A Brief Catch-up and Something Interesting

It’s been a fair amount of time since last I wrote. Judo at the club has been moving along, but I’ve been busy job hunting. Roswell is a hard town for jobs of the “over qualified.” I’ve got some plans for the blog for the next month or so and should be writing more often.

I’ve been looking at some interesting stuff lately and working on developing some plans. I love research and have been doing a lot lately. I found an interesting looking book on kanji that I’m going to try to pick up (maybe someone will buy it for me for my birthday, which just passed). I found some interesting questions regarding the highest possible ranks in judo. And I am going to talk about my kids’ classes.

First, the book: it’s called “The Key to Kanji” and it’s written by Noriko Kurosawa Williams. It’s not like most kanji books where they essentially define the character so you have to memorize what it looks like and the stroke order. Instead, it’s a break-down of the kanji and it’s evolution to its current appearance. This strikes me as similar to teaching root words, prefixes, and suffixes for all of our Latin and Greek based words in English. (And chords of “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak” from “My Fair Lady” go passing through my head.)

That weblink gives two sample pages (click on the Preview tab) that you can print out to evaluate. Or, if you just want them handed to you…Kanji_301-600_1R 1.pdf and Kanji_301-600_1R 2.pdf.


I’m going to expound upon this pdf in another post, but to give you something to read now: JudoKodokan-Nov1963-20QuestionsRank.pdf. Some of the interesting bits are Questions 6, 10, 12 (this is for AnnMaria and a comment she made at the JudoForum Camp in 2008), 14, 16, 17, 18, and 20.