Well, I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving had a good and safe holiday. Sadly, not the case for one of my neighbors today. I am not sure what happened; I only saw the ambulance and the EMTs. But I live in a zip code that has one of the highest active COVID case rates in the city, so that it was COVID-related did spring to mind.
I'm completely exhausted at this point. I woke up this morning and knew very quickly my anemia is back. Great timing! I still managed to roast a pretty good turkey and make 3 fancy side dishes, but in terms of getting any studying done, I'm running on fumes. I did Memrise, Drops and Clozemaster, and then read a bit of Russian, and that was it. Ik ben te moe om iets anders te doen. Я слишком устал, чтобы делать что-нибудь еще. Tha mi ro sgìth 'son rud eile a dhèanamh. Je suis trop fatiguée pour faire autre chose. Aku terlalu lelah untuk melakukan sesuatu yang lebih.
That reminds me--I really miss Indonesian and my other Austronesian languages. They have been mostly sidelined for the 6WC, but I do a little practice every day on Memrise and Clozemaster at least.
Anyhow, I was just going to chill in front of the TV but then someone on Twitter tweeted this Kino song and now I have to listen to it 50 gazillion times like an post-Thanksgiving Day zombie.
Victor Tsoi was a pretty interesting person, despite having lived a tragically short life. He had an tremendous impact on Soviet-era pop music on that side of the Iron Curtain, but many of us music geeks on this side wouldn't learn about him until after his death.
I listened to some Kino a few 6WCs back but at that time I barely had any vocabulary. The lyrics to this song are pretty accessible to me now. It only took a few listens before I had the chorus memorized.
Я смотрю в календарь, я знаю, что скоро зима. Наша улица на глазах меняет цвета. За решеткой желтой листвы я вижу птиц. Моя двадцатая осень сводит меня с ума. Я люблю этот город, Но зима здесь слишком длинна. Я люблю этот город, Но зима здесь слишком темна. Я люблю этот город, Но так страшно здесь быть одному, И за красивыми узорами льда Мертва чистота окна. Фонари за окном горят почти целый день. В это время я не верю глазам, я верю часам. И теперь я занят только охраной тепла. Вот ушел еще год - сколько останется нам? Я люблю этот город, Но зима здесь слишком длинна. Я люблю этот город, Но зима здесь слишком темна. Я люблю этот город, Но так страшно здесь быть одному, И за красивыми узорами льда Мертва чистота окна.
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
My Navajo November review is over, and according the the 6WC bot, I did 24 hours and 54 minutes working on Navajo. So not quite 30 hours, but close. Sadly I must put Navajo aside again, because I need to focus more on Dutch and other languages I'm maintaining at a higher level. However, after the 6WC, I think I will look into making a Navajo Memrise course so I can continue practicing it a little every day like I do with my Austronesian languages.
Yesterday, I was still feeling pretty anemic, so aside from dealing with the technician who came to do pre-winter maintenance on our furnace, I stayed in bed pretty much the whole day, doing language stuff that I could do on my tablet while re-watching the whole season 2 of The Expanse. I recently learned that The Expanse has several language options now, like 13 different audio options and 25 different subtitle options. I do not know when Amazon added these but these were not available for me when Amazon took over the show's production from SyFy, so I just assumed they would never add any because Amazon has never been the friendliest platform with regards to accommodating multiple language options. I suppose I should see what other Amazon-produced shows have similar language options.
Since my discovery of The Expanse's language options, I've been mainly watching it in English, as English is easy for me to tune out if it's just playing in the background, with Dutch subtitles. Since I'm re-watching it I don't have to pay that close attention. I only pay close attention when it's an important and particularly stand-out scene, or if it's the title sequence, because the artwork is gorgeous and I adore the show's theme song (the lyrics are in Norwegian, by the way):
EDIT: unfortunately the video was taken down
Someone in another thread, I forget who and which thread, mentioned Manu Chao, and it made be think of this song from 2001 that Chao had played guitar on, so I've been listening to it a lot lately. I hadn't listened to this song in like 8 or so years. Listening to it now feels like a reminder of just how long I've been toiling away at French.
For my French Book SC, I finished Histoire d'une âme and have started re-reading Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. I still do not know where my copy of Tout s'effondre is.
