I've been cleaning up my life the past few months. I finally quit drinking and am now beyond 90 days sober. Yesterday was a weird day (the 4th) because I haven't had a sober 4th in almost 2...
Exemplary
I've been cleaning up my life the past few months. I finally quit drinking and am now beyond 90 days sober. Yesterday was a weird day (the 4th) because I haven't had a sober 4th in almost 2 decades. I quit posting here because I felt ashamed how I was just adding "noise" or just anywhere. One of my many many reasons I had to quit drinking for good.
Anyway, today I am going to relax with some video games I got off the steam summer sale because wow, I've saved around $800 the past 3 months.
*: I went on a 2km walk this morning and it felt great
Awesome! Fallout 4 has also been sitting in my backlog for, oh, I don't know... years now? I understand the struggle. Nevertheless, hope you enjoy the game!
Awesome! Fallout 4 has also been sitting in my backlog for, oh, I don't know... years now? I understand the struggle. Nevertheless, hope you enjoy the game!
Beyond the normal house-cleaning and -keeping chores of this weekend, I want to finish up my roll of film to send off to a developer. Right now, I'm thinking about sending one each to The Darkroom...
Beyond the normal house-cleaning and -keeping chores of this weekend, I want to finish up my roll of film to send off to a developer. Right now, I'm thinking about sending one each to The Darkroom and The Indie Film Lab -- the second one is much closer to me so I hope they do a good job.
I also think I'll finish my review of The Outside by Ada Hoffman (which is great by the way, highly recommend it) and maybe take our foster dog to an adoption event.
LT won't teach you much vocabulary, but it will teach you how to make use of your English knowledge. It was so useful to be able to use my English to learn Italian, and my method was similar to...
LT won't teach you much vocabulary, but it will teach you how to make use of your English knowledge. It was so useful to be able to use my English to learn Italian, and my method was similar to Michael's (I can write up about it later but unfortunately I am short on time for a couple days, reply if you want me to talk about it; there is also this thing that I wrote recently). But for vocabulary, there is nothing better than reading a lot, with an open eye for morphological patterns. Even very recent borrowings can have wildly different meanings, and you only get the nuance with reading or listening in natural contexts.
Sorry for late reply, things are kinda going fast for me these days. The biggest essential of my study method was to study the linguistic aspects of the languages I know. For example, the...
Sorry for late reply, things are kinda going fast for me these days.
The biggest essential of my study method was to study the linguistic aspects of the languages I know. For example, the etymological links between the present day vocabulary of English and Italian: English uses a huge amount of Latin loan words and other morphemes that has been transferred and are productive in today's English (-ive, -al, -ation, -able are some examples). Finding out how to deduce the Italian counterparts of these almost halved the effort needed to learn vocabular and read text early on: revolution = rivoluzione, patience = pazienza, involuntary = involontario, rapidly = rapidamente, etc. The Wikipedia articles for the respective languages make a good start.
I also always look for patterns everywhere. This not unrelated to the above, that one is a patterns business too, but here I'm talking about patterns internal to Italian, e.g. understanding what in- or a(d)- or s- or -ità does to the stem they are added on, where prepositions appear, when do alternative word orders appear, what morphosyntactic patters appear in which contexts. Patterns, in general. Learning these subconsciously through attentive consumption of comprehensible input furnishes you with the knowledge required to understand novel constructs when you encounter them.
Let's dissect sbilanciato. s- occurs with various meanings, but the most prominent one is negation. -(a)to is the participle suffix (1st conjugation masculine), and just like in English, participles can be adjectives. Now we're left with bilanci(a). Can we think of a possible cognate in English? "Balance" comes to mind. So what we have at hand is "not balanced". I imagine something that was knocked out of balance. When I look up the word, I find out that we've hit the nail on the head. What is the point then, if I can just go to the dictionary? Well, when this sort of analysis becomes a reflex when confronting unknown words or other structures, you can make out part or all of the meaning while you're still reading, w/o breaking the flow. Also, you figure it out in context. These two mean that you are more likely to retain the word, and you train your morphosyntactic knowledge of the L2 in the meanwhile.
