(Rather dubious) accomplishments!
Jun. 22nd, 2025 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverOh, where to start?
I've been pretty proud of keeping up my intention of posting a story a month since last September, and in fact posted two stories last month, but now we're getting to the end of June and I'm not sure I'm going to make it. I do have a really short scene that I've been working on and the first draft is almost done, but there's only eight days left in the month and that's not much time for editing. Maybe I need to do a quick drabble. Or maybe I should just go with "an average of one story a month" and rest on my May laurels.
We haven't made much progress on our work around the house lately, mostly because of a whole host of medical problems for both of us that took a while to deal with. Nothing major or long-lasting, but enough that for two weeks, between the both of us, we had appointments every single weekday.
To me, the worst was spraining a tendon in the little finger of my writing hand. I don't even know how it happened. I was playing on my iPad and reached to touch something with my index finger and BAM! My little finger just exploded in pain -- on the top part, starting from distal joint and radiating down the middle phalanx. (Thank you, Martha Jones, for teaching me the bones of the hand!) I mean, I wasn't doing anything with it! And then it was fine. Then a few minutes later, I did something else and it happened again. It seemed that it was flaring up every so often when I moved the finger, so I put on a popsicle-stick splint.
The urgent care facility sent me to a hand therapist, Casey, and she identified it as a sprain of the tendon that runs from the distal joint diagonally toward the inner side of the proximal joint. (There's another one on the outer side, so together, they kind of form a V with the point on top of the distal joint.) She gave me a "buddy strap" to keep the little finger from splaying out to the side and to remind me to go easy on the hand, then the next week, when it was a bit better, taught me exercises to re-strengthen the muscle on the inner side of the finger.
It took almost a full month for the finger to recover, and there's still occasionally a bit of stiffness there. I was able to return to playing drums pretty early on, as the ring and little fingers are only used for stick control, but that first rehearsal, I ended up leaving early because my hand just got too tired and I didn't want to re-hurt it. I still have not re-picked up clarinet or sax (which, in hindsight, might have been what hurt it in the first place) because I still don't feel that the finger is 100%. (In fact, it is currently aching and clicking when I bend it.)
Hurting the hand also meant that my work on the house stalled, but we're starting to pick that back up. One of the things we did was clean up the TV area and then buy and install a newer, better TV. The old TV (which I think we bought over fifteen years ago) is destined to be used for viewing while working out on ellipticals, when we've cleared the space for that. We've also done more work on clearing that space, in specific, sorting through our old game consoles and games and boxing them up and storing them away.
It's really starting to look like we will actually get this place cleaned up, hopefully even by the end of summer. Optimism is high.
That might not sound like much of an accomplishment, but honestly, it really is. I don't tend to finish games. If I like a game, I almost always play through it to about 75% and then move on. If I really like the game, I might return to it but will start from scratch.
I have at played Stardew Valley to that point but didn't finish it (either get married, explore all the way to the end of the dungeons, or built a full farm) at least eight times. I've gotten Rune Factory 4 halfway through the second arc three times. I don't know how many Rimworld colonies I've developed and abandoned.
I've been really wanting to get Baldur's Gate III, ever since it came out. I loved the first one and did actually finish it, but that was over twenty-five years ago, when I used to finish games. (This never-completing-anything thing is much more recent.) The second one was also great, though I didn't finish that one. However, BG3 carries a hefty $60 price tag, and knowing that I probably wouldn't finish it (and being unemployed) has kept me from getting it. Maybe I'll get it on sale, if it ever gets down to about $40, I thought. (Note: I don't begrudge them that price tag. It's a triple-A game and is produced by a huge team; that is a reasonable price for this type of game. I just am not willing to pay for it.)
But then Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time came out with the same price tag. It looked cool on the surface, but as I read more about it, I realized it was exactly what I wanted to play: skills with long progression, crafting, and generally easy combat. I ached about it for a day, and finally my husband said to get it... so I did.
And yes, it's been awesome, enough so that I finished it! Well, I should say, I played through the story and finished that; there is plenty more to do in the game. I bought it a month ago and I'm still playing it every day, trying to develop my town and build legendary items and explore the frankly enormous world of Ginormosia and the randomly-generated Treasure Groves. I can see where I'm going to start getting bored of it, but for now, it's been awesome.
Yes! I hit the 1000-day streak in Duolingo a few days ago! Very proud! And yet, not particularly happy with it.
I've come to the conclusion that Duolingo is a terrible language teacher. The only thing it does well is keep you studying, by having that streak counter. It's a psychology trick, where you show that counter and the subject is compelled to keep working at it just so that the counter doesn't get reset back to zero. (One of the drawbacks of this method is that if something interrupts the counter, the subject will almost always abandon it. Think about it: if my 1000-day streak is broken, I'd have to work for over three years to get it back. No way.)
But I've been studying for 1000 days and I still can't speak the language. Okay, so those 1000 days were broken up between German and Japanese, so that's part of the problem. I studied German so that I'd know a little bit when I went traveling and did a little Japanese at the same time, but then I switched completely to Japanese when I went on my Europe trip (which I still haven't talked about here).
The thing is, Duolingo teaches you the language by memorization. Each lessonsection starts by giving you a bunch of phrases or sentences to memorize, then runs you through exercise translating those sentences and some variations on those sentences back and forth.
The problem is that it doesn't tell you why. For example, in German, there are a number of different words that translate to the English word "because". If I remember correctly, when Duolingo introduced the concept of "because", it used "denn" for a number of lesson sections. Then, it started using the word "weil". Then, many lesson sections later, it started using the word "da".
Duolingo does have a reference section at the beginning of each lesson section, talking about what you're going to learn in that lesson section, and I went through all of them and none of them talked about the words for "because", why they were different, and when you were supposed to use them. I had to do a web search to find the answer: you use different ones based on the type of clause that follows it. (That is a very simple answer; it's more complicated than that.)
Native speakers learn how to use the word correctly through personal experience in talking with others, but Duolingo doesn't have that. They used to have features for students to speak with other students and learn together, but they've been systematically removing anything that allows any interaction. They've even just recently removed uploading your own profile picture; now you have to use their avatar creation tool or just have your initial be your pic.
The Japanese lessons are even worse. The reference section for each lesson section simply contains a list of "sentences you'll be able to say by the end of this section" -- no explanations at all, of any type. Thus, though I've been learning all this time to say "gakkou NI ikimasu" for "I am going to school", now the lessons are using "gakkou HE ikimasu" for "I am going to school". Why??? Why are there two different ways to say the same thing?
It turns out that, just like in the German example, there's a subtle difference: the ni article means that the school is the destination, while the he article is translated better as "I am going in the direction of the school". But I had to research that on my own. If I'd relied on what I learned from Duolingo, I'd be saying the wrong thing.
Another example from Japanese: "ani ha haha no TONARI imasu" for "My brother is next to my mom" vs. "ani ha isu no YOKO imasu" for "My brother is next to the chair". Why? Because tonari is used for similar objects and they don't actually need to be near each other, while yoko is used when the objects are right next to each other and their similarity to each other isn't important. In other words, one is more about their physical similarities and the other is more about their spatial arrangement. But Duolingo introduced these two words in the same lesson (right next to each other, actually) and attributed them the same meaning, without explaining or even acknowledging that they weren't the same.
There's another thing that's frustrating me about the Japanese lessons and that's how they're handling learning to read Japanese. There's a lot to learn to read Japanese. There are two "alphabet" systems, called katakana and hiragana, which spell out the pronunciations for you, and then there is kanji, which is the Chinese writing system that has a character or group of characters for each word.
I have it pretty easy for hiragana and katakana because I already read and write both of them, even though I don't actually speak the language or know what the words I'm reading/writing mean. But, I noticed that when I started doing the Japanese lessons, they didn't teach you how to read them. They started right away with phrases and sentences, and you can turn on romaji -- that puts the pronunciation in English over each character -- but they didn't try to introduce new characters slowly. This is different from the Russian lessons (which I also studied for a little bit), where they limited the words you were using to slowly introduce you to the Cyrillic alphabet.
