2021: The Learned and the Loquacious [de, zh, es, ko, gd, ar]

[LunaMoonsilver]

Have you tried an on-screen keyboard? If you're using Windows you can swtich it on using the control panel and going to keyboard settings, or simply press Windows key + ctrl + o

It hovers over whatever else you are doing. You can click on it with the mouse, or simply carry on using your physical keyboard to type while using the on-screen keyboard as a reference.

w h a t

Nope, I haven't, but I know what I'm checking out after work! Thank you!

[LunaMoonsilver]

03.01.2021

• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [de] Reading - even more of stern Crime. Getting soooooo close to the end.
• [de] Watched The Dark Knight Rises.

Really enjoyed revisiting this trilogy, especially since I haven't watched it in a while. Gotta pick a new series for tonight.

And, although I didn't get a lot of studying done yesterday, I did get the Arabic virtual keyboard up! Yay! Gonna add more Anki cards / learn a couple more letters tonight.

Also, if anyone's interested, there's a 24in48 Readathon running this weekend! I'm actually not going to take part; I knew it was in February, but I thought later in the month, so I have a bunch of other stuff I want to get done this weekend (writing, coding practice) - but the link's there for anyone who's interested.

[cjareck]

I was reading about Audacity, labelling, and splitting into tracks, so am going to investigate that further this evening and see if that speeds up the process.

It is an excellent free software that allows finding sounds on the track automatically by defining the length of the silence among them. Audacity is REALLY worth time spend on learning how to use it.

[LunaMoonsilver]

It is an excellent free software that allows finding sounds on the track automatically by defining the length of the silence among them. Audacity is REALLY worth time spend on learning how to use it.

Haven't quite found the time to do precisely this yet buuuuut I have worked out how to quickly add labels/export multiple, which has saved so much time for my Anki loading sessions. I just have to find an hour or so to sit and finish breaking down everything from unit one

Quick updates for the last uh *checks notes* week...

04.02.2021

• [zh] Reading - still working on 花木兰, also noting down unknown words.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [de] Watched I, Robot. I'd watched a playthrough of Detroit: Become Human the week before and was really in a robot revolution frame of mind!

05.02.2021

• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [es] Reading - a chapter or two of Fullmetal Alchemist.

06.02.2021

• [ar] Study - Sound and Script lesson two. Got through most of the sound part of the unit.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [es] Study - redid the 'examen' from the end of unit 10 and I got 52% correct this time, rather than 31%. Still need to work on things though, clearly! (Mostly the translation aspects.)
• [es] Reading - the first chapter of Attack on Titan.

07.02.2021

• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [zh] Anki reviews.
• [de] Reading - stern Crime - I finally finished this issue!
• [de] Watched Inception. Again, hadn't seen it in ages and post-Dark Knight, was really feeling like another film with Tom Hardy in it. I enjoy Inception but I'm definitely more interested in every character who's not Dominic Cobb, so I probably won't watch it again for a while.

08.02.2021

• [gd] Study - some of Teach Yourself Aonad 6 (finished the grammar section, started on the exercises).
• [gd] Anki reviews.
• [es] Reading - a chapter and a bit of Attack on Titan.

09.02.2021

• [ko] Study - Living Language L2. I've gone back because of my issues with vocabulary retention; I do need to put more into Anki, but here I used the tried-and-true method that helped me out when I first started studying Mandarin: I handwrote the words out a few times. Do need to get into the habit of doing that daily if it's going to help long-term, but once the basics are down everything should become much easier.
• [ar] Study - finished Sound and Script lesson two. Well, kind of. I didn't pass - got a couple of the long/short vowels wrong on the test (which I knew I was unsure about!) and I'm still not 100% there with remembering how to join up certain letters. Might try this test again next time I sit down to study.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [ko] Anki reviews. (Need to add audio to these.)
• [de] Reading - Die Bücherdiebin. Yeah, I started another book. No, I'm not sure why.

10.02.2021

• [de] Study - grammar. Still just slowly working on this, but I got all the things being tested in today's exercise right (got some other things wrong lol), which makes a nice change!
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [de] Reading - Ein Gutes Omen.
• [de] Watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine. God, it's such a terrible film that, again, I hadn't watched in soooo long. I mean, I enjoyed it, but it is b a d.

Plan for today is ~30 mins for each language (well, I'm going to watch The Wolverine in German so that I can get to the very, very good film Logan tomorrow), so we'll see how that goes!

