neurasthnia

[neurasthnia]

Xiyuan Park, Wuhan, China

[neurasthnia]

monthly summary for april!! i was really doing the most this month, god bless. 🌷

languages: i hit my absolute maximum for Content And Media that i can stand and therefore all my monthly hour goals will be plateaued for now

i hit 600 hours for spanish!!! 150 hours in korean!!!!

cello: am very much enjoying when i do practice but how to set aside phone and pick up cello i ask. how.

exercise: started three classes per week at a pilates/barre place down the street and have hit over a dozen classes this month!

math: i'm lowkey starting on a khan academy math journey? i read an article about quantum mechanics news & then watched a recommended reading thing, and now i'm wanting to build a solid math base & maybe learn more about physics. it's just so interesting?

drawing: finally started draw a box!!!! amazing wonderful powerful. found some pens, some printer paper, & got a sketchbook!!

#studyblr #langblr #* #also you have to zoom in but there are MANY tulips

[neurasthnia]

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow

#1

[neurasthnia]

like ok in ten years i speak five languages and have a small stem degree and i have a house and i can play cello and i can sail and i can make beautiful and weird oil paintings. i know about history and poetry and music and art and math and really. it's a beautiful dream.

idk my current mania might be about getting an associates in mechanical engineering. yes it's completely unrelated to my job. but like. physics is so cool???

[neurasthnia]

idk my current mania might be about getting an associates in mechanical engineering. yes it's completely unrelated to my job. but like. physics is so cool???

[neurasthnia]

real.

[neurasthnia]

I found a cool Russian cursive handwriting generator if any new Russian learners need some help

#russian notes

[neurasthnia]

Italian LGBTQ+ films

A few days ago I was asked to post some LGBTQ+ films, so here’s a list of some recent ones where one or more characters are queer.

Io sono l’amore (2009)

Chiamami col tuo nome (2018)

Croce e delizia (2019)

Good As You - Tutti i colori dell'amore (2012)

Puoi baciare lo sposo (2018)

Io e lei (2015)

Le fate ignoranti (2001)

Diverso da chi (2009)

Il padre d’Italia (2017)

Te lo dico pianissimo (2018)

Saturno contro (2006)

L’estate addosso (2016)

Ci vediamo a casa (2012)

Favola (2017)

Nove lune e mezzo (2018)

Rosso Istanbul (2018)

Indivisibili (2016)

Questi giorni (2016)

Mio fratello (2015) [short film]

Viola di mare (2009)

La bestia nel cuore (2005)

La cena di Natale (2015)

Come non detto (2009)

N.B. Use a VPN if one of these films is available on either RAIPlay or MediasetPlay. VPNs get behind geographical restrictions so that you can access geo-blocked websites. A lot of them are free too. Alternatively, you can check Infinity.tv (which is a legal Italian streaming website like Netflix). Happy watching! :-)

#italian notes

[neurasthnia]

[neurasthnia]

hii!!

I followed you a while ago but I just starting using tumblr again and discovered the CI dreaming spanish method thru your posts. (I was looking for something like this for so long!)

I'm already on B1 proficiency level in spanish, but I still feel my speaking skills are not developed as other skills.

How should I approach the dreaming spanish platform?

How does it work for somebody who is not an absolute beginner?

thank you <3

hiiiii!!!!

this is a really good question! i would start with trying a few videos to discern what's easy but not dead boring. a fair amount of the community agrees that easy content is good for speech and challenging is good for comprehension.

from there, most people just kind of add in hours that would set them at equivalent to wherever they level out, and then run through the full 1,500 hour goal. if you're not motivated by tracking time, or milestones &c. then you could roughly do the same, but more casually. picking the speakers, series, and subjects that interest you, and just incorporating extensive listening into your daily schedule.

i'll throw out an honorable mention for crosstalk. i haven't done it before, but i'm planning to as soon as my weekly schedule settles. here's the guide i have bookmarked.