Okay, I thought, that's reasonable. There's a section in the app that lists all of the hiragana and katakana and shows you how to write them, so you can rely on the romaji for pronunciation and then go practice the reading/writing over there. It's kind of hidden away (well, it is now; Duolingo is slowly hiding away all of its auxiliary content so that they can display the paid content on the main page to coax you to buy it), but it's there.
Kanji is different. Over the course of the lessons I've done so far, they've been introducing a handful of kanji in each section, usually one or two, but at most four. They've been mostly simple kanji that are easy to differentiate from each other and are very useful, such as the numbers (they introduced about three of them apiece over four lesson sections) and sun and moon (which are used in the words for day, month, Japan, etc.). Once they introduce them, they continue to use them so you learn them over time.
Then, about two months ago, the new lesson section I got into introduced eight new complex kanji. The next one, six. This last section that I started two nights ago? Eighteen. Some of them are being used in later sections, but some seem to be introduced and then never mentioned again... until three sections later when you've totally forgotten them. I am having tons of trouble trying to remember them and tell them apart.
There are also some weird continuity issues. The current section I'm doing is about saying where things are in relation to each other, thus the kanji for the "tonari" and "yoko" thing I mentioned as well as items in your house like "hondana" for "bookshelf", but then also the kanji for "dirty" and "Taiwan". In addition, the lesson teaches you the kanji for Taiwan, which is two characters side-by-side, and then makes a point to also teach you the word "wan" (the second character in "Taiwan"), but doesn't tell you what it means or give you an example of how it's used in a sentence.
I have the strange feeling that they changed the person designing the lessons and the new person was like, "Oh my god, they're so far behind! They really should be *here* at this point, so I'm just going to stuff in as much as I can so they catch up."
Which leaves me frustrated at my 1000-day mark, because at this new pace, I'm not able to retain anything and will have to start studying outside of the app, and I'm thinking, if I'm doing that, why continue to use Duolingo? But then if I stop, I break my 1000-day streak. Sigh.
I've been pretty proud of keeping up my intention of posting a story a month since last September, and in fact posted two stories last month, but now we're getting to the end of June and I'm not sure I'm going to make it. I do have a really short scene that I've been working on and the first draft is almost done, but there's only eight days left in the month and that's not much time for editing. Maybe I need to do a quick drabble. Or maybe I should just go with "an average of one story a month" and rest on my May laurels.
We haven't made much progress on our work around the house lately, mostly because of a whole host of medical problems for both of us that took a while to deal with. Nothing major or long-lasting, but enough that for two weeks, between the both of us, we had appointments every single weekday.
To me, the worst was spraining a tendon in the little finger of my writing hand. I don't even know how it happened. I was playing on my iPad and reached to touch something with my index finger and BAM! My little finger just exploded in pain -- on the top part, starting from distal joint and radiating down the middle phalanx. (Thank you, Martha Jones, for teaching me the bones of the hand!) I mean, I wasn't doing anything with it! And then it was fine. Then a few minutes later, I did something else and it happened again. It seemed that it was flaring up every so often when I moved the finger, so I put on a popsicle-stick splint.
The urgent care facility sent me to a hand therapist, Casey, and she identified it as a sprain of the tendon that runs from the distal joint diagonally toward the inner side of the proximal joint. (There's another one on the outer side, so together, they kind of form a V with the point on top of the distal joint.) She gave me a "buddy strap" to keep the little finger from splaying out to the side and to remind me to go easy on the hand, then the next week, when it was a bit better, taught me exercises to re-strengthen the muscle on the inner side of the finger.
It took almost a full month for the finger to recover, and there's still occasionally a bit of stiffness there. I was able to return to playing drums pretty early on, as the ring and little fingers are only used for stick control, but that first rehearsal, I ended up leaving early because my hand just got too tired and I didn't want to re-hurt it. I still have not re-picked up clarinet or sax (which, in hindsight, might have been what hurt it in the first place) because I still don't feel that the finger is 100%. (In fact, it is currently aching and clicking when I bend it.)
Hurting the hand also meant that my work on the house stalled, but we're starting to pick that back up. One of the things we did was clean up the TV area and then buy and install a newer, better TV. The old TV (which I think we bought over fifteen years ago) is destined to be used for viewing while working out on ellipticals, when we've cleared the space for that. We've also done more work on clearing that space, in specific, sorting through our old game consoles and games and boxing them up and storing them away.
