s;lowmoon wrote:...This lost week has made me realize that I'm living in a relationship to my surroundings that is extremely infantile. I rely heavily on access to a tool that I can't build, maintain, repair, or control. I simply hope that someone out there will keep it functioning and give me access, like an infant blindly searching for a breast. A bit disturbing to think about. But we're not here to talk about that. We're here to learn languages. Weiter!
I live in the Caribbean. When Hurricane Maria struck, I was without electricity for almost three months... and I am a language-learner. How did I manage?
One of the good things about being alive in the 21st Century is all the amazing web based tools we have available with which we can learn languages. Online dictionaries are a great convenience. One can still learn without them and still use electronics even when there is no web access.
DaveAgain wrote:I used to live on a farm; power and telephone/internet outages were a common thing. We used to have back ups to cope with that: candles, a clockwork radio, and internet access via a USB dongle that connected to a mobile phone network.
When I got electricity back around Thanksgiving 2017, my wired internet took another four months to return. Without electricity, I still had to work and my cell phone was my lifeline. I had upgraded to unlimited data and I tethered my phone to my laptop for internet. Bandwidth was limited so no streaming video, but it was enough to do my job.
Living in a condominium, we are not allowed to have generators no matter how "super quiet" they may be. So, I had two car batteries and an inverter plus a solar panel to charge the batteries and rotate them out. This allowed me to work charge my tablet and phone. I even downloaded my daily language listening podcasts- though much more slowly.
What helped me more than anything was having content to hand and not depending on online tools. I do most of my learning through a tablet. I prefer an old school pdf, which I can edit and read in "night mode" on my tablet, to app based learning and even to hard copy learning. If I am reading, I have several pdf dictionaries in all my languages which are searchable. If they are around 300 pages, I can scroll through them quickly and save time over using the search feature. I can copy and paste a definition if I am feeling lazy. Then I can insert the definition into my highlighted text and it reduces to a little clickable balloon with the word highlighted. After I've done my reading, say 10 pages or so, I can check out my "comments list" and see all my notes. I can touch them and it will take me right back to the word or phrase in context to reinforce my learning. I usually physically enter the definition as I find the act of doing so helps to reinforce it in my mind.
My Kindle has a pop-up dictionary for some of my languages. I can use the device on a full charge for several days. Kindle also has notation features.
Before electronics, people used paper dictionaries in a device called "books". They took notes on paper too in something called a "notebook". This can still be done today. So, where there is a will, there's a way. App based an online based learning is a godsend until it goes away. Don't let that stop you. If I lose it all again... it is Hurricane season again and the National Hurricane Center is calling for a
record season this year, I can still make it happen. My tablet will charge in a couple of hours. On it I have books in various formats; pdf dictionaries; grammar resources; parallel texts; audio; even video. In fact, I only sparingly use wifi with my tablet.
It is amazing what can be done with pdf- how texts can be annotated and made to be more useful. With full pdf writer software, I have many more options to customize my texts on my laptop and transfer the files to my tablets. Reading a parallel text on a tablet is so much better than in a physical book or, two books, or two side by side windows on a computer screen. I can open up the text and expand L2 to take up the whole screen. I can then scroll over, if I need to or want to, to check the original or the translation. You can
make your own parallel texts easily. Yeah, there's a little work involved.
These days, a cheap 10" android tablet can be had for under a hundred dollars US. I have a 10" one and a 7" one, as well as a kindle dedicated e-reader with e-ink. To myself, I call them my 'language-learning machines". These devices are critical to my learning and with the, I can be independent of the web. You can too, you just have to break yourself from the app/web based mindset. Yeah, there's some work involved, again, but the payoff is worth it even if you don't lose electricity and the internet for months. What I have described, I do everyday. It's worked pretty well for me over the years.
