110 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2024
    1. This guy learns music creation efficiently, by learning the theory first and really analyzing worked examples (the masters). Positively surprises me. I rarely come across a non-learning expert who intuitively uses proper processes for skill acquisition.

  2. Aug 2024
  3. Jul 2024
    1. This lovely old file cabinet is 52" high x 14-3/4" wide x 27-1/2" deep. Each drawer is 6-1/8" wide x 4-6/8" high x 18-1/4" deep. It has a few scratches on the side, but nothing that can't be touched up. Otherwise, it's in good condition. In the early 80's, I worked on a TV series called "Cassie & Co." starring Angie Dickinson. This (and another antique file cabinet) was purchased and used as set dressing in Angie/Cassie's office. When the show was canceled, I bought the cabinets and have had them ever since. I don't have specific background info on them.

      https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/3801438776811728/

      Sold · Antique 16-Drawer Library Card File Cabinet

      Purchased for $250

      cost per drawer $15.63

  4. Apr 2024
  5. Mar 2024
    1. This morning I ran across a copy of Jane Austen's novel Emma with some of the keywords on each page translated into Welsh as footnotes at the bottom of the page. Apparently it's part of a series of classic books published by Icon into a variety of different languages and meant for language learners.

      The full list of their titles with Welsh can be found here: Webster's Welsh Thesaurus Editions

      I'm curious if anyone has used these before, and if so, how helpful they've found them for building their Welsh vocabulary as they read English language works.

      Is anyone aware of Welsh language books that have this sort of English vocabulary cross listed on the page? (Sort of the way in which lingo.360.cymru has news stories in Welsh with English translation help along the way?)

      syndication link: https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/websters-welsh-thesaurus-editions/40131

  6. Feb 2024
  7. Jan 2024
  8. Sep 2023
    1. https://www.ebay.com/itm/204449941096

      2 drawer 4 x 6" card index<br /> Listed in September 2023 for starting bid of $32.95

      Cost per drawer: $16.45 <br /> Cost per drawer with approx. shipping: $25.75

      Purchased 2023-09-10

  9. Aug 2023
    1. https://www.lochby.com/collections/frontpage/products/venture-pouch<br /> Lochby Venture Pouch<br /> $44.00

      Acquired one of these in early 2023 on sale?

      several internal sections including for pens. <br /> will easily fit a handful or so of 4 x 6" index cards for quick travel

    1. Bailey Pearlescent White Lacquer Ballpoint Pen

      https://www.cross.com/cr_en_us/at0452-22

      Purchased as a gift on 2023-07-31

      Uses standard Cross refills like Medium Ballpoint Refill #8513.

  10. Jul 2023
    1. Purchased from JetPens.com on 11/19/2021

      2023-07-02 With very minimal use, the cap plastic cracked against metal ferrule and broke without any forcing at all. Repair? Replacement? Appears to be a common problem with TWSBI pens.

  11. Jun 2023
  12. Apr 2023
    1. I've been experimenting with the idea of combining ChatGPT, DALL-E, the ReadSpeaker TTS engine and the LARA toolkit to create multimedia stories that can be used as reading material for people who want to improve their foreign language skills.

      https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5438280716

      Manny's description of writing introductory language books using ChatGPT.

  13. Mar 2023
    1. We know from modern neuroscience that prediction is a core property of human intelligence. Perhaps the game of predict-the-next-word is what children unconsciously play when they are acquiring language themselves: listening to what initially seems to be a random stream of phonemes from the adults around them, gradually detecting patterns in that stream and testing those hypotheses by anticipating words as they are spoken. Perhaps that game is the initial scaffolding beneath all the complex forms of thinking that language makes possible.

      Is language acquisition a very complex method of pattern recognition?

    1. The Language Master<br /> BBC - Michel Thomas<br /> [English CC]<br /> [Leg. PT-BR]

      Michel Thomas is one of the most brilliant language teachers in the world. His usual clients are movie stars and business leaders. This programme takes him to a Sixth Form College in London to work with school pupils, to test his claim that he can teach anyone a language in a week - with no reading, writing or homework. The film also explores his personal history - as a hero of the French Resistance during WW II.