It's really starting to look like we will actually get this place cleaned up, hopefully even by the end of summer. Optimism is high.
That might not sound like much of an accomplishment, but honestly, it really is. I don't tend to finish games. If I like a game, I almost always play through it to about 75% and then move on. If I really like the game, I might return to it but will start from scratch.
I have at played Stardew Valley to that point but didn't finish it (either get married, explore all the way to the end of the dungeons, or built a full farm) at least eight times. I've gotten Rune Factory 4 halfway through the second arc three times. I don't know how many Rimworld colonies I've developed and abandoned.
I've been really wanting to get Baldur's Gate III, ever since it came out. I loved the first one and did actually finish it, but that was over twenty-five years ago, when I used to finish games. (This never-completing-anything thing is much more recent.) The second one was also great, though I didn't finish that one. However, BG3 carries a hefty $60 price tag, and knowing that I probably wouldn't finish it (and being unemployed) has kept me from getting it. Maybe I'll get it on sale, if it ever gets down to about $40, I thought. (Note: I don't begrudge them that price tag. It's a triple-A game and is produced by a huge team; that is a reasonable price for this type of game. I just am not willing to pay for it.)
But then Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time came out with the same price tag. It looked cool on the surface, but as I read more about it, I realized it was exactly what I wanted to play: skills with long progression, crafting, and generally easy combat. I ached about it for a day, and finally my husband said to get it... so I did.
And yes, it's been awesome, enough so that I finished it! Well, I should say, I played through the story and finished that; there is plenty more to do in the game. I bought it a month ago and I'm still playing it every day, trying to develop my town and build legendary items and explore the frankly enormous world of Ginormosia and the randomly-generated Treasure Groves. I can see where I'm going to start getting bored of it, but for now, it's been awesome.
Yes! I hit the 1000-day streak in Duolingo a few days ago! Very proud! And yet, not particularly happy with it.
I've come to the conclusion that Duolingo is a terrible language teacher. The only thing it does well is keep you studying, by having that streak counter. It's a psychology trick, where you show that counter and the subject is compelled to keep working at it just so that the counter doesn't get reset back to zero. (One of the drawbacks of this method is that if something interrupts the counter, the subject will almost always abandon it. Think about it: if my 1000-day streak is broken, I'd have to work for over three years to get it back. No way.)
But I've been studying for 1000 days and I still can't speak the language. Okay, so those 1000 days were broken up between German and Japanese, so that's part of the problem. I studied German so that I'd know a little bit when I went traveling and did a little Japanese at the same time, but then I switched completely to Japanese when I went on my Europe trip (which I still haven't talked about here).
The thing is, Duolingo teaches you the language by memorization. Each lessonsection starts by giving you a bunch of phrases or sentences to memorize, then runs you through exercise translating those sentences and some variations on those sentences back and forth.
The problem is that it doesn't tell you why. For example, in German, there are a number of different words that translate to the English word "because". If I remember correctly, when Duolingo introduced the concept of "because", it used "denn" for a number of lesson sections. Then, it started using the word "weil". Then, many lesson sections later, it started using the word "da".
Duolingo does have a reference section at the beginning of each lesson section, talking about what you're going to learn in that lesson section, and I went through all of them and none of them talked about the words for "because", why they were different, and when you were supposed to use them. I had to do a web search to find the answer: you use different ones based on the type of clause that follows it. (That is a very simple answer; it's more complicated than that.)
Native speakers learn how to use the word correctly through personal experience in talking with others, but Duolingo doesn't have that. They used to have features for students to speak with other students and learn together, but they've been systematically removing anything that allows any interaction. They've even just recently removed uploading your own profile picture; now you have to use their avatar creation tool or just have your initial be your pic.
The Japanese lessons are even worse. The reference section for each lesson section simply contains a list of "sentences you'll be able to say by the end of this section" -- no explanations at all, of any type. Thus, though I've been learning all this time to say "gakkou NI ikimasu" for "I am going to school", now the lessons are using "gakkou HE ikimasu" for "I am going to school". Why??? Why are there two different ways to say the same thing?
