Christopher Merle

Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

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Duocon 2021 (and my language goals)

August 22, 2021 /

Duolingo just hosted Duocon (virtually). It’s an event they’ve started doing two years ago. You could think of it as one long infomercial. Duolingo is a great way to get you started learning a language, but you won’t achieve fluency with it if that is your goal. You’ll eventually need to find other material and tutors to get you there.

You can watch all the talks here. Patton Oswalt kicks it off.

So the video at the top is all of Duocon and watching it reminds me so much of the HBO series Silicon Valley’s Pied Piper.

It is interesting. I wasn’t aware of Duolingo’s English Test which actually seems to be a good and affordable service available to the public for foreign students wanting to get into universities that require such a test.

I’ve been watching the full Duocon video a little bit at a time and it’s more impressive, interesting, and enjoyable than I thought it’d be. At the same time it reminds me more and more of Pied Piper from HBO’s Silicon Valley. The most surprising thing is the use of AI for the voices. They use voice actors, but then they manipulate the voices for the characters for the lessons.

What’s interesting they align their lessons with CERF. Their goal is to get people to B2, but if you get to level 5 of a language it’s equivalent to A2.

I started off with German for the first six months and then I added in Russian. A few months ago after I finished the German tree I started Spanish. German keeps adding stories, so I go back to those. Spanish also has stories and podcasts. Russian doesn’t have either feature. I do have some background in all 3 languages. I took 1 year of Spanish and 2 years of German in high school. I have a minor in Russian from college. I am not fluent in any of these languages yet. I’ve forgotten most of my Russian, but I can still read and pronounce it. I’ve been doing Duolingo for 18 months now, but I haven’t done it exclusively. I added in reading, listening, and video material mostly to German. My goal is to be fluent in one language before tackling another. I should say tackling fluency in another language. I probably shouldn’t be juggling three languages.

Here’s a list of languages in chronological order of starting to learn more of and how much I’ve learned if I can quantify it.

Spanish  1 year in high school, Duolingo for 6 months
German 2 years in high school, Duolingo for 1.5 years, lots of German language YouTube videos, German graded readers.
Russian 3 years in college, Duolingo for 9 months
Japanese 1 semester in college
Gaelic 4 years of self-study + immersions (and a few weeks of Irish because it’s a closely related language)
French 3 months of self-study
Cherokee 1 month of self-study + 2 sessions

I’ve decided that I have no real interest wanting to learn more French at this time, but really want to be able to speak German well. Considering how much time I invested in Russian I feel I ought to achieve a level of fluency in it as well, but that could be the sunk cost fallacy. I was going to have an opportunity to speak Russian on our now cancelled 2020 Baltic cruise which is the reason I started using Duolingo along with German. I knew more Russian so I didn’t feel like I had to brush up as much to be a tourist as I did for Germany. There may also be a bit of a sunk cost fallacy in learning Gaelic too, though I am quite proud it was the first language I learned mostly on my own.

I want to speak Spanish better because it’s such a practical language to know living in Tucson and being so close to Mexico (though I don’t want to visit while their murderous drug wars continue). German was and is my first foreign language love. I have German ancestry. I also want to learn Cherokee because I have Cherokee ancestry and I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I want to learn Gaelic because I love Scotland. It’s the one language I actually had a short conversation in.

I won’t start a fourth Duolingo language until I’ve completed the tree of at least one other language. That would be Russian because I’ve done more and it has less material than Spanish.

There are a few other languages I’m interested in. Latin, Greek, and American Sign Language. Here are my current languages I want to learn and in order of importance:

German
Gaelic
Cherokee
Spanish
Russian
Japanese

Spanish is probably the most practical of all the languages. The one I’m likely to use most in my daily life or that I could use. I don’t plan to seriously tackle other languages until I’m satisfied with my progress in German.

Hello 2021

January 17, 2021 /

2020 has been a heckuva year and 2021 is really a continuation of that year. In three days Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president. He has a lot of work ahead of him. I wasn’t sure we’d even reach this point and after what happened on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC, it almost didn’t. It still might not happen but the odds are growing less and less. We will still have to hold those accountable and defuse the situation. The pandemic is still raging and getting worse despite vaccines being rolled out.  If people would just stay at home as much as possible and wear masks when out, we could get it under control, but thousands are dying every day. And it won’t abate for weeks.

Gutenberg

October 5, 2020 /

I’ve activated the Gutenberg Editor in WordPress. I’ll be able to switch between it and the Classic Editor (which I prefer), but I know that I’ll need to learn it. It’s very similar to Wagtail’s StreamField editor. You create blocks to build your page. It’s supposed to be more flexible and powerful.

I don’t care. It’s very different and, frankly, a pain in the ass to switch. It’s like going from Word 97 to Word 2003 (I don’t remember the exact names). It required learning Word all over again. This is on a smaller scale but it is a big change.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It also pisses us off.

Me

Somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona.
US-Canada border near Glacier National Park (Montana and Alberta)

Three Quotes That Define America

September 22, 2020 /

When I saw the last quote I was reminded of the other two. I think all pretty define the problem we face in America. But is it really a problem? Short answer Yes. Long answer,  I’ll try to explain in a later post.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Newsweek: “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, January 21, 1980, p. 19.
https://aphelis.net/cult-ignorance-isaac-asimov-1980/

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

Three Cheers for Socialism
Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart February 24, 2020
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism

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