Adventurenet.net

August 28th, 2023, 9:09 am ☀️ 98° F (36.6 °C)

I have been living in Texas for about half of my life, but it’s time to nail down the details.

This was a book I ran into at Barnes & Noble last week (and then ordered on eBay). Topic include Spanglish, Fiesta in San Antonio, barrel racing and more

Mi esposa & I completed the library adventure and made it to the final two libraries in Austin. I did not realize how small the Twin Oaks branch is, or how delightful the Howson branch is. Highly recommend.

And finally, my quest to continue learning & to prepare for a trip to Japan has hit the 1,000 day mark.

To be clear not all 1,000 days are Japanese, a good portion of this is Spanish learning and I have used some streak freezes.

DuoLingo & I have a complicated history with Japanese. I wasn’t interested in learning the written language. I was only interested in learning enough conversational Japanese to “get by” while traveling, so on my first attempt I left the English letters above the Japanese characters enabled.

Eventually I realized that I was slowing down my learning by not knowing how to read the language and so I turned off the English and then came the realization that I was too far behind.

So I restarted.

This was much better. I was able to read the language and I made.it further into the lessons and was on a good run until an update.

Duo changed the way that lessons were doled out and added some words to earlier chapters that were not there before. Suddenly 10-20% of the words were foreign to me.

So I started over.

I am now in my third run through the Japanese language lessons and I am currently in the learning Katakana section, which is important but also the section that I enjoy the least.

But I am learning and my comprehension of Hiragana is better than it was before and I’m sure my Katakana will also improve.

I just wish it were broken up. I would prefer to learn like 15 katakana at a time and then back to regular lessons as this written language is used rarely enough that it has been difficult to retain.

But I digress, it’s important and I will push through.

Wish me luck.

Keanu says “Hi.”