It turns out that, just like in the German example, there's a subtle difference: the ni article means that the school is the destination, while the he article is translated better as "I am going in the direction of the school". But I had to research that on my own. If I'd relied on what I learned from Duolingo, I'd be saying the wrong thing.
Another example from Japanese: "ani ha haha no TONARI imasu" for "My brother is next to my mom" vs. "ani ha isu no YOKO imasu" for "My brother is next to the chair". Why? Because tonari is used for similar objects and they don't actually need to be near each other, while yoko is used when the objects are right next to each other and their similarity to each other isn't important. In other words, one is more about their physical similarities and the other is more about their spatial arrangement. But Duolingo introduced these two words in the same lesson (right next to each other, actually) and attributed them the same meaning, without explaining or even acknowledging that they weren't the same.
There's another thing that's frustrating me about the Japanese lessons and that's how they're handling learning to read Japanese. There's a lot to learn to read Japanese. There are two "alphabet" systems, called katakana and hiragana, which spell out the pronunciations for you, and then there is kanji, which is the Chinese writing system that has a character or group of characters for each word.
I have it pretty easy for hiragana and katakana because I already read and write both of them, even though I don't actually speak the language or know what the words I'm reading/writing mean. But, I noticed that when I started doing the Japanese lessons, they didn't teach you how to read them. They started right away with phrases and sentences, and you can turn on romaji -- that puts the pronunciation in English over each character -- but they didn't try to introduce new characters slowly. This is different from the Russian lessons (which I also studied for a little bit), where they limited the words you were using to slowly introduce you to the Cyrillic alphabet.
Okay, I thought, that's reasonable. There's a section in the app that lists all of the hiragana and katakana and shows you how to write them, so you can rely on the romaji for pronunciation and then go practice the reading/writing over there. It's kind of hidden away (well, it is now; Duolingo is slowly hiding away all of its auxiliary content so that they can display the paid content on the main page to coax you to buy it), but it's there.
Kanji is different. Over the course of the lessons I've done so far, they've been introducing a handful of kanji in each section, usually one or two, but at most four. They've been mostly simple kanji that are easy to differentiate from each other and are very useful, such as the numbers (they introduced about three of them apiece over four lesson sections) and sun and moon (which are used in the words for day, month, Japan, etc.). Once they introduce them, they continue to use them so you learn them over time.
Then, about two months ago, the new lesson section I got into introduced eight new complex kanji. The next one, six. This last section that I started two nights ago? Eighteen. Some of them are being used in later sections, but some seem to be introduced and then never mentioned again... until three sections later when you've totally forgotten them. I am having tons of trouble trying to remember them and tell them apart.
There are also some weird continuity issues. The current section I'm doing is about saying where things are in relation to each other, thus the kanji for the "tonari" and "yoko" thing I mentioned as well as items in your house like "hondana" for "bookshelf", but then also the kanji for "dirty" and "Taiwan". In addition, the lesson teaches you the kanji for Taiwan, which is two characters side-by-side, and then makes a point to also teach you the word "wan" (the second character in "Taiwan"), but doesn't tell you what it means or give you an example of how it's used in a sentence.
I have the strange feeling that they changed the person designing the lessons and the new person was like, "Oh my god, they're so far behind! They really should be *here* at this point, so I'm just going to stuff in as much as I can so they catch up."
Which leaves me frustrated at my 1000-day mark, because at this new pace, I'm not able to retain anything and will have to start studying outside of the app, and I'm thinking, if I'm doing that, why continue to use Duolingo? But then if I stop, I break my 1000-day streak. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-22 08:49 pm (UTC)Ooh, I can sort of relate to the alphabet thing. The first time I actually tried doing Duolingo ( back in 2017 or so) I did Hebrew. Which it did not teach you how to actually type. 😔 It just started with some simple words ( bread, milk, love, etc. ) I quit after so long.
But I came back last year and started Spanish. My streak is currently 270 days.
( Have you gotten any bizarre sentences yet? I’ve had none as of now in Spanish, but one that I’ll never forget in Hebrew was: is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? )
no subject
Date: 2025-07-04 08:01 am (UTC)I've found when it comes to DIY any progress is good progress. It's never ending really. You'll always find something.