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August 27th, 2010 Enter your password to view comments.
$5,000 – How Should We Spend It?
August 20th, 2010 § 12 Comments
I meant to make a video/blog about this earlier in the week, but… Things have been pretty crazy. Let me give you the back story… Oh! And Chinese lessons will start up again the week after the competition is over (September 8th).
The Project
Last week I heard about a contest that the company Kohl’s is having. They’re giving away ten million dollars ($10,000,000) to 20 different schools. Every school in the country is competing to win five-hundred thousand dollars ($500,000). The money is going to go to the 20 schools that get the most votes during their campaign. There’s an awesome school here in Milwaukee (St. Marcus) that was already in the top 50 schools and they want to use the money to help with expansion.
I got all excited because it was an “epic” project to work on (you know how I love epic projects). So ever since last week I’ve been brainstorming ways for them to win, and all of this week I’ve been putting videos and webpages together. (One page being a contest to win an Xbox 360 Slim, go vote and sign up if you haven’t yet!)
The Money
Now… You know me (or you should!) I was prepared to go into bipolar-epic-manic-LETS-DO-THIS mode without « Read the rest of this entry »
Improving The Livemocha.com Mandarin Chinese Speaking Exercises
August 5th, 2010 § 6 Comments
I expressed some dissatisfaction about some aspects of Livemocha.com‘s service in a tweet and they tweeted back to me:
Livemocha: @miltownkid thanks! we are happy to fix any errors. can you identify the course/unit/lesson number?
I could try to express myself in 140 characters on Twitter, but I thought this could be useful information for them and anyone following my Chinese lessons because I plan on having you use Livemocha in the future (for pronunciation practice).
The two problems I have with the speaking exercises are « Read the rest of this entry »
Pinyin Initials
August 4th, 2010 § 6 Comments
[Combinations of initials and finals from Pinyin.info]
Alright. In today’s (laid back on the couch) lesson I went into more depth on pinyin initials. Most sounds in Mandarin are made up of initials and finals (but you know this already as we covered it last week when I introduced initials and finals. 
)
I’ll quickly cover everything I covered in the video in this blog post.
Listening to and Pronouncing All of the Initials
You can « Read the rest of this entry »
How Do You Change Bad Habits?
August 2nd, 2010 § 7 Comments
I was reading Theoricus’ post on motivation and he mentioned habits. I picked up my copy of Jack Canfield’s “Success Principles” to review what he said about habits. He recommended making a list of your unproductive/negative habits and then replacing them with productive success habits and developing systems that support them.
He also recommended getting help from friends/family/coworkers/(subscribers? 
) to identify what they thought were limiting habits.
Once you make this list of bad habits, the goal is to replace them with good habits. Pretty simple right? Not so simple.
Changing Too Many Habits A Once Is A Bad Habit
The last thing Mr. Canfield mentioned was working on « Read the rest of this entry »
