Weird Web October - Transparency
When we decide you want to learn something new it can feel incredibly daunting. Regardless of starting point or motivation, we are embarking on a journey into the unknown. Questions are everywhere;
- What should I learn?
- Where do I start?
- How should I learn?
- How do I measure progress?
- What if I give up?
Back in 2019, I gave a talk at the London Gophers meet-up. The talk was titled: Beyond the Tour. I can remember feeling like a fraud for giving the talk. I was well in to a career working with technology and here I was, using up a precious speaking slot, talking as if I was a complete beginner. I hadn’t achieved anything groundbreaking with Go. I had no new framework or product to promote. This was a talk about learning, an approach to learning that embraced the fact that I had other interests outside the world of Go. At the heart of my journey to learn Go, a series of intersecting interests.
I am interested in photography and was interested in generating statistics around how I shoot. Do I tend to gravitate to similar aperture, shutter speed, iso settings or is my photography all over the place. I was learning Go, and this was a great excuse to combine these interests; I set out to build an Exif parser in Go.
Interested in Art? An exhibition at the Tate Modern back in 2018 inspired me to explore generative art with Art in The Age of Computers.
A consistent hobby of mine has been learning Chinese. Languages were never a strength of mine at school. And my journey to learn Chinese has been one of slow but stubborn persistence and many years stuck at a learning plateaus (pdf). Two things have been instrumental in my stubborn persistence:
- The belief that taking a break is not giving up
- The ability to combine learning Chinese with other interests
The first of these could be seen as an excuse for backing away from learning the language. Taking a break can feel like it undoes months of learning in a matter of weeks. But it is the ability to combine learning Chinese with other interests that has helped keep me combing back to the language.
When I get stuck, or start to lose interest in learning Chinese, looking for ways to combine it with other things I’m doing can inject a new sense of energy.
- Bedtime story for the boys? Try reading in Chinese.
- Nothing to read at my current level? An app that highlights known characters.
- Curiosity about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs)? Make reading recommendations based on my known vocabulary list.
These points of intersection may be contrived but they come with a number of benefits. The most compelling for me has been the injection of curiosity to an interest that has started to wane. In trying to highlight known vocabulary in a passage of text, I ran into the interesting challenge of knowing where word boundaries are in Chinese (they don’t use spaces). Identifying proper names, v.s the component characters that make up the names was another challenge. I’d never considered either of these whilst learning the language but understanding them was key to highlighting vocabulary.
As I continued and tried to compute readability scores for text, I felt that my early attempts were inconsistent. I was using familiarity with vocabulary (specifically character recall) as a proxy for readability. My algorithms tell me I should be able to read a piece of text and yet there were times when I was unable to guess at what the text might mean. Internet slang, 成语 (chéngyǔ), and popular news articles all felt unreadable. I started to question what it meant for a piece of text to be “readable”. In English we have the Flesch–Kincaid readability model. What models exist in Chinese?
This ability to draw on the intersection of interests to further our learning is not something that we discover as adults. Watching my two boys growing up, I’ve observed the delight they feel when two separate interests come together and reveal something new.
- When maths and numbers appear in your piano lesson
- When you make a poster in art and get the opportunity to fill it with Concorde facts
- When you wonder how fast your bike is going and realise that geometry, maths, computing, physics, and Lego can come together to give you the answer
We talk of focus, avoiding distractions, doing one thing at a time. These are important, but equally important is ensuring we have the space to be bored, to let our minds wander, to find where our varied interests intersect. These are a source of inspiration.
This post was inspired by the IndieWeb Carnival Feb 2026. Hosted by Zachary Kai, the theme was Intersecting Interests. Head on over to his blog to read other entries on the theme.