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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is because most East Asian languages actually don’t conjugate their verbs at all!

    In Chinese, for example, you always use the same exact verb, you just add extra sounds called “particles” to the sentence to contextualize what you’re saying.

    e.g. “I’m going to the store” in Chinese is 我(wǒ - ‘I’)去(qù - ‘go’)商店(shāng diàn - ‘store’). I go store.

    To say “I went to the store”, you don’t change “去/qù”. Instead you still just say “I go store”, but you add “了/le” to the end of the sentence. “Le” is a particle that means “to finish; to be completed”.

    So to say “I went to the store”, you literally say “I go store (past particle)”, and the listener knows that the statment “I go store” already happened and ended - past tense.

    This is why native English speakers often think of this type of grammatical mistake when they think of common English mistakes that East Asian language native speakers make.












  • I’m a news junkie too, and I also used to have a problem with online conflict. I got so worked up posting on Twitter in 2016 that I broke into hives. No joke…

    I took several years off from the news, but I reestablished a healthy relationship with it 3 years ago. What revelation did I have?

    Comment sections aren’t informative. Just stick to factual reporting and if you need to hear some opinions to help you contextualize things you learn, stick to centrist sources and try to read at least two differing opinions per topic.

    I only get news from AP News, Reuters and Five Thirty Eight.

    If I desperately want to hear an opinion, I’ll read an editorial in The Economist or I’ll look at polling numbers.


  • I was able to lucid dream for about 6 months when I had a good environment for it.

    I lived in a foreign city, and had a very well insulated high rise bedroom with climate control and a professional blackout curtains installation. As a result I slept very deeply.

    I also did regular reality checks 5-10 times per day and spent time remembering every dream I had right when I woke up, a dream journal-like exercise but lazier.

    Unfortunately, lucid dreaming sometimes triggered sleep paralysis for me. Its very unpleasant.

    I don’t lucid dream anymore but I have retained the instinct to recognize a bad dream and snap out of it to this day.