It’s cool to be the guy that can strike up a conversation with the strangers having a conversation in a foreign tongue — in their own language. That was one of the biggest motivating factors for me to learn Japanese. That and watching One Piece without subtitles.

The first day you spend studying everything is new. We’re in the novel world where we can talk about French baguettes and Italian spaghetti or Japanese apologies — staples to a language, things are exciting.

We learn the meaning of the cool words — expressions in popular culture, how to greet new friends…

I grew up ignoring math classes. Honestly, I grew up ignoring all my classes, but I made a point especially about not putting extra effort into math.

But math is…

Programming tutorials are a complicated matter. If you’re learning how to program, inevitably you’re going to come across a point where you have to just copy someone’s code. This is a dangerous activity, and if you don’t do it correctly then you won’t learn.

Recently I’ve been trying to get a better handle on the MERN tech stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, React, and Node). My approach was to try to get a vision of what a finished product might look like. There are plenty of finished examples on the internet — if you look around on Github you can find more…

I’ve tried learning about six or seven languages at different points in my life, and if I have to be completely honest — my pace has slowed down a lot over the last two years. I don’t always find the same success I had before. Concentrating on language learning isn’t something as readily available to me as it was a few years ago. I have a family now, and that takes priority. But this doesn’t mean I have to forgo language learning altogether.

If you’re finding it difficult to keep making progress, here are some tips for making the best…

Growing up in Queens was awesome because there was always someone speaking a language I couldn’t recognize. I’m proud to be a product of one of the most diverse places in the world. It’s almost impossible not to be interested in languages when you’re almost guaranteed to hear at least two or three just walking out the door.

Learning a new language was one of the most difficult, rewarding projects in my life. But it wasn’t as easy as saying 1,2,3 go — There were a lot of things I had to do before I got over all the false…

There seems to be no end to the amount of times we have to do something over and over, to how many times we have to read something over and over. Yet in this novelty chasing, instant-gratification fueled purgatory we call life, we can’t seem to get enough of it. How often are we fooled into running after meaningless skinner boxes, only to finally get them and never open them up? How many experiences do we have before we get to the point where we finally stop to think about them?

Yet down that same road, how many times do…

Okay, quick, very weird question — at what point does the rest of the world stop and you begin? And to that same point — is it the same place where you stop and the rest of the world begins, does one spill over to the other? What is the ‘self’, and more importantly, what is myself?

I teach the reflexive pronoun -self as a grammar point in my class — it’s an object that ‘reflects’ the subject. There’s a bunch of silly little examples “WE did it all by OURSELVES”, “I went to the movies by MYSELF”, “YOU’VE soiled…

I remember how I spent a long time as a kid online playing MMORPGs and avoiding social contact. At first, it was a dismissal. I didn’t want to talk, and I refused to see a point in it, even for online interactions. After I grew a little, it became a more serious question though. What is the point? What’s the goal? Why should I, or any other human being, speak to another?

In the context of an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), the most obvious answer seems to be for cooperation. We need to interact with players to trade…