cblum

+1 to using it as opportunity to listen to a podcast.

I consider it some of my best podcast listening time. Somehow I’m more tuned in when doing house chores vs. trying to just sit and listen, or while walking outside where I have to pay attention to traffic when crossing the street and such.

To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold.

The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.

A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.

Pimsleur is awful for Mandarin. I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on it.

Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting.

I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).

> FSAs are insane, conceptually.

Indeed. I don’t understand why they cant just make medical expenses tax-deductible up to a certain amount. The effect would be the same. Why do I need a separate account for it, and why do I have to guess how much I’ll need every year (as you pointed out)?

I guess at least part of the answer is that the companies administering FSAs make money out of this system. Sigh.

Somewhat kinda related: I grew up in a Brazilian town that borders one of our many Spanish-speaking neighbors. We used to make fun of the folks across the border for pronouncing pizza like piça (“pissa”), which on our side of the border was a vulgar word for penis.

FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.

This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.

I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.

Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.

What’s the work culture there like? Is it more relaxed than in North America or Western Europe?

On a related note, I don’t know how Apple has managed to mess up so badly the idea of storing your own information like address, phone number, etc.

Every time I’ve moved, for months afterwards I keep having to fix my address when using Apple Pay or setting directions to home, etc. because it seems like they keep multiple copies of that information all over the place, instead of referring to a single piece of information.

Places I can think of where I’ve had to update my address one by one: each credit card I have associated with Apple Pay; Maps; my own contact that I can share with others; subscription information; shipping address for Apple Pay.

I get it that some people use separate billing and shipping addresses, but for the vast majority of people the use case is “I have a single home address where I want to direct Maps to, be billed at, and ship stuff to, please update it all at once when I update my address.”

Very sorry for your loss. I lost my dad almost 13 years ago and my mom 4 years ago, much earlier than I though I’d lose either of them.

The initial intensity of the grief you’re feeling will go away with time, and you’ll go back to feeling normal. But I do wanna share with you that some amount of grief will always be there with you from now on. My experience has been that even after all these years, I’ve thought about and missed my parents pretty much every single day since they passed. You should know that that’s coming, and it’ll be particularly tough around major life events like getting married and having kids.

Know that what you’re going through is normal and human. Try to get as much rest as you can, and reach out to people close to you to either talk through things or get distracted for a moment.

> Parking apps are worse than parking meters.

I generally agree, but I’ve had a great experience with one of those. I just wish they all did the same streamlined thing this one particular app I used did.

The QR code I had to scan actually ran an App Clip instead of taking me to a website. Everything was done in one screen: enter plate, parking stall number, hours. My physical interaction with it was just scrolling a little and hitting a button. Done. Wonderful.

Most parking solitions are a shitshow though. Multiple screens (seriously, why?!), having to create an account, not handling payment via Apple Pay so I have to enter my credit card manually. Having to enter the parking location manually (how come it’s not a parameter in the QR code URL?). I’d really like to know what happens at the companies that develop those. It’s borderline criminal how bad they are.

Other than the Bible, that would be Dune and Starship Troopers. I can't really put my finger on how specifically they influenced me, but I often find myself recalling scenes and quotes from those two books when discussing deeper topics with family and friends.

I'm learning Chinese characters following Heisig's method. I use to create mnemonics when those are not provided in the book, since I have a hard time coming up with my own. Turns out ChatGPT can get quite creative. I also use it to generate bizarre images that remind me of how certain characters are written (for example, 象 elephant shares its top part with 兔 rabbit and the bottom is the same as the bottom of 家 home, which actually used to mean pig, so I used ChatGPT to create an image of a rabbit-headed, pig-bodied elephant to prompt me to write 象 when it comes up in Anki).

I'm not a native English speaker, but that's what it guessed.

Over the years, starting in my late teens (I'm in my late 30s now), I've put TONS of effort into sounding like a native speaker (moving to the US 10+ years ago has certainly helped).

I feel so validated right now :)

I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept waiting for a twist in the story, where the main character would realize that both worlds were terrible, but it never came.

Dune. So many thought-provoking quotes throughout the books, especially the first one. This one pops up in my head often, many years after having first read the book:

"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"

Also Starship Troopers. Reading it made me somewhat regret not joining the military.

> My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing.

I have a 5-month old baby and I can tell you it’s possible to keep your language learning going, but you’ll have to be more intentional or even forceful about it.

Before my son was born I studied/immersed almost all day except when I was working or hanging out with my wife (and often the latter still counted as immersion since she’s Chinese :) and we’d watch Chinese TV shows together).

After he was born time became si significantly more limited, but I was (am) determined to keep learning the language.

Here’s some of what I do:

- I could drive 15 minutes to work, but instead I take public transit. That helps me accomplish two things: daily exercise walking to and from the station, and time to listen to podcasts or audiobooks (in Chinese, of course). Once I’m on the bus/train, I’ll either do Anki or a Hello Chinese lesson.

- I try to go to the office as early as possible on any given day, and use the extra time before work to study. I could do this at home, but it’s quieter in the office.

- Most days I’ll spend my whole lunch break on language learning.

- I stick to all of this even on days when the baby kept us up all night long.

