Language Learning and the Logic of Large Groups
Some thoughts about blog statistics and considering language learning as part of human nature.
Category Archives: Blog Analytics
Self Taught Japanese: A look back at 2020 and what is to come in 2021
In this post I take a look at what STJ has achieved as a blog in 2020, and what I have achieved as a publisher (including some statistics on both). I also talk about some plans and aspirations for 2021.
How I got over half a million hits in a year
The other day I happened to check my yearly views for 2018 and was surprised by the number: a little over 500,000. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about blogging and statistics so I in this article I would like to talk about what helped me get this amount of traffic. Keep… Read More »
Blogging about blogging: optimizing page load time (it does matter!)
While I try to keep this blog focused on Japanese-related stuff, once in a while I will post about something else, and waiting about blogging is one my favorite topics for that. Several years ago I switched this blog from a basic WordPress.com account to a self-hosted account. While there is some cost associated with… Read More »
Blog statistics: sometimes the best statistic is a selfish one
While I try to keep my posts mostly related to learning Japanese or translations, because of the amount of time I spend thinking about blog statistics I like to write articles about stats once in a while. By no means do I consider myself an expert at statistics, but I know they are a tricky… Read More »
Japanese short novel translation “Memoirs of a Traveller” (ある旅人の手記): Ch.4 “Festival Girl”
This is the fourth chapter of the story “Memoirs of a Traveller” which I am translating from Japanese to English. As you might guess from the name, this is a fictional tale about someone’s travels throughout various places. You can see my review of this story here, and the translation of the prologue here, chapter 1 here, 2 here, and 3 here. I highly… Read More »
A response to a reader’s comment about Gengo, quality, and rates for translation
Recently I received a long, interesting comment from scalesoflibra, a reader and fellow blogger on one of my posts about the translation service Gengo. You can see that person’s full comment on the previous link, but I’ll give a brief summary of it here: Gengo charges around 5 cents for a standard level translation job, which means that… Read More »
Bye to Google Adsense
Sometimes you just have to try something yourself to see what will happen, even if you’ve heard from people who have done it themselves. Putting ads on this blog is one such thing. I had done some research and determined that there was a chance I could make at least a few dollars a month… Read More »
Migrating to a self-hosted WordPress blog and hidden drawbacks
In the last week I’ve went through the process of migrating this blog from a standard WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. I’ve been running this blog for several years and have written a couple hundred articles, so I thought it was time to take it to the next level. A self-hosted blog has many advantages,… Read More »
Two modes of foreign language reading: content-focused and language-learning-focused
When reading in a foreign language we are not yet fluent in, our brain is struggling to do a great deal of things simultaneously. We’re desperately trying to grasp the overall meaning of the passage at hand, while looking up individual word meanings and pronunciations. We are also trying to think in terms of grammar… Read More »