So, looking for patterns (and learning info that'll help spot them, like etymology or diachronic development of the relevant languages) and figuring out stuff in context is at the core of it. The stuff described in that blog post is basically a method to fabricate situations in which this mechanisms can easily work, almost involuntarily. The key here is to not be a perfectionist and not force yourself to understand the entire thing at once, using dictionaries and other helpful stuff. Many times even in our native language we don't understand every detail of a message so that's not a big deal. But when we study a foreign language and have the false (but very common) belief that it is not common to not understand stuff in their entirety in our mother tongue, we gravitate towards a more lab-like study of the L2, which is productive for some, but leaves out a lot of the use-related aspects of language and is not as effective in general.
Do not hasitate to ask me further stuff! Have a nice time learning Italian.
On Saturday I thought of either going to a carnival or seeing a local indie band I previously saw last year (they were actually phenomenal.) Not too keen on it cause I think a friend is going to...
On Saturday I thought of either going to a carnival or seeing a local indie band I previously saw last year (they were actually phenomenal.) Not too keen on it cause I think a friend is going to be there, one who has begged me for money before and has borrowed too much from me.
Sunday will be my gym day. It'll be interesting to see how korean ginseng and a higher amount of protein snacks affect my muscle growth.
I'll take a morning train to Ankara tomorrow for preliminaries and an interview for the first of the three unis I applied for an MA in linguistics after failing the one in Istanbul a couple months...
I'll take a morning train to Ankara tomorrow for preliminaries and an interview for the first of the three unis I applied for an MA in linguistics after failing the one in Istanbul a couple months ago. It will take more than four hours and it is fucking beautiful. Along the İznik Bay the train is sandwiched between sea and low mountains, then it goes along the big and beautiful Sapanca Lake, after Arifiye it dives south to float in vast steppes in between blue and green mountains, then as Eskişehir nears farms extend from one end of the plains to the other. It is a voyage I love, and a flight takes just as long if you factor in all the waiting and travelling, whereas with the train you pop out of it in the middle of the city. If I was not on a shoestring, I'd take the Orient Express to Kars and back to Ankara after sorting my things out there, and find where (wanderlust trigger warning!) this mind boggling beauty be, before heading to Izmir next week. It is a 25 hour ride from Ankara to Kars, and that much back from there. I will definitely do it in the coming months tho.
the battery in my macbook pro (late-2013) bubbled up late last night. I took it in this morning to get it fixed, but they (typically) don't have the part. So after waiting about three to five days...
the battery in my macbook pro (late-2013) bubbled up late last night. I took it in this morning to get it fixed, but they (typically) don't have the part. So after waiting about three to five days to get the part in, they want another three to five days to do the actual repair. Its insane.
In this model, they don't just replace the battery, but the trackpad, keyboard, and upper casing -- all adding up to $290CAD. It's crazy.
So I am spending today putting xubuntu on my old beefed up (for its time) XPS 1640 from about a decade ago. I'll most likely lose the weekend getting everything set up just right...
Worst case I'll just use my other modded Chromebook... but regardless, the overall process of using a different system for a week is frustrating.
So I will be spending my weekend moping and hopefully unlocking the mysteries of magic trackpad gestures with the newest kernel.
Watching Stranger Things 3 I guess. It's kinda been like Heroes for me in that Season 1 was novel, Season 2 was just more of the same, so hopefully Season 3 breaks that pattern.
Watching Stranger Things 3 I guess. It's kinda been like Heroes for me in that Season 1 was novel, Season 2 was just more of the same, so hopefully Season 3 breaks that pattern.
I'm going to keep on grumbling about summer - it must have been some two weeks since the last time I had a decent night of sleep. Otherwise... I have some meds to pick up, more maths to re-learn,...
I'm going to keep on grumbling about summer - it must have been some two weeks since the last time I had a decent night of sleep.
Otherwise... I have some meds to pick up, more maths to re-learn, the beginning of a short story to expand, and I want to add an HTML generator "module" to my phlog generator. The latter is half-working already, I use troff to produce -ms/-mwww macros instead of a gophermap and then feed the result to grohtml, but I need to chop up the output into something useful. I'll probably write a phlog post about that once I'm done.
