I gave myself a deadline of today to decide whether or not I'd continue with my Czech A4 learning schedule as planned. It's not so much a schedule (there are not really deadlines) as a big spreadsheet with lots of check boxes.
<ranty tangent about programming>
In other news, a while ago now I discovered conditional formatting in google sheets. I suppose it was only a matter of time until I discovered the IF and IFS functions and started writing nonsense strings of characters in my spreadsheets. It's so useful. I am probably reluctantly clinging to my ignorant non-programmer ways only because I know exactly how hard and painful the learning curve is gonna be. It is not going to be fun at all. Things like { } and ~ and | and < > and / \ can just stay away from me for a little while yet, but I am sure that someday, I'm going to cave in under this mighty pressure of, "auuuugh I wish I knew how to do x." And, you know, five years from then, after I've learned at least two programming languages (Danny says you have to learn multiple ones before you can really start to see the patterns in what applies to the language and what is universal to programming), watch out world.
But for the moment, I have other pursuits and projects and my self-confidence is still very fragile. I recently decided to wean my baby, which was definitely the right choice for my mental health. I've felt so much better since then - dramatically better. But it's not like lactation immediately ceases, so... I should be careful not to take on too many new projects too quickly.
Besides that, like I said, I know that learning how to write code is going to be difficult to me. I've had a few false starts on that trail (though I did get an A in that Java class in college - but it's allllllll forgotten, except things like sitting in the computer lab next to Nate, or the joy of seeing the stupid GUI work for the first time, or feeling very self conscious about being the only woman in my class..).
It's abstract. It's not intuitive. It is very logical, and I know that I struggle with organizing my thoughts that way. It takes me time and a lot of effort. My 8 year old son, of his own ambition, decided to learn python through Khan Academy. I'm still at the point where I can help him when he gets so frustrated he can't work his way through the tutorials ("Hmm. I think you need to call the variable inside the function. Try putting it there [points] instead." "Mom! You're the best!") but that is not going to last very long, and I know it.
</tangent>
I've been reading some very interesting academic articles about Second Language Acquisition. There's this big theory out there called the "input hypothesis" which basically is that SLA depends on the input being just a teeeeeeny tiny bit beyond your capacity. I have vague memories about learning about this in college, too. It's logical. There is also a lot of support of read-read-read-read-read-read-read-read-read for SLA. Just, read everything you can. That is not the current plan. The next version of my plan is going to look a lot different.
I had been feeling really frustrated because the second that my emotional limitations felt like they were lifted from me, I found myself surrounded by some very real physical limitations. I have five children, it's summer, my mom was not around to watch them at all - my days have been completely consumed in childcare and housework. I don't hate it, and at the same time, I'm looking forward to September when school starts again.
I did what I could to try to work my way through my really ridiculous spreadsheet. I started with the tasks that were the easiest to do alone. Part of the problem is that even though emotionally I feel so much better, it's still really difficult to communicate with my Czech collaborators (almost all of whom I haven't spoken to in weeks). But this week, I finally managed to drop some of them a line and vaguely explain where I've been, ascribing it to a serious health problem. Mental health is still health, even though it feels so... much... not. Ughh.
Whatever kind of collaboration is in store for me this summer, it's almost certainly mostly going to be asynchronous. I mean, it's going to have to be (see point about having five children).
In the end, I decided that I'm not going to give up this plan, in spite of its flaws. I already modified it to be much, much fewer words/"unit". I just want to work my way through it. Maybe that's just because of pride, but I don't really care; I want to finish something I start, especially when it's something like this. When this is over, I will move on to A5, which I think is going to be a lot simpler in design, and involve a lot more reading and watching films or TV shows (which are shorter, which is an advantage).
If I could program, I would write a program that would automate finding the frequency of words in SkELL. I don't even care what kind of output it would be. Copy and pasting 120 values from a single table into a spreadsheet would be a cinch compared to looking up 120 different words and doing it one at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment