David, turned up a surprisingly balanced article from the Taipei Times about learning Chinese in Taiwan. In the past, I’ve found most of that papers pieces about tourism or learning Chinese in Taiwan to be little more than advertisements, this one was long and pretty well thought-out.
Learning Chinese is hot, but you would hardly [...]

This week was “Walk to School Week. The 國語日報 had an article on it:

為了宣導小朋友走路上學的好處,臺北縣市,高雄市選定本週作為”走路上學週”,昨天一大早,台北市教育局長吳清基就站在文昌國小校門口,一一為小朋友的”走路上學週護照”貼上認證貼紙; 台北縣長周錫瑋也到江翠國小擔任一日導護志工.
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許多原先騎車,開車帶著小朋友上學的家長,遠遠的就讓小孩下車,讓小朋友經由”安全走廊”自己進入校園.

This is great! The government has decided to declare “Walk to School Week” to draw attention to the benefits of walking to school. Top officials are even standing at the gates of schools to give the kids who [...]

A few days ago, John (of Sinosplice) sent me a link to an article titled, “Against School”. Interestingly, it was written by John Taylor Gatto, former New York State and New York City teacher of the year. He goes into a long explanation about how public schooling is used more as a tool for promoting social conformity than as means to an education. Quite a bit of the article rang true in my ears. Indeed, I’ve found a very large disconnect between schooling and education in my own life.

My own experience with language learning has been a long and painful journey. Some people have told me they thought I had a “natural aptitude” for learning foreign languages. If only they knew. All of my more recent success is a direct result of spending 10 years failing… miserably.
Latin
Excluding the small amounts of Spanish introduced [...]