I also have some fiction I want to read - Mistborn, Malazan - but I probably won't get around to it this week.
Made breakfast for me and my roomate, preparing to clean up the house while they're out doing errands. Then I'll be watching today's Tour de France stage, while working on a tildes competitor in...
Made breakfast for me and my roomate, preparing to clean up the house while they're out doing errands.
Then I'll be watching today's Tour de France stage, while working on a tildes competitor in go.
In the evening going to ride my bike for an hour or two.
I've been cleaning up my life the past few months. I finally quit drinking and am now beyond 90 days sober. Yesterday was a weird day (the 4th) because I haven't had a sober 4th in almost 2 decades. I quit posting here because I felt ashamed how I was just adding "noise" or just anywhere. One of my many many reasons I had to quit drinking for good.
Anyway, today I am going to relax with some video games I got off the steam summer sale because wow, I've saved around $800 the past 3 months.
*: I went on a 2km walk this morning and it felt great
That's an incredible accomplishment. You're an inspiration!
Out of curiosity, what games are you going to be playing?
I have a massive backlog and I keep going back to old games I've already beaten. I think I'm going to finally nail down Fallout 4 today
Awesome! Fallout 4 has also been sitting in my backlog for, oh, I don't know... years now? I understand the struggle. Nevertheless, hope you enjoy the game!
Horizon zero dawn was one of the best games released last year. That along with spiderman and god of war the ps4 has got amazing exclusives.
Beyond the normal house-cleaning and -keeping chores of this weekend, I want to finish up my roll of film to send off to a developer. Right now, I'm thinking about sending one each to The Darkroom and The Indie Film Lab -- the second one is much closer to me so I hope they do a good job.
I also think I'll finish my review of The Outside by Ada Hoffman (which is great by the way, highly recommend it) and maybe take our foster dog to an adoption event.
Grilling, smoking some ribs (if the weather behaves), Breath of the Wild, chauffer/spawn wrangler for other kids' birthday parties... Mostly fun?
LT won't teach you much vocabulary, but it will teach you how to make use of your English knowledge. It was so useful to be able to use my English to learn Italian, and my method was similar to Michael's (I can write up about it later but unfortunately I am short on time for a couple days, reply if you want me to talk about it; there is also this thing that I wrote recently). But for vocabulary, there is nothing better than reading a lot, with an open eye for morphological patterns. Even very recent borrowings can have wildly different meanings, and you only get the nuance with reading or listening in natural contexts.
Sorry for late reply, things are kinda going fast for me these days.
The biggest essential of my study method was to study the linguistic aspects of the languages I know. For example, the etymological links between the present day vocabulary of English and Italian: English uses a huge amount of Latin loan words and other morphemes that has been transferred and are productive in today's English (-ive, -al, -ation, -able are some examples). Finding out how to deduce the Italian counterparts of these almost halved the effort needed to learn vocabular and read text early on: revolution = rivoluzione, patience = pazienza, involuntary = involontario, rapidly = rapidamente, etc. The Wikipedia articles for the respective languages make a good start.
I also always look for patterns everywhere. This not unrelated to the above, that one is a patterns business too, but here I'm talking about patterns internal to Italian, e.g. understanding what in- or a(d)- or s- or -ità does to the stem they are added on, where prepositions appear, when do alternative word orders appear, what morphosyntactic patters appear in which contexts. Patterns, in general. Learning these subconsciously through attentive consumption of comprehensible input furnishes you with the knowledge required to understand novel constructs when you encounter them.
Let's dissect sbilanciato. s- occurs with various meanings, but the most prominent one is negation. -(a)to is the participle suffix (1st conjugation masculine), and just like in English, participles can be adjectives. Now we're left with bilanci(a). Can we think of a possible cognate in English? "Balance" comes to mind. So what we have at hand is "not balanced". I imagine something that was knocked out of balance. When I look up the word, I find out that we've hit the nail on the head. What is the point then, if I can just go to the dictionary? Well, when this sort of analysis becomes a reflex when confronting unknown words or other structures, you can make out part or all of the meaning while you're still reading, w/o breaking the flow. Also, you figure it out in context. These two mean that you are more likely to retain the word, and you train your morphosyntactic knowledge of the L2 in the meanwhile.
