Some of my generic tricks for language learning are:
-don't just lock in on one learning app or method but always be open to find better tools. Every language has different options. But don't waste too much time on that either - that's the language equivalent of trying every JS framework before starting your personal website
-identify what the hard and the easy bits of the language are. Ask yourself which of those you absolutely need in order to progress and which can wait.
Then tackle the low hanging fruit while you start nibbling at the hard-but-necessary ones and leave the hard-but-less-necessary ones for later - by which time they will be easier because you'll be more familiar with them.
Your perception of what the hard and the easy parts of the language are will evolve with time, stay open to that.
-adding to the last point, identify your strengths and weaknesses towards the language, this includes understanding what advantages your current stock of languages give you. Like, how Japanese pronunciation is easy for a Spanish speaker, but vocabulary acquisition isn't. Or how if you have very good memory but poor social skills you'll be good at building your vocabulary but speaking will require extra effort.
It is hard when they are such close languages! But maintaining is always hard. I compare it to building with clay while it's mildly raining. You need to keep re building chunks that fall off what you've built. Eventually some chunks dry enough that they are solid forever and you use them as a base to keep going.
I don't think you need to put a lot of time and effort in maintenance but you do have to put some with certain regularity
I thought that was a pretty common thing to feel? I mean, the different personality thing. I had never thought about things not feeling so real... I'm gonna definitely meditate on that one for a while
I also got sad when i started replacing my native language with English in my thoughts, and pushed myself to think in Spanish again, have more Spanish speakers around me etc. since i no longer live where i learned my native language, i speak a somewhat "foreign" to myself version of it, which introduced a new type of sadness - that of not being recognised as a local in your own home, losing a specific kind of personality that's bound to a specific place- but that's one I've learned to live with
Been learning Japanese for...uhmmm...30 years? Not at a consistently intense level, but i started at age 12 with a book my grandpa got me for my birthday when i was a full on anime nerd.
I am fluent in a handful of languages so i know i have it in me but, Japanese, oh boy, it's a tough nut to crack. I am conversationally fluent but I'm aware I must sound like a monkey half the time.
Japanese is deceitful because the basic grammar rules are pretty simple once you get your head around them, not a lot of tenses or conjugations to learn, not even plurals or gender for the most part.
But something about how simple it is makes it actually harder to understand, like the meaning is all these nuanced expressions that take forever to learn, and then of course the completely alien vocabulary, which because of the lack of phonetic variety there's lots and lots of ambiguity, too many similar words. And then there's all the speaking registers as used by different classes of people...
When canal+ reached Spain sometime in the 90s the scrambled signal was in black and white and much more distorted... That didn't stop all the kids in my class from secretly taping the porn they played on Friday nights and trying to follow what was going on - it was like making out shapes in the clouds. I wonder how much more advanced that system was.
I clearly remember feeling this fatigue already 20 years ago when piracy became super easy and i went from the teenage paradigm of buying one album, say, a month, and learning the ins and outs of it for that month, to having more in my hard drive than i could chew on. I remember thinking oh back in the day it was easier to love music!
I have since learned to stop being nostalgic about the scarcity and instead trying to be more, um, mindful of my consumption. Genre rabbit holes are great. Live music is too. I avoid the recommender algorithms as much as i can instead going for albums or curated compilations - much prefer YouTube to Spotify for this. When people let the algorithm play, I can clearly hear the lack of intentionality and it bothers me immensely.
Aha yes RCA it was I remember now! If your memory is better than mine you might remember a very lost and confused Spanish boy with messy hair who was barely surviving in Tokyo, that would have been me. I remember a get together with your crew in a house way in the outskirts of Tokyo. Also remember trying to get an internship with Maywa Denki and failing, but someone in your class did get it.
Wait who did you go to his studio with in 2008? My friend Cesar Harada invited me along when he went with the kids from his class in i think late winter 2008, I believe they were a Parisian design school but the memory is vague
This, and not only that - i use my tablet instead of a mouse for everything, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, and there's a few annoying things about that which could potentially be fixed if Wacom realizes we do this. The pressure sensitivity gets in the way of a lot of things like selecting files in explorer for example. But yeah please ask for permission Wacom, even fucking Google does that when you are first setting up Android
Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you to call me out and reach for old school copyright laws to stop me from using it. Which is no different than me uploading a Techno Viking video to YouTube and getting sued by him or flagged by YouTube, is it?
