Physical Health or Lack Thereof: Well, crap, I relapsed

Much to my great dismay, I overdid it with a task that involved heavy lifting and dust, and relapsed so badly that I missed the last week of my Spanish class.  I have an appointment for a chest CT tomorrow, and an appointment with a pulmonologist on October 6th, so here's hoping that my even worse case of long covid won't become an ongoing situation.

Deberes: El Clima de Alemania

We spent a lot of time on chapter three, delving into the geography and culture of Spain and some other Spanish-speaking countries.  I even did a short presentation on Mexico! 

This chapter also included talking about weather and climate.  When I was circling exercises in the workbook section of Aula Internacional, I somehow missed number 19, and ended up freestyling it during class when we went through the homework.  That said, I thought it would make a good practice text, which is one of the things I want to devote space to in this blog.

La Clima de Alemania

Alemania es un país con algunas zonas de clima.  En el norte del país hay una clima marítima con mucho llueve.  En el sur del país hay una clima continental con la imagen estereotípica de cuatros estaciones: un invierno frío con nieve, una primavera amable con llueve, un verano caliente, y un otoño como la primavera.  En verdad en invierno llueve mucho también pero en las montañas Alpes nieve mucho con nieve eternal en los picos.  En verano hace a veces calor pero llueve mucho también con temperaturas mas frías.  Mi estación favorito es otoño porque me gusta mucho los colores.

Deberes: El Alfabeto

The very first homework exercise in chapter one of Aula Internacional asked us to write a word in Spanish corresponding to each letter of the alphabet.  Since I am, as mentioned elsewhere, something of a fake beginner at Spanish, I decided to challenge myself by constraining my choices to words related to food.  Some of the letters were a bit tricky!  (K and W ended up being words listed as “alternate spellings”, but hey, it counts.)  Here’s what I came up with:

A como arroz B como bebida C como comida D como desayuno E como empanada F como frutas G como gazpacho H como horchata I como ingrediente J como jamón K como kiskilla L como langosta M como mantequilla

N como naranja O como oporto P como paella Q como queso R como relleno S como salsa T como tapas U como uva V como verduras W como whisky Y como yogur Z como zanahoria

What a Difference a Game Makes! (but only when it's the right game)

I have been playing "cozy games" since long before they were called such: I literally got hooked on the Nintendo64 version of Harvest Moon before 2000, and have been playing games of that ilk ever since.

The last few months since Frida died, I have been playing Skyrim on my Nintendo Switch, as it was ported there recently, as I don't currently have a PC gaming setup, and my Mac is limited not only by available titles but the fact that it's ancient.  (I've also been playing The Elder Scrolls games since TES3: Morrowind in about 2004.)  Skyrim on Switch has been limiting compared to playing it on a PC, as it's notoriously buggy and you can't install unofficial patches to fix it, but it's been gaming comfort food since losing my little doggy.

However, a few weeks back, I saw a trailer on the Switch Store that promised a new title to get into, one I could play from the comfort of my wingback chair (which requires less energy than playing at my desktop), and which promised to tickle the same sorts of happy places in my brain as Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.  (ACNH was my saving grace the first few months of lockdown, before magnesium supplementation improved my health enough that I signed up for intensive online German classes.)

You see, the disadvantage with Skyrim is that there are no logical pause points, so it becomes far too easy to fall into a game-shaped hole, only getting up when biological dictates force me into it.  It's been a beneficial pattern at some points in my life to engage in "Stardew and Stuff", where I play a day in-game, and then get up and do something for a bit.  (I do have Stardew Valley for my Switch, but I'm so used to playing it on the desktop that I just haven't been able to get into playing it on console.)  

Since last Friday, I now have a new source of serotonin and structure: "Fae Farm and Futz".  I'm nearly through my first year in-game, and still have lots to do in the main story quest, to say nothing of things like romancing the romanceable locals.  The art is beautiful, the story is satisfying, the gameplay is intuitive, but has enough to distinguish it from Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, or Stardew Valley to make it worth the somewhat high price point.  More importantly, it helps me to get back to doing little things around the house to help both my mental health and Lars's (without falling prey to the behavior I inherited from my father where I pounce on my first bit of energy in days, try to do ALL THE THINGS, neglect to take breaks, and end up feeling worse than ever).

