Arthaey's Once & Future Log [ES/FR/HU/ASL/DE...]

[rdearman]

I always thought it would be good to be able to mark a card as Cloze and it just did every word as cloze without me having to mess around with it in anki to mark the ones I want as cloze. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

[Brun Ugle]

I always thought it would be good to be able to mark a card as Cloze and it just did every word as cloze without me having to mess around with it in anki to mark the ones I want as cloze. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

There’s a MCD plugin that does that. It makes a close card for every word in the sentence in a “note”. Then you can just delete any cards that you don’t want.

[arthaey]

I always thought it would be good to be able to mark a card as Cloze and it just did every word as cloze without me having to mess around with it in anki to mark the ones I want as cloze. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

I'm more interested in being able to make true sibling cards for cloze recognition & production, and generated TTS from them as yet other sibling cards.

But built-in cloze notes don't allow you to make multiple card templates for the same note. So I have to basically recreate the hiding aspect of cloze notes, but with normal/basic templates. :/

[arthaey]

I'm at 4,000 words of my Spanish NaNoWriMo story. Even better, I just met a friendly Chilean WriMo who lives here in Seattle! We went to a cafe this morning, chatted a little about ourselves and our stories, then got to writing.

Her accent was very easy to understand. She said she was making an effort to talk a little slower than usual because she "knows Chileans speak badly and quickly". I told her psh, native speakers don't speak badly, dialects aren't bad, and she seemed surprised by & pleased with that attitude. She said other Spanish-speaking countries don't like Chile's Spanish.

Have others here on the forum encountered that attitude?

[eido]

Have others here on the forum encountered that attitude?

Me and one of my language exchange partner's once discussed a video with a guy speaking Chilean Spanish. I was saying something about not being able to understand dialects, and he said, "Well, have you heard Chile's? They're impossible to understand. Murderers of language." My LE partner is from Mexico. Another time, a girl LE partner who's from either Chile or Argentina (I can't remember which) was talking about how everybody hates Spain Spanish. I mentioned I watched Sherlock in that dialect, and how I'd found the series through unsavory means on the Internet. She said, "It's a running joke in the Spanish-speaking community that that's the only version of the dub you can find on the Internet, because it's so horrible and no one wants it." I don't know if this was a comment on the translation or the acting or what, but we proceeded to talk about why Spanish speakers hate each other's dialects so much. All she could answer was that they prefer their own. I said if it was me, an American, I wouldn't mind hearing English people speak and if Sherlock had been in Spanish first, and they dubbed it into British English, I wouldn't have minded. She said there's not a lot of difference between American and British English, but there is between, say, Spain Spanish and Argentine Spanish so people freak out when they're forced to watch something not in their dialect. They find it offensive, I guess. That's all I could get out of her, though since my Spanish isn't up to par and I didn't want to start a fight. I would have to disagree with her though on the differences between English dialects - some have regionalisms that are hard to wrap your head around. Though she's perhaps right on the whole.

[devilyoudont]

People around me speak Caribbean Spanish. I hear so many random complaints about it, it makes me afraid to try to learn the dialect

[SGP]

People around me speak Caribbean Spanish. I hear so many random complaints about it, it makes me afraid to try to learn the dialect

Complaints like what?

[devilyoudont]

People around me speak Caribbean Spanish. I hear so many random complaints about it, it makes me afraid to try to learn the dialect

Complaints like what?

It's ugly, people only speak like this because they are ignorant, it's not real Spanish, it's not understandable...

[SGP]

People around me speak Caribbean Spanish. I hear so many random complaints about it, it makes me afraid to try to learn the dialect

Complaints like what?

It's ugly, people only speak like this because they are ignorant, it's not real Spanish, it's not understandable...

So that were some of the people's complaints.

As soon as I would have fully advanced with Spanish, definitely intending to take a closer look at this variant. Already knowing more than one thing or two about its English counterpart, and also a bit about the French one. To me it simply is fascinating.

[arthaey]

Lots of exciting Spanish things to report! It's been a good month for Spanish.


Averaging 1.5 hours per day over the last 30 days!


ATracker 2018-10-11 to 2018-11-11

Moving out of our apartment was stressful, yes, but it turns out that schlepping moving boxes and cleaning floors is also a great opportunity to listen to hours of investigative journalism from Radio Ambulante and amazingly-well-done audio fiction in the form of El Gran Apagón.

Then November arrived and with it NaNoWriMo. I've written 4,500 words in Spanish so far! (My personal goal was 10k rather than the usual 50k.) It's been much easier than I anticipated, which is a really great feeling.

I also finished reading La línea se convierte en río: una crónica de la frontera (Francisco Cantú) and started El libro negro del programador: cómo conseguir una carrera de éxito desarrollando software y cómo evitar los errores habituales (Rafael Gómez Blanes). Thumbs up to both.


I started a Spanish Club at work

We had ~6 people express interest, and 3 of us were able to make it (the other 3 being at other locations for work projects the day we were meeting).

The other two coworkers who joined me were at or close to my own level of Spanish, so we were able to just talk, which was exactly what I'd hoes for. We're going to try meeting every other week, with an informal agenda.

This week, we discusssed our work projects. I took notes of the words we wanted to use but didn't know (mostly work-specific vocab).


Italki Lesson: Pair Programming

I had my first italki lesson with a Mexican who's studying computers in Vancouver. At my request, we tried pair programming on whatever he wanted, so long as he helped me with the tech terms in Spanish.

It went great! We had a good discussion about how Spanish speakers have to be familiar with English terms, but they often use translations of terms too. And I found it a great challenge to be thinking in code and producing commentary in Spanish.

At the end of the hour, I was the one to point out the time. He had completely lost track of time, getting involved in programming task and forgetting we needed to stop! He said, Muchas gracias, fue una de las mejores clases en las que he estado. "Thanks a lot, it was one of the best classes that I've been in."

So yeah, I'm pretty pleased with how well it went. I've already signed up for another session, but not until after I get back from:


One week in Guanajuato, Mexico

Very (very!) late Thursday night, I will be flying to León, in central Mexico, then onward to the city of Guanajuato with my sister and her friend! By sheer coincidence, I will also be meeting up with a coworker who will overlap with us by one day. Maybe our next Spanish Club meeting at work will be talking about vacations.

I anticipate lots of Spanish practice over the week in Mexico, claro. The really hard thing will be limiting how many books & magazines I allow myself to purchase…