Tag: arabic

On streaks

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I’m starting to think that I have an unreasonable number of Things I’m Supposed to Do Every Day. I didn’t post last night because I got home from work, had dinner, and collapsed; I was in bed by 8:00 and dead to the world by nine, and at around 8:40 it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged yet and I almost got out of bed to write a quick post. The thing is, I don’t know how many different things is a reasonable number of things that I do every day, or at least do so often that I notice if I don’t do them on any particular day. Shall we list them? Why not!

  1. Blog. Now, granted, I don’t do this every day, but I’m trying to write more this year than last year and I really don’t like taking more than one day off a week. At one point I went for around (nearly?) two years without missing a day. I don’t feel the need to build up that kind of streak again but I definitely want missed days to be infrequent.
  2. The Whole Year Puzzle. My wife got me this thing for Christmas; that’s it up there; I probably should have taken the pieces out, but you get the idea– the months are across the two rows at the top and the rest are days, from 1-31, and supposedly you can rearrange the wood pieces to show every single day of the year. There are multiple ways for most (all?) of the days, too– every time Bek and I have compared our days (she has one too) they have been different. It’s set to Feb 11 because I try to keep it a day ahead. I didn’t do this yesterday either, so today I did the 10th and the 11th, because I can’t skip a day.
  3. Wordle. You all know what Wordle is. Takes two minutes, most days. My longest unbroken streak of wins was 167. It’s been 292 days since I skipped one. Prepare for a NYT games streak, by the way.
  4. NYT Mini Crossword. Generally under a minute. I occasionally go on tears where I’ll do the regular crossword every day, but the longer ones can take over an hour and I don’t usually want to burn that much time. The Mini is much shorter.
  5. Spelling Bee, also an NYT game. I win this every day and I try to do it without any clues. I’m not successful at that terribly often– maybe once or twice a week. That said, I usually only need clues for the last four or five words at most, and there are sometimes up to 70 words. I don’t actually play Connections very often because I’m terrible at it. I lose more often than I win.
  6. Duolingo. I’m back on my Arabic again; I deleted all my progress and started over, but I’m doing a full … circle? Lesson? Whatever they call them, I’m doing one of them a day.
  7. Busuu. I’m keeping a streak up here as well. Busuu breaks down into chapters and lessons; I’m in Chapter 4, Lesson 5, and shit is getting complicated fast. That said, I’m still doing a lesson a day. It’s a lot harder than Duolingo but I feel like I’m learning more effectively. That said, the tiny font is still killing me. I may switch this to my iPad to see if the increased screen real estate leads to bigger letters. I could learn to read this damn language if I could just see it. 

The weird thing is looking at that right now, I feel like it’s not that much? But I also feel like I spend way too much of every day thinking about whether I’ve finished xxx yet or not, and that might be a sign that it’s time to cut some stuff. How can I do all this and still spend six hours fucking around on TikTok every night? I gotta keep my priorities straight, people!

Oh, so you wanna fight now

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Busuu threw this at me just now, out of nowhere:

There were another couple of sentences beyond this, but you get the idea. This induced panic at first– I am nowhere near being able to translate any of this shit, but after a second what I realized is that this is actually a drill at parsing individual words out of a sentence. The underlined ones– for some reason Paul didn’t have one in his last sentence– were blank, and I was given five or six options for the word the person said to choose from. I managed to 100% it, then did it again when I decided I was going to make a blog post out of it, so … yay me.

Also, this is much bigger than the screen of my actual phone, and Christ, I’m going to need to start doing this on my iPad or something just to be able to read the letters. This font is a bitch.

I spent the rest of the evening writing practice tests for tomorrow. My day is set for the next couple of days of school, then easy intro to Pythagoras on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be an easy week. He said. 

A tentative endorsement

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I asked a few days ago if anyone had any recommendations for language-learning apps, and while I didn’t actually receive any (you bastards) I did manage to find an app called Busuu all on my own. I’ve been going back and forth between it and Duolingo all week, and while I’m only five days in, I already like it a lot more than Duolingo, if only because 1) it’s explicitly teaching me how the alphabet works, or at least trying, and 2) in the bits in between talking about different sets of letters, it’s approaching language-learning in a way that makes a lot more sense to me than Duolingo’s style, which is … idiosyncratic.

(What do I mean by “idiosyncratic”? Duolingo did not tell me how to say hello to someone and ask them their name in half a year of study. It did, however, tell me how to comparatively rank my feelings about my lion vs. my neighbor’s lion.)

