French

What I took away from Scott H Young’s article

I’ve been learning French, on my own at a snail’s pace over the past year or so. All because I want to read Émilie du Châtelet, Dumas, Verne, and Montaigne in their native tongue. Since I cannot do immersion nor give regular practice the time it wants, it’s … slow going But I do, do it. Regularly and deliberately. I’ve built up a vocabulary of about 500-700 words by now and I know if I keep this up, I’ll be able to do read well in time. ...

Long day today1. I thought I got nothing much done, until I wrote this post. So, more incentive to keep writing these. Python Learning about how to make keyword arguments stick. And how to think about structuring programs Devops Deep dive into how to add prow job listings to the dashboard and viceversa; how to go about looking for the job from the dashboard Urdu / French Lots of practice with vowels and the ‘jiim’ group of letters. Since I know Hindi, Urdu progress is much, much, much faster than French. I think that is because, I am forcing my English grammar / vocabulary on another Romance language that has Germanic influences. This is leading to a lot of cognitive dissonance and slow progress. Much of my Urdu vocabulary comes from Hindi, which I learnt as a kid, and I definitely did not go looking for the “right” way to speak it. Better to just do French similarly as well. While I cannot do immersion, I can do what I want to do with French. Begin reading what I want to. Whether I understand it or not. I realise this will take me a lot longer than Urdu or Hindi, but that’s ok. Émilie du Châtelet, Montaigne and Dumas are not going anywhere, and neither am I :) My frame of learning now, after doing these two languages, as well as the rest of the stuff I am doing, is to just begin doing2. And figure out / learn the rules, the grammar, the conventions as you go. Physical Activity They call it chest and arm day. I presume, the exercises are meant to strengthen them. Right now, it’s just a stiff, painful mess. I cannot wait for this phase to be over. Books / Reading Finished reading, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. It’s a hauntingly, beautiful book. A spiritual successor to the Little Prince and a Lindy book for sure. Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...

Morning Lets see what this day holds :) French Did a review session Made 15 flashcards MITx, 6.00.1x, Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python goofed off on twitter and read articles on blogs instead of studying learnt about tuples. it’s been an hour & a half and I am still terribly distracted. doing the dishes to regain focus. be back in 30. Nope. cannot focus. Annnnnd now there is no power. This day is done! Will just sit at the window and enjoy the rain :) Hopefully tomorrow is a better day. ...

Just did the MIT course all day today, because my next problem set is due tonight and I did not want to fall behind again. Got distracted a bit, but a lot less than yesterday with the way Nikola renders headers, and youtube videos of sausage making :P Now that I am going through the class, I realise programming is not what I imagined. It is at once, much simpler and a bit more complex than I thought it to be. More than that, I realise I can do this. :) ...

Day 1 is an disaster of fantastical proportions. I did lots of stuff. But I got nothing of consequence done. Save one big thing. I managed to buckle down and study for six hours. That counts as a win, a big one in my book. Will hopefully get more done tomorrow. If you are following this blog, the days might soon seem out of sync. That’s because I’ve decided that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are my days of study. Monday & Tuesday are for work, while Satuday and Sunday are for home and family. I need to practice what I preach and have margins and boundaries in my life. ...