Tag: writing

FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH BUSUU

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching

… now Lingodeer is my best friend.

(My life has just changed; while checking to make sure that I was using the right color to cross out the Busuu app, I discovered that new friend Salman in that famous picture is the guy on the left, not the guy on the right, and for some reason I can’t handle that.)

But anyway. The last time I rattled on about Arabic apps on here I was already starting to sour on Busuu, but things have gotten rather worse since then, and since I’ve also found a decent third Arabic-language app (I will never stop collecting them) I figured it was worth another post. Now, it’s worth pointing out: I’m only discussing the app’s approach to Arabic, as I’ve not tried it with any other language, and Arabic is fucking hard, so I can imagine writing an app about how to teach it is also pretty fucking hard.

But nonetheless. I’m not actually giving up on the app, because the (effectively) dictation sections are genuinely useful, but I don’t think it’s teaching me anything any longer. For example, yesterday’s unit was called “Making Plans.” It taught me the words for:

  • Plans;
  • To Be Free (one verb form);
  • “do you fancy”…
  • “let me know”
  • “give me a call”
  • “How about…”
  • Shall
  • “I’d love to,”
  • “Do you mind,” and
  • “Sorry, I can’t.”

It breaks these down into groups of three or so, and after each few words it’ll repeat one and I need to click on the definition. After a couple of groups will be one of the listening exercises I mentioned in the post above, and then it’ll go through all the words and I’ll have to pick the translation from three possibilities. A lot of the time a good test-taker with no Arabic could get these right; for example, if a phrase ends in a question mark, and only one of the answer choices is a question, that’s the right one.

And I figured out the other day that this last flurry of multiple-choice questions will be in the order the words were presented, which … makes the whole exercise useless, frankly. And then there’s the social media functions, which I’ve abandoned entirely, because no one who has been using this app could possibly complete these exercises, particularly the written ones. You can record a few seconds of silence to get past the “record yourself talking about making plans with a friend” prompt, but if you write something it wants several sentences, which I am incapable of without literally typing them into Google Translate and copy-pasting what it gives me back.

Oh, and the community feedback had potential to be super useful, except for one little thing: the helpful people out there who want to work with me on improving my Arabic largely don’t speak English. Giving me pronunciation tips or correcting my grammar in Arabic isn’t actually helpful!

So, yeah. I’ll keep fucking with it because I paid for it, but fifty days into Round III of Learn Arabic I’m no longer stressing about this app.

That said, let’s talk about Lingodeer, which sounds dumb but which is the current big winner among my Arabic apps. Wanna know why? Here’s why:

You know what that is? That’s a fucking spelling test. Wanna know the best way to get me to learn to read this language? It turns out that it’s spelling tests. Every letter and vowel and pronunciation mark in that group needs to be used– as of right now, they haven’t started throwing distractors at me yet– and Lingodeer deliberately overpoints everything, focusing on teaching pronunciation much more than any of the other apps would. Many of those characters don’t even appear in standard (?) Arabic– I’m still not a hundred percent certain how the dialect differences work, and this app really wants lots of -un endings on words, but when I type “My sister” into Google Translate I get أختى, which has a few less vowels than they give me up there.

You might have to stare at it for a moment to figure out my mistake here; the Arabic masculine word for “British” is, roughly, biriitaaniyyun. That squiggle that looks like a W above the letter on the left indicates a doubled letter, and I put it in the wrong place– I wrote it as biriitaanniyun.

(Why the doubled vowels? Because there are three long vowels in there. In most cases a long vowel is represented as a doubled vowel when transliterated. Where Lingodeer gets weird is insisting on also including a short vowel every single time a long vowel appears, which it does several times here.)

Anyway, there are thirteen individual characters that needed to be put in the right order to get that right, and I only missed one of them, which felt awesome. And then it hit me with the feminine version, which is even longer, and I got it right:

I give you biriitaaniyyatun.

More hotness? I want lots more of this. Rub it on my face:

Every single section has stuff like this, that gets way into the weeds, and is fucking awesome. Even if I don’t look at it on every unit, the fact that it’s there is magnificent.

This is, slowly but surely, actually teaching me to read. I’m making progress here. Which is awesome. And is why Lingodeer is my new best friend.

Go ahead. Ask me questions. I might be able to answer them.

ETA: I just jumped back in and did some more spelling exercises. I’m proud of this, dammit:

A tentative endorsement

On By Luther M. SilerIn life

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.

In which I have been here a long time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek1 Comment

I discovered a rogue bit of autocorrect had changed “Baldree” to “Balder” in the previous post and went to fix it, only to discover this little bit of blogwankery. My review of Bookstall & Bonedust was the four thousand, four hundred and forty-fourth post on the site, and this one is number four thousand, four hundred and forty-five.

Whew. That’s … that’s a whole lotta words, right there.

On 10 years of Infinitefreetime

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing

10 years ago today, I started a blog.

Since then?

10,545 subscribers.

419,908 unique visitors with 745,292 page views.

4,260 posts, counting this one.

Those utter bastards at WordPress appear to have removed all of my writing-related stats, but I hit a million words in November of 2019, and since that was also the 3,000th post it’s probably not unreasonable to suggest that I’ve written about 1.3 million words or so here.

I’ve had at least one hit from damn near every country on Earth. The only voids on the map big enough to see are North Korea, Western Sahara, Guinea, Gabon, and the Central African Republic.