Some important things to bring up:

- This all comes at the expense of not having time for any other interests. I have a whole backlog of sci-fi books and other material I’d love to read, but I choose to prioritize learning Mandarin.

- I’m paying a price when it comes to making connections at work. Spending my whole lunch hour on learning means I stopped joining coworkers for lunch. Although right now I also don’t join them to minimize potential exposure to sickness that I could bring home and pass to the baby.

- This can also be detrimental to job performance. I could be putting in more time on learning job-related stuff or simply getting more done, but again, I consider learning Mandarin a priority.

- Other than Anki, I don’t do any learning on weekends. There’s just no time or opportunity to do so.

Not sure if any of this will apply or be doable to you. A lot of it will also come down to your family situation and your relationship with your partner. In my case, I’m lucky that she’s very supportive of my interest in her language.

Good luck! The baby will be a ton of work but also a ton of fun and love :D

> there are lots of people who take it way too far

I wrote in another comment that that’s exactly my issue. I can easily spend hours, days, weeks even just tweaking my card templates due to Anki’s extreme customizability. That stems from a (false!) belief that I can somehow find just the right card format that will impress the language in my head in no time. Took me a long time to reign in the impulse to endlessly tweak templates. I remember having days when I felt extremely frustrated after realizing I had spent pretty much my entire study time working on Anki and not exposing myself to the language.

I too find it wild when people do it at a beginner stage.

Back when I was learning English during my school years, I only started seriously watching native content after I already had either a B1 or B2 certificate. At that point I already knew most of what was being said, I just wasn’t used to hearing/parsing it in real-time and without the “padding” that comes with learner-oriented content. So the gap I had to bridge there was small.

The burden of learning basically everything at the same time - word meanings, grammar patterns, native-level speech patterns and speed - sounds daunting to me. But I think if you are at a life stage where you can put tons of time into it, it works.

The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cautious and ideally find a way to validate the content it generates (in my case I can run it by my wife).

I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)

I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duolingo-like app.

These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.

Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.

I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.

I see, I didn’t know about Argentina.

I grew up in a border town bordering Uruguay and over there I’d definitely see folks carrying their personal thermos and cuia. But I would see groups on the Brazilian side of the border.

Correct, that’s a thing only in Rio Grande do Sul.

Source: born and raised there :)

> I'm trying to understand why the characters in Dune fought with swords, pikes and knives.

At least part of the reason is that the interaction between a lasgun and a shield would cause a powerful explosion that would kill the shooter too. No one wants that and no one will give up their shield, so they had to go back to melee weapons.

> "oh, if I cry I will get to eat right away."

This kinda matches what I’ve read recently in a parenting book.

I’m currently reading Bringing Up Bébé, a book written by an American journalist who lived (maybe still lives?) in Paris and had her kids there. She wrote it after she started observing that French parents don’t seem to have the myriad of exhausting issues American parents have, or at least not with the same intensity and for the same duration.

When it comes to sleep, she writes that most French babies sleep through the night by the time they’re 6 months old.

According to her, what a lot of American parents (and from my experience as an expat, parents from several other countries too) do wrong is to immediately tend to the baby the moment they make any noise at night, in the first months few of their lives (this apparently doesn’t apply to the very first month though). That trains the baby to do exactly what you wrote, to get what they want as soon as they wake up in the middle of the night.

According to the author, French parents typically wait a few minutes whenever the baby wakes up at night. Most of the time the baby goes back to sleep.

The explanation she offers is that babies’ brains don’t know how to link one sleep cycle to the next, so they wake up between cycles and typically cry or fuss for a bit. By leaving them alone for a few minutes instead of instantly reacting, parents can help their brains learn to connect sleep cycles more efficiently. If they’re immediately picked up though, they’re actually being trained to do the exact opposite and to stay awake instead.

I really like your post btw, going to look up what you wrote about as it sounds invaluable in case the French method doesn’t work :)

Chinese also describes time in terms of “in front” (前) and “behind” (后), and it’s the opposite of what you might expect: the past is “in front”, the future is “behind”.

I find the concept fascinating. It makes sense: what’s in front of you can be directly seen, much like you can remember and “see” the past. But the future is unknown, like something behind you that you can’t see.

Lol I’m that partner. I’m very particular about how clothes should be washed and dried. I care about things like sorting loads, proper machine settings for what’s being washed, etc.

> So I doesn't seem like the more difficult testing actually helps much.

Brazil has a higher rate than the US, but you wouldn’t be able to tell based on the testing there. Mine was:

- Backup parking

- Parallel parking

- Drive around the city with an examiner for a few minutes

Any mistakes in the first two and you’re disqualified. You have to get them right the first time with no corrections (or at least that was the case back in 2007 or so).

For the driving part, you can make two small mistakes. Any critical mistakes immediately disqualify you.

In comparison, in my WA test when I moved here I botched parallel parking 3 times until I got it right. Then I indavertently speeded and also didn’t fully stop at a stop sign (either of which would’ve been a disqualifying mistake in Brazil IIRC). Still got my license.

Nevertheless, I find it MUCH safer to drive in the US (WA in particular, the only place where I’ve ever seen folks consistently driving at or below the speed limit). Brazilian drivers are crazy aggressive and in a lot of places traffic rules are treated as mere suggestions.

He is risen indeed!