Month: September 2012

Walking results

There are in fact still two days to go to  the end of September, but already it’s clear from the graph that with a result of 139 km for September so far I’ve beaten the January result of 135 km and won’t manage to beat the March record (the record month for this year – and of all time – although that only means since May 2011 when I got the pedometer) of 170 km.   I prefer to save attempting that one for October – we’ll see how that goes.  There were three better months in 2011 or between 150 and 165 km, so that makes this month the 5th best.

The graph comes from http://www.silvaconnect.se , which is the on-line tool for holding and displaying stats of the users of the Silvaconnect pedometers. The highest ones in their range have the possibility to synchronise via a computer to this website, and it’s a facility I greatly appreciate. One can also pit one’s performance against friends using the same pedometer.

The graph shows pretty clearly what happened to me in the summer – the months of July and August were my months of being ill. At the start, when I was already ill but maybe just bronchitis rather than full blown pneumonia, I was still walking, and so the first ten days of July had some walking, but much less than normal. The same for the last week of August.

As I was hoping, the level of health to which you get back after recovering from an illness is higher than the level achieved before, and so the result for September is higher than that for April or May or June. I’m hoping that I’ll beat all the records to date, in other words beat 170 and get past that white line you see on the graph which was supposed to be my target for average monthly performance this year, not record performance, but I’ll hold that target over for next year.

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A question on the Goldlist Method

Français : A small list of common Louisiana Fr...
Français : A small list of common Louisiana French words different from normative French. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nice to see there are still all the time more and more people discovering the method online and finding out about it. One viewer asked me today:

Hello, in the last few days I’ve spent a few hours watching Your videos about the Goldlist Method. They have answered most of my questions, but one. Which is; as You’ve said, it is not a language course, or language learning method, but a way of learning vocabulary, so to learn a language the student also needs a book about the language. But how to use the course, if I’m using the Goldlist method? I mean, to make sure that the words I’ve learnt, I remember with the long term memory, I should not have contact with them for at least two weeks, but I would have if I were to use the course. Should I actually use the course (the way it’s meant to be used) after I learn all/most of the vocabulary contained in it? That would mean spending quite a few months learning the vocabulary, and not being able to really say anything in the target language. Or should I read enough about the target language’s grammar before? Though, that would mean spending some time learning the grammar, without knowing too much vocabulary to practice it with.

When I choose a language course, I try and find one that has vocabulary given in each lesson (as well as an index at the back, and graded grammatical explanations in each lesson. So I copy over the voicabulary items as single line items, and I copy over the grammatical paradigms as well as the explanations in summarised form as line items, just like noting things out of the book. I don’t need to write out all the dialogues and I don’t then usually need to do the exercises.

The fact that common words will inevitably be met again while I’m working further on the course is not an issue. These are the words which are so common of course you are going to learn them if you learn also the uncommon words, but in fact you shouldn’t panic unduly about seeing the words again, you just shouldn’t revise them again, but press on forward.

Even if you end up writing a word or grammar point more than once because you forgot you met it already, and only discover this on a later distillation, it’s really no big deal. Goldlist is quite a long project even though it’s probably the quickest way to learn in terms of total time spent, and these small inaccuracies will all come out in the wash.

Hope that helps.

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Interesting information about Christadelphians and others on YouTube

English: World map that show the status of You...
English: World map that show the status of YouTube in countries Green: Has local YouTube version Olive Green: Has local version. Blocked before. Red: Still blocked Pink: Blocked and lifted Purple: Blocked with limitations. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The channel “excatholics” is one I’m subscribed to on YouTube and highly recommend it to my viewers. I don’t think I have any real disagreements with this brother’s theology, although I do think he uses the term “Calvinist” to describe thinking that to my mind is hypercalvinism, and that what he thinks himself is what I’d describe as Calvinistic – in any rate it’s certainly not Arminian.

Here’s one great example of his work – during the watching of this small hilltop sermon today I got the breath of fresh air that his words often give me several times over.

He hasn’t offered a space for comment or even rating on that space, which is a stylistic difference as I am all for letting people have their say and engage them in some way, but if you want to rate this or discuss it on this forum, I don’t see why not. Syndication has been allowed on the video and so I have syndicated it without specifically asking. I will let James know that I have re-blogged this piece and if he’s not happy then I can always remove it later.

I don’t need to say much about the topic of Christadelphians as he covers it in my opinion perfectly well. The remarks he makes are particularly insightful.

Enjoy!

FUCATOKK – repost of an old attempt of mine at an easy conlang (unfinished – collaboration welcome)

FUCATOKK

Uncle Davey, 2003

Lesson 1 – Alfabet

The alphabet of Fucatokk contains the same 26 letters of the modern English alphabet and no diacritics.

Each letter has one sound only and always keeps that sound. Words are spelt as they sound in the Fucatokk language.

Some of the letters, especially ‘q’ and ‘x’ have quite different values to those usually given in modern English, but most letters are not so surprising.

The punctuation marks and the numbers, other than where they abbreviate letters using the Fucatokk alphanumeric shorthand, follow typical European usage, except for the absence of capitalisation, which is perfectly acceptable form in Fucatokk.

Many people visiting this will know Esperanto, so here are the Esperanto equivalents of the Fucatokk letters:

a = a (Short. Long is ‘ey’)
b = b
c = cx (English ‘ch’ as in ‘church’)
d = d
e = e (Short) Continue reading “FUCATOKK – repost of an old attempt of mine at an easy conlang (unfinished – collaboration welcome)” →