About
Global Maverick is a blog dedicated to exploring what it means to be a global citizen, and providing tips and tools to increase your connection to the rest of the world. I write about three major topics: language, culture, and travel.
A new post is posted every Tuesday (as of October 27, 2009). Sometimes I’ll write about tangentially related topics, and post them on other days. You can follow along by RSS, email updates, or just by checking in here at the site. You can also follow along via my Twitter account, where I’ll post updates to this blog and lots of other things.
About the author
My name is John Biesnecker, and I write Global Maverick. I’m originally from the United States, but have lived in China for most of my adult life. I’m currently based in Shanghai, where I run a small company and am a father and husband. Global Maverick is very much focused on my own passions and goals, and I hope that through my writing I can help other people do interesting things and bring the world a little closer together.
I also keep personal blogs (in order of increasingly triviality) here and here.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
John,
I am learning Spanish (not Chinese, though that is next on the list!) but I really enjoy your blog and appreciate what you have to say on the topic of language learning. I have a quick question, if you have the time. I have been going through the trouble of adding audio to my Anki content, either through original sources or using TTS, and I was curious if you thought this was a good idea/necessary? I listen to a ton of content, so I’m not sure if I need to add the audio or not. Also, adding the audio tends to become a sticking point that keeps me from imputing new data into Anki. And, to top it all off, I lost all of my audio imput for my existing deck when my computer crashed and burned.
What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance for your time.
Charles.
Hi Charles,
First, thanks so much for the comment! I’m glad you like the material I have here.
As for the audio, I think it’s a good idea, unless it stops you from entering new material (as you say it has). I do it sporadically, too, but it does take a lot of time and I think on average entering new material is more important than accompanying that material with audio. Plus, as you say, you’re already doing a lot of listening outside of your SRS reps.
That’s my two cents.
Hi John,
I wanted to say that since I found your blog I have really been enjoying it. In fact I used your posts on SRS programs as the basis for a short write-up that I did for our new SRS program that we offer to Spanish and English learners on http://www.lenguajero.com
I was wondering whether you would be interested in maybe including us in your list of resources (Lenguajero is free), or perhaps writing a short post about us. I think we encompass all three aspects of your blog (language, culture, and travel). Here are a couple of links to some blog posts that we have done about how we ended up building Lenguajero, and what we are all about.
http://travelojos.com/2009/08/quest-to-master-spanish-evolves-into-web-2-0-startup/
http://www.nerdynomad.com/2009/09/03/interview-with-august-about-lenguajerocom
Sorry if this comment is a little “spammy” I wanted to email you directly, but couldn’t find any contact info for you.
Thanks,
August Flanagan