So I had an extremely ridiculous idea the other day. My girlfriend, who is originally from Hong Kong, speaks Cantonese as her first language and is proficient in Mandarin. I, being a good ol’ American mono-linguist who took Spanish in high school and is now learning Japanese in college, only barely know the difference in sounds between these two Chinese dialects.

From time to time, I find it amusing (at my girlfriend’s expense) to string random syllables together that I deem sound like some sort of Chinese. I then look at my girlfriend with a wide, cheesy grin and ask expectantly for her professional translation. Of course this is ignorant, and I hope I am not accidentally overheard and misunderstood by a passerby. However, I have actually managed to come up with sentences- most of the time gramatically incorrect. It was after one of these “sessions” that I talked with a friend and decided it would be a great exercise in internet stupidity to blog about my findings. I call it Trial and Error Chinese for the Average Man Hoping Not to Learn a Language But Instead to Butcher it At the Expense of a Poor, Patient Chinese Girl: For Beginners…

Finally, ambitiouspagoda.com is at least reasonably respectable. I installed a blog (who doesn’t) and a wiki (really useful for all my project tracking) so that this site has a point in its own existence. I realize there are still a few design issues, but I’m happy for now, so people like Adam Butterworth who happens to be sitting right next to me should hold his tongue

I think I’m resigning from the web design stuff for a little bit, and I’m going to stay true to the theme of this Fall quarter here at the Rochester Institute of Technology: No Web Development In Jason’s Schedule! Hopefully I can use the time to populate this site with some content from the other fields in technology and art that I like a lot better.

Enjoy and feel free to browse around!