SC Progress:
Histoire d'une âme - 250 pages
Rownd a Rownd, 1 pennod - 19 minutes Ros na Rún, 2 eipeasóid - 48 minutes
Last edited by Cèid Donn on Sun Jan 03, 2021 9:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
The other night I had a dream that I was back at work, and I was reading a story to my students, but instead of it being in English or Spanish, it was in Russian. Nice to see Russian is sinking in enough for me to dream about myself speaking and reading it. The story in my dream seemed to draw some vocabulary from these stories I read for the previous two 6WC.
Someone posted a link to this video in this thread about Russian grammar books.
While I don't think this was really helpful in answering the OP's question, I agree with this approach for the most part. I mean, I'm 100% guilty of doing exactly what he says.
Perhaps 80% of my Russian study has just been trying to acquire enough vocabulary and an intuitive sense of the language, which is why I'm drudging through Метро 2033 even though doing just 10 sentences from one of Clozemaster's grammar sets for Russian make me want to cry. I don't even know what grammar I'm suppose to know "well" at this stage. I look at my Russian grammar books and go, "Wow, that's a lot to practice," and then quietly close them again. I'm familiar with a lot of grammar--I'm just very far from mastering any of it. And I'm not going to worry about it. I prefer to pretend I'm Kató Lomb, reading through my first real Russian book with nothing by a dictionary to help (and parallel text in English, German and Spanish, and not in some Hungarian bunker hiding from the Soviets, but with my cats in my house, hiding from COVID). I'm just glad I don't have to learn Russian for any other reason than self-improvement and pleasure.
I do think building vocabulary is very crucial to getting anywhere with any language and if you find studying grammar tedious or frustrating or daunting, then just work on vocabulary building instead. Or phonology. That's the other thing I think learners really do need to learn that this video doesn't address.
Anyhow, I have always found studying grammar so much more productive and comprehensible after I have extensive experience with that language, i.e. have built up a decent vocabulary, know the phonology and have an intuitive sense of how the language is suppose to sound, look and feel. So I will eventually get around to studying Russian grammar for mastery. Just not today.
I finished Colloquial Dutch 1. In the vein of what I was talking about above, I am not going to worry too much about mastering the grammar, but I did go through and review all the vocabulary before startng Colloquial Dutch 2. About halfway through the text, I got lazy and stopped recording the vocabulary in my Dutch journal so I will need to catch up on that. I also need to catch up in my Memrise progress with the Dutch course because, as you can see from the progress bars in my sig, I'm really not progressing in it very quickly. I can partly blame Memrise for how many reviews they throw at me, but the real problem is I often wait until the end of the day to do my Memrise practice, and I end up just sprinting through them all. Right now I have active Memrise courses for French, German, Spanish, Russian, Welsh, Tagalog, Indonesian and Maori, plus 2 active courses for Hawaiian and Dutch each, plus occasional courses for Swedish, Gaelic, and Vietnamese when I feel up to it. It's a lot to sprint through an hour before going to bed. I should probably try to get those done earlier.
Aside from Colloquial Dutch, Memrise and Drops, I have been using DutchPod101 for additional listening practice and vocabulary building. I'm also working on Dutch phonology, mostly with the videos from Learn Dutch with Bart de Pau, although I also like the Dutch & Go with Nout and Dutchforn00bs channels too. But I like Bart because he just gets down to business in most of his videos:
I like Dutchforn00bs' videos but it seems she hasn't been making any new ones for many years. That's a shame. I find her a likeable video tutor, perhaps because she reminds me so much a Dutch college friend from years past.
Dutch phonology isn't that intimidating. All of the sounds I know from my other TLs. It's just a matter of using them as they should be used in Dutch. That's when it gets messy. But I'm still relatively new to Dutch and I suspect as I spend more time with Dutch, things will fall into place.
In other developments, I have had some linguo-wanderlust for Belter Creole and LSF/LSQ. Belter Creole is the conlang from The Expanse, originally from the books and since developed further for the TV series and by the fandom, that draws from many languages including Esperanto. This is probably the closest I've even come to having any interest in Esperanto, by the way. There are already a couple of Belter courses on Memrise. While not a high priority, I'm very tempted.
As for LSF (French sign language)/LSQ (Quebec sign language), I forget what exactly sparked my current interest, but I may look further into this. I know a small amount of ASL, from past friends and from my work, and in practical sense, it would be better for me to learn more ASL. But, I don't know, LSF just seems cooler. From the wiki page, it seems LSQ is a mix of ASL and LSF, so it would probably be better to just learn LSF. This isn't something I'll be starting anytime soon. The idea needs to marinate for a bit.
