Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[inu]

This seems like a sound plan to me. I’m curious how this works for you in July.
(BTW nice videos on the topic. I subscribed to your channel.)

[rdearman]

This seems like a sound plan to me. I’m curious how this works for you in July.
(BTW nice videos on the topic. I subscribed to your channel.)

Thanks. I normally don't repost my videos here unless they're relevant to something I'm doing with languages. I do a lot of random stuff for videos which have nothing to do with languages, like making beer from breakfast cereal or writing an assembler in Rust, or making a camping stove from baking tins.

Which is probably why YouTube never promotes my videos, well, that and the fact that I don't pay them to promote videos, which is the only way they promote videos.

[inu]

I prefer authentic creators who are making content for the fun of it and I like to look over the rim of my teacup. Variety is the spice of life after all!

[jackb]

I really like your plan. Using Anki this way may actually make it enjoyable. With all of the learning work happening before it gets entered, reviews should go by in a flash. The number of reviews will still be large at the end of the month, but actually doing the cards shouldn't be daunting because you shouldn't have many fails/hard cards. I look forward to seeing your progress.

Persimmon? Wordlists strike again! I can't say I've actually seen or tasted a persimmon. Realistically, word lists are the only way to get this done without going bonkers. Finding 30 new, good words and trying to learn them everyday would push me over the edge.

Good Luck!

[rdearman]

Italian
I blew off my Italian language exchange, I wasn't feeling very well.

French
French people are now ignoring me. Or they are all busy, one or the other. I did however watch a couple of French films. It is nice to watch something which isn't in English and understand what is happening. One day perhaps Korean will be this way.

Korean
I've done dry runs of the 30:30 challenge, and I'm now settled on my plan of action. Other than those vocabulary things, I haven't done much. Two of the Koreans I spoke to before have told me they will be taking a long-time hiatus, and one of the others has completely fallen off the world and disappeared. I have two people who are steady regulars, and one cancelled on me, and the other I cancelled on her. It was Father's Day and I had a bunch of people around, so couldn't talk.

I hope to get back to regular chats in Korean (as best I can) next week. I haven't watched any K-Dramas last week, which was probably a first for me.

General Stuff
I've been reading like crazy, trying to plug the gap between where I should be with my reading and where I actually am. I'm only 14 books behind now, so hopefully with a lot of work I can bridge the gap.

Have done a video on how AI can lie to you, but I've actually been using AI a lot. I've been "writing" some new books, which is basically me speaking into my phone's voice recorder, uploading it on to my computer. Then I use Whisper AI to change it into very badly formatted (but accurate) text. Which I then upload in sections to ChatGPT with the prompt to:

Code: Select all

Please tidy this up.  It is voice-to-text and it needs to have "newline" replaced with a newline, "begin quotes" with quotation marks, etc. I would like it well formatted. Don't change or remove any of the words, just modify the formatting.


I have dragon speaking, but honestly this works a lot better, and although it is a little fiddly to start, I've created a Makefile that handles all the work.

Code: Select all

.SUFFIXES : .txt .m4a
SOURCES := $(wildcard  *.m4a)
OBJ := $(subst m4a,txt,$(SOURCES))
WS = whisper
WG = wordgrinder

FLAGS = --device cuda:1 --model small
.PHONY: test clean imported

all : $(OBJ)

%.txt : %.m4a
   $(WS) $(FLAGS) ./$<
   $(WG) --convert $(patsubst %.m4a,%.txt, $< ) $(patsubst %.m4a,%.wg, $< )

clean :
   rm *~ *.json  *.srt  *.tsv  *.vtt

imported:
   mv odt/*.odt odt/imported/

test: $(SOURCES)
   @echo $(OBJ)
   @echo PREREQUISITES: $^


I don't bother with the wordgrinder file now, since the ChatGPT can be pasted straight into a document after the AI tides up the words. Before, I was putting into a wordgrinder file, so I could go through and fix all the editing. The ChatGPT is a lot faster than doing it that way, even if I can only get it to do a couple of thousand words at a time. The Whisper thing could be faster and more accurate, but I only have two 4-GB GPU's. (I'm poor). So I go from 1st draft to 2nd draft very quickly, then I have do start the long slog for 3rd, 4th, 5th .... ad infinitum drafts.

[DaveAgain]

French
French people are now ignoring me. Or they are all busy, one or the other. I did however watch a couple of French films.

