13: meta

Some brief thoughts:

I was really stressed out at the beginning of the week. I need to figure out how to achieve balance in my life. What things can go, what things must stay, how to prioritize, etc.

My family is my first priority. It's really tough to know how to sub-prioritize that, though. I am a stay home mom. It's a really complex web of flexibility and obligations. I could write a novel about it, but I'll spare you...

I decided that I'm really unhappy when I don't get time to do genealogy for myself. So I will have to make time for that. It might come at the expense of some of my Czech studying. Ironically, my genealogy and heritage is the reason I am studying Czech.

I did a terrible job this week at putting my learning in a loop. It's just so difficult to write. I'm slow. There's thousands of words inside me that can't get out, so I feel really frustrated. It's much more enjoyable to speak and listen and even read than to write. But next week is a new week, and I will try to force myself to write. I think it's going to take some kind of consistent TIME commitment, rather than an end goal commitment.

Actually, that might be a better approach anyway. Measure achievements in time rather than "what I did."

I'm really annoyed at all the Czech textbook authors for doing the world's lousiest job of striking a balance between overwhelming the reader with words and introducing the concepts too slowly.

Honestly, they just didn't do a good job of predicting the order in which English speakers would benefit learning these concepts. It's not natural to break up accusative forms, leaving masculine animate for a later date. It actually causes anxiety, "oh this will be too hard for you to learn all at once."

And either they introduced the noun patterns without me noticing (wall of text) or they didn't at all. More about this later...