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
I have a 730 day streak on Clozemaster as of today. Technically since 2020 is a leap year, I have to wait until tomorrow to say I have a 2 year streak, if we want to be that precise about it, but most any other year, today I would have a 2 year streak. Although this doesn't mean I'm the bestest language learner ever, it is a little token to show I'm sticking with it.
I'm really happy about this, because consistency is something I have had to work hard at. My typical streaks on sites like Memrise or Drops have usually ended around 3 or 4 months, when I would inevitably get burnt out and just stop. So making it to 2 years is a big improvement.
So what is different about Clozemaster for me? For one I find it fun, even on days I'm a little bored with it. Also, for those days I'm feeling bored with it, doing the bare minimum to keep my streaks in multiple courses isn't big hassle. While Clozemaster has added features in the past years, it's still a fairly streamlined app for how many bells and whistles it has now (although you may need to set up your personal settings to opt out of some of more hassle-y features nowadays). The other thing in the admin there actually listens to user feedback, which has helped improve it even if I'm not a fan of all the recently added features. That new-ish feature where in the drop-down menu for your courses, the courses you have done for that day are now highlighted in green as well as the little checkmark? Yeah, that was my request after missing a day in my Russian course, because with my poor eyesight, I find those green checkmarks difficult to see on my tablet's small screen. So if you like that feature, you're welcome. And if you hate, well, you're welcome.
I am a little sad that I don't have a 2 year streak in any one individual course. The reason for that is at the start of this streak I was still rotating through the Celtic language courses. The only course that I was constantly doing every day was the Indonesian course. However, a while back, I experienced a mishap with syncing the Android app and the website that reset the streak for my Indonesian course to zero. Not understanding what had happened, I didn't report it in time to get a reset (the admin there are very generous with resetting streaks if it you lost it due to a technical or accessibility issue--they reset my Russian course after that visual impairment issue without me even asking for it). But I would have had a 2 year streak in that course. The next closest is the Irish course where I have a 673 day streak.
At some point I just decided to try to keep streak in all the individual courses. I have over a year streak in 10 courses now. All the others are newer languages for me, except for French. Exactly 169 days ago, I skipped over my French from English course during an afternoon practice session, with the intent of doing extra work in it later in the evening, and proceeded to do all my other courses. I forget about it and went to bed early--100% my bad and I'm still annoyed by it.
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We're in the final week of the 6WC. I am not close to B1 with Dutch but it has been pretty productive so far. I almost have all the vocabulary from Colloquial Dutch 1 recorded in my journal--at least all the vocabulary I want to record. I find writing out vocabulary in my journal very beneficial--I do it a little like the "scriptorium" method: I read the word or phrase out loud, repeat out loud as I write it down, and after I completed a block of vocabulary, I read all them through aloud again. It's slow and time-consuming, but it is very good for memory building.
Also, as I discussed before, when I write things down in my journal, being able to have that information in a different context outside of the original source makes my brain create more specific memory connections to it. If I don't do something like this, those individual vocabulary words just start to blend together in one big vague memory of using that particular textbook or website, which is kind of useless. My journals are my remedy for this. Also, later on, I can easily reinforce those newer memory connections by reading that vocabulary from my journals as a quick reference. This method, although quite time-consuming to create, has proven very fruitful for me. I also miss doing it when I don't keep it up, which to me is a sign that it helps in both conscious and unconscious ways with my confidence with my TLs. I don't know about other people, but being able to recall vocabulary well does wonders for my confidence!
I haven't planned to do a lot toward my SCs this weekend. My bout of anemia earlier last week opened the door for a bronchial infection, so I still need to take it easy. I can read Gaelic, French or Spanish easily enough while in bed, provided I don't just fall asleep in the middle of it, but German, Irish, Welsh, Breton and especially Russian is harder because I need to be able to look up words and make notes as needed. As for my Film SCs, my current fatigued state is making me impatient with following dialogue in my TLs most of the time so I'm just not doing a lot at the moment, despite my earnest desire to keep up with Rownd a Rownd and Ros na Rún in particular. I'm mostly just re-watching The Expanse instead this weekend.
