I recently read Scott H. Young’s article on How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language and realised it would be a handy guide for me, as I go about increasing my French & Urdu vocabulary.

This is what I took away:

• The first 2000 words will cover 80-90% of a language’s vocabulary. 3000 will cover 95%. That should be your goal.
• Use a frequency dictionary, then according to frequency do 1000/2000/3000 words
• 10000 will lead to almost being fluent. Hard to do that quickly with French, sitting in India. But, aspirational goals :)
• Do:
  • Flash cards, knowing that this will not teach you the nuance and flavour and texture of French
  • Graded reading, Like the article states

  To successfully guess the meaning of a new word from its context, we need to understand between 95% and 98% of the surrounding words. This is difficult to achieve with native-level materials. Graded readers, which deliberately limit vocabulary, can be beneficial here.

  • If you’re doing the slow and steady way, because you lack the time, then growth will be slow. Assume 400 new word families a year
  • Use the four pillars of learning. Paraphrasing & Quoting the article:
    1. Meaning-focused input.
       Input provides the raw data for learning new words and enriches the contextual associations of words studied deliberately elsewhere. This includes conversations, books, films, television and other media that you attend to primarily for their meaning.
    2. Meaning-focused output. (Note: I am focussed on reading and writing)
       Speaking and writing are more difficult than simply understanding particular words from input, as using words correctly requires a more precise knowledge of each word and its meaning.
    3. Language-focused learning.
       This is the deliberate act of memorizing words, studying flashcards, or receiving explanations about word meanings. Webb and Nation argue that this should account for ~25% of the time spent learning a language.
    4. Fluency development. (I don’t know how I’ll do this. Re read stuff? Watch TV again.)
       Finally, attention should be paid to activities that speed up the understanding and production of words already known. Familiar materials that enable quick reading or conversations on familiar topics may not be needed to build new vocabulary, but they reinforce what was learned previously.

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.

One way I practice is to take something in French and read it slowly, looking up words and phrases and slowly building up the missing pieces.
And to do that, I need something in French. I stumbled across the France Pittoresque site and fell in love with it. French and History! Just my kind of site.

Being the lazy bum, that I am, I went looking for an RSS feed, so that I could read their daily article in Reeder.
And hit my first stumbling block.
The good folk at France Pittoresque, don’t provide a feed. Or if they do, I couldn’t find it. Even after looking and looking. And then looking some more.¹

You know where I’m going with this. This is a job for Huginn!

This is how the site looks today

And this little item is what I want to get, on a daily basis.

So I whipped up this scenario.

1. It scrapes that little section I mentioned above and gets me the title, the url and the description of the article

2. And generates an RSS feed that I can then use in my feed reader!
   The feed is normally at:
   http://your-huginn-instance/users/[your-user-id-int]/web_requests/[agent-id-int]/some-'secret'-string.xml
   
   It looks more complicated than it is. It’ll get generated the moment you create your agent. One advantage of using a vm is that my feed is accessible from any device.

You can find the scenario code here, if you want to play with it.

Huginn has proven invaluable when it comes to doing all the little things, that I’d rather not do :)
Merci beaucoup, Huginn!

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.

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.

The day isn’t over yet. Will attempt to solve the problem set at night.

French

• Did a review session
• Made 25 flashcards

MITx, 6.00.1x, Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

• Good programming
  • More code is not necessarily a good thing
  • A good measure is the amount of functionality, the utility, your program provides
• The notion of abstraction
  • like a thing you know how to use.
  • the details of how it is internally are irrelevant to you
  • the box provides utility and you know how to use the controls to get what you want. that is all that matters.
  • like a phone. or a tv. or a scooter.
• The notion of decomposition
  • i can take all those dumb black boxes that I know how to use
  • and mcgyver them together to do something I want.
  • use independent pieces of codey things that each do something and then glue them all together to get the program I want
  • or to invert, can i break my big problem down into small independent pieces that I can write, or use other folks’, that I can stitch into my own little frankenstein?
• Decomposable Code, divide code into modules that
  • are self contained
  • are reusable
  • keeps you and the code organised
  • keeps things coherent
  • can be done with functions or classes
• Abstractable Code, build a black box that
  • cannot see details
  • does not need to see details
  • does not want to see details
  • hides the gory details from you. or just the fact that your magical thing is made of small boring pieces :)
  • can be done with function specifications or docstrings
• One new aspect of functions I learnt was that they have specifications.
  • Thinking back, it’s a well, duh! point, but I’m glad I learnt it explicitly.
  • there’s a contract between me, the author of the function, and its users
  • there’s a set of assumptions that the function has. this is what I expect, this is what I want, these are the values you need to pass, this is what the environment needs to look like, what is the phase of the moon?, yadda, yadda
  • and if those assumptions are met, there are guarantees I can make about the output.
    • pass these numbers in, in this sequence, and you will always get this output. put the dough in the oven, when the new moon is rising, and you will always get delicious pizza
  • in python, a docstring documents what the function assumes and guarantees. good programmers do this to help other folk using the function and to save their own future dumb selves
• I learnt recursion
  • from what i understand, this means that i take something i know and then use it to repeatedly tackle a complicated problem, if said problem, lends itself to being broken down that way.
  • break it down until i reach a step where i know i can do all of the operations on my own.
  • multiplication is a good example.
    • I know that if when a*b when b is 1 is just a.
    • so I can write a function that keeps adding a to itself while decrementing b until b reaches one and et voilà, that value of a is my answer
    • I got that backwards. I know that i need to repeatedly add until b is 1. so i just keep adding a to a function that just asks if the value of b is 1. if not just add a to that same function where the else states that I reduce b by 1. when b is 1, i just return a which will be the first of the added as and the function then begins looping outwards and backwards adding a. I realise I have horribly explained it, but it’s somehow more intuitive and more elegant to my mind and fun to watch, so I’ll let Professor Grimson do it much better than I can
    • I still don’t totally get it, but I get that this is cool and makes tackling hard problems easier. Hopfully more understanding will come with time.

P.S. A note to student planet readers, if you miss some posts in that feed, check the site to see if I wrote anything (or manually subscribe to the main feed.) I might be uncomfortable pushing certain language or frustrations of mine to other learners at large.

French

• Created cards and a review sesion

Python Problem

• I decide to tackle this first thing in the morn and sank like a stone.
• I yak shaved for 2 hours (git issues, setting up a dedicated desktop space for study, rsync issues, syncthing issues, crontab issues, more git issues)and then took nearly another hour trying to remember things and then by the time I had some idea of how to tackle the issue, it was lunch time. Hopefully better luck tomorrow

The MITx, 6.00.1x, Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python course

• I am hopelessly behind and playing catch up.
• Already missed the deadline for the week one exercises.
• Hopefully will be all caught up by this time next week.

I learnt

• that iterables are things that can be counted. like beads in a string, or on a rosary.
• strings are a form of iterable.
• Bisection searches to find square roots are much more efficient than having to go slowly guessing our way up.
• I should not compare floating point numbers (e.g. test for equality). Their internal representations might just be subtly different. Instead use the absolute value of the difference of the two floats. abs(x-y) instead of x==y
• Start with a basic set of code, check to see what it runs on, and then see if small changes to the code can solve other similar problems or improve the efficacy of existing ones. (Newton-Rhapson better to find roots than Bisection guess better than incremental exhaustive guessing)