The Wonder of Critical Frequency
Fri, Jan 7, 2011
This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
About two weeks ago, in an effort to increase my Esperanto vocabulary, I signed up for lernu.net’s Vorto de la Tago (Word of the Day) service, which sends a daily email with, you guessed it, the word of the day. These emails are great for SRS because they include quite a few example sentences. The definitions are also monolingual (Esperanto-only, no English translations), which I think is a good thing because I notice that when I read Esperanto text I translate it to English mentally, thus slowing me down. So now I have these great daily reminders to add some new sentences to my SRS, and they’re forcing me to use the language to describe itself rather than using the crutch called English. And what did I do with these fantastic reminders?
Use tatoeba.org for mining sentences
Thu, Aug 26, 2010
This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
Usually when I am reading in Spanish, and I find a word I don’t know and can’t figure out from context, I look it up in a dictionary. Often the sentence I originally found that word in is long and/or complex, which doesn’t make it a good candidate for entry in my SRS, so I will usually enter the example sentence in the dictionary into my SRS instead. But what if there is no example sentence for that word? This dilemma happens with at least half of the words I look up. Until recently, I didn’t have a good solution. Most of the time I would just let it go and later forget the word, causing myself to look it up again.
Recovering from a period of demotivation
Fri, Oct 24, 2008
This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
I need to make a confession. Over the past month or two, I’ve not been studying Spanish or any other language as I should. I found myself neglecting my SRS for up to a couple of weeks at a time. I was not studying any new material. I was not playing My Spanish Coach on my Nintendo DS and I was not listening to any of the Spanish podcasts that I had subscribed to. I was not watching Spanish television and I was not practicing speaking and listening with my Spanish-speaking friends.
Tue, Nov 6, 2007
This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
“Al rescate” is Spanish for “to the rescue.”
Some of you may have noticed my lack of posts in the past couple of weeks. My work life and my home life conspired to consume any free time I had so that I could not even study new Spanish or Greek material, let alone write about it. I did manage, with the help of Mnemosyne, to maintain what I had already learned so that I was able to pick up where I left off. That little bit of maintenance did the job fantastically!
Εν αρχη: Starting with New Testament Greek (again)
Sun, Oct 7, 2007
This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
Εν αρχη (en archae) means “in the beginning.”
After 7 months without studying at all, I’ve finally sat down and spent some time a couple nights ago to study New Testament Greek (also called Koine Greek). I’m primarily following the lessons in a book called “Learn New Testament Greek” by John H. Dobson. I started on the third lesson as the first was all about the Greek alphabet, which I still remember, and the second lesson was mostly simple words that I also still remember.