Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby Systematiker » Mon Jan 30, 2017 9:00 am

Just dropping by to let you know I enjoy reading your log, even if it does give me an ear-worm every time I see the title (creature of the night...)
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System Configuration: Part Logic, Part Madness

Postby coldrainwater » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:36 am

Tonight was all about system configuration at work. Three points of success worth noting, completed just shy of midnight.

Now in German:
    Visual Studio (IDE (interactive development environment) for writing computer programs on [mostly] Windows)
    SSMS (IDE for querying databases on SQL server)
    Office 2013 (ubiquity in business, now also in German and notably the only one I needed to pay for as a language pack). I would say it was worth the money as their install actually converts formulae and other more internal aspects of Excel et al to foreign language displays.

For the technologically curious, I have been able to get all my home operating systems to change language easily but I think my work computer has a roaming profile and some GPO's (global policy objects applied to multiple computers on a network) and RSOP (their resultant set of policy) values that are/will prevent me from easily/safely switching the OS display language. My box is old also and doesn't seem to like the free language packs. In any event, I often live in or near some IDE so the OS is a minor concession.

I have mostly avoided the addiction/pitfall of buying every possible language course under the sun, but I do have a modest penchant for buying and applying language service packs. Visual Studio barked at me a bit and took its own sweet time installing today (read hours al cabo). Having Outlook 2013 (email client) history in other languages has been nice and allows me to make very efficient historical searches. Libro1 and Hoja1 have their own space in queryland.

I mapped my left-alt keys to umlauts so I can make me some ü, ö, ä and so forth while I listen to my normal Eisbrecher, Unheilig and Black Heaven Pandora stations at work. I am glad I don't really pick up the language through music listening like that as it leaves me some epic tunes to work with without distractions (vocals often need to be in foreign language for me or I'll get off task).

¡Bastante! Ahora me acuesto.

-Erizo
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Night of grammar

Postby coldrainwater » Thu Feb 02, 2017 5:39 am

It is a bit of comic relief that I recently perused old HTLAL threads on picking professions when learning languages (international intentional gamification work as alliterative alias #1). I find myself interested in picking mining as a secondary profession and levelling up accordingly (leaving primary profession slot open with call and put options down the line for the purpose of creating small armies). I decided to spend tonight reading over some ´practice makes perfect´ material and I find myself mining verbs like you might mine vocablos from fine prose. It is kind of an interesting method to get a bit of grammar experience without really focusing on grammar. I have a small Kindle library that does not oft break out of its technical cage. Some pedantic material I left myself for times when the mood strikes a fancy. Tonight it fits as an appetizer.
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Aliento: Breathing a Sigh of Relief

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Feb 06, 2017 6:04 am

Deberes Completed: Hardware and physical space is configured. This includes adding 4GB of RAM to a Windows laptop dev box and successfully ghosting the old HDD to a new SSD for a slight performance boost (space be damned). Today marks the first day where I hit the no-excuse-point for ramping up computer science studies (in foreign language por supuesto). I ran into my first German technical problem as it has been a while since I used one of the disk partitioning tools to wrangle with hardware updates. I installed the GUI utility in German for added challenge and it caused at least an hour of troubleshooting efforts as I couldn´t find out why it wouldn´t ghost an image in a simple manner. Turns out, in addition to using the right software utility on the master OS, I needed to convert the target partition to/from MBR, but I did not read this clearly as I was fixated on other components of the German error messages (confused is the better diction here). After a little cheating and google-fu, I figured it out. For the record, I definitely prefer my interfaces to be in languages that I am not familiar with. If I am anything at or over A2 in a tongue, it is too easy to read everything since you see it everyday and the buttons keep staying in the same place. If you are after some neural rewiring, what you see needs to be pretty challenging to you and it helps to keep a keen eye for when a task is getting too comfortable (I usually notice it by boredom or too much automaticity).

Data Structures: This is a placeholder for today, but since I seem to like lists so much, this looks like a natural point for me to start the fundamental portion of my computer science playground.

Manuel Seco: I can´t say enough about how happy I am to have this monolingual reference dictionary. It really shines in the example sentences it gives for usage of each word that proffers acceptation. I get a good overall reading experience that is concise and succinct as I am learning new vocabulary. I am not sure you can say it is comparable to the online reverse-context sites, but it has the ad(dis)vantage of being print. A big disadvantage is the physical size of the book. It should have probably been split into four volumes rather than two (and the first volume is still lost in postal space). I suppose the publishers didn´t figure on some idiot like myself reading the thing 15 years down the road in the edad of micro-devices.

Escritura: It took me more than a week to derive an acceptable physical device setup to type and read from said Spanish tome. I modified my original technique slightly to focus on parts of the grammar that are not clear to me. So far this has been very helpful in making sure that I don´t gloss over new learning. I think the habit will shine as I soon delve into more refined technical literature where I´ll need to employ slightly more advanced scripting and replication of ideas.
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Visual Dictionary

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Feb 06, 2017 7:46 am

Goal achieved: Completed second visual dictionary. This one was the shorter DK Spanish English bilingual dictionary. I have a third visual dictionary on the ready and I make a mental note to start it here. I am in the mood for a few idioms, so I may go Kindle, bitácora, or tapa blanda when picking my resource (maybe all three).

Now for some shut-eye.
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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby coldrainwater » Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:32 am

Occasionally my journals are more useful with a modicum of structure added. Today´s entry will reflect that mindset.

