Carm's corner

Mandarin lessons

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 04:01:52 GMT

Next monday will be a month since I started my Mandarin lessons and there hasn't been a single class where I feel like I'm idle or that it's pointless. I always end up feeling a bit dizzy because it's a lot to take in: hanzi, tones, meanings, structures... I particularly struggle producing the first tone, but the teacher makes us practice every class and that helps with the self-consciousness of not getting it right on the first try. But all in all it doesn't feel impossible to learn. I feel like learning Japanese has helped somehow, not regarding phonetics, because japanese phonetics are way easier (at least from the perspective of someone whose first language is Spanish).

I love that the teacher respects our intelligence and challenges us.

I am relly enjoying it, even though Wednesdays are a bit frantic because I have to take the kid to his Python classes, so first I have to take 30 minutes of my class on my phone, in the cab, and then the rest in a café, where the wifi sometimes is... not the best. This Wednesday I had to solve some exercises in the car and it was hell, haha. You can imagine how those sentences looked in hanzi *grimacing*

Something I like a lot are the handwriting exercises. I find them particularly calming, even though they're homework. But focusing on the stroke order and direction of every line reminds me a lot about why I like practicing kata. It's almost meditative. It also reminds me of my early childhood, when I loved the handwriting excersises in cursive. I could spend hours on my notebooks.

Anyway, I wish I had started my language learning journey earlier (I did, with English, but it's a bit different, maybe I can talk about that sometime, in another post), but I'm still glad I started it now.

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Japanese, Madarin, Thai...

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:22:07 GMT

Japanese

I started attending japanese classes last year and it makes me happy. I really love learning languages. And even though I'm going slowly, I feel like I am doing fine. I had to pause my classes this ummer because they didn't open a group for the third level but also because after some awful homophobic and transphobic comments the professor made, I decided I didn't want to stay there. So I looked up everywhere else. I am enrolling in a different school this fall. There, they also offer conversation practice, kanji classes, and some other activities like karaoke evenings (in japanese, obviously). It makes me excited.

Mandarin

I would be lying if I said reading danmei and watching cdramas didn't influence my decision of wanting to learn mandarin, because it did. But it goes beyond that. I wish I had the oportunity to learn many languages when I was younger, but back then my resources were a lot more limited. I just had access to english lessons and I've never been a self-taught person, to this day, I always feel like I need the guide of a teacher for some stuff, at least for a while.

So, it really wasn't an impulsive decision. I thought about it for months, researching the different options I had and last week I finally decided to enroll for Mandarin classes. Starting next month. I think I can do it. And I know it's not going to be quick, but the fact that now I can pay myself for the things I want, it's very satisfying. Let's see if my brain doesn't break. I hope it doesn't.

Thai

I couldn't find in person or online Thai classes here (in my city/country)... so I looked for any kind of lessons. I ended up subscribing to Lingodeer for almost half a year, but I didn't feel like it worked for me. I also enrolled in a MOOC offered by the Thailand Foundation but I really don't learn watching videos, I get easily distracted and have to repeat them at least three times because I almost always end up spacing out at some point. I decided to pause the Lingodeer subscription because right now I need to save as much as possible, but I plan to at least finish the MOOC. I hope I can find different resources at some point because I really like Thai and want to learn it. Although I don't have a specific goal, it's nice to recognize some words in the dramas.

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Sometimes I fantasize about just dedicating my life to learn as many languages as possible... unfortunately, I have to work to survive and that doesn't leave me the time to do it. And also... money is limited an there are other priorities like... eating and paying bills, and all that stuff.

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A lot of stuff

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 04:13:04 GMT

Why are bodies?

I am a body, I have a body, I inhabit a body.

Bodies are... a thing. When mine doesn't hurt, it's easy to forget it exists and just focus on other things: work, the book I'm reading, the show I'm watching... But when something hurts it's very difficult to think about anything else or do anyhting else, not even pleasant activities or even rest and at some point it's just too much and I need to sleep as much as I can to recover and I feel bad for wasting time.

Fortunately, after a week of fighting my body (and brain, but that's almos a daily battle) I can go back and do things I need to do and the stuff I want to do too.

Fediversary

Yesterday was my fediversary. That is: the anniversary of the day I joined the fediverse. I had made an attempt once before but I didn't know how to start and what to look for. This time was different and it helped a lot that I joined at the same time as a handful of people from the Our Flag Means Death Fandom when many of us were trying to find a home away from twitter.