Radio France have a short series about creativity you might like, Votre cerveau: La créativité:

Dans cette saison 3 de la collection de podcasts "Votre cerveau", la neuroscientifique Samah Karaki décrypte plusieurs aspects cognitifs de ce qui peut vous conduire à être créatif : motivation, collectif, tolérance à l'incertitude - écornant quelques mythes associés au talent.

[rdearman]

Italian
I haven't done a lot with Italian lately. The last two language exchanges I was due to take got cancelled, either by myself or my partner. But I'm due to have one tonight, which will probably be cancelled if I'm honest. I do have a poetry book which I bought on my trip to Milan, and I had planned to memorise some of the poems in it. Perhaps I need to do that.

French
For French, I haven't done anything. I haven't spoken to anyone or even watched a television show in French in a long time, and I really need to get back to doing it.

Korean
As usual, most of my focus has been on Korean. For Korean, I'm doing the 30-30 challenge, and honestly, it is really difficult. Some days are easier than others. On some days, the words are simple. I can make a mental connection with some image in my head, and I can remember how to spell them.

I do Anki cards for the 30 words each day, although I don't actually answer any of the questions in Anki until I'm pretty confident that I've memorized them using manual methods like writing them down, saying them, and repeating them, etc. So when I actually do the Anki, I usually can whip through either half or three-quarters of the words without actually trying hard to remember. And of course, if they come back up the next day as well, so I am being constantly reminded of the vocabulary words.

But it is difficult, and I have seriously considered skipping one of the days each week just to go back and try and remember all of the ones that I had from the previous days. But I'm not going to do that yet. I'm hoping that Anki will sort that all out for me as far as the review portions go.

The other thing I'm doing in Korean is I've done a couple of language exchanges. I do try to speak to people for the first few minutes anyway in Korean. I try to do 15 to 20 minutes of Korean. But that is a real hard struggle for both me and my language exchange partners.

Doing the vocabulary has meant a lot of exchanges on KakaoTalk where I'm asking questions about the words. Like, for example, the word for "free," does this mean free as in no cost or does it mean free as in free speech, that sort of thing. And then I get clarification around the words.

Realistically, I could use a dictionary, but I can't really find one. But one of my Korean language partners gave me a good suggestion which was just open up google images, and search for that word. The image normally will tell you the word's context.

General Stuff

And on more general stuff, I have been trying to make sure that I read more. I'm only three down off my target at the moment, so I've done 60 books, and I should have done 63 so far.

But anyway, I'm working away at that, trying to, you know, just get to where I should be reading-wise. I've been doing a lot of writing. I've done a few more autodidactic podcasts, so I started Season 4, although it's not on the release schedule yet. I think the first one goes out possibly today or tomorrow, but I need to finish the remainder of the season and then get those scheduled to go out.

Yeah, basically, most of my time has been focused around trying to do vocabulary work, which takes a lot of time. Trying to write some books and some blog posts and things, and trying to get the podcasts all finished for this season.

[Le Baron]

For some reason I never saw the podcast links in the signature. I just bookmarked the site. I listened to one of the podcasts. Do you write the script and deliver it, or deliver it then write a transcript?

[alaart]

[b][color=#0000FF]

[...]
Realistically, I could use a dictionary, but I can't really find one. But one of my Korean language partners gave me a good suggestion which was just open up google images, and search for that word. The image normally will tell you the word's context. [...]

I do the google image search too and even put the pictures into Anki. Works perfect for languages with other scripts like Korean, but not so well for languages like Filipino. Just beware of the occasional sexual image you will encounter because you learned a word with a double meaning...

While I do recommend the method you are using (asking re-enforces memory more than looking things up in a dictionary in my opinion) there is a Korean dictionary that does what you want: krdict. For example in your example it will give all the different definitions of "free" in English (and in other languages like Japanese if you want) and you can see which Korean word to use for which situation.

What it doesn't provide is sample sentences though, so for this I still ask native speakers.

[rdearman]

For some reason I never saw the podcast links in the signature. I just bookmarked the site. I listened to one of the podcasts. Do you write the script and deliver it, or deliver it then write a transcript?

Bit from column A and bit from column B. I have tried to get a bit more professional. I used to wing it from an outline and then have to write a transcription. So now I write the script and read it. That way I have the transcript ready to post. Lol.

Most podcasts don't do transcripts, but I figured if you were learning English a podcast with a transcript is helpful.