6 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
After talking about Clozemaster and how wonderful it is, I feel I need to add this:
Today Clozemaster rolled out an update to their leaderboard that allows virtually any user to see most of your study stats, which in my opinion, is a violation of user privacy and an open door for harassment. This is especially concerning seeing Clozemaster has been plagued by a small group of hypercompetitive users who have routinely accused other users of cheating or otherwise not "legitimately learning" on the site, even though they cannot prove any of these accusations, and some of them have made their accusations on other platforms outside of Clozemaster. So now they have access to stats that they may try to use to "prove" their accusations, and they may do it on platforms where the targeted person doesn't know their data is being posted and used in that manner. This is bad.
As someone very familiar with online harassment and trolls, and who's already the target of one hypercompetitive Clozemaster user who has a petty beef with me (over something that happened on a different site), I'm taking this very seriously. I sent Clozemaster an email expressing my concerns. We'll see what they will do, if anything, but as it stands now, I may not be using Clozemaster for much longer. Which just, well, sucks.
That would be massive blow for my current routine. I hope it doesn't come to that. But I need to feel safe online with the sites I use--that's not negotiable.
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
I just caught up on your log after being pretty much off the site for weeks, and since writing a log can feel like talking into the void, I wanted to let you know it was a super fun and informative read. I particularly loved the multilingual COVID/Dune post in particular, and can totally relate to your organizational issues arising from childhood chaos. I'm hyper-organized and efficient at work, but at home things can so easily go off the rails.
And hugs and empathy with your health/fatigue issues--it's so frustrating for me when bodily malfunctions prevent our brains from having all the learning fun we might enjoy (and, unfortunately, research definitely indicates that stressful childhoods make us more susceptible to such malfunctions, sigh).
tangleweeds wrote:I just caught up on your log after being pretty much off the site for weeks, and since writing a log can feel like talking into the void, I wanted to let you know it was a super fun and informative read.
Go raibh maith agat! I am glad you enjoyed reading it.
And hugs and empathy with your health/fatigue issues--it's so frustrating for me when bodily malfunctions prevent our brains from having all the learning fun we might enjoy (and, unfortunately, research definitely indicates that stressful childhoods make us more susceptible to such malfunctions, sigh).
I appreciate it. I try not to dwell too much on such things, but my health issues are very much a part of my language learning journey. If I am to be able to have any success with languages, I need to confront these sorts of issues that effect how much time and energy I have for learning, and to process them in a constructive, meaningful way, rather than get down on myself.
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There are 2 email from Clozemaster in response to my email, and I haven't read them yet because I honestly do not have the energy and emotional stamina for this right today. I was so upset about this leaderboard thing last night I had trouble sleeping and ended up spending some of the wee hours watching parts of the Franz Lang movie M.
The movie is on both You Tube and Daily Motion, and as far as I can tell, these are legal. The You Tube one has hard-coded English subtitles, so I'm watching the one on Daily Motion. So far the German isn't hard to follow. I started writing some notes on it in German this morning. If I feel up to editing my sloppy German, I may post something about it after I finishing watching it. I did this in French with Je t'aime, je t'aime for a TAC on Unilang years ago, and I always wanted to do that again with another classic film in one of my TLs but never have. I probably could do that with La jeune fille en feu, although it's a more recent film, it's definitely worthy of the effort to write my impressions of it in French. Of course, that would warrant watching it a 3rd time, which I'm not opposed to.
Honestly, with how gloomy and blue I've been feeling lately, I probably could just spending every evening until Spring re-watching La jeune fille en feu and doing cross-stitch--a hobby from childhood that I recently picked up again after being inspired by the scene in this film of Sophie doing needlepoint (I would love to relearn how to do needlepoint some day--I only ever learned the basics and never do much of it--but since I have more experience doing cross-stitch, I went with that).
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I also have this desire to read a biography in French. In particular, I want to read one on Rimbaud--I've read Graham Robb's biography (in English) several years ago, and I would really like to read the massive French language biography by Jean-Jacques Lefère. Unfortunately, thanks to Amazon and its pricing algorithms consuming most of the internet, I was not able to find a copy that is within my Winter budget. I do so miss that days when Abebooks wasn't an Amazon acquisition and you could find some used bookseller in some town in New England selling your desired book for $2.99 plus shipping. Anyhow, I had to settle for a much shorter biography on Verlaine, by Jean-Baptiste Baronian, of which the Kindle version is currently on sale for $10 on Amazon.com. I'll start that after I'm done re-reading Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, which I meant to do today but didn't because I spent most of the day reading my Spanish copy of Dune and was enjoying it so much that I didn't want to stop and switch books.
