#(i have a notebook where i wrote down guides of all the grids like with teams/drivers/team changes/etc)

[skitskatdacat63]

Love to go back to my desk once I've woken up and see whatever weird thing I was working on at like 5 am. This one I think is genuinely interesting but also would look so deranged to anyone else 😭 I was writing a color coded guide to how I group drivers in my head with examples with different grids(i.e. how the demographics change) and now I want to write one for all of the 2000-now grids. Completely normal behavior what are you talking about

[karanguni]

[Japanese] Language Learning Signup

So, I've been thinking about how to get around to starting language learning posts here with you all. It's been awesome seeing a general interest in getting back up with Japanese, but it is tricky when we are all at different levels of formal/informal education and exposure, have different learning styles, and have no native speaker to reference. This post is going to be two things: a general braindump, because on weekdays my capacity for critical thinking gets expended in the office trying not to murder people whom I want to send to http://www.lmgtfy.com, and also a general signup to commit to some goals.

Braindump

If years of academic Japanese have taught me anything, it is that critical mass is the most important part of acquisition. This guy over at All Japanese All The Time may sound quacky and weird, but the core of his ideas are right, IMHO: there is a time and place for rote repetition, and often picking up a new language is it. The trick – I think – is that certain types of rote work better than other types of rote depending on who you are. I was very surprised, when I briefly stayed for more than just a holiday in Japan, to find that rote memorisation of vocabulary (literally going alphabetically)... worked. But that was because I was immediately exposed to usage, and there was a constant feedback active/passive loop. I'm going to try to provide that exposure, but at the same time rote has got to work for the individual since – short of switching all your internet browsing over to JP – it's hard to get effective reinforcement. Picking a non-English/first-language aid/crutch to make rote effective might be the key here: visual people might go for picture flashcards, audio people might try to memorise a song, textual people a Japanese-to-Japanese definition or reading in general. That's my meta on "picking stuff up" in general. But there are whole categories of stuff to "pick up" – reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing fluency, speaking fluency. I'm going to focus almost entirely on reading and listening, with a side-step into writing to reinforce the two and copying spoken Japanese by natives to do the same. I'm nowhere near native, and will not pretend to be: I'm not going to teach or co-learn aspects that I'm not native in. It's fairly important to emphasis the "do not co-learn badness" part here: reinforcing bad and/or plain wrong ideas can be fundamentally terrible for you. Even then, it leaves a lot of stuff to cover, and a lot of ways which it can crossover into more intense practice in the writing/speaking domain.

Goals

So - goals! NYRs! Whatever you want to call what you want to achieve! I'm thinking we do this on a week-by-week basis, because long-term goals are hard to hit: it's easy to overpromise and even easier to underdeliver. Weekly checkins with others = peer pressure = good pressure. Even if a goal is dropped, rolling it over to the next week is easy. Then there can be big picture goals: things you want to achieve that you might not get 100% of the way through but that will guide weekly aims. These can go up to the end of the year. Here are mine for the upcoming week:

Write a post a week with original material catered directly to people's questions or difficulties

Work through, by rote, 10 常用漢字 per week including all phrase-words

Translate at least half of a rakugo story and publish it here

And my bigger goals:

Write a website or flashcard tool or GDocs thing so that people can have printable, submittable worksheets/exercises

Get through my kanji book by doing the 10/week minimum by the end of the year

Watch at least 12 episodes of something in Japanese with only Japanese subtitles by the end of the year

Switch over to only using Japanese-to-Japanese dictionary lookups by March

If you're interested in tagging along – whether you're seeing this post now, or at any time at all while I'm still updating my journal with the tag "Japanese" – leave a comment with yours. Depending on what people jot down, I'll plan for the next post!

Prep

Until the next post, here are some things you can do to get yourself prepared and/or excited. Physical Study & Practice Materials Don't even bother typing when you do any exercises – go straight to pen and paper, and then type in response to posts here. Muscle memory is your friend, and it's really nice to write things physically! Get a nice writing implement while you're at it. Ballpoint and 0.5mm pencil will smudge the least; gel will be smudgier; nibs will be painful. Muji has great pens and Japanese writing supplies if you're lucky enough to live near one. You're going to be writing a lot: enjoy the experience! (I hated coming to America where most writing paper felt like sandpaper. It makes a difference when you're doing repetitive exercises, let's just say that.) Then get good writing paper. Cheap: get a notebook, preferably one without any lines, or at least faint ones, or one that's gridded. You want to not feel like you're cramping your kana and kanji. I'm a big fan of nice paper, so I'd be happy to send people notebooks! Slightly more expensive: find and print grid paper online. Henceforth, we shall call it by its given name: 原稿用紙 genkoyoushi. One PDF source here. Prettier and better ones with kanji grids. Print a whole bunch for your weekly goals! Expensive: Japanese stationary stores (and some Asian marts) in the US will have 原稿用紙 for sale in tear-off gum pads or in practice notebooks. Japanese IMEs I'll write a separate post on getting set up on this because this one is already the length of the moon, but you should get your computer set up to switch cleanly between English and Japanese IME inputs. Google has an IME that introduces crowdsourcing to typing: this is awesome, because suggestions that pop up are going to be the most-used ones. I default keyboard switching on all my systems to something like CMD-SPACE or WINDOWS-SPACE. Dictionary/Grammar/Practice Books If you're just starting out, resist the urge to buy anything just yet. I have tens of reference books I've never cracked open beyond an initial gleeful reference. Books that are really useful in my experience: one good physical introduction-level book if you're just starting out. This can be Genki, Minna no Nihongo, or any equivalent. Make it a goal to go through each chapter. Write on every margin. Use the hell out of it: make it worth your money. Other useful books are JLPT practice books. Stores like Kinokuniya will often have entire sections dedicated to them. They sometimes come in trilingual or quadrulingual mode, English/Korean/Mandarin/Japanese being the most common. If you have one of the other two (Korean/Mandarin), they provide a interesting triangulation onto certain grammatical or vocabulary contexts, though the quality isn't necessarily always 100%. I'll grab some PDF'd materials that I'll put up into f-locked posts – those will get you through just about anything else. For kanji, don't pick up a dictionary unless you plan on using it. I've got some recommendations if you do want one, but in the meantime sites like Jisho.org will get you through just about anything. On the iPhone side of things, imiwa? is an invaluable app. Audio/Visual This will be expanded further along, but now is a good time to figure out if you like listening to songs, or anime, or Netflix original series. Shows like 深夜食堂 (shinya shokudou/Midnight Diner) on Netflix have both English and Japanese subtitles in addition to being good introductions to aspects of Japanese culture and types of speech – I highly recommend watching them in English now, and then gradually trying to pick up things from the Japanese subtitles later. My Old Posts I did a short-lived and more disorganised equivalent of this last year: if you're starting from the kana or basic grammar level, it might be good to go back through those posts. If you're interested in More Estorericer Stuff, I once wrote a post on classical Japanese and the opening lines of the Tale of Heike. It's written sort of terribly, but if it interests people I would love to do more of that – gotta keep in practice. comments Comment on DW: http://ift.tt/2Flb5FF

[sylvaetria]

Hi Hi! I've been interested in secular witchcraft for a long time, but i'm finally starting to stop just researching, and I want to try and start practicing! I've collected a bunch of resources, but what are some of the first things you'd suggest picking up from the store? Candles, herbs, oils, etc? Also, any beginner posts you could link me to would be wonderful. I'm all ears! Have a wonderful day

Hey, congrats on deciding to practice and doing your research! Are you excited? Nervous? Enjoying what you’ve seen so far? Is Tumblr your primary resource? :)

I wanna learn so much from new witches omg. (There’s irony in there.)

Well, it honestly depends on what you wanna do and use yourself. Because personally, I picked up a few of each - I got some tealights from WalMart, bought some cheap incense from somewhere else, picked up some dried herbs from the grocery store that I didn’t already have in the kitchen, and found like five or six crystals I liked from Green Earth. I spent maybe like twenty bucks. That was my beginner’s witch kit.

But, again, it all comes down to what you want to use. Are you more interested in working with candles in magic? Candle magic *is* a really easy but effective method of magic, and candles are everywhere, and really cheap. Most spells use candles in them, not necessarily as the focal point of the spell, but they also do wonders for boosting energies. A bag of 100 tea lights goes a long way in witchcraft. Color correspondences can help, but isn’t necessarily required.

Or maybe crystals are where you wanna go. Crystals have amazing energy, but are a bit more on the pricey side. It can also be hard for people who don’t know a lot about them to tell them apart - the “danger” in this is being swindled by people claiming their crystals are something they’re not. Doesn’t mean they won’t work for their “declared” intent, necessarily, but it means you just dropped a lot of money on something worth a tenth of that. 

That doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to work with them, though. Because they’re an amazing tool, really - you just gotta do some more research, and be confident in where you’re buying from. Finding a reliable dealer with decent prices is where it’s at. But then, once you’ve got some crystals, they’re really versatile. They can be used on their own, or in conjunction with other spells, put them in jars and sachets, or in poppets, make grids, use them to charge other things, just stick like ten of them in your pockets - boom, witchcraft. 

Oils aren’t something I necessarily recommend, to be honest. Not because they aren’t useful, because they are, just like any other tool can be (just gotta know how to use them). I just don’t know a lot about essential oils. xD If that is the area you wanna go in, however, it’s worthwhile to know that you’re gonna want to do some more research on the topic, and be wary of any allergies you may have, and for the love of god don’t put a crapton of pure oil straight on your skin.

Herbs is a little bit of a tricky area too, especially when using them as medicine. It requires a lot of research and safety if you plan on ingesting herbs for actual remedial purposes. If you just want to use dried herbs in, like, jars and spell bags, it isn’t nearly as bad, but you still want to keep an eye out for any poisonous / toxic plants and allergies. The stuff you can get pre-dried from grocery stores and dollar stores are honestly enough in most cases, and there’s lots of substitutes for more expensive or exotic plants, depending on intent.

If you wanna grow your own herbs too, that’s an option, but another area I don’t know a lot about, so I can’t give you any more advice on that besides do some more research. (It seriously never ends, so I hope you like studying.)

I guess this sort of answers your questions, but not really in the way you wanted. So, long story short, what you pick up depends on what and how you want to practice. However, I’ll give you a list of items I would recommend, purely based on my own craft, but I feel they’re pretty good staples to have all around.

candles - versatile as all hell; can be used on their own or in any other spell; bags of white tea lights are super cheap and easy to find; worry about colors later; scents can be used as correspondences as well but don’t hinder in any way

also, if you can’t have open flames for whatever reason, they have LED / battery powered candles in some dollar stores now; not to mention, tech magic?!

matches - they smell nice, and can light candles; suuuper cheap, but in bulk; unless you’re allergic to sulphur, then just a lighter will work

herbs - dried herbs from the grocery store seriously do the trick just as well as fresh / organic stuff; Bulk Barn / Barrel has a lot of awesome stuff for super cheap too; start off with just a few general / all-purpose ones, and then add to your collection as you go along; it starts to build up over time, trust me

sea salt - cleansing and protection; can be used as a base for most herbal mixtures

rosemary - considered a substitute for most other herbs

basil - has like a shit ton of correspondences

cinnamon is useful to have too

if you wanna curse, pepper flakes, paprika, or cayanne pepper should do the trick

jars - do I even need to explain?; dollar store, man; even thrift stores have some pretty amazing and cool looking bottles and stuff

notebooks - not something necessarily overly witchy, but more so to write down what you learn; trust me, you’ll wanna do that, especially with correspondences; also, sigils

also, though, keeping a blog can be a great way to have a magical book; can be password detected / kept secret; tags are useful for organiazation; and then you have us assholes in the community to hang out with too xD

writing utensils are also kinda required to, you know, write in books; black Sharpies are useful for actually drawing on stuff - candles, sachets, etc.; good for sigil work

scrap fabric - but some cool patterns from thrift stores or whatever; useful for making sachets and poppets

sealable plastic bags can do in a pinch though, really; also can be drawn on with Sharpie for easy sigil application

string / thread - tie up bags, herb bundles; make sachets and poppets; also useful for bindings, and that’s a good skill to know

mini sewing kit - super useful to have in general, and all parts of it can be used for something, somewhere

tea bags - seriously, tea has magical properties too; super discreet; and easy as hell; play around with different flavors for intents

crystals - clear quartz is super cheap and all-purpose; buy like five of them and just use them over and over; again, another thing it might be useful to have like three or four basic ones and then build your collection over time; that’s how most of us get our arsenal of supplies

clear quartz - substitutes for any other crystal

amethyst - super cheap and easy to find; variant of quartz; good for sleep and peace and divination; also purple

tiger’s eye - I’m biased because this is my favorite crystal; good for protection and courage; did I mention it’s awesome to look at?

incense - not necessarily required, but I like to have it; smells nice, useful; so many scents; can be found pretty cheap all over too

again, if you can’t have open flames in your place, you can try those wax melters; definitely pricier, but versatile for magic as well; and I mean, they just smell, so, good; my mom has one with like sugar cookie wax cubes; and I come home and think she’s baking, and I get super excited; but it’s a lie

So, yeah, that’s my list, and reasons for what I wrote. That’s just some ideas to get you started. If you choose a path that doesn’t need those things in them, obviously don’t bother then. And depending on what “type of magic” you wanna do, your basic supply list might be very different. For instance, a sea witch probably won’t care so much about kitchen herbs, and stock up on sand and seaweed, sea shells and salt water. 

Since you asked for beginner’s posts, too, you can have my whole list:

Advice for Witchlings: [Part 01]; [Part 02]

[How to Start Being a Witch] (an ask)

[How to Begin to Do Magic, and Other Questions] (an ask)

[Advice to Baby Witches]

[Becoming a Witch] (an ask)

[For a Beginner] (an ask)

[Getting Started]

[How Do You Even Begin?] (tw: gif)

[“I’m Interested in Witchcraft, Where Do I Start?”]

[The Newbie Witch - What Others Often Don’t Tell You About Beginning the Practice]

[9 Practical Tips for New Witches]

[NSFW (Not Safe For Witches): Staying Safe in Magic]

[100 Tips for the Secret Witch]

[St.’s Short and Sweet Guide to (Not Asking Her) How to Get Started in Witchcraft and Magic]

[10 Common Misconceptions of Baby Witches]

[Things I Wish Somebody Had Told Me in the Beginning: Witch Edition]

[Tips for Beginner Witches] (an ask)

[Tips for Beginners] (an ask)

[Tips for Extremely New Witches] (an ask)

[Tips For Those Who Are Considering Witchcraft]

[Top Witch Tips]

[What I Wish I Knew Starting Out]

[“Where Do I Start?”]

[Where to Start] (an ask)

[Witchcraft, Where to Start?]

[Witchling Tips]

I did it! I made a post that wasn’t mostly links! :o Anyway, sorry for my smartass mouth, I was having fun with this. I hope you enjoyed reading, and I hope it gave you some ideas, and helped you out! Good luck! And if you need any more clarification or have more questions, you know where to find me. :D