i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Found an article with suggestions and am noting for future checking-out. This isn't my personal recommendation, but if any of y'all have used these, feel free to comment.

* Drops ("Language Learning Games: Drops"). Mostly vocabulary rather than full sentences. Free accounts limited to 5min/day. Paid upgrade available. Company also has apps for specific languages incl Korean, Tagalog, and others

* Busuu. No time limits for free accounts, at least. Paid upgrades available.

* Memrise. Free plan is more vocab than full sentences. Grammar lessons require paid.

* Babbel. Exclusively paid r/th freemium. Mostly just European languages.

* LingoDeer. Has Asian and European languages - there is also a games app for Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Chinese and German. Mostly paid.

Also

* I keep wanting to do a language in addition to the Spanish that I'm duolingoing, but a) I can't decide between Yiddish and Korean and Japanese and Russian and ASL, b) three of those involve new alphabets, c) the last one I can't practice "speaking" and so it'd be harder to learn and also it's not practical for communicating, and d) even with Spanish, which is quite similar to English, I'm having issues remembering things these days

* I am half tempted to get a (cheap-ish) bugle, because it doesn't involve fingering and therefore I can either duct tape it to a stick and hold it myself, or have someone hold it for me, and teach myself to play based on YouTube videos, but that is like an incredibly silly temptation to have??? Especially since beginning brass sounds horrible and loud. And the "duct tape to stick" thing probably wouldn't work because it needs to vibrate or something.

(But it would probably be epic for maintaining lung function, lol)

I keep not getting around to posting here. Not sure how much is "typing is hard" (this entry took an hour! On my tablet, which I can type on faster than on my computer!) and how much is just being out of the habit.

Ended up not doing turkey day at my dad's, mostly for mental health (I have Opinions about people who choose not to get vaccinated during a pandemic "because freedom", and I didn't want to spend the entire time watching what I said) but also because... I'd made a comment on twitter about wanting to do Hanukkah this year, so my dad offered to do latkes and candles last Sunday, aka the first night, and sent me home with the menorah and candles and some thanksgiving leftovers, which ended up being pretty close to perfect.

The candles, incidentally, claimed to be dripless. They... uh... well... weren't. I'll upload photos at some point.

I'm also sort of getting into Yiddish on duolingo, though I'm shaky on some of the alphabet (duo uses the Hebrew lettering for Yiddish, not the transliteration into Ronan lettering) ... I've got the consonants pretty well, but the vowels are killing me. And for the language itself, it's Germanic enough that I'm both doing okay and hella confused. There's a vowel shift going on, making words sound like other words.

From memory -- at least in the Hungarian Yiddish dialect duo is using, the word for "you" is /dee/ instead of German du. The word for here is either /du/ or /doh/, i forget which, instead of German da, and I keep wanting to translate doh as there (German dort). I also get into trouble with /vee/ and /voh/; in German the first (wie) is how and the second (wo) is who, but in Yiddish /vee/ is who. (Amusingly, how many -- in German wieviel -- sounds like wiffle, just with v instead of w.)

It's kind of like the German interference I had learning Russian. The word /ya/ is yes in German and I in Russian; /da/ is yes in Russian and here in German; all very frequently used words. So inevitably I'd use the wrong one ...

Sometimes it's not confusing between words, just hard to remember. I can after a second remember that /daan/ in Yiddish is your (in German it's dein, pronounced /dayn/ rhyming with wine) but trying to generate the Yiddish is harder, both because remembering THAT the vowel shifts isn't the same as remembering HOW, and because the vowel letters are hard for me to remember.

Anyway, at least duolingo has taught me how to say that things like "a zebra in a pyramid". So helpful?

(Ok to be fair they were teaching similar-to-English words for alphabet practice .. /a zehbra een a piramid/ or /a kehmul een London/ are easier to decipher than, uh, other things.)