***
I like posting songs so here's another one: I haven't listened to this song in a while, this is really the only song by Zazie that I've heard that I like, but something triggered my memory of it and I've have had it looping in my head all day:
The lyrics really have stuck with me despite haven't listened to it in years.
Je suis un homme de cro-magnon Je suis un singe ou un poisson Sur la terre, en toute saison Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Je suis un seul puis des millions Je suis un homme au cœur de lion A la guerre, en toute saison Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Je suis un homme plein d'ambitions Belle voiture et belle maison Dans la chambre, dans le salon Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Je fais l'amour et la révolution Je fais le tour de la question J'avance, avance à reculons Oui je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Tu vois, je suis pas un homme Je suis le roi de l'illusion Au fond qu'on me pardonne Je suis le roi, le roi des cons
J'ai fait le monde à ma façon Coulé dans l'or et le béton Corps en cage et cœur en prison Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Assis devant ma télévision Je suis de l'homme la négation Pur produit de consommation Mais mon compte est bon, mon compte est bon
Tu vois, je suis pas un homme Je suis le roi de l'illusion Au fond qu'on me pardonne Je suis le roi, le roi des cons
C'est moi le maître du feu, le maître du jeu Le maître du monde, et vois ce que j'en ai fait Une terre glacée, une terre brûlée La terre des hommes que les hommes abandonnent!
Je suis un homme au pied du mur Comme une erreur de la nature Sur la terre, sans d'autres raisons Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Je suis un homme et je mesure Toute l'horreur de ma nature Pour ma peine, ma punition Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond
Je suis un homme et je mesure (Au fond) Toute l'horreur de ma nature (Qu'on me pardonne) Pour ma peine, ma punition (Je suis le roi) Moi je tourne en rond, je tourne en rond (Le roi des cons) Moi je tourne, on tourne en rond, en rond
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
Just a quick update to say I'm finishing my 6WC early, although I will continue to work on Dutch, in particular with Memrise and Colloquial Dutch, at least until the end of the year. I haven't been tweeting to the bot for the past couple of days because I'm feeling pretty low, physically and mentally, which makes keeping track of my study times difficult. I just need to not have that hanging over me right now. I'm still studying and working on SC materials but I just am not up to recording them with the 6WC bot as I have been. Eventually I'll update my SC progress bars, but until I do I'll just record completed SC items here and tally them up whenever I feel up to it.
Oh and the response from Clozemaster was "Thanks for letting us know." They say they will work on an option for opting out of the leaderboards but it will be a while. Meanwhile my enthusiasm for doing work on Clozemaster has crashed and I'm just doing the bare minimum and even thinking about deleting some of my courses there.
In other language app news, Drops has been bought by Kahoots! which is a company that caters largely to schools and other educational institutions, although they say their market is wider, but nonetheless it is not encouraging news for anyone hoping that Drops will continue adding lesser studied and endangered languages, i.e. the kinds of languages not often taught in schools, which is one of the app's bigger advantages over other apps. <heavy sigh> Not feeling so bad about letting my sub expire now.
In more light hearted news, Tom Scott released a new video on languages. He's easily in my top 5 favorite English language You Tubers, maybe in my top 3 even (after Max Miller of Tasting History and Caitlin Dougthy of Ask a Mortician--these two channels have been getting me through this pandemic). Anyhow, interesting video. Have a look:
SC progress:
Films/TV
Спутник (Sputnik) -- 108 minutes
This is currently on Hulu with hard-coded English subtitles. Big, white English subtitles. It's not that bad as far as "In the vein of Alien" movies go.
Le Jeu de la dame, 3 épisodes - 142 minutes
Rownd a Rownd, 1 pennod - 19 minutes
"UEFA Championship: Zenit v Dortmund" en español - 45 minutes
Boring match that didn't matter. Only watched the first half. I was mad that they weren't airing the PSG v Istanbul Basaksehir match for that day here, but that match ended badly for reasons (that you can google if you really want to know) so I guess I should be glad I didn't get to watch it. They re-played the match today (still couldn't watch it)--I'm just glad Mbappé scored.
