I had a LE in Korean today, which once again is just me speaking to a Korean person in English and a few moments of Korean is used. However, I am still watching a ton of Korean. At the moment, I've switched focus from K-Dramas to YouTubers. I have been binge-watching a woman called Rirang (리랑) https://www.youtube.com/@RirangOnAir who goes camping. They have excellent subtitles, and a lot of what she is saying is very repetitive between each video. So lots of this repetitive vocabulary is sticking to my Teflon coated brain. I've also purchased a good quality notebook, and I plan to start the new year by writing a diary in Korean. It will obviously be short, crap entries, but hopefully it will help, and it will be some contact with the language every day.
I've started doing some French language exchanges with a woman whose daughter married an American, and she is pretty driven to perfect her English. So we've been doing daily language exchanges. Today we agreed to talk about Christmas, and then spent over an hour talking about gardening, slugs, and mosquitos. "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley"
My Italian LE's were cancelled due to Christmas as my LE partner has her family visiting and doesn't have time. I have had offers for Mandarin exchanges, but I cannot get dragged down that rabbit hole again!
On a general note, I have given up on the memorisation thing. Although it worked, I didn't really have anything of interest to memorise. I have a couple of Robert Frost poems memorised and one from the Italian poetry book I bought in Milan, but I'm going to park that now due to lack of interest. Although the next time I'm in the dentist chair, I'll probably wish I had memorised more stuff to keep me occupied.
As for my reading, I have completed 33 books since the 2nd of September, and I'll be making a new reading list for 2023 this week. Half of the remaining books on the current list probably will not make the cut, and I'll just give those away to friends or neighbours or put them up for adoption here. I've worked out that I'm averaging ~3.36 days per book, so doing 100 books in a year should be achievable, since this works out to about 108 books per year at that rate. The good news about that is it means I'll clear all the current backlog of books off my shelf in July or August. To clarify that further, I'll clear the backlog of English and French books, part of the Italian books and possibly 1 of the Korean books, and zero of the Mandarin ones.
Which means sometime in February or March I can start collecting even more books to clutter up my bookshelves! It did occur to me if I went back to the bad old days of commuting I would get through the books a lot quicker, since being stuck on a train for 15 hours a week gives a lot of time for reading. So that is me done. Oh, I did come up with a rather interesting prompt for the ChatGPT AI program which you might want to try out if you write stories.
https://chat.openai.com/chat
Code: Select all
I want you to act as a creative writing coach. I want you to generate a detailed writing prompt for me. The prompt will be for a different randomly selected genre of story, eg sci-fi, romance, mystery, fantasy, etc. You should add to this list of genres as appropriate. You should set the prompt to have word count targets, some character or situations which are required and some which are optional. You will generate a new prompt each time I say "again"
As a general rule, however, your prompt for a story should answer the following questions:
Who is the main character?
What does the main character want?
What prevents the main character from getting what they want?
The plot idea, e.g. “what happens” in the story
Setting: the time, place and world that the story is set in
Draw creativity from puns, word play, alliterations, and onomatopoeias or any area you find available. Avoid clichés such as love interests. Characters need depth and should each have conflicting goals.