Not bad, for a site literally named after the idea that I was too fucking busy to have a blog.

In which I think not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking

Missing a day once in a while is no big deal, even if I don’t do it very often. But I refuse to be busy enough to miss two days in a row, even if the post for that second day is a ridiculous two-sentence half-assed excuse for a blog post.

This one is three sentences.

The last post of last year

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I keep almost writing a 2021 blogwanking post or a sort of round-up of last year, and then finding excuses not to do it. Not that the bathroom renovation isn’t more interesting (I hope, at least) than endless navel-gazing, but I can only put this off for so long before I just can’t write it any more. So, long story short: traffic last year was way way way down, which doesn’t matter because it’s still plenty high for a personal blog site of a non-famous person in 2021, and y’all are stuck with me here anyway for the foreseeable future. Two things are pretty cool. This is the lifetime map of countries that I’ve had hits from:

That’s … everywhere, basically; that island up at the top is Svalbard island, where less than fifty people live, most of whom are climate researchers, and it’s part of Norway anyway. North Korea. South Sudan. Tajikistan, I think? (EDIT: Nope, that’s Turkmenistan.) These are not heavily populated countries with a lot of infrastructure, in other words. And despite the low numbers of actual hits (down over 20K in hits and about 12K in unique visitors) the geography from last year is pretty gratifying all by itself:

One way or another, the notion that people from literally all over the world have at least popped in over here, if not actually stuck around and hung out, is pretty amazing.

I have to admit something that is, if not a Hot Take, at least not an especially popular opinion: for me personally, and my immediate family, I don’t think last year was that bad of a year. Now, you have to take this in context, where I am pretty sure that I have described every year since 2016 as the worst year of my life, and I remain of the belief that yes, my life really did spiral south for five straight years, culminating in the loss of my mother on January 11, 2020. 2021 was the first year in a long fucking time where I have a few good things to think about when I look back on it. My brother and his wife had their first child. My dad’s doing okay. We’ve done a lot of work on the house. I made more money last year than I’ve ever made before, a feat I should be able to repeat this year, and because I’ve paid off my credit cards, leaving me with no credit card debt for the first time since college, I’ve been able to keep more of that money and use it for more than just paying off interest. My son is happy and healthy and thriving at school. My wife got a promotion and a raise. I, who a few years ago was convinced I’d never see the inside of a classroom again, got nominated for Teacher of the Year again. By the time this school year ends, I’ll not only have paid off my car, but my student loans might be gone.

All in all, on a strictly personal basis, I can actually see some light again. I have reason for at least a guarded level of optimism, which has not been true for quite some time. I mean, the rest of the world is still going to hell, don’t get me wrong. But at least not everything is going to shit.

My one big personal regret right now is that my writing career is, at the least, on a significant pause, and very well might be done. I haven’t written a word of fiction in at least a couple of years, and I’m not missing it much. I mean, it’s not like I was changing the world or anything like that, as much as I tried to take everything seriously, I never managed to make any money at it– every single con I attended lost me money, so it was more of an expensive hobby than anything else. I’m not saying I’ll never release another book, but I’m not in a hurry to.

You never know. Most of my creative energy lately is going here and to the YouTube channel, and maybe eventually that’ll blow up. If not, well, we’ll see what comes next.

In which no, you cannot

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching

I discovered earlier today that this had happened– read the first couple of paragraphs if you don’t immediately see why I’m linking to it. The lady who wrote it sent me a very nice email about it, which I think deserves a response, if only to point out that I haven’t thrown myself down a hole or anything since I wrote that post. I was fascinated enough by it that I actually outed myself to the rest of the math team this afternoon so that I could share the article with them, so if any of my co-workers abruptly stop talking to me in the next few days I guess I know why.

I’m not quite sure what the hell happened today. My observing student taught his first lesson today, to my first and second hour, who were absolutely perfect for him, a feat that led to me spending $20 on candy this afternoon on the way home, and I intend to distribute every single piece tomorrow. Then third and fourth hours showed their asses in a big way; I had to put three kids out, and then the class period ended abruptly when the entire 8th grade got called downstairs for a meeting on no notice at all.

Oh, and Hosea asked four different girls to either be his girlfriend or to let him kiss them today, so I had to deal with that. One of them brought me a note he had written her. Check this out:

She has declined his offer to be her pudding.

I am not currently aware of whether the same poem was also used for the other girls, or whether those requests were in person.

God, I need tomorrow to be quiet.

Hey, my book’s out!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Yes, I know, you’ve seen that image on this page an awful lot lately, but the fact is that other than irregularly mentioning it here I’ve done nothing to let people know that Click was coming out, and the fact that I’m too lazy to market my own books probably isn’t a great sign? Unsurprisingly, presale numbers reflect my lack of effort. At any rate, it’s available now, so feel free to go grab it if you want to and, for some reason, haven’t yet.

This is my last week of summer vacation, effectively, since I need to kick shit into gear starting August 1st and the kids are back on the 11th, and other than getting the boy back and forth from camp every day I don’t have a single Goddamn thing to do. Not an appointment, not a job responsibility, nothing. It’s video games, lounging about (I just got out of the pool) and cleaning for the next six days, and I am super psyched about it.

After that, I get busy fast, and this year’s gonna be a hell of a ride no matter what happens. But this week, I’m not stressing about anything at all unless I absolutely have to.