I am glad for that group of people because thanks to them, even if I don't consider myself part of the fandom anymore, it wouldn't have been so easy to stay. And the fact that blorbo social is a nice place helps too. I really enjoy the local feed of the server and reading people's posts even though we don't share fandoms. And except for one or two weird experiences, I really like that space. It feels very very different from other social media. The filters are great because they work and I don't miss the ads, gosh... I hate the ads everywhere else and they're almost unavoidable on mobile *sigh*.

Other thing I like is that I've found people to talk to about new interests, like danmei and cdramas. That's nice.

There are other interesting things like the fan promt game or the fan chats. The fan prompt game has inspired me to fill a couple of promts when my brain is not full of bees and my creative side is not buried under a mountain of other stuff.

But also, I admit now I expect other kind of features, like circles. I wish we had something like that because lists are totally not the same as circles. I hope we get that kind of stuff soon. I'd also like the option to limit who can reply to posts (something I saw people talking about a couple of weeks ago... I think... what is time?)

Anyway, it's been a good year and being there also encouraged me to create an account here.

Wow, I didn't realize I had so much to say about that topic. Ha.

Japanese classes

Last year I also enrolled in Japanese classes. I took two levels at the language faculty of the local university, in the courses they offer for the public. And I learned, but I ended up not liking the teacher after he made a couple of homophobic and transphobic comments and at least two classmated agreed with him. And he's the only teacher for the first five levels, so I decided to look up a different school. I couldn't enroll for the summer classes because I took an instructional design workshop and an H5P workshop and it would have been too much. But I'm going to enroll in fall classes and keep learning in that other school. It's actually one of the others in my city listed in the Japanese Embassy webpage...

Meanwhile, I have been practicing on the Japan Foundation platform and duolingo. I ... don't love duolingo except for the kanji practices and that it's mobile friendly. I am trying to explore different apps but sometimes I just don't like the UI... I'm very picky about that and it isn't always rational, sometimes it's just not the most comfortable for me and different apps offer differnt things... yeah, I know it's obvious but those things aren't always for everyone and it's necessary to try them to know what works for me and what doesn't.

I haven't talked a lot about my journey like I did in the beginning because I feel like right now I'm just practicing and not making much progress... but I'm sure that as soon I resume the formal lessons I'm going to start talking more actively about it.

Coding lessons

A couple of weeks ago (?) I asked (on fedi) where should I start if I wanted to learn coding. I said that I was aware that maybe my question was inviting chaos (because fedi) but some people were very kind and asked what I wanted to do with coding and then, after I replied, gave me some suggestions of places where I could check. After doing that, I started taking the lessons on freecodecamp, specifically the Responsive Web Design courses. I'm having fun so far.

Back in the day, in one of my jobs, I briefly had to update the website and used Dreamweaver to do it, I learned a bit of html and I liked it but I didn't last enough in that job to keep learning and then I had a lot of things... but the interest has been there for a while and I wanted to get back to it.

I know it's the adhd looking for the next shiny thing and we'll see if it sticks... But I like seeing things appear on the screen when I tell the computer what to do, heh.

Typos

I have been working as a copyeditor (sometimes as an editor and proofreader too) for the last decade. Typos are my nemesis. I was a grammar nerd (in Spanish) since I was in fourth grade. I work as an instructional designer that copy edits texts and part of my job is to make sure that the publications I correct do not have typos (or other more serious errors, but I am only going to talk about the typos here), so... they're a very big part of my life. And I hate them. I hate it when the things I write have typos. I obsessed over not having typos on my personal posts about silly stuff and I deleted them if no one had interacted with them only to correct them and post them again.

But in the last two years I have been learning to let go of control and one very simple thing I can apply it to is that: not letting a typo bother me to the point of obsessing over it. When I work, I cannot do that, but no one is going to judge me for having a couple of typos on a social media post... and if they do... well, unless I see them talking about it, it doesn't affect me.

I still try to avoid them but sometimes I am just too fucking tired after reading all day and my eyes don't even register them anymore. Only when someone replies or interacts with my posts do I read them again and discover the antics of Titivillus who, like a good devil (I think of Crowley, from Good Omens), has evolved along with us humans...

But now I just let the typos exist. And that's fine... I guess. I definitely won't try to edit this post later if I find typos.

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