[LunaMoonsilver]

Plan for today is ~30 mins for each language

endlessly making plans I never achieve...

Tbf, I was sooooo tired Thursday/Friday (though uh Friday's may have been a result of watching The Wolverine super late and then doing my 30mins of reading, so it was all 1000% self-inflicted) that I didn't get much done at all. Today's been great, though!

11.02.2021

• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [es] Anki reviews.
• [de] Watched Wolverine: Weg des Kriegers. Again, this is not a really good film (made worse by the fact it's a semi sequel/spin-off to X-Men: The Last Stand, which I just... do not enjoy), but there's some interesting characters and, well, it's still fun!
• [es] Read some more of Los juegos del hambre. Katniss is going to the Hunger Games!

12.02.2021

• [ar] DLI Basic Arabic - working on unit one again to practise my handwriting a little, though I think I'm going to just load up the unit two vocab into Anki and move on soon. Also, how I've grasped the Arabic alphabet (it's nowhere near perfect - I still don't know all the letters! - but it's not bad) is making me take a look at the Korean alphabet again; I'm still shockingly bad with Korean vowels, so this needs a liiiiiittle work.
• [ar] ArabicPod101 - I signed up for a free account late last year and they have a fair amount of free content, so I had a poke around. Looks like the complete beginner's pathway is free so I had a quick listen to the conversation. If there's enough free stuff on there, it might be a good supplement as something more up-to-date than DLI.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [de] Read some more of Ein Gutes Omen.

A note before I lay out what I did today: yesterday, I re-read iguanamon's multi-track approach blog post and took a look at what I've been doing. Since I've been using DLI, I've been browsing the DLI/FSI courses a lot anyway and I think I already had it in the back of my mind that I wanted more resources for at least Scottish Gaelic and Korean, as just the one course is fine but... kind of boring, and not as good at reinforcement as I'd like.

Plus, doing Arabic for the FLC means I need to gather as many free resources as possible, so this was a good chance to do an inventory there.

So, I made a full list for all my languages (because I need to start spending some time studying German too, not just watching films ) and decided to try an hour on each language today. It's been fun!

13.02.2021

• [ar] DLI Basic Arabic - more writing out exercises from unit 1.
• [ar] Anki - adding cards, splitting up audio, and then doing reviews.
• [ar] ArabicPod101 Newbie L1 - learnt another way of saying hello مرحبا and how to say how are you etc.
• [es] Living Language L11 - decided to move on from unit 10's review exam and onto a new lesson. Got through the dialogue and new vocab.
• [es] Listened to ~20m of the dialogue from FSI Basic Spanish Unit 1. I'm not using the book for this, just practising sentence drills and pronunciation.
• [es] Anki - adding cards and doing reviews.
• [de] GLOSS - I remembered that it exists! Did a 2+ reading lesson all about mosquitos and the viruses they can carry, which introduced some new, (currently) useful vocabulary. The grammar stuff was all about relative pronouns, which I knew, so got through this fairly quickly, but it was fun, so I'm going to add GLOSS lessons into my routine.
• [de] grammar - had a very good German day; did an exercise putting all kinds of idiomatic phrases into the Perfekt and got 100%. Sure, they were fairly easy, but still... Also banked a lot of idioms for later.
• [de] Anki reviews.
• [zh] Colloquial Chinese 2. So, I wanted to switch up textbooks for Mandarin especially because I feel like the NPCR books are useful but are kind of difficult to use without a tutor to tell if you get exercises correct etc. I checked the final lessons in this book and I didn't know some words, so I figure it'll cover a fair bit I know (or am supposed to know) and will teach me something new. Anyway, made it through the first dialogue and language points.
• [zh] Reading - picking out unknown words/phrases from 花木兰 still (intensive reading).
• [zh] Anki - adding cards and doing reviews.
• [gd] Colloquial Scottish Gaelic. I briefly looked at lesson one a week or two ago, but didn't really go into it. Have decided to do this alongside Teach Yourself; I'm not doing badly with Gaelic but I'm having trouble with some of the constructions, so hopefully this will cram them in my brain a bit more.
• [gd] Teach Yourself L6. I'm onto the exercises, which, I'm doing better than I thought I would! Next exercise up is constructing sentences though, so... that may change.
• [gd] Anki - adding cards (trying to catch up to where I am in TY) and doing reviews.
• [ko] Pimsleur L1 - have done this lesson before, so it was smooth sailing.
• [ko] Living Language L2 - looked at the grammar notes again, wrote out more vocabulary.

