Start of a new adventure

Learning a new language and culture is always intimidating and yet curiously fun at the same time.  I am currently trying to learn Japanese and having to learn hiragana, katakana, and kanji is a hassle sometimes.  Hiragana is a type of alphabet with 48 characters and is a flowing style of writing.  Hiragana is mainly used for words that are native to the Japanese language.  Katakana is another alphabet with 48 characters just like hiragana but has a much sharper edge to it.  Katakana is mainly used for words that are from the outside countries.  Kanji is probably the hardest to learn because it has characters that are symbols that mean a specific thing.  To properly read higher level things in japan you have to at least remember 2000 kanji characters.  Hiragana and Katakana even though there are 48 characters this isn’t counting the combined form of ya, yu, and yo also the dakuten and the handakuten markers for some of the characters.  The dakuten marks are the characters with quotation markers on them that change ka to ga and so on.  The handakuten markers are the characters with circle dots on them that change ha to pa and so on.  Learning to correctly use all of these together and trying to make sense of them does take a lot of studying and practice, but you will get better at it.  I have memorized both the katana and hiragana characters and started to memorize some of the kanji characters.

Here and There

I was not born in the US and lived nearly half my life outside the states.  I originally came from Laos I then moved to Thailand and finally came to the US.  My accent and the way I use words have always been changing to adapt to where I currently live.  When I first came to the US trying to learn English and how to use the words correctly I ran into many troubles with different words.  At first people did not understand what I was trying to say since in my home country we pronounce every letter that is in the word, but in English there are silent letters or letters that combine to sound like another letter.  Take in example the word phrase, ph creates an F sound but for a time I would pronounce the ph in phrase like my last name Phomsaly many people would pronounce it Fomsaly, but that is not how you’re supposed to say it.  When I speak with people I always change the way I speak with them depending on who they are.  To my family and friends who speak my native language I will sound different to them when I speak my native language.  To my friends who speak English depending on how they talk I adapt my speech to them sometimes I sound a little from the south or if I don’t know where they are from I will speak with no accent and pronounce my words just like how they are sounded out in the dictionary.  To those I don’t know yet I always try and remove any accents and pronounce the words just like in the dictionary.  I am currently learning Japanese and have some Japanese friends and when I try to speak their language it’s like learning to speak English again at first I sound my words out and speak slower than normal but later on I will speak at a faster rate more natural just as I have done with English.

Programming Literacy

Literacy defined in the dictionary could mean one of two things the ability to read and write or having knowledge that relates to a specific subject.  I would like to write about the second definition and that is the knowledge pertaining to programming.  I worked as a computer programmer for five years and learned many different languages that exist only in programming.  I learned from the basic known as visual basic or VB up to visual C# or just C# there are many more languages, but I will only use those two for now.  I mainly worked with and programmed for C# programs.  At first when you look at a block of code all you see if weird words with dots and semi-colons or an underscore at the end of the lines and you wonder what those words and symbols mean.  To learn programming you have to have a curious mind and the willingness to accept failure because you’ll fail many times before you succeed, but you’ll learn a lot when you fail.  The whole process of learning in programming is from failed experiments while trying to do something new.  When you start a new programming project it never starts with coding anything.  First you need to have a defined paper of what this project is for and what purpose it has.  Second you need to start a logic flow where different variables, methods, functions, and classes do what and where they interconnect with each other.  Then starts the fun of coding when you have both the defined purpose and logic flow the coding is a little bit easier.  After comes the most frustrating part of coding the quality assurance testing making sure your code works as it should.  After that is done you will have a finished program.  This is just a brief overview of programming.