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Totally unrelatedly, the Babylon 5 rewatch I'm doing with my mom -- so slowwww because I have limited mom stamina, especially when she Lingers so one episode takes 2-3 hrs of mom exposure, and she doesn't want to watch separately -- got to A Voice in the Wilderness, which is one of my favorites from S1. I'd forgotten that was the episode with the Ivanovo-is-God speech, lol. Also Londo's Hokey-Pokey rant.

Next up is Babylon Squared. Also among my favorites!

(Shadows and Portents is up there too, although in rewatch I got annoyed at the cc text -- when the Centauri dude is laughing about how his seer aunt predicted he'd be killed by shadows ha ha how silly, and he ends up being killed by a mysterious vessel later that episode, snd the point of him disbelieving the prophecy to begin with is that he thinks she means shadows, i.e. darkness on the wall, not knowing that the Shadows are an old race recently reawaken ... and the first time around that's what the viewer thinks too. Only, the closed captioning text capitalizes "Shadows" in that line...)

B5's special effects and title sequence both look 90s as hell.

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Speaking of my mom ... she wants to know what I want to do for Christmas. My gut reaction is "introvert party with me and the pets where I play animal crossing and watch die hard and nothing else" but I don't think she'd be happy with that, lol. I'm just ... idek. I'm cynical about how commercialized and ubiquitous Christmas is these days, carol singing makes me miss the harp I can't play any more, there's no magic any more, and I realized one of the things making me dissatisfied with Christianity is that if Jesus fixed things (and I know that's a big if but it's also central to Christianity) why are things so fucked up. And my increasing dissatisfaction with Christianity means that the "prepare for and celebrate the birth of the Baby Who Will Save The World" aspect of Christmas is less gripping, and the family aspect of Christmas is awkward when my mom is a lonely energy suck and my dad is married to someone who thinks I hate her and my sister has kids who are cute but exhausting, and I'm an introvert anyway, and I'm awkward about giving and receiving gifts. And there's also the "pagan holiday they got papered over with Christianity labels" factor, and my increasing awareness of Shitty White-People Behavior.

But I'll probably end up doing something with my mom anyway.

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For some reason I am remarkably chatty today. Talked my aides' ears off; even posting here is a reflection of that. No clue why but it's better than the sheer exhaustion I've mostly been feeling.

Yay I guess?

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Got Covid booster today. In home, which was nice and convenient. My initial vax was J&J so I asked for (and got) Pfizer.

Yay for another layer of Swiss cheese protection, boo for needing it.

So I seem to have very persistent trouble mixing up two particular kanji, 立 (stand) and 六 (six) I mean, not when they're side by side like that, but I keep reading the wrong one. Especially since 六つ and 立つ are both vocab words that pop up. They don't share meaning, they aren't pronounced the same. they aren't even the same parts of speech -- the first is muttsu, a counter word (adjective I guess?) meaning "six things", and the second is tatsu, a verb meaning "to stand".

I know the difference. I just ... pick the wrong one. Frequently.

I also seem to like to mix up 日 (sun/day) and 月 (moon/month), not on their own but in connection with numbers. 六月 rokugatsu means june (I suppose the kanji could also plausibly mean six months? or would that need an additional counter? NB I do know of the Wikipedia page on counters, I'm just being lazy. And sticking to what wanikani uses.) and 六日 muika means six days, but I keep recalling the wrong one. And 月 uses the ichi/ni/san numbers and 日 uses the hito/futa/mit numbers (except not for ichi, because ichinichi is fun to say) but I don't always remember which uses which.

Which is the other thing I mess myself up on: kun vs on readings, when to use which, and *which* is which. Wanikani doesn't teach every reading of each kanji, just the most common one(s), which might be either kun'yomi or on'yomi.vit does say, but I don't remember it. And the theory is that it's faster to learn one pronunciation that occurs the most often, and learn the others when they crop up in vocabulary, but then I try to shove the wrong pronunciation in. 立つ tatsu (to stand) takes the ta reading of 立, but 市立 shiritsu (municipal) takes the ritsu reading of 立, and the main thing that keeps me from trying to put shita as the reading for the latter is that shita is the pronunciation of 下 below (which is sa in words like 下がる "to fall" but shita when used alone) and I wrote a note for myself that 市立 is not 下.

