Questions: Which of the apps that I use actually accomplish what they purport to do, and which apps don’t claim to advance a user’s skills in any particular way but actually do? Considering the first question… Duolingo: The premise: advance your knowledge of a language or learn a new one. The process: short lessons comprised of a mix of vocabulary, forming sentences using a word bank, translating written sentences into English, and transcribing spoke sentences into the language you’re studying…. Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Attempt at Live Blog: Difficulty rating 5.4
This time I’m ready with tab open for writing down all of Olly’s puns (I’m…fighting an impulse here. You can fill in the blanks, I’m sure) and probably even inventing some where they don’t exist! (Such as: yesterday the other commentator, Dr. Lisa Gannon, referred to a male gymnast’s dismount as “the culmination” of his high bar routine, and I was certain she was hiding a pun on “Kolman-ation” in there (Kolman is a very difficult but fairly common release… Read more »
Books of 2019, Part 7
Conversations With Friends, by Sally Rooney: It’s sometimes hard to read a book objectively when it’s been so widely discussed/acclaimed (I haven’t researched too deeply, but my assumption is that Sally Rooney’s other book, Normal People, is much more recent and came out to huge praise, and that that caused everyone to go back and read this first one (or I’ve been living in a tiny hole far away from the rest of the reading world, but it definitely seems… Read more »
The Ballad of Judy Loman
Or more accurately, the ballad for Judy Loman. Most accurately, it wasn’t a ballad; it was a piece commissioned by – who? I can’t find it online. It’s probably in a paper program somewhere deep in a box, part of my relentless archives. Some websites say Loman retired in 1991 – she would have been in her mid-fifties. Other sources say she was the principal harpist for the Toronto Symphony until 2002 – mid-sixties. I heard her play live only… Read more »
Lingoist
Duolingo finally listened to (half of) my pleas and added a Latin course! I’m not currently tutoring any students in Latin, but enough schools in NYC require it of their 7th and 8th graders that I hope the chance will arise again. So far I’ve only worked through a few of the most basic lessons, so I can’t say how effective or comprehensive the course is. (I can say that I can tell it’s new/in beta because, as compared to… Read more »
Eyes and Ears and Mouth and Nose
What causes that occasionally morning eye pain, the chlorinated feeling after being nowhere near a swimming pool? Is it closing your eyes too long? Not shutting them for long enough? It happens infrequently enough that I find myself weaving through the same thought process each time. I worry more about my ears than I do my eyes. Every time I see a show I wear earplugs – sometimes I wear earplugs in loud bars or restaurants, and always when I… Read more »
Research
In sixth grade I was tasked with writing my first research paper (I chose Andrew Lloyd Webber as my topic, and quickly discovered that structuring a research paper around a person is easier than structuring a paper around an event, idea, or place). Every sixth grader at my school had this assignment, and two years later we all were assigned slightly longer research papers. I can’t remember what my topic was in eighth grade, which is bothering me. I feel… Read more »
Unfinished
I’m generally a completionist. I don’t like to leave books half-read, and I can probably fit the books I’ve started but not finished into one blog post: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman: I actually read more than half of this and then just…stopped. It sat next to my bed for almost a year before I took it to one of those little free libraries. I also watched the first five or so episodes of the TV adaptation with my roommates,… Read more »
Books of 2019, Part 6
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee: I found this…okay. I think I’m not the audience for sweeping family narratives in which there’s no one main character or family (I felt this way about Homegoing as well), where history and plot, rather than character or writing, are the focus. There are books I love (Waterland, for one) that reach backward into history to explain the circumstances of the main characters, but there are main characters. Pachinko covers almost a century and felt… Read more »
Repeat and repeat
Just as there are topics that perennially, perhaps cyclically come up on Twitter (“Do you wash your legs,” (h/t Reply All) “Ruin a movie in one letter/Fat band names,” etc), there are pet topics that I can’t deny myself writing about every few years. Going to grocery stores while traveling is one of them. Last year I spend a week in London and ate the same perfectly calibrated Tesco salad every night: spinach, “semi-dried” tomatoes (are they partially dried by… Read more »