I'm obviously not going to do an hour every day, but this was a nice day of language learning and I feel like I've made some progress (however tiny) in each language. I could definitely see a difference with languages like Korean, where I did Pimsleur first and then LL after - the hangeul was easier to read because I'd already warmed myself up to the language. I'm trying to do some Arabic every day for the duration of this 6WC at least, so I might try and get ArabicPod done first thing in the morning (like, when I'm still in bed ) and see if that helps me get into DLI later in the day.

Arabic and Mandarin are tomorrow's focuses... as well as everything else I neglected to get this done today!

[IronMike]

I re-read iguanamon's multi-track approach blog post and took a look at what I've been doing.

I do this at least once a year. I think it is the wisest language learning advice out there. (I need to pdf it in case something happens to the page in the future.)

[LunaMoonsilver]

I do this at least once a year. I think it is the wisest language learning advice out there. (I need to pdf it in case something happens to the page in the future.)

It's really so useful! I'd definitely read it before but this was the first time I really got it (or at least, got how it would apply to my own learning), so that's pretty awesome

14.02.2021

• [de] Watched Logan: The Wolverine. God, I love this film. And I'm glad it came out post-Deadpool (which, incredible that that was even done after the first film in this makeshift trilogy) because it only really works as a film made for adults. Like, sure, there's the mutant kids but it's all about facing your decline and death and what legacy are you leaving behind and what do you become once that thing you've known as your 'purpose' is over. Honestly, I could probably write a full essay on how much I love this film but that's not what we're here for (though if you're also one for the action: great fight scenes with SIGNIFICANTLY fewer cuts than other Marvel films, so you might not get l i t e r a l whiplash while you watch)... so instead, I'll just say that I'm pretty happy with my German listening. I've still got a few more films to watch but I'm having no problems at this point. Of course, all of these films have been re-watches - though I hadn't watched any of them for several years - so I'm now debating going through the Fast and Furious series (have previously watched 4-5/8 (?) films) or The Hobbit & LotR trilogies (I never watched The Battle of the Five Armies). Or, I could (and probably should!) switch to Spanish for the rest of the month.
• [ar] ArabicPod101 Newbie lesson 2 - went over how to say 'how are you' again, with replies for more than one person, and saying good morning, good evening, etc. I'm going through the Standard Arabic pathway, so they do point out that the way they teach you to say 'good morning' is Egyptian but honestly nbd, I'm still not sure which dialect I want to learn and it seems like most people would understand that anyway.
• [ar] Anki - added cards and did reviews.
• [de] Reading - more of Ein Gutes Omen.

15.02.2021

• [es] - Reading - more of Los juegos del hambre.
• Fitness Challenge - 1 x strength training workout (idk how many I'm at for the year, but it's not many, so just gonna reset to 1/150); stretching for the splits (Blogilates day 1)

Had a relaxed couple of days after my marathon session on Saturday, but today's focus should be Korean (+ Arabic), so I'm hoping to get through Pimsleur L2, a little studying and my Anki reviews.

Also, it's Pancake Day today, so hope you've had lots of pancakes if you're into that sort of thing. (I have and I am )

[jeff_lindqvist]

Also, it's Pancake Day today, so hope you've had lots of pancakes if you're into that sort of thing. (I have and I am )

Here it's Shrove Tuesday (new word for me...), which means that it's also the big day for the semla.

[LunaMoonsilver]

Here it's Shrove Tuesday (new word for me...), which means that it's also the big day for the semla.

Okay, I'm two weeks late, but those semla look amazing so now I have to go find some

For language learning: didn't have a spectacular two weeks (a lot of last week was just my minimum reading/Anki goals) but towards the end of the month, I got back on Trello and started to sort out what I wanted to do. A lot of the issue is just that there's a ton of different things I want to work on, but I need to get better at a) accepting that if I keep working at something, the cumulative effort pays off and b) organising my time to make this possible. Trello and using sprints seem to be an effective way of doing this - I'm giving myself around three weeks per sprint, which seems to be about the length of time where I can continuously focus effort AND expect to see changes in any given project. Much longer and I lose interest, much shorter and the achievements aren't as measurable.

Anyway, I've only been doing that for a week or so (implemented it for work too), so we'll see how it goes. Either way, it was nice to get all the projects I want to work on laid out so I can physically see the steps I need to take - not a wasted effort!

Gonna follow this up with a Feb summary/March targets Happy March, everyone!

[rdearman]

You sound suspiciously like a software developer.