Now I just face the challenge of enjoying my game without sacrificing too much time to it that I could be spending on Spanish or blogging, which is another set of problems inherent in stimulating my ADHD brain with a Shiny New Game.  ¡Buena suerte para mi!

Physical Health or Lack Thereof: Not dead yet!

One of the things I love most about online classes is the low threshold for attendance. I missed class last week due to my recent covid infection (the sequel nobody wanted!), as I was just too sick and brainless. If it were an IRL class, I would definitely be missing this week: partly because I would be concerned about spreading my infection, but mostly because getting bathed, dressed, and to a class would take all of my limited energy reserves, leaving none for participating in the class. 

Today after spinning up for a bit, I managed to get myself excited for returning to Spanish class by watching the just-released Geography Now! Uruguay episode. After that, I went through the chapter I missed, and managed to do most of the homework. By no means am I completely caught up, and I have definitely lost ground from not practicing conjugations and vocabulary while sick. Nevertheless, I stand a pretty good chance of attending class tomorrow, even if I show up unshowered and in pajamas.

Here’s hoping that I keep creeping back towards my previous suboptimal levels of functionality, so that I can get back to trying to rehabilitate my brain via language learning! 

Every Struggle Has Setbacks

Despite taking many precautions after he tested positive, I unfortunately caught COVID from my husband.  It seems to be a mild case so far, which is understandable as I've had at least two or three vaccines and already had it once.  However, it means I might not have the mental or physical energy to keep up with my Spanish as much as I want to, to say nothing of my blog.  I do have some draft entries that function as background information, so I might fish some of those out and post them.  Watch this space for updates!

From Both Sides Now: Holy Crap So Many Apps!

 Back when I was still teaching, students would frequently ask me for my recommendation for apps for learning English.  I hadn’t really investigated the topic, but usually threw out DuoLingo as a name because it’s free and it’s gamified.  In truth, though, any language learning tool, be it beautifully engineered software or handwritten flashcards, is only as effective as long as you use it frequently and consistently.  Will you use it five or more minutes a day, every day?  Then it’s a good tool.  Will you pay a lot of money for it, binge use it for a couple of days, then stop?  Then it’s not a good tool.

One of the problems inherent in most language learning apps is that they try to be all things to all people for all target languages.  The problem, however, is that different languages present different challenges to different learners due to different factors.  To take my own current example: Spanish is a grammatically gendered language with extensive verb conjugation.  

For people not into foreign language learning, let me explain: nouns in a great many languages have a gender, typically masculine and feminine for Romance languages (German throws in a neutral as well).  This typically means that there are two different variants of articles (“a/an” and “the” are the indefinite and definite articles for English, respectively), depending on whether the noun they are with is masculine or feminine.  Adjectives attached to these nouns also get endings depending on gender and whether they’re singular or plural.

Furthermore, verbs in Spanish are EXTENSIVELY conjugated, with different endings based on number (first, second, or third, as in “I”, “you”, or “it”) and number (whether they’re singular or plural.  Plus whole different ways of doing the endings depending on the verb tense (where you are in time) and voice (whether you’re talking about fact or conjecture).  Fortunately, at this point I only need to learn present tense, but I want to make sure that’s solid before I have to throw in other ones.  

And just to make matters worse, even though 95% of verbs are likely to be regular, the remaining 5% are irregular (which means memorization rather than extrapolating from known building blocks), and language being language, the most common ones are the most likely to be irregular (like “be” and “have”).

So, to that end, I need apps that will help me learn those two classes of grammar challenges.  Genders dovetail nicely into just learning vocabulary, and I have a trick planned for that (which I originally designed for German genders, but never got around to using).  Vocabulary is something I will tackle with a spaced repetition system, which I will get back to in another post.  But for conjugations, I have identified a couple of different well-rated apps which are specialists rather than generalists: ConjuGato (love the pun!) and Ella Verbs (also a pun, but only when you see that the icon has an elephant in it).  Watch this space for reviews in the future!