![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
...my life has been consumed by puzzles. Almost 9,000 pieces of puzzle, altogether. There were days when I worked, ate, and did puzzles until bedtime. Attempts or read or exercise or anything else were unsuccessful. Doing puzzles was what my brain wanted to do. Granted, I plowed through three Great Courses and the first two seasons of the Magnus Archive while solving those puzzles, so it wasn't a complete mental vacation. But the itch appears to have been scratched for the time being, and it's nice to do a variety of other things again.
Before I had any idea that November 7 was going to be anything other than A Day, I engaged in a marathon stress clean of the living spaces. We are talking furniture-moving, surface-dusting, baseboard-scrubbing, grout-whitening, houseplant-grooming, fridge-sorting, closet-organizing, clothing-rationalizing, toilet-, sink-, tub-, microwave-, cooktop-, and oven-scouring, junk-purging, marathon stress clean. Excepting a single unorganized drawer and basket of clothes on the bedroom floor, I currently inhabit a glossy interior design magazine of a living space that only extreme physical labor can bring.
Deep cleans can definitely be cathartic. But it’s also nice to just exist in a state of uncluttered-ness, and I've made an effort in the intervening two weeks to nip even minor clutter encroachments in the bud. It's a nice feeling.
These efforts were assisted today by the delightful surprise acquisition of another shelf, spotted on the side of the street during the week's bread run. In a true stroke of luck, it was the identical triplet to the two surprise shelves we picked up back in June. We initially decided to continue on with errand-running but when it was still there on our return (and after checking with the store it was in front of that it wasn’t theirs) we hiked that sucker two miles back home, disinfected it, and installed it alongside its brethren.
And finally, last week's language learning. I've always taken a butterfly approach to language acquisition, alighting on whatever (passive listening, grammar drills, shadowing) strikes my fancy in the moment, but as an experiment I decided last August to methodically work through two resources, for two languages, start to finish, just to see what it's like. Specifically, these are Mango Language's Korean program and LearnManx.com's Podcast Gaelgach; I've been doing one unit a day from each.
Mango Korean: Chapter 5, Units 4-8; Chapter 6, Units 1-2
Mango Languages is basically Pimsleur for Dummies. You'll learn to regurgitate some canned dialogues on typical Language 101 topics (food, numbers, nationality, etc.) but you are not going to learn how to have a freeform conversation, nor will you learn anything about how the language functions. There are also a fair number of unexplained inconsistencies and errors, so while I wouldn't recommend using Mango to start learning a language, for my purposes (namely, correcting spots where my speaking has slipped toward Japanese usage) it isn't bad, particularly given that it's free through the library.
Podcast Gaelgach: Lessons 35-41
My introduction to Manx was Phil Kelly's (now defunct) website back in the '90s, and man is it nice to hear how the language should sound when spoken aloud. But what I really love about this resource is that while the instruction is top-notch, the podcast itself is not polished. It's just a recording of an instructor and his two students, cut into 4- to 10-minute clips. In other words, it a microcosm of the entire language-learning experience. You hear the students whispering answers to one another when they get stuck, laughing at the ridiculous example sentences, gasping when the instructor hits them with a real poser, and cheering each other on when they get something right. You hear pencils scratching as they take down notes.
The thing is, I have been there, so many times, and so it wasn't long before I started rooting for them too--especially because by the third or fourth installment, you really start to see their individual personalities emerge. And none of these individuals are even ever identified--you never even learn their names--but I feel such camaraderie with them; I find it way more effective than the falsely bright "You got this, champ!" canned encouragement in Pimsleur, Mango, and the like.
And weirdly, because there's no testing or skills checks beyond trying to answer the instructor's question alongside the students, I retain far more of it than I do material from many of the proper courses I've been in. (WhyTF so many schools grade language classes on a curve is fucking beyond me. But they do, and then wring their hands wondering why students approach language learning with anxiety and dread while ignoring suggestions to "have fun with it" and "not be afraid of making mistakes." /soapbox) So yeah, good stuff.
これで以上です。
Before I had any idea that November 7 was going to be anything other than A Day, I engaged in a marathon stress clean of the living spaces. We are talking furniture-moving, surface-dusting, baseboard-scrubbing, grout-whitening, houseplant-grooming, fridge-sorting, closet-organizing, clothing-rationalizing, toilet-, sink-, tub-, microwave-, cooktop-, and oven-scouring, junk-purging, marathon stress clean. Excepting a single unorganized drawer and basket of clothes on the bedroom floor, I currently inhabit a glossy interior design magazine of a living space that only extreme physical labor can bring.
Deep cleans can definitely be cathartic. But it’s also nice to just exist in a state of uncluttered-ness, and I've made an effort in the intervening two weeks to nip even minor clutter encroachments in the bud. It's a nice feeling.
These efforts were assisted today by the delightful surprise acquisition of another shelf, spotted on the side of the street during the week's bread run. In a true stroke of luck, it was the identical triplet to the two surprise shelves we picked up back in June. We initially decided to continue on with errand-running but when it was still there on our return (and after checking with the store it was in front of that it wasn’t theirs) we hiked that sucker two miles back home, disinfected it, and installed it alongside its brethren.
And finally, last week's language learning. I've always taken a butterfly approach to language acquisition, alighting on whatever (passive listening, grammar drills, shadowing) strikes my fancy in the moment, but as an experiment I decided last August to methodically work through two resources, for two languages, start to finish, just to see what it's like. Specifically, these are Mango Language's Korean program and LearnManx.com's Podcast Gaelgach; I've been doing one unit a day from each.
Mango Korean: Chapter 5, Units 4-8; Chapter 6, Units 1-2
Mango Languages is basically Pimsleur for Dummies. You'll learn to regurgitate some canned dialogues on typical Language 101 topics (food, numbers, nationality, etc.) but you are not going to learn how to have a freeform conversation, nor will you learn anything about how the language functions. There are also a fair number of unexplained inconsistencies and errors, so while I wouldn't recommend using Mango to start learning a language, for my purposes (namely, correcting spots where my speaking has slipped toward Japanese usage) it isn't bad, particularly given that it's free through the library.
Podcast Gaelgach: Lessons 35-41
My introduction to Manx was Phil Kelly's (now defunct) website back in the '90s, and man is it nice to hear how the language should sound when spoken aloud. But what I really love about this resource is that while the instruction is top-notch, the podcast itself is not polished. It's just a recording of an instructor and his two students, cut into 4- to 10-minute clips. In other words, it a microcosm of the entire language-learning experience. You hear the students whispering answers to one another when they get stuck, laughing at the ridiculous example sentences, gasping when the instructor hits them with a real poser, and cheering each other on when they get something right. You hear pencils scratching as they take down notes.
The thing is, I have been there, so many times, and so it wasn't long before I started rooting for them too--especially because by the third or fourth installment, you really start to see their individual personalities emerge. And none of these individuals are even ever identified--you never even learn their names--but I feel such camaraderie with them; I find it way more effective than the falsely bright "You got this, champ!" canned encouragement in Pimsleur, Mango, and the like.
And weirdly, because there's no testing or skills checks beyond trying to answer the instructor's question alongside the students, I retain far more of it than I do material from many of the proper courses I've been in. (WhyTF so many schools grade language classes on a curve is fucking beyond me. But they do, and then wring their hands wondering why students approach language learning with anxiety and dread while ignoring suggestions to "have fun with it" and "not be afraid of making mistakes." /soapbox) So yeah, good stuff.
これで以上です。
Tags:
From:
no subject
From:
no subject