This has been the month of Anki addiction. I had heard about it many times in reading about other language learners, and late last month I finally took the plunge. Precisely because it is stripped down without the bells and whistles of Memrise, it is so much faster, both in terms of study time and even in making new cards.
I discovered were quite a few fairly common Spanish verbs that I kept "reading around" thinking I sorta knew what they meant, and, nope, I did not. This month of working on Anki has helped me move past that and has made my reading in Spanish even smoother, and thus even more enjoyable. Somewhat ironically, by going back to flashcards, with is supposedly a stupid method that doesn't give enough context, I am empowered to do more of the reading that is supposed to give me all the words I need. I am a believer in reading as the best way to pick up vocabulary, after all, that is how I picked up my vocabulary in English -- but then I had all the time and print access in the world. I think for my situation it is better to use Anki for some explicit vocabulary study.
I am working on Esperanto again. It looks like that will be the language I read fluently in for goal #10. A little flash-card work really processing some key words went a long way. I can now read Vikipedio, the Wikepedia in Esperanto, with just a little help from an online dictionary. I then put those words into Anki, either as a) whole sentences b) the word defined with an Esperanto definition or c) the word defined with an image.
Body
I've been working through greasing the groove with modified push-ups. I do a lot of hanging from my pull up bar.
Spirit
So many beautiful fall days. I keep telling myself that a year from now I will have more free time to spend walking in them.
The shorter days have oft lead to a crisis of spirit for me, but last year I did well by listening to what the rhythm of the season was saying: just do less.
I pulled the following off the "currently working on" list:
French and Italian vocabulary
Mental math
Memorizing a deck of cards
Memorizing poetry
These are reminders of the time in my life when I was hanging around my father during his terminal illness and the time of the hardest grieving. I want to go back to each of this projects in due time, which probably means in the summer.
I reread a piece I wrote called Getting the Most out of Life. It serves as a great little journal entry from that time. Some of it reads so beautifully that I thought about sharing it with a friend who has been having a tough run, but I notice that is bogged down my my analytical attempts to nerd my goals, so to speak. I think I am going to write another draft of it, keeping the beautiful, getting rid of the list making and obsession over technique. I would say those kinds of idiosyncrasies are the heart of the project of this blog.
But the spirit requires another vehicle for expression, which shouldn't be too controversial of an idea.