Books
Litir à Ameireagaidh (ath-leughadh) - 96 duilleagan
I literally just grabbed a book off of my Gaelic pile and read it in bed the other night. As I've mentioned before, most of the Gaelic books I own I've already read before at least once. With this one, I think this was the 4th reading. Very easy book.
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers - 469 pages
I also read through the French wiki page on this book. Did you know that this is the 5th most translated book in the world? It's been translated into 174 languages. Impressive. The wiki page is a bit long, but I promise, it's nowhere as long as the French wiki page on Tom Jones.
(Why I was reading through the French page for Tom Jones is a story for another time. )
4 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
It's been over a week since my last update. I've been dealing with fatigue and health issues, and just haven't been in the mood to write a post. But I have been doing stuff for my SC, watching stuff for my Celtic and Russian Film SCs and plugging away at my multilingual Metro 2033 reading mainly.
By the way, for anyone is interested, Netflix has Russian dub and subtitles for The Queen's Gambit, although you will likely need to use the search audio/subtitle function to access them if you're in the US like me. The dub and subtitles aren't the same, which is not surprising but unfortunate as in some cases I really cannot understand some of things the voice actors say.
Other things I've been doing is trying to get into a new routine of dictation practice, drill practice and journal writing. I've been doing dictation for French, using the Une dictée par jour site, and Gaelic, using some Stòrlann materials. I need to find something for dictation with German and Spanish (and maybe other TLs) that would be equally convenient and easy to use. If anyone knows of anything (free) that might work, let me know. It'd be greatly appreciated.
With my journals I'm mainly recording vocabulary and recording sentences I plan to add to my private Cloze-collections for Celtic and Austronesian languages. Nothing exciting. I did finish watching M but I did not complete my German journal entry and honestly have lost interest in doing so.
On the topic of things I've kind of lost interest in: Dutch. Yeah. I'm not doing much with it outside of Memrise and a tiny bit of Clozemaster. I'm not quitting it. I just cannot look at Colloquial Dutch 2 right now. I am somewhat encouraged that I can understand a lot of Dutch Pod101's quiz dialogues without looking at the subtitles. But for now I just want to limit my Dutch work to Memrise.
Clozemaster made good on my request to opt out of the public leaderboards. In order to do so, you need to go into your Account tab and select to opt out. I'm satisfied with this, although I admit I will likely miss the leaderboards a little. When things weren't all toxic with people accusing other users of cheating and abusing, and people (often the same ones) doing every trick they could think of "beat" the people they were accusing, the leaderboards were kind of fun. The other thing I really got bummed out about was newer users complaining about long-time users who were at the top of individual courses leaderboards often simply for being around longer (of which I was one on several course leaderboards), as if this was somehow unfair, to the point the admin have considered doing away with the all-time leaderboards. That bothered me because it felt like some of us old timers would be punished for simply being around for a long time, and not because we had done anything wrong. Anyhow, not my problem anymore.
I don't have a lot of plans over the rest of the year. My family wants me to do some baking and cook a few "big" dinners over the next 2 weeks so I will be spending more time on that. But I will be thinking over what I hope to do next year and maybe even make some language learning New Year's resolutions, although I'm just as bad as the next person about keeping them.
4 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.
Cèid Donn wrote:I need to find something for dictation with German and Spanish (and maybe other TLs) that would be equally convenient and easy to use. If anyone knows of anything (free) that might work, let me know. It'd be greatly appreciated.
I still managed to roast a pretty good turkey and make 3 fancy side dishes, but in terms of getting any studying done, I'm running on fumes. I did Memrise, Drops and Clozemaster, and then read a bit of Russian, and that was it. Ik ben te moe om iets anders te doen. Я слишком устал, чтобы делать что-нибудь еще. Tha mi ro sgìth 'son rud eile a dhèanamh. Je suis trop fatiguée pour faire autre chose. Aku terlalu lelah untuk melakukan sesuatu yang lebih.
I do not know when Amazon added these but these were not available for me when Amazon took over the show's production from SyFy, so I just assumed they would never add any because Amazon has never been the friendliest platform with regards to accommodating multiple language options. I suppose I should see what other Amazon-produced shows have similar language options.
From the wiki page, it seems LSQ is a mix of ASL and LSF, so it would probably be better to just learn LSF. This isn't something I'll be starting anytime soon. The idea needs to marinate for a bit.
