MandarinDid a couple of Language exchanges, one of them with a teacher of mandarin. She has started me off with some basics, which is easy because I'm a false beginner, and she seems determined to teach me.
KoreanMy lesson dates got screwed up somehow, and my tutor has informed me today that he doesn't earn enough from iTalki to continue to teach, so he is looking for a job and will update his schedule if he has any time slots where he'll continue to teach. This is a major setback for me. I'll need to work around it for a little while and either find a new tutor or buckle down and do some self-study.
Meanwhile, my memory of words continues to fail. I think my tutor is a bit exasperated with me anyway, since he told me. "Rick, a teacher can show you how to fish, but you have to catch the fish yourself!"
He is of course correct, so I'm going to work up some lessons for myself. I already know that I've forgotten counting, or at least I'm under performing in things like:
- I'll have 4 coffees please.
- I am 56 years old.
- My daughter is 33.
- I have ₩2,353.
I've knocked-up a spreadsheet with a random number generator and practice making sentences. Basically, I generate random sentences in English and try to do some translations. This worked well for sentences such as:
Anna is 20 years old.
안나 나이는 스무살 이에요.
Please, may I have 41 beers
맥주 사십일잔 주세요?
We have 33 kiwi fruits
키위 삼십삼 있어요.
I plan to get my sentences checked by a native speaker during my exchanges. I still struggle to know when to use sino-Korean numbers or pure Korean numbers. There doesn't seem to be any hard and fast rules, it seems to be just one of those things you "know" if you're a native, or you pick up eventually.
ItalianCouple of language exchanges and I continue to read. Nothing exciting to report here.
I've been reaching out to people on conversation exchange who live in Milan because I've got a trip booked there in November, assuming nothing comes up. I was hoping to try to find someone to speak to face-to-face while I'm there.
FrenchYou remember when I did that massive binge reading of all the French books in my house in order to make space and get rid of them all? Well, my neighbour just dumped another batch of French books on me. Sigh...
General StuffGenerally I'm going well on the reading front, although mostly in English. French once again has attacked me from behind in the form of my neighbour trying to drown me in books. But I'm getting rid of books faster than I'm collecting them at the moment, so that is a bonus. I have just under 50 books on my "to read" list, and I have now read about 19% of them. So I feel I am doing well on these books. The one taking a lot of time is actually a book in English called, "Introduction to programming in Emacs Lisp", although 조지,마법의 약일 만들다 by Roald Dahl is actually taking the longest, since I've only managed about 2 pages in about 4 weeks.
I'm still working on getting things into memory, currently working on remembering:
- Fifteen points of information for each member of my family.
- Two Robert Frost Poems
- List of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order.
- Commands for the GNU Screen program
- Resistor band colours
- Chinese zodiac signs
- Countries in the UN and their populations as of 2019
- The 20-times table
- Squares up to 25 (I used to know this, so it is a refresher)
- Korean vocabulary (this is just an ongoing thing)
I go into more detail on
the other forum. But if anyone is interested in memory palaces, or other mnemonic methods,
they have a free e-book you can read.
I think that not having a Korean class for a couple of weeks might be a benefit to me,
IF I spend the time consolidating what I know. So working the memory palaces and anki decks hard in order to absorb the vocabulary which I've been taught. Really using my language exchange partners and consuming my 30 minutes rather than just chatting with them in English. I think I might need to get some more exchange partners for Korean. I did ask my wife if I could just get a Korean girlfriend, but she said no again. Honestly! She is so selfish.
But since I will not have a Korean girlfriend or a tutor for the foreseeable future, I'm going to have to rely on myself to keep progressing. Which is a bit like storing your grain in a rat's nest, it isn't the best strategy.