Language
    Spanish bilingual dictionary: ~30 minutes, somewhat boring, probably need a day or three off from dictionary practice.
    Passive German practice: via Übersetzenl at home and at work.
    Noted Aprende Git as a Kindle based resource for intro Github material.
    Want to try language gym verb trainer next time I am in the mood for active verb practice.
Cardio
    49 flights of stairs with bodyweight + 100 lbs (lunch time).
    Five miles jogging after work.
    Dumbbell rows for back work.
    Quick note that dual cardio sessions makes for a highly productive mental state.
Diet
    Clean overall including variegated salad, tuna, blueberries and coconut oil. Huge bowl of pineapple for lunch.
    Seemed to promote good learning mental state.
    Extra protein is helping.
    Broke coffee-free habit again and downed roughly three cups today.
Programming
    Culling and triaging resources like a bandit.
    Khan Academy noted for algorithm and data structure section (ES).
    Algorithms and Data Structures in Java (website ES).
    Algorithms and Data Structures in Python (mostly EN-US resources).
    Planetacodigo - sitio web en español para desarrolladores.
    Competitive programming sites (topcoder, codechef, etc). Look for these in (ES/DE).
I consolidated some of my learning resources tonight to focus on a nice mix of Spanish and programming. I will share more details as I have time. I sense I have about 30 minutes before calling it a night and will spend the balance of it with mindfullness practice. Until next time...

-Erizo
Last edited by coldrainwater on Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Colas, pilas y listas

Postby coldrainwater » Fri Feb 10, 2017 7:11 am

I think the computer science study plan will work! I popped open a Python cookbook in English that happened to address some recipes using basic data structures. I read the chapter, took a few nuggets there and here, and proceded to surf my way to Spanish resources of the same ilk. Right now, I am reading slide presentations and have eye-marked some technical pages that show implementations. I´ll be able to take each in turn and use the foreign language practice to reinforce the fundamentals. Reading the Spanish terms that would otherwise be boring in English triggered instead notable interest (and we can hope better learning of both CS and ES). Furthermore, I can implement portions of the code in Spanish while instantiating objects as needed with the requisite international English syntactical constructs (likely in Java, Python, and the occasional functional or .NET based language).

I like that I am getting a good mix of reading, writing and thinking the language a la vez using this approach. As I need breaks from what many would call ´hard focus´, I can peruse more general Spanish material with a bent toward passive (or at least easier) learning de vez en cuando. I find it interesting and exciting to learn the depth of a ´new´ subject first in Spanish and then later (as if it were an afterthought) in my L1.

-Erizo
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Sunday

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Feb 13, 2017 5:08 am

What I don´t write in my log I am condemned to forget. In other words, I spent several hours browsing amazon thinking I would run into shelves of compsci books in Spanish and was met with the normal definition of insanity. I traced my scattered musings back to a hidden tab in my google spreadsheet with a list of resources pertinent and a prominent note to visit youtube unabashedly. Thusly I find myself back on track. Good logging, scattered be mine thoughts.

Less scattered is my plan of attack for the coming week. I have a good start on reading a book entitled ¨Mindfulness para Dummies¨. The whole para Dummies series is worth a look for exposure to different domains. I feel calm of mind, sosegado, if you will. I am also taking action to improve my lifestyle by adding a short burst of cardio training upon waking followed by a short meditative cooldown. As a noctambulo, I tend to bumble about in the wee hours and I think the effort exerted will go noticed if not appreciated.

Interestingly, the few hours I have spent in compsci have already helped me somewhat. I read briefly about machine learning techniques and realized how the same ideas apply to my own fuzzy techniques for reaching a state of language learning flow. There is a constant rebalancing act that benefits from reasonable points of data capture and analysis. It lead me to tweak a few variables in my ambient environment as I find them on my list of past bright spots. I also see parallels with Bayes Theorem and the related theories of probability. Practical is exciting when it improves life.

Sed feliz,

Erizo
Last edited by coldrainwater on Mon Feb 13, 2017 7:56 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Coursera, Khan, and the University of Youtube

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Feb 13, 2017 7:49 am

As I lay me down to sleep, I think I have the sailboat pointed in the right direction. I burned a few bridges and canceled any recurring subscriptions to traditional Spanish course material in favor of diving headlong into native material and going about my normal learning routines (in Spanish now).

I watched several short videos from MOOCS (massive and free online courses) topical to my current studies (learning, nueroscience, computation and the like). A few notes in brief:

MOOCS
    The presenters tend to speak relatively slowly (they may know they are presenting to L2´s internationally) with some variance from person to person.
    I use Spanish subtitles liberally and so far haven´t had trouble reading along. Subtitle quality is very good.
    I use judgement and sometimes pause or replay if I hit something I don´t know.
    Balanced listening practice with grammar curiosities.

Youtube
    This is also working well for me as it pertains to finding university level learning material.
    Interleaving practice is much easier to invoke with Youtube as it is a very flexible learning platform that lets you look at a topic from many angles and many abstraction levels concomitantly.
    I still have the basic plan to embark on deep dives using Wikipedia (ES) and targeted chapters in Spanish for any of the high level topics that hit my interest.

I am jotting down what works as I go so I´ll have a permanent record of it to look back on the next time I veer off on a tangent. I have little visions of 1960 Malcolm Maltz and his teleological servo-mechanism dancing around in my head. Those self help books can be dangerous even years after they are first read. I am glad I am browsing compsci material now.
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Aprender (Coursera Course)

Postby coldrainwater » Tue Feb 14, 2017 6:08 am

The course I am listening to currently is a MOOC on metacognition and thinking. It is a topic that I have some exposure to through similar English language courses in my pre-Spanish study days. As the instructor dives into the meat of the subject, I need to slow the replay of the video lectures somewhat as I want to be able to capture what they are saying fully. It also took me longer when solving simple math problems presented in Spanish word form. That is exactly what I was hoping would happen and I am pretty excited about the prospect of getting so much unexpected listening practice tailor made for improvement. My ears need the exercise.
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