The other cool thing Busuu does, beyond, y’know, teaching things in a reasonable order, is that it allows you to record yourself speaking or writing short sentences and then builds a social media site on top of that, where you can listen to people trying to say sentences in English and help them out, or vice versa. I’m not completely sold on this, especially since the last time I really interacted with it it told me to “describe myself or someone else,” a feat completely beyond my abilities, and then wouldn’t let me move on without entering something. I wrote “I don’t know how to do this” in the box, and have received a handful of corrections entirely in Arabic, which, of course, I can’t read, nor do I actually know how to type Arabic letters on my phone in the first place. (And, to be clear, they wanted Latin transliterations, so “Marhaba, asmi Luther,” not مرحبا، اسمي لوثر )

Also, I’m most of the way through a seven-day trial period, and the premium version is a year for $84. Which I’m willing to pay, don’t get me wrong, but is probably too steep for quite a lot of people. And the font is too Goddamn small, but that’s true of damn near every Arabic app I’ve ever encountered. I need Arabic to be about twice as big as Latin letters to be comprehensible. That size in that little bit of Arabic up there? Too fucking small.

Anyway, despite all that, early signs are definitely positive on this one. I’ll report back once I get further in and let you know if my feelings change.

Back on my bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve jumped back into Duolingo again, trying to regain what little Arabic I had learned on the first run, and … man, the way this software works just isn’t going to do it for me. I know how to learn from books, but software still eludes me; has anyone out there actually had any luck learning a language (use whatever definition you want for “learning”) using software of any kind, whether desktop or phone app or whatever? Particularly when the language in question was written in something other than Latin script? Let me know.

On Arabic and learning to read

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

ليس لدي فكرة عما يقوله هذا

According to Duolingo, I have been studying Arabic daily for one hundred and forty-seven days. And Duolingo does a lot of things, but one of the things that Duolingo has not managed to do in 147 days of daily practice is teach me to read Arabic. One would think that would be an early priority! It is not. Duolingo teaches almost exclusively through word recognition– what teachers used to call the “whole language” method of teaching reading, and for the most part genuinely seems uninterested in actually providing explanations for things unless absolutely necessary. Even then it kind of hides them in corners of the app and finds ways to make them useless anyway. There is actually a “Learn the letters” section! I have been doing lessons in there for months and it still hasn’t gotten to half the letters.

Whole language is bullshit, y’all. Even as an interested adult it’s an insanely rough way to learn a new language. It means that in-context I can recognize words but if you throw a sentence at me with no context I may not even be able to figure out all the letters. After five months. Keep in mind I already read Hebrew and once taught myself to read German from essentially scratch over a weekend so that I could pass a mandatory translation exam for my degree. I’m good at languages! But this isn’t it. And I also take issue with some of Duolingo’s choices for the sentences and phrases they’re throwing at us. For example:

تلفازي داخل أسدي

Which means “My television is inside my lion” and I swear to God is a sentence that has shown up in my exercises, I believe in a unit called “Express a problem.” That’s not a joke. It’s a real thing. Or this one, during the unit on prepositions, which consisted exclusively of things being in front of or behind things:

هناك زوجتك مع رجل خلف المطعم

That means “There is your wife with a man behind the restaurant,” and … okay! Sure! That’s a thing that has probably happened. But I don’t know how to say “hello” or introduce myself yet. They have literally not taught “Hi, my name is _____, how are you?” but I can express trepidation about the eating habits of my lion.

Anyway, over the last few days– because there is no problem so minor that I won’t try to solve it by throwing money at it– I have acquired both a fine set of Arabic alphabet flash cards and a new textbook dedicated specifically to teaching reading. I have learned more about the alphabet in an hour of perusing that book between today and yesterday than I have in five months of Duolingo. Sadly, I have not received further instructions about how to express my feelings about my lion:

أنا أحب أسدي لكني لا أحب أسد جاري.

That’s “I love my lion but I do not love my neighbor’s lion,” and again, no, that’s not a joke.

About that wedding…

On By Luther M. SilerIn StoriesLeave a comment

10570415_903878939640335_2608527244589607807_nSo this is a new thing.  I’ve never come home from a wedding wanting to do research before.  My cousin’s new bride is Lebanese, and her entire family are Melkite Catholics.  The wedding woke up every last bit of me that used to be a religious scholar, and I walked away all kinds of full of questions.  The ceremony was split fairly evenly between English and Arabic, which was already fascinating enough on its own, and the full name of the church is the Melkite Greek Catholic Church– and there was Greek in abundance all over the church itself– despite the fact that it is an Arab Catholic church.