#* #langblr #dreaming spanish

[neurasthnia]

if you make art that is good, that’s ok, but don’t post it anywhere you sick fuck. art is supposed to be bad

#5

[neurasthnia]

my friend and i were going to study a language together and wound up having to cancel our plans due to scheduling pressures, but! through research we came across a really cool resource for reading in a TON of languages: bloom library!

as you can see, it has a lot of books for languages that are usually a bit harder to find materials for—we were going to use it for kyrgyz, for example, which has over 1000 books, which was really hard to find textbook materials for otherwise. as you can see it also has books with audio options, which would be really useful for pronunciation checking. as far as i can tell, everything on the site is free as well.

#2 #very nice!!!!!

[neurasthnia]

just hit 600 hours of spanish comprehensible input!!!!! level five, my love. 💙💙💙

if you’re unfamiliar, comprehensible input is listening and reading at a level you understand. no matter what learning method you choose, CI will be a part of the long-term plan, but there’s a ton of free Spanish CI online for even complete beginners, day one learners.

the goal is one thousand and five hundred hours total. i'm so close to halfway there!!

method notes & six hundred hour notes:

there's a ton about the method here, and this FAQ page. see also, the reddit, the discord.

it took me one solid year to get to 300 hours (182 study days), and about six months to double it (in 123 study days).

i do think it's so funny that you can see the media binge right before every 'level up'. if trends follow next time it'll be a full ten hour day, which would be terrifying except i did hit ten hours this time including korean. insane??? this time last year i could barely do an hour a day????

for the last hundred hours i've only done content made for native speakers: nonfiction audiobooks, docuseries with audio description, & news podcasts, mainly. reserving the right to get back into DS, but thankfully i've found comprehensible longform media. the shorter videos may be popular but they're much harder to binge.

as a note, i aim for gist- to story-level comprehension for all my content.

i did make some reading plans, but i've been going back & forth every day on prioritizing reading or not. basically i don't have more time in my day - if i start reading it'll cut into audiovisual CI time. i can of course extend my 1500 hours timeline, as it's just a made-up 'deadline.'

see also my last update at 450 hrs

#langblr #* #comprehensible input #spanish update for future reference #dreaming spanish

[neurasthnia]

Kajita Hanko, Postcard. New Herbs (Wakana) II from the series The Tale of Genji

Late Meiji era 1905

#yes and good

[neurasthnia]

btw I've found these stretches from the WAK blog very helpful when knitting a lot:

Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!

especially with gift knitting I know it can be tempting to push through it for a deadline, but it's really not worth causing long term injury. (And anyone knit-worthy should be understanding of that, imho.) Stay well :)

#craft notes

[neurasthnia]

watching my lads fight 천지 in between chapters of my graded reader. spoiler alert this woman mightve beat her ex to death in a pub?? tío juan, my guy?

#langblr #* #domestic violence for ts i guess this reader is wild #i hope i add s ome spice to that timeline but honestly i just had to record this one for myaelf #ugghhhhhhh tired

[neurasthnia]

exciting find for people interested in Buddhist lit: found a PDF of Patrick Olivelle’s translation of Asvaghosa’s Buddhacarita.

it’s one of my favorite versions of the Buddha’s life and that translation is the best imo. Much more significant reasons to give it a look: Asvaghosa was the premier Sanskrit language poet/dramatist pre-Kalidasa, who offers a lot in homage to him, and Ambedkar notes him specifically as an influence for his “The Buddha and His Dhamma” (from his preface: “I would particularly like to mention Ashvaghosha's Buddhavita[=Buddhacharita], whose poetry no one can excel. In the narrative of certain events I have even borrowed his language.”)

this translation is ime difficult to find and is expensive and shouldn’t be locked away to academes. I’m grateful to an old teacher for leaving it to me. It’s rare to have an opportunity to recommend it when I can’t physically loan my copy out so

(it looks longer than it is, it’s a bilingual edition and it’s poetry. really lovely)

#tbr #3