💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › tofu › 1607206343.gmi captured on 2023-04-20 at 00:59:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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Things have been nice lately. Been killing time with Duolingo, going through the Japanese > Chinese, English > Esperanto, and English > Spanish trees for the most part.
Chinese isn't as hard as I expected. While my memory is bad with certain hanzi, but the grammar is straight forward.
I'm glad I picked Esperanto back up again. I finished the tree years back, forgot all about it, and now I've gone back through it. Initially, I dropped it to focus on Japanese, out of fear I would get better at Esperanto and focus less time on Japanese. Now that I've come back to it, I have to say it has improved my Japanese in regards to how I think of grammar. I really appreciate it for it's grammar.
As for Spanish, it's fun. The grammar is confusing to use, but that's not a big deal, since I'm focusing on reading over using it for now. I have friends that speak the language, so it seems one of the more useful languages for me to learn.
Japanese has been nice, I've studied 15k words now. While I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near fluent, I can understand plenty of media without a dictionary. However, I can't form complex sentences on the spot. Though through immersion, I've developed a decent feel for if a sentence I've constructed feels off or not. Recently, I lowered my new card count from 22 to 11. I might raise it back up if I feel like it. Still haven't found a good outlet for talking in it. The best outlet I can find is Twitter, which I'd rather not support.
I'm waiting for the Japanese > Korean tree to come out. At the start of next year I want to pick up Korean and watch how far I can get in a year. Japanese grammar is very similar to Korean grammar, so I should make decent progress in a year. It should also help my Japanese a little, since I'm planning on studying it exclusively in Japanese. My goal with the language is to be able to enjoy media and simple sentences in the language with a dictionary.
Mum bought me some phone styluses the other day. Simple, cheap stuff, they work just fine for art. I bought an expensive phone stylus awhile back, yet I might prefer these.
Installed Anki back onto my phone. Going to use it as an art timer, for warmup sketches in my sketchbook and value studies on my phone. Hopefully my arm doesn't act up, if it does I'll just practice with my left.
I'm fond of this place, and Gemini in general, it's cozy. There's a certain charm the modern web has been lacking for a long time now. Twitter's platform in itself encourages short, fast, posts and blocking strangers enmasse. While curating your online experience is a good thing, the very fact that it is the current centre of the web with little active alternatives and used seriously for politics, makes it a mess, and that's not going over all the privacy and ethical issues with the platform. The web used to be an escape from reality but now it's the other way around.
Actually one more thing I hate about twitter, is how creatives have been commodified to the extreme. I see so many artists these days suffering from carpal tunnel and other health issues just to stay on top. You are worth more than your skills.