      The Michel Thomas method involves: - slow build up of words, phrases, natural grammar - forced production of the language through practice - positive interaction - patience - no stress - no judgement - encouragement - constant evidence of progress

      How does "understanding" of the language evolve out of this method? It's more like revelation rather than understanding...

      This method appears much more atomic than that of SSiW (Aran Jones), but some of this is down to the fact that there's a live person who is able to unjudgementally prompt one with pieces which they've missed. The teacher has the context whereas the taped instructors do not. Presumably this sort of interpersonal prompting and context isn't necessarily required, but it can help to better lower the learner's stress and potentially speed up the learning process. It would require some standardization to set up a specific experiment to test between these two modes to tease this data out.

      Reference key: [[Levy1997]]<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

    1. Dr. Pimsleur’s research on memory was perhaps one of his most revolutionary achievements. He discovered that if learners were reminded of new words at gradually increasing intervals, each time they would remember longer than the time before. He documented the optimal spacing for information to move from short-term into long-term, or permanent, memory.

      I thought Ebbinghaus did this in the late 1800s?! 😜

    1. My Ten Years With Michel Thomas - Dr. Harold Goodman

      https://youtu.be/askAFNzI9Rc

      Michel Thomas taught languages conversationally in both languages by creating absolutely no pressure or worry and always keeping students in the "now".

      Find:<br /> Kaplan, Howard. “The Language Master.” The Jerusalem Report, August 11, 1994.

      Watch:<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

    1. The Ollendorff method likely influenced the development of other well-known 19th century foreign language learning methods, for example, the Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer[7][8] which was widely used until the 1950s.[9]

      The Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer of teaching languages was popular until the 1950s and was influenced by la méthode Ollendorff from the 1830s.

    2. Ollendorff was heavily indebted to an early "modern method" teacher, Jean (John) Manesca, who appears to have written the first fully developed modern method language course in the early 1820s.
    3. he developed "la méthode Ollendorff" (the Ollendorff method), a new way of learning foreign languages based on oral communication rather than on textual comprehension as used in the traditional "grammar translation" method.
    1. Slow learner

      reply to jo-king

      https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/slow-learner/38360/8

      I don't do it as much as I did when I started out, but I would put the audio files into a podcatcher that allowed me to speed up or slow down the audio. The first time through I would slow the audio down to 75% of full speed so I didn't need to fiddle so much with the pause button (especially when I was listening while commuting or doing other household chores). Then I'd speed it up a bit each time until I was able to do 1.10 or 1.25x speed at which point the pauses weren't long enough to get a word in edgewise. At this point I move on to the next. Be careful here though as on some of the longer sentences at the ends of some lessons, if you play them too slowly, you'll forget what the beginning of the sentence was by the time they get to the end.

      Based on a trick in my daughter's dual immersion Japanese class which used the word "wakanai" (Japanese for "I don't know"), I also formed the practice of saying "ddim gwybod" in place of words I couldn't immediately remember so that I could focus on the ones I did know instead of getting too tripped up on the ones I didn't. Eventually on repetition and revision they would slowly seep into my brain. Fortunately the kind and patient instructors on the tape never made fun of me or judged me for my mistakes and that made it much easier to eventually pick things up.

      Sticking with it has become quite fun and it definitely gets easier with time. pob lwc!

  14. Feb 2023
    1. reply to Share the ideas dancing in your ZK with us. February 17, 2023

      Congratulations @Will on the milestone! @ctietze's analogy with smithwork is fantastic. I might also liken it to the point in acquiring a new language when one begins dreaming in their new target language. So many talk about the idea of increased productivity associated with having a zk, but most spend an inordinate amount of time on shiny object syndrome or over complicating it and never get to the point of quickly writing things out, filing them, and being able to trust that their system will just work™. When you no longer notice it anymore and it has become second nature is when the real fun (and magic) begins to happen. It also seems easier and more natural to break the "rules" once you've internalized the basics. We should spend more time talking about the value of 'zettelkasten fluency'.

      I'm excited this week to be doing some work in areas of the history of misinformation, cultural myths, and 'American exceptionalism' in preparation for Dan Allosso's upcoming book club on Kruse and Zelizer's new edited book. I suspect he'll announce it shortly at https://danallosso.substack.com/ if folks are interested in joining in the discussion/sensemaking.

      Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books, 2023.

  15. Jan 2023
    1. https://polygloss.app/posts/scottish-gaelic-and-language-jam/

      Some useful resources for Scottish Gaelic.

      Also interesting to see how someone else approaches self-learning a language and what they compiled.

  16. Dec 2022
    1. There are different kinds of information, some of which don't make sense being recorded at all. I was struggling with what to record and what not to record for a long time. For example, I took notes on programming syntax that are just useless (most of these things can be googled in seconds and they are usually decently documented already).

      How was this not obvious from the jump? Was the author of the essay so distracted by shiny object syndrome they failed to see the obvious?

      It's like taking notes in a language class... the goal is to read and write with fluency, so you practice these things regularly and gain fluency over time. Taking notes about the grammar and syntax of a language is highly unlikely to get you to fluency. Note taking is the wrong tool for a number of processes and the user should very quickly get a gut feeling for what's useful and what is not.

      This author obviously missed the boat here.

  17. Oct 2022
    1. To this day, most institutions of higher learning either do not know how to instructstudents in reading beyond the elementary level, or lack thefacilities and personnel to do so.

      This was revised in 1972, but this statement is sadly still broadly true today in 2022.

      What other advanced reading teaching is broadly available outside of this particular text?

    2. Intellectual readiness involves a minimumlevel of visual perception such that the child can take in andremember an entire word and the letters that combine to formit. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly andto use several sentences in correct order.

      Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?

      How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?

    3. method," and the method known variously as the "see-say,""look-say," "look-and-say," or "word method." Doubtless experiments are now being undertaken in methods and approaches that differ from all of these. It is perhaps too earlyto tell whether any of these is the long-sought panacea forall reading ills.

      Hence, researchers are very active at the present time, and their work has resulted in numerous new approaches to reading instruction. Among the more important new programs are the so-called eclectic approach, the individualized reading approach, the language-experience approach, the various approaches based on linguistic principles, and others based more or less closely on some kind of programmed instruction. In addition, new mediums such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet ( i.t.a. ) have been employed, and sometimes these involve new methods as well. Still other devices and programs are the "total immersion method," the "foreign-language-school

      Have we ultimately come to the conclusion that neurodiversity means there is no one-size-fits all solution? Should we also be placing some focus on orality and memory methods to allow those to flourish as well? Where is the literature on "orality pedagogy"? Is it a thing? It should be...

    4. analytical rather than synthetic, originated in Germany and was advocated by HoraceMann and other educators after about 1840. This involvedteaching the visual recognition of whole words before givingany attention to letter-names or letter-sounds.

      Did this approach have a categorical name?

    1. https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2018/11/11/on-word-field-farming/

      Creating world fields (groups of words related to a particular area or field of knowledge) can be helpful for acquiring vocabulary in a new language. There's no research here to back up the claim, but it's an interesting word game and method for familiarize oneself with a small area and acquire new words related to an area or various related stem words.

  18. Sep 2022
  19. Aug 2022
    1. The person who has acquired knowledge of a language has internalized asystem of rules that relate sound and meaning in a particular way.
  20. Jul 2022
    1. Jun 6, 2018 — Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub is a perfect illustration of how value is ascribed differently in Silicon Valley than in the ...github microsoft acquisitionwhy did microsoft buy githubwhy did microsoft buy github redditmicrosoft github strategygithub revenuewho owned github before microsoftPeople also search for

      Jun 6, 2018 — Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub is a perfect illustration of how value is ascribed differently in Silicon Valley than in the ...

    1. Microsoft acquired GitHub, a popular code-repository service used by many developers and large companies, for $7.5 billion in stock.
  21. Jun 2022
    1. Interleaving is a learning technique that involves mixing together different topics or forms of practice, in order to facilitate learning. For example, if a student uses interleaving while preparing for an exam, they can mix up different types of questions, rather than study only one type of question at a time.Interleaving, which is sometimes referred to as mixed practice or varied practice, is contrasted with blocked practice (sometimes referred to as specific practice), which involves focusing on only a single topic or form of practice at a time.

      Interleaving (aka mixed practice or varied practice) is a learning strategy that involves mixing different topics, ideas, or forms of practice to improve outcomes as well as overall productivity. Its opposite and less effective strategy is blocking (or block study or specific practice) which focuses instead on working on limited topics or single forms of practice at the same time.


      This may be one of the values of of the Say Something In Welsh method which interleaves various new nouns and verbs as well as verb tenses in focused practice.

      Compare this with the block form which would instead focus on lists of nouns in a single session and then at a later time lists of verbs in a more rote fashion. Integrating things together in a broader variety requires more work, but is also much more productive in the long run.

    1. the more effort they had to put into the study strategy, the less they felt they were learning.

      misinterpreted-effort hypothesis: the amount of effort one puts into studying is inversely proportional to how much one feels they learn.


      Is this why the Says Something In Welsh system works so well? Because it requires so much mental work and effort in short spans of time? Particularly in relation to Duolingo which seems easier?

    1. As my colleague Robin Paige likes to say, we are also social beings in a social world. So if we shift things just a bit to think instead about the environments we design and cultivate to help maximize learning, then psychology and sociology are vital for understanding these elements as well.

      Because we're "social beings in a social world", we need to think about the psychology and sociology of the environments we design to help improve learning.

      Link this to: - Design of spaces like Stonehenge for learning in Indigenous cultures, particularly the "stage", acoustics (recall the ditch), and intimacy of the presentation. - research that children need face-to-face interactions for language acquisition

  22. May 2022
    1. https://www.oldtrestle.com/product-page/theory-gin-002

      Theory Gin 002 is a gin experiment influenced by whispers of the East. It borrows five-spice powder and black tea from the Yunnan province, emboldening traditional botanicals in the bottle. With a second infusion, green tea marks its unique color and palette. Theory Gin 002 is the second in a series of gin experiments.

    1. If you can acquire the youngest users, retain them as they get older, and continue to attract the new cohorts of young users, you will win over time. 

      Kids are the biggest and most expansive demographic to acquire users from.

    1. https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/what-language-s-are-you-studying/73190

      I've been studying Welsh on and off now for just over a year.

      I've been using a mix of Duolingo for it's easy user interface and it's built in spaced repetition. I like the way that it integrates vocabulary and grammar in a holistic way which focuses on both reading, writing, and listening.

      However, I've also been using the fantastic platform Say Something in Welsh. This uses an older method of listening and producing based teaching which actually makes my brain feel a bit tired after practice. The focus here is solely on listening and speaking and forces the student to verbally produce the language. It's a dramatically different formula than most high school and college based courses I've seen and used over the years having taken 3 years of Spanish, 2 of French, and 2 of Latin.

      The set up consists of the introduction of a few words which are then used in a variety of combinations to create full sentences. The instructors say a sentence in English and the listener is encouraged in just a few seconds to attempt to produce it in the target language (Welsh, in my case), then the instructor says the sentence in Welsh with a pause for the student to repeat it properly, another instructor says it in Welsh with a pause for a third repeat. This goes on for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. The end result is that the learner gets into the language much more quickly and can begin both understanding the spoken language as well as produce it much more rapidly than older school based methods (at least in my experience, though I have known some college language labs to use a much more limited version of a similar technique). Each lesson adds new material, but also reviews over older material in a spaced repetition format as well so you're always getting something new mixed in with the old to make new and interesting sentences for conversation.

      SSiW also has modules for Manx, Cornish, Dutch, and Spanish.

      I find that the two done hand in hand has helped me produce much faster results in language acquisition in an immersive manner than I have done previously and with much less effort.

  23. Apr 2022
    1. Since most of our feeds rely on either machine algorithms or human curation, there is very little control over what we actually want to see.

      While algorithmic feeds and "artificial intelligences" might control large swaths of what we see in our passive acquisition modes, we can and certainly should spend more of our time in active search modes which don't employ these tools or methods.

      How might we better blend our passive and active modes of search and discovery while still having and maintaining the value of serendipity in our workflows?

      Consider the loss of library stacks in our research workflows? We've lost some of the serendipity of seeing the book titles on the shelf that are adjacent to the one we're looking for. What about the books just above and below it? How do we replicate that sort of serendipity into our digital world?

      How do we help prevent the shiny object syndrome? How can stay on task rather than move onto the next pretty thing or topic presented to us by an algorithmic feed so that we can accomplish the task we set out to do? Certainly bookmarking a thing or a topic for later follow up can be useful so we don't go too far afield, but what other methods might we use? How can we optimize our random walks through life and a sea of information to tie disparate parts of everything together? Do we need to only rely on doing it as a broader species? Can smaller subgroups accomplish this if carefully planned or is exploring the problem space only possible at mass scale? And even then we may be under shooting the goal by an order of magnitude (or ten)?

    1. allow Jakobson to explain why the first person and its cognates are both thelast linguistic acquisition of the child and the first linguistic loss of the aphasiac.Jakobson’s first essays to be translated into French came out in 1963. Barthesrefers to them, the very same year, in the preface to the Critical Essays where heidentifies (if one may say so) both positively and negatively with those two invalidspeaking subjects whom, for not having yet (or having no longer) access to thefirst person, he promotes as models or examples for the writer, granted one differ-ence: the writer takes responsibility for not uttering the “I” that both the childand the aphasiac are constitutionally unable to use.

      Is it broadly true that the first person and cognates are the last acquisitions of children and among the first losses of aphasiacs?

    1. Researchers have demonstrated, for instance, that intentionallyimitating someone’s accent allows us to comprehend more easily the words theperson is speaking (a finding that might readily be applied to second-languagelearning).
  24. Mar 2022
    1. First is that it actually lowers paid acquisition costs. It lowers them because the Facebook Ads algorithm rewards engaging advertisements with lower CPMs and lots of distribution. Facebook does this because engaging advertisements are just like engaging posts: they keep people on Facebook. 

      Engaging advertisements on Facebook benefit from lower acquisition costs because the Facebook algorithm rewards more interesting advertisements with lower CPMs and wider distribution. This is done, as all things surveillance capitalism driven, to keep eyeballs on Facebook.

      This isn't too dissimilar to large cable networks that provide free high quality advertising to mass manufacturers in late night slots. The network generally can't sell all of their advertising inventory, particularly in low viewing hours, so they'll offer free or incredibly cheap commercial rates to their bigger buyers (like Coca-Cola or McDonalds, for example) to fill space and have more professional looking advertisements between the low quality advertisements from local mom and pop stores and the "as seen on TV" spots. These higher quality commercials help keep the audience engaged and prevents viewers from changing the channel.

    1. Future tools will provide standard ized learning streams to help novices perform basic tasks and scaffolding that wraps the tool with guidance as users acquire expertise. Experts will be able to record their insights for others and make macros to speed common tasks by novices.

      We've been promised this for ages, but where is it? Shouldn't it be here by now if it were deliverable or actualizable?

      What are the problems in solving this?

      How might one automate the Markov monkey?

    1. Evaluations of the platform show that users who follow the avatar inmaking a gesture achieve more lasting learning than those who simply hear theword. Gesturing students also learn more than those who observe the gesture butdon’t enact it themselves.

      Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.

      How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?

      Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?

      Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.

    2. In a study published in 2020, for example, Macedonia and a group of sixcoauthors compared study participants who had paired new foreign-languagewords with gestures to those who had paired the learning of new words withimages of those words. The researchers found evidence that the motor cortex—the area of the brain that controls bodily movement—was activated in thegesturing group when they reencountered the vocabulary words they hadlearned; in the picture-viewing group, the motor cortex remained dormant. The“sensorimotor enrichment” generated by gesturing, Macedonia and hercoauthors suggest, helps to make the associated word more memorable

      Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.

      It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.

    3. the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory during foreign-language encoding.

      Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.

    4. Back then, Macedonia foundherself increasingly frustrated with the conventional format of foreign-languagecourses: a lot of sitting, listening, and writing. That’s not how anyone learnstheir native language, she notes. Young children encounter new words in a richsensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch theshiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh andsmelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing fromthe second-language classroom.

      Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.

    5. Cooke often employs a modified form of sign language with her (hearing)students at UMass. By using her hands, Cooke finds, she can accurately capturethe three-dimensional nature of the phenomena she’s explaining.

      Can gesturing during (second) language learning help dramatically improve the speed and facility of the second language acquisition by adult learners?

      Evidence in language acquisition in children quoted previously in The Extended Mind would indicate yes.

      link this related research

    6. Studies show that children whose parents gesture a lot proceed togesture frequently themselves, and eventually to acquire expansive spoken-wordvocabularies.

      Studies show the importance of gesturing in developing children as a precursor to language. Adults who gesture more have children who gesture more as well. There also seems to be a direct correlation to the gestural vocabulary of children at 14 months and their verbal vocabulary at 4 and 1/2 years of age.

  25. Feb 2022
    1. The basic approach is in line with Krashen's influential Theory of Input, suggesting that language learning proceeds most successfully when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible L2 material in a low-anxiety situation.

      Stephen Krashen's Theory of Input indicates that language learning is most successful when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible material in low-anxiety situations.

    1. This is a pretty cool looking project for language learning.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Manny Rayner </span> in Manny Rayner’s review of Abécédaire le petit prince | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>02/18/2022 11:40:10</time>)</cite></small>

      We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabet book based on Le petit prince. If you're a fan of the book and beginner level in French, you might find it fun! Start Chrome or Firefox and go here.

      There's a set of 26 pages, one for each letter, and each page comes in three versions. In the Semantic version, you can click on the picture and hear the word spoken in French; hovering gives you a translation. In the Phonetic version, you can hover over the word and spell though it one letter group at a time. Clicking on a letter group will play the sound and show you other words where that sound occurs. In the Examples version, you'll see a French sentence from Le petit prince which uses the word, annotated with audio and translations both for the individual words and for the sentence as a whole.

      The screenshot above illustrates. The D word is dessins ("drawings"). This is the Phonetic version: I've just clicked on the letter group in, and it's played the sound /ɛ̃/, the nasalised vowel that this letter group usually represents in French, and shown me that the same sound also occurs in invisible ("invisible") and jardin ("garden"). If you go to the Examples version, you see the sentence Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. ("My drawing wasn't supposed to be a hat") from the first chapter of the book.

      Comments will be very welcome! We're thinking of doing more of these and want to know where we can improve things.

  26. Dec 2021
    1. Neither, we think, would anyonewho has ever learned a truly alien language deny that doing so takesa great deal of imaginative work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts.

      Learning and mastering an alien language takes a tremendous amount of work, taxing one's imagination attempting to come to terms with similarly alien cultural concepts.

  27. Nov 2021
    1. Huang, speaking in Chinese, agrees that radicals can facilitate the mastery of characters while also building cultural understanding, yet he also encourages teachers to become versed in common inconsistencies.

      Learning radicals in languages like Chinese and the related Japanese can not only help vocabulary and literacy, but build cultural understanding of the language and culture.

    2. Mingquan Wang, senior lecturer and language coordinator of the Chinese program at Tufts University, insists that radicals should be a part of the curriculum for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. “The question is,” he says, “how that should be done.” In spring of 2013, Wang sent an online questionnaire to 60 institutions, including colleges and K–12 schools. Of the 42 that responded, 100 percent agreed that teachers of Chinese language should cover radicals, yet few use a separate book or dedicate a course to radicals, and most simply discuss radicals as they encounter them in textbooks.

      This has been roughly my experience with Japanese, but I've yet to see an incredibly good method for doing this in a structured way.

    1. Over the years in academic settings I've picked up pieces of Spanish, French, Latin and a few odd and ends of other languages.

      Six years ago we put our daughter into a dual immersion Japanese program (in the United States) and it has changed some of my view of how we teach and learn languages, a process which is also affected by my slowly picking up conversational Welsh using the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/ over the past year and change, a hobby which I wish I had more targeted time for.

      Children learn language through a process of contextual use and osmosis which is much more difficult for adults. I've found that the slowly guided method used by SSiW is fairly close to this method, but is much more targeted. They'll say a few words in the target language and give their English equivalents, then they'll provide phrases and eventually sentences in English and give you a few seconds to form them into the target language with the expectation that you try to say at least something, or pause the program to do your best. It's okay if you mess up even repeatedly, they'll say the correct phrase/sentence two times after which you'll repeat it again thus giving you three tries at it. They'll also repeat bits from one lesson to the next, so you'll eventually get it, the key is not to worry too much about perfection.

      Things slowly build using this method, but in even about 10 thirty minute lessons, you'll have a pretty strong grasp of fluent conversational Welsh equivalent to a year or two of college level coursework. Your work on this is best supplemented with interacting with native speakers and/or watching television or reading in the target language as much as you're able to.

      For those who haven't experienced it before I'd recommend trying out the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1/intro to hear it firsthand.

      The experience will give your brain a heavy work out and you'll feel mentally tired after thirty minutes of work, but it does seem to be incredibly effective. A side benefit is that over time you'll also build up a "gut feeling" about what to say and how without realizing it. This is something that's incredibly hard to get in most university-based or book-based language courses.

      This method will give you quicker grammar acquisition and you'll speak more like a native, but your vocabulary acquisition will tend to be slower and you don't get any writing or spelling practice. This can be offset with targeted memory techniques and spaced repetition/flashcards or apps like Duolingo that may help supplement one's work.

      I like some of the suggestions made in Lynne's post as I've been pecking away at bits of Japanese over time myself. There's definitely an interesting structure to what's going on, especially with respect to the kana and there are many similarities to what is happening in Japanese to the Chinese that she's studying. I'm also approaching it from a more traditional university/book-based perspective, but if folks have seen or heard of a SSiW repetition method, I'd love to hear about it.

      Hopefully helpful by comparison, I'll mention a few resources I've found for Japanese that I've researched on setting out a similar path that Lynne seems to be moving.

      Japanese has two different, but related alphabets and using an app like Duolingo with regular practice over less than a week will give one enough experience that trying to use traditional memory techniques may end up wasting more time than saving, especially if one expects to be practicing regularly in both the near and the long term. If you're learning without the expectation of actively speaking, writing, or practicing the language from time to time, then wholesale mnemotechniques may be the easier path, but who really wants to learn a language like this?

      The tougher portion of Japanese may come in memorizing the thousands of kanji which can have subtly different meanings. It helps to know that there are a limited set of specific radicals with a reasonably delineable structure of increasing complexity of strokes and stroke order.

      The best visualization I've found for this fact is the Complete Listing of the 214 Radicals and Major Variations from An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy by Kunii Takezaki (Tuttle, 2005) which I copy below:

      A chart of Japanese radicals in columns by number, character, and radical name & variations with a legend for reading the chart

      (Feel free to right click and view the image in another tab or download it and view it full size to see more detail.)

      I've not seen such a chart in any of the dozens of other books I've come across. The numbered structure of increasing complexity of strokes here would certainly suggest an easier to build memory palace or songline.

      I love this particular text as it provides an excellent overview of what is structurally happening in Japanese with lots of tidbits that are otherwise much harder won in reading other books.

      There are many kanji books with various forms of what I would call very low level mnemonic aids. I've not found one written or structured by what I would consider a professional mnemonist. One of the best structured ones I've seen is A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall (Tuttle, 1988). It's got some great introductory material and then a numbered list of kanji which would suggest the creation of a quite long memory palace/journey/songline.

      Each numbered Kanji has most of the relevant data and readings, but provides some description about how the kanji relates or links to other words of similar shapes/meanings and provides a mnemonic hint to make placing it in one's palace a bit easier. Below is an example of the sixth which will give an idea as to the overall structure.

      I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'd found an online app called WaniKani for Japanese that has some mnemonic suggestions and built-in spaced repetition that looks incredibly promising for taking small radicals and building them up into more easily remembered complex kanji.

      I suspect that there are likely similar sources for these couple of books and apps for Chinese that may help provide a logical overall structuring which will make it easier to apply or adapt one's favorite mnemotechniques to make the bulk vocabulary memorization easier.

      The last thing I'll mention I've found, that's good for practicing writing by hand as well as spaced repetition is a Kanji notebook frequently used by native Japanese speaking children as they're learning the levels of kanji in each grade. It's non-obvious to the English speaker, and took me a bit to puzzle out and track down a commercially printed one, even with a child in a classroom that was using a handmade version. The notebook (left to right and top to bottom) has sections for writing a big example of the learned kanji; spaces for the "Kun" and "On" readings; spaces for the number of strokes and the radical pieces; a section for writing out the stroke order as it builds up gradually; practice boxes for repeated practice of writing the whole kanji; examples of how to use the kanji in context; and finally space for the student to compose their own practice sentences using the new kanji.

      Regular use and practice with these can be quite helpful for moving toward mastery.

      I also can't emphasize enough that regularly and actively watching, listening, reading, and speaking in the target language with materials that one finds interesting is incredibly valuable. As an example, one of the first things I did for Welsh was to find a streaming television and radio that I want to to watch/listen to on a regular basis has been helpful. Regular motivation and encouragement is key.

      I won't go into them in depth and will leave them to speak for themselves, but two of the more intriguing videos I've watched on language acquisition which resonate with some of my experiences are:

  28. Sep 2021
    1. https://www.orvis.com/softshell-hammock-seat-protector/224S.html

      This arrived at the house today. Lily will take some getting used to it. She wants to nose around at the corners so she can sit on the floor and put her nose between the seats still.

      Seems to work relatively well in the rear cargo space too.

    1. Focused on one particular topic

      Glimpses of mastery

      Some basic needs of language learning are fulfilled here:

      • sympathetic listener
      • immersion
      • role model
      • 24/7 practice

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6MdRTc0yE

  29. Jun 2021
  30. Mar 2021
  31. Dec 2020
    1. The Globe and Mail reports that Element AI sold for less than $500 million USD. This would place the purchase price well below the estimated valuation that the Montréal startup was said to have after its $200 million CAD Series B round in September 2019.

      This was a downround for them in a sense that eventhough they sold for USD$500M their post-money round in Sep 2019 was CAD$200M meaning that they did not improve on their valuation after one year. Why?

  32. Oct 2020
    1. maybe once a week do a weekly review and put stuff back into the wiki, either new notes, or refinements of existing ones

      This regularly scheduled review and revision portion can be very important. Too often people throw things into their "stream" and then never revisit them. The reflection and review over them may help one gain greater perspective or allow them to re-think something to discover bits they may not have seen or realized before, particularly after intervening time has provided additional ideas and experience.

  33. May 2020
  34. Apr 2020
  35. Mar 2020
  36. May 2019
    1. Virtually all BPMs have utilities for creating simple, data-gathering forms. And in many types of workflows, these simple forms may be adequate. However, in any workflow that includes complex document assembly (such as loan origination workflows), BPM forms are not likely to get the job done. Automating the assembly of complex documents requires ultra-sophisticated data-gathering forms, which can only be designed and created after the documents themselves have been automated. Put another way, you won't know which questions need to be asked to generate the document(s) until you've merged variables and business logic into the documents themselves. The variables you merge into the document serve as question fields in the data gathering forms. And here's the key point - since you have to use the document assembly platform to create interviews that are sophisticated enough to gather data for your complex documents, you might as well use the document assembly platform to generate all data-gathering forms in all of your workflows.
  37. Sep 2018
    1. A big part of the problem is at the university level, in schools of education, according to the authors of a 2016 article in the Journal of Childhood & Developmental Disorders. "Faculty have ignored the scientific knowledge that informs reading acquisition," the authors wrote. "As a result, the pre-service teachers who are being educated at these institutions fail to receive the necessary training."
  38. Jun 2018
  39. Mar 2016
    1. structural acquisitions included a conventional T1-weighted sagittal scout series, a proton density/T2-weighted interleaved double-echo axial series, and a three-dimensional inversion recovery-prepped spoiled grass coronal series

      ID: Scout Type: Scout AcquisitionInstrument: McLeanScanner

      ID: T2 Type: PD/T2 AcquisitionInstrument: McLeanScanner

      ID: Anatomical Type: SPGR AcquisitionInstrument: McLeanScanner

    1. The acquisitions included a 3-D inversion recovery-prepped spoiled gradient recalled echo coronal series, which was used for structural analysis (124 slices, prep=300 msec, TE=1 min, flip angle=25°, FOV= 24 cm2, slice thickness 1.5 mm, acquisition matrix 256×192, number of excitations=2).

      ID: SPGR AcquisitionInstrument: MRIScanner Type: SPGR

  40. Dec 2015
    1. This could be the first time we can talk with empirical evidence about language requiring innate components or not.