...and then they ask me for the kanji pronunciation they taught, which is neither sa nor shita but ka.

Anyway.

I'm also having minor kanji mixup issues with a few other pairs. 午 and 牛. 石 and 右. 方 and 万. If I'm really tired, 九 and 力 and 刀. I know the differences if I'm paying attention, but if I zone out just a little bit I get it wrong. (And I'm not even trying to write them, which is good because as you can tell, tiny differences matter.)

And I have a bad habit of misreading/mistyping the hiragana *in the vocabulary word* and not checking against what's there -- I will see 生まれる -- umareru, to be born -- but type umoreru うもれる or something, and even though I got the kanji part right, I don't notice the hiragana difference. It's worst when it's a typo, but regardless of whether I meant to type it right, it should be obvious. And it's not. And I submit and get it wrong.

(Luckily the only consequence of "wrong" is that I review it again sooner. There's no permanent grade or score, no points to lose, no punishment. It's nice.)

The site I'm using for learning kanji gives examples -- when you're learning radicals (the building blocks) they give example kanji, when learning kanji they give example vocab, and when learning vocab they give example sentences.

Most of the sentences are normal.

Some are ... very wtf.

八つのかおと六つのうでがあるもの、なーんだ。
"What has eight faces and six arms?"

わたしはハンバーガーをひつぎに入れた。
“I put a hamburger into the coffin.”

This is as epic as duolingo's "nosotros no tocamos el pollo" (we do not touch the chicken) and "no soy un pingüino" (I am not a penguin.)

Edit for one more:

川をみるといつもいかりがこみあげてくる。
Whenever I see a river, I get so pissed off.

So in addition to duolingo, I have fallen in love with memrise -- it's another language learning thing, similar but different. It has an adorable space/alien theme (idek but it's cute) and uses real people as speakers and generally does a good job as far as I can tell in the two days I've been fooling with it.

The only quibble I have is that when it is in free type mode (instead of picking the correct option or refrigerator magnet style things, it has you spelling), the keyboard it has you use is tiny. Limited keys, but smaller than the native iOS keyboard, and when I'm in bed with my glasses off and my cpap mask half blocking my vision, it's hard to tell the difference between q and o and a, or between i and ¡ and !, or whatever. And the line of keys is in random order, so I'm doing a lot of squinting.

But I like the other aspects of the interface, and I like that it starts with sentences like "what's up" or "hi" or "let's go" or "please", instead of the "the man eats an apple" that many of the duolingo courses start with. (Not welsh, though -- dw i draig!)

I dabbled briefly In Danish before deciding a) Danish pronunciation/spelling is wacky, and b) it was silly having memrise on one language and duo on another while also doing hiragana in a different app. So I decided that I'd do Japanese in all three. I have hiragana to the point where I can sound it out -- not really reading it yet, the way I can read Cyrillic, because it's very much "okay か is ka and ん is n and じ is shi... no, ji.., so ... oh, kanji", but at least I know the letters. I am a little :/ at the prospect of katakana also (whyyyy have two syllabaries) and more so at kanji, but ... eh. So far duo and mem are both just using/teaching in hiragana.

(The other app I'm using is "Learn Japanese!!" The first lesson is free, but you gave to pay for the rest -- $2 for the hiragana pack, $8 for the whole thing which includes katakana and some basic lessons, which isn't bad; same company has a kanji app, presumably similar model. I know I could have stuck with free tools, but this one is good about teaching you how to write, which is nice reinforcement rather than just staring at the characters.)

...I'm trying to convince myself that I shouldn't also do the Spanish unit on memrise. I'm not sure how successful I'll be in that regard.

This entry amuses me because I'm "complaining" about 4K lingots being a lot ... and right now I have 9100.