Someone will always post this on top of any thread about TikTok and that someone must not have tried Tik Tok for very long. My feed is chok full of those that are supposed to be discriminated against, they have solid audiences, and there's great healthy communities around disabilities, LGBTQI+, race issues, politics...I rarely get a hot white babe doing a trendy dance and if i do she will probably have a prosthetic leg
If it's like the older models in the series, it has a few different modes, one of which is the edit mode which is kind of like a tracker where you fine tune the notes and events that you first write in the step or the live sequencer
I've been a huge of the qy series for years. Bought a qy20 about 20 years ago in a thrift store because Tricky had said he wrote all his music in a qy10 (the even more rudimentary one in the series) and that's how i first learned to sequence music. Remember feeling very proud after finishing a clone of daft punks 'da funk' but also write a lot of bizarre experimental things, all gone now because i didn't know you need to open it up and replace the memory battery every once in a while. The limited, hard to use interface made you be very economic with your decisions, which spurred creativity, i would come up with ideas that don't happen when I'm in a modern DAW, just because I'd be staring so hard at those little numbers and tweaking then. Also had a lot of fun combining purely sequenced tracks with live recorded ones that I'd then tweak in the sequencer. The automatic chord sequence generator was fun sometimes but never really used it much. Then there was the way it kind of forces a series of song parts that you are supposed to use to structure your song (intro, main1,main2, main1tomain2 and outro if i remember correctly) which you could also bend to your advantage.
I got a qy70 not long ago which i haven't given to as much love as my old qy20, but then again i was a bright eyed 20 year old with lots of time in his hands. The qy700, which i never used, looks like it's probably less clunky to use thanks to more buttons and screen real space, so i imagine it loses some of the creativity born out of extreme constraints part, but still makes you think different
In this thread - people who have never used tiktok talk shit about tiktok. Some of my favorite tiktokers are severely disabled, grotesquely disfigured, and wildly popular, and making a living telling stories that they would otherwise not be doing
I have tons of these that i keep picking up from free boxes in the street, i rarely have the time to digitize them but they really are some beautiful time capsules and i should...
I have like 3 vcrs, a capture device and a pretty big collection for my tiny apartment. In my city (Berlin) putting free boxes in the street is common practice and between that and the abundant junk stores I can always find new material. Sometimes i find a full collection that feels like getting the login details to someone's pre-internet "accounts" - i recently found a box obviously belonging to a GI stationed in Germany, it had a good cross section of American pop culture, military aviation stunt videos, family home videos and the crown jewel, a tape called "Thank you america!" made by the German army for the GIs.
I also cherish very much the boatload of random tapes i got from the closing of a video rental place in Japan... The tapes cost 50 cent each, ended up costing me a good $300 in excess weight at the airport (plus a bit of a sweat as i entered another store and they set off the alarms, causing an army of employees to cover them with alarm defusing bags!), but that stuff is actually priceless and you can't find it anywhere in the internet.
Future publishing was the shit back then. I lived in the Canary Islands where thanks to the influx of British tourists and migrants we had a steady flow of one-month-late, overpriced British press. Everything from future publishing was miles ahead of the Spanish videogame press, Super Play and Edge were my favourites, i still have a good collection in my mother's basement... It's how I learned English, and the joys of British humour, but also how I learned to think critically about games at a different level. Peter Moulineux was an ever present figure in them, of course.
Oh my, yes. Although I disagree, as it's not such a hard thing when you break it down, I'm usually considered a language genius. I am fluent in more than a handful of languages and my travel activity of choice is learning the local language as fast as I can, which starts yielding real results around the 2 week mark. But despite living in Germany for 16 years and having studied it in a bilingual middle school for a handful more, I don't dare near a German newspaper.
Japanese has proven similarly hard, but for completely different reasons.
someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.