure and What Is Quantum Mechanics?: A Physics Adventure. I think I may have finished the first one, but I definitely could not finish the second one. They are rather big books, which dwell a bit too much on cheap fiction, while trying to entertain and shamelessly plug their original language teaching business. nevertheless, I’ve learned some interesting things from those books. I liked the fact that quite a bit of math is proposed to the reader, while making it sound like child play.
For example, I liked the explanation of the constant e in one of those two books. While the Penrose book has introduced it by page 80, and still hasn’t introduced derivatives nor has said that e is actually special as its a derivative of itself. ..but there is still a long way to go for me into the book, so I’ll have to wait and see if he’ll spend more time on that.
Damn it’s almost 3AM.. zzzzzz
poof

Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized