I finally finished my Moleskine notebook in March. This has been the absolute hardest book to fill up (2 years and 3 months for ONE book, seriously?!), mainly because life is busy and drawing – ain’t nobody got time for that. Click the picture to go to the gallery – it contains tons of pictures.

Celestial Lights from Ole C. Salomonsen on Vimeo.

I made an illustration portfolio. Yay! You can see it here. The text is in Japanese, but what is important is the rest of the content, right?

First of, I just wanted to show this awesome video: “Skype Me Maybe” – sung in 30+ languages by 17 polyglots! Super inspirational!

Now, onto another set of language-related links. Most of them are about – surprise, surprise – Japanese, but there is also some Norwegian, French and general language links mentioned.

1. Smashing Magazine has a great article about Japanese, A Beautifully Complex Writing System.
2. Free FSI language course in French can be found here!
3. The Polyglot Project Podcast – Episode #1 – Moses McCormick can be heard here on David Mansarays site.
4. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but here is the wiki-page about Kyouiku-kanji. If you feel like the 2000 joyo-kanji is too much to grasp at first, mastering the 1006 kyouiku-kanji can really bring you a long way when it comes to reading and understanding Japanese.
5. Japanese idiom dictionary! This is great for figuring out colloquial use of japanese, which can be hard if you don’t have a real japanese person at hand to ask.
6. Japanese proverb dictionary! (You have no idea how impressed Japanese people get when you throw in a proverb or two in your conversation!)
7. A resource site for JLPT N1, N2 and N3. Mostly in Japanese. Not the easiest thing to navigate, but some good resources hidden in there.
8. Kokuji 国字 or Wasei Kanji 和製漢字 are Kanji that were created in Japan. Most of them only have KUN readings, but there are some Kokuji that have ON readings because they were assumed to have them according to phonetic association with similar characters. Here is an extensive list of kokuji.
9. Nice little blog about language learning: www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com.
10. Verbling is like chatroulette, only in the languages you are studying. Super neat idea, although I am a bit camera shy myself.
11. If you are interested in Norwegian language, you can listen to free podcasts called “Språkteigen” here. It is a program produced by NRK, in Norwegian, about quirky (and not so quirky) aspects of the Norwegian language. For intermediate, advanced and native speakers.

And here is a bonus video: 日本人が知らない日本語. Funny drama in Japanese, about Japanese. The Swedish girl’s Japanese accent cracks me up every time.

Finally! After an insanely long time without having a photography portfolio, I finally made one and updated the content. You can click the picture or click here to see it. It is still somewhat in the works, I need to add an about-page, a couple of more pictures here and there, not to mention cut a couple of pictures from some of the sets, but right now I am just really pleased and super happy to have something up and running. I forgot how hard it is to work with your own pictures putting a portfolio together, I have spent the last days killing my darlings over and over. Hope you enjoy it!

Mr TSO never ever stops to amaze. Western Norway nature at its best. It makes me proud to think that I grew up in the middle of this. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

I am plugging away to reach my exam goals right now, so no blogging for me until the exams are over next week! For now – I just wanted to share this absolutely wonderful video – About how to remember more things, better. Truly inspiring for busy students right before an exam. I feel a huge happy boost of energy. Hope you are all having a wonderful weekend, I am hitting the books!

This video from ZeFrank is just what I needed to hear right now. Probably you need to hear it as well.