There is history here, and I must learn it.  I managed to wedge my way into an interesting conversation with the deacon at the reception, only to get called away by the distribution of wedding cake and Lebanese baklava, which caused me to ask my cousin all sorts of questions about the Melkite position on polygamy.  Needless to say, I did not manage to acquire a second Melkite wife to make baklava for me.  These are an interesting people, and I wish to know more of them.

So, yeah: the reception.  The reception started off with what I would call typical reception music; the newlyweds walked into the hall to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, which I approved of greatly.  Maybe twenty minutes into the dancing, the DJ abruptly veered into what initially felt to me like Arabic pop music, but probably wasn’t, because her entire family immediately knew what to do about it.  This was awesome, especially when the oldest, fattest dude at the wedding proceeded to manage to get every Lebanese woman at the reception, as well as most of the younger white ones, dancing in a circle around him while he cut a rug worthy of BB King in his prime– at which point he broke the circle and dragged my only-barely-willing cousin and his new bride into the middle of it so they could dance around them instead.  Dude was amazing.  Sadly, I wasn’t able to get good footage of him, because while my iPhone can handle darkish rooms for pictures, video with bad lighting just isn’t happening.

The song after the Arabic dance music?  Yeah!!!  Which was also hilarious.

Then there was this dude.  I love this dude, just for rocking that suit:

IMG_1518The jacket matched the pants perfectly and was positively Zoot-suit like in its length.  I didn’t get a chance to talk to this guy much but he is my favorite.  Well, my second favorite, after that other dude.

Things I want to learn

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Uncategorized1 Comment

Had to cancel another ukulele appointment yesterday; it’s been two weeks since the first one, which is still the only one I’ve been to.  Other things keep intervening on both our parts.  I’m practicing occasionally but not really committing to it.  Still can’t handle that whole three-finger-chord thing.  I suspect when I topped out at Medium difficulty on Guitar Hero and Rock Band that was life telling me that I was never going to be any good at playing stringed instruments.

That said, it got me thinking about what other shit I was terrible at that I didn’t want to be terrible at any more.  Here’s a partial list.  Add your own!

  • Cooking.  I’m actually making great progress on this so far this year, as shown by the fact that half of my posts are about something I made.  But I want to be better.  I’m still doing pretty well for someone who could barely boil things at the beginning of 2013.  My next target is going to be chicken paprikash; sometime in the next couple of days.  In the meantime I need to find some hot paprika.
  • I have failed at learning two academic things in my life.  The first is calculus, which I dropped out of about 2/3 of the way through my senior year when I realized that a) I didn’t need it to graduate; b) I was already admitted to and scholarshipped at my school of choice, and c) I was a goddamn second-semester senior and screw calculus.  I took no math whatsoever in college, unless statistics count, and I loved both of the statistics courses I’ve taken– I tested out of all of the requirements my college had.  But I would like, as a grown-up, to have at least a vague understanding of what calculus is about and how it works.  There is a course on my iPad.  I’ve never opened it.
  • The second thing is Arabic, which I made the mistake of taking my first semester of my freshman year in college, and I wasn’t prepared for it so I dropped it.  I’ve learned Hebrew since then so I know I can handle non-European scripts.  There’s a course for this on my iPad too.  I don’t even necessarily want to learn to speak or understand it; I just want to be able to read and write in it.  I can still read (pointed) Hebrew, if slowly, despite the thirteen years that have passed since I had any formal instruction, so I figure once I’ve learned it it isn’t going to go away.
  • The building trades.  I could make this four bullets if I wanted to, but I gotta leave for work in a few minutes.  In no particular order:  Carpentry, plumbing, electrician…ing, and enough basic mechanical engineering that I feel like I know my way around an engine.  I’d like to know enough to be able to wire up a lamp to a switch or build a bookshelf or replace drywall or fix a spark plug or trade out a toilet without screwing it up.  It’s entirely possible that I’m already capable of these things if I take my time and am careful about it, but I’d like to know enough to know that what I’m about to do isn’t going to work, rather than my usual method of repeatedly screwing up until I get it right.  I’m not completely clueless; I managed to install a new radio in my current car without electrocuting myself, but still.  Better is the metric here.
  • Botany.  There’s a bunch of goddamn plants in my back yard; I wanna know what they are.
  • Music, specifically ukulele and harmonica, and whatever music theory knowledge is required to be able to competently handle those two instruments.  I have a story that I need to remember to tell you about going to Guitar City yesterday.  I very nearly did something bad.

I’m sure there’s more; I’ll edit if something obvious comes up.  What do you want to know about that you don’t?