So, looking for patterns (and learning info that'll help spot them, like etymology or diachronic development of the relevant languages) and figuring out stuff in context is at the core of it. The stuff described in that blog post is basically a method to fabricate situations in which this mechanisms can easily work, almost involuntarily. The key here is to not be a perfectionist and not force yourself to understand the entire thing at once, using dictionaries and other helpful stuff. Many times even in our native language we don't understand every detail of a message so that's not a big deal. But when we study a foreign language and have the false (but very common) belief that it is not common to not understand stuff in their entirety in our mother tongue, we gravitate towards a more lab-like study of the L2, which is productive for some, but leaves out a lot of the use-related aspects of language and is not as effective in general.
Do not hasitate to ask me further stuff! Have a nice time learning Italian.
Oh god, how stupid am I :))
Tho the similarities between En/It and En/Fr are almost identical, so the methods would be identically useful.
I need to work on my condo to get it ready to sell. Also, I need to make more garb for Pennsic.
On Saturday I thought of either going to a carnival or seeing a local indie band I previously saw last year (they were actually phenomenal.) Not too keen on it cause I think a friend is going to be there, one who has begged me for money before and has borrowed too much from me.
Sunday will be my gym day. It'll be interesting to see how korean ginseng and a higher amount of protein snacks affect my muscle growth.
I'll take a morning train to Ankara tomorrow for preliminaries and an interview for the first of the three unis I applied for an MA in linguistics after failing the one in Istanbul a couple months ago. It will take more than four hours and it is fucking beautiful. Along the İznik Bay the train is sandwiched between sea and low mountains, then it goes along the big and beautiful Sapanca Lake, after Arifiye it dives south to float in vast steppes in between blue and green mountains, then as Eskişehir nears farms extend from one end of the plains to the other. It is a voyage I love, and a flight takes just as long if you factor in all the waiting and travelling, whereas with the train you pop out of it in the middle of the city. If I was not on a shoestring, I'd take the Orient Express to Kars and back to Ankara after sorting my things out there, and find where (wanderlust trigger warning!) this mind boggling beauty be, before heading to Izmir next week. It is a 25 hour ride from Ankara to Kars, and that much back from there. I will definitely do it in the coming months tho.
Deploying my first containerised docker instance to DigitalOcean for my business. Lots of learning.
the battery in my macbook pro (late-2013) bubbled up late last night. I took it in this morning to get it fixed, but they (typically) don't have the part. So after waiting about three to five days to get the part in, they want another three to five days to do the actual repair. Its insane.
In this model, they don't just replace the battery, but the trackpad, keyboard, and upper casing -- all adding up to $290CAD. It's crazy.
So I am spending today putting xubuntu on my old beefed up (for its time) XPS 1640 from about a decade ago. I'll most likely lose the weekend getting everything set up just right...
Worst case I'll just use my other modded Chromebook... but regardless, the overall process of using a different system for a week is frustrating.
So I will be spending my weekend moping and hopefully unlocking the mysteries of magic trackpad gestures with the newest kernel.
Watching Stranger Things 3 I guess. It's kinda been like Heroes for me in that Season 1 was novel, Season 2 was just more of the same, so hopefully Season 3 breaks that pattern.
I'm going to keep on grumbling about summer - it must have been some two weeks since the last time I had a decent night of sleep.
Otherwise... I have some meds to pick up, more maths to re-learn, the beginning of a short story to expand, and I want to add an HTML generator "module" to my phlog generator. The latter is half-working already, I use troff to produce
-ms/-mwwwmacros instead of a gophermap and then feed the result togrohtml, but I need to chop up the output into something useful. I'll probably write a phlog post about that once I'm done.I also have some fiction I want to read - Mistborn, Malazan - but I probably won't get around to it this week.
Made breakfast for me and my roomate, preparing to clean up the house while they're out doing errands.
Then I'll be watching today's Tour de France stage, while working on a tildes competitor in go.
In the evening going to ride my bike for an hour or two.
Tomorrow rinse and repeat, minus the cleanup.
Building some Magic the gathering decks, and hopefully going to the climbing gym tomorrow if my injury recovers.