paperpools: dolce vita ist vorbei

Overheard at Café Kleisther last night.

Unimprovable.

Secondhand Sales

Readers sometimes want to buy copies of The Last Samurai for friends. It's tempting to buy the book "As New" for $1.70 + $3.99 postage rather than for $14.95 with free shipping in an order of $20 or more, especially if there are many, many friends. The author gets nothing on a secondhand sale -- but then, the author would get only $1.12 on the new book. To send the author $1.12 the reader would have to pay an extra $9.24. That's a pretty expensive goodwill gesture.

Goodwill doesn't have to cost that much. PayPal takes 30 cents + 3% on each transaction; if you send the author $1.50 by PayPal she will get $1.15. So only 35 cents of the goodwill gesture goes to a middleman. It would look like highway robbery if we hadn't seen the competition.

Greek, Latin

Rhapsodes
Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin: has recordings of Homer, Pindar, many others.

Perseus
Extensive body of Greek and Latin texts in the original languages and in translation; offers ability to click on a word for a definition, grammatical information. Also has lexica, grammars, various other resources. NB: the texts are generally editions that are out of copyright rather than modern versions, so the reader is for the most part offered texts reflecting the state of scholarship at the end of the 19th century. The texts also have no apparatus criticus. So it is a useful resource, but one to be used with caution.

Online Intro to Modern Greek

Japanese

Japanese learning materials, including kanji charts, dictionaries, grammars, a wide range of books on Japanese culture, back issues of Mangajin and much more, are available from Jim Rose at Rolomail.
Rose also runs Kanji Café, a vocabulary-building resource which allows you to build a personalised dictionary for vocabulary review. This now includes a set of several thousand animated stroke-order diagrams.

Japanese for Your Mac, a website run by Christopher Bolton of Williams College, offers guidance for Mac users who want to use Japanese in e-mail, browsers and word processing programs.

Yakuza Japanese

paperpools

Sunday, June 28, 2009

dolce vita ist vorbei

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