Also a 525 day streak.

(Mostly just lazy-ass Spanish review because I have for no apparent reason decided to learn Japanese -- this four months after I culled my books and got rid of all my Japanese stuff because I was never going to learn it, lol -- but I want to get solid (or at least liquid) before anything. I have an app and am making progress (it groups them five at a time, a-i-u-e-o, and I have a/ka/ga/sa/za groups down, although I weirdly confuse ko and so a lot, and u and ku) but I'm not at the point where I am comfortable trying Duo's Japanese, *but* I also don't want to lose the streak, just because.)

I've decided to temporarily give up on Greek -- I'm still curious about it, but Duo isn't the best mechanism for learning it.

Still haven't decided between Russian, refresher course in Spanish, or German. For tonight I did Russian, going back to the beginning, but I think it is more like Greek, in that I really need solid grammar info as well as what Duo gives. There is something to be said for using real words instead of memorizing charts, but there's also something to be said for the charts. Especially since my brain is not the super-elastic brain of a child.

But I did find that the Greek iThing keyboard is a lot easier to grok for English speakers than the Russian keyboard.

( blathering about keyboard layouts )

Ah, human/computer interaction and user interface design. Two subsets of my major that I learned very little about! (I'm still resentful about my major -- I sort of herded myself into it because I could finish in time with what I had already taken, and while there's a lot of fascinating stuff, flailing is not the best way to come at a major. And I picked a specialty in eenie-meenie fashion, ending up in computer music because "I like music" and because it had the fewest classes, or at any rate the fewest horrid-sounding ones (I thoroughly hated philosophy by that point); only I'm not a composer and the classes turned out to be basically graduate-level, which is not the best for a flailing depressive undergrad. I still half feel like I didn't deserve my degree, that the (minor but still freaky) car accident I was in gave me sympathy points and the resident faculty member of my dorm was the head computer music person (oh yeah that was another reason) and idek. Back to the point though: if I'd come in wanting to do symsys from the first, rather than starting with computer science and then not being able to do that but not having enough time to do another major (and there's no way in hell im going TiVo ask my parents now whether they would have funded another year if I'd needed it, because the answer will probably make me sad) and so grasping at symsys as a last resort panic option, I would have made different choices, something more linguistics-y or user interface design -y. And I've lost track of my parenthetical. Was this a parenthetical? I think so.)

I have not heard back from duolingo re the streak thing. I don't know whether I will.

I have several dilemmas.

Do I keep going, which allows me to unofficially add the 625 to my streak since I know I continued it even if they don't? Pro: it still gives me a daily target, and learning in small increments is better than not at all. Con: Typing is hard on the computer, and the web interface sucks on iPad; it might be nice to take a break; it doesn't have to be duolingo that I do every day.

If I keep going (or take a short break and come back), what language? Welsh is fun but impractical, and of course getting harder; German would be nice to re-fluent-ize in, but there's very little practical benefit to that either; Russian has a practical benefit (one of my aides is Russian); and I could always start a new language, like Dutch or Hebrew, just for fun. I don't think it would be a great idea to try to do more than one at a time. I suppose I could do a different one every month, and just spend the first few days refreshing on that language, but that might not be the greatest.

Or I could just give up, because it's not like there's any point anyway sorry, brainweasels got out for a bit there.

I was golding up some Welsh skills, because I'm obsessive this way.

"Dw i'n hoffi coffi" translates to "I like coffee". Word-wise it's basically "Am I liking coffee"

"Dw i'n hoffi coffi da" translates to "I like good coffee," Welsh does adjectives after the noun (so good coffee is "coffi da", literally "coffee good", rather than *da coffi.)

Except my brain wanted to parse it first as "I like coffee, yes", and then as "I like coffee here", before being willing to settle on the correct one. (Russian and German uses of "da", rather than Wrlsh.)

...I keep being tempted to really confuse my brain by double-duoing, but maybe I shouldn't, lol.