Say you wanted to learn to play baseball. Could you write a list of parts of baseball that you could practice or study separately?
You can repeat this for many topics that one could learn about.
Say you wanted to do a task, like microwave some food for lunch. Could you divide that into multiple sub-tasks and write down an ordered list?
You can repeat this for other tasks.
Say you want to think about an idea. Could you make an idea tree, where you divide it into multiple children, and then you divide each of those into multiple grandchildren?
Tree diagrams are multiple layers of breaking things into parts.
Like here’s an example:
teaching chess to all children in school
pros
might help with logical thinking skills
cons
might make the kids hate chess
I broke the original prompt into two parts which could be considered separately, pros and cons. I brainstormed one of each. Could come up with more. Could break each pro or con into more parts. Could also divide the original idea up in different ways, e.g.
teaching chess to all children in school
practical issues
budget for chess sets
finding chess teachers
what subjects get less time?
political issues
legal issues
abstract issues
criticisms of chess
alternative topics
is Go better than chess?
what about playing a variety of board games?
why not teach something else entirely?
how to use large language models effectively
how to get a job
how to survive if the electric grid is destroyed
understanding domestic abuse
understanding and overcoming bias
Do those trees help? I’m trying to show you can just take anything and break it into parts multiple ways. And each part is itself a thing you can take and break into parts.
Last month I had a lot of stuff going on and it looks like I wrote around ~10 days out of the month?
Today was my first day writing in April. Hmm. I’ve been gone for 8 days. Why was that? lets see:
stress from work. the way my manager communicates stresses me out. hmm. though many managers have done this to me. how do i differentiate when a manager is communicating something that i did bad to inform me and to generally hold me accountable versus them trying to find reasons for firing me.
got caught in binging a tv show. when i binge its hard for me to stop. but that was only for the last 3 days (and I just finished it). its called the lincoln lawyer. its on netflix. i liked it a lot.
besides stress from work. I think its also because of how my manager has scheduled me recently. she scheduled me from 3 to close for the past few months or so. i got into a routine of sleepining in and starting to work on philosophy and other stuff around 12/1. Now she changed my schedule this past week to 12 to close. Which gives me just enough time to get ready, clean up, eat breakfast, and go to work. I have been scheduled like that before so it shouldn’t take me long to get used to it. annoying its so inconsistent.
I have a streak of 20 on DuoLingo. I did, however, miss a day. DuoLingo just used a streak freeze on it. So in total I have done 19 days of 15 minutes of DuoLingo. I have been doing DuoLingo Japanese.
Hmm. Also been having various home renovations done. Been hard to keep a consistent routine. Though I should probably work on making my routine consistent even in the midst of a mess.
I like it so far. One thing I’ve noticed is that I while I would read grammar resources about the past tense of a verb, I didn’t really process it as past tense when watching anime or whatever. I noticed this, in part, due to DuoLingo marking me wrong when I would answer in present tense over a past tense statement.
Some issues: I don’t like the lack of explanation. It just kinda throws stuff at you. I don’t know if I would like it as much as I do without prior Japanese knowledge. The other issue is with some vocab. Certain Japanese characters have grammatical uses such as は、に、と、で、も、etc. Duolingo will sometimes combine these words with a grammatical particle. Hmm. Here’s an example to explain it: とちゅうで(tochuude). Duo presents this as one whole word. However, the actual word part is とちゅう meaning on the way. で is just a grammatical particle related to place/location.
Yeah I don’t love that. I also wish every time they taught a phrase they’d tell me what the individual parts are and their literal translations. And sometimes with a word with multiple kanji like 日曜日 they introduce it without telling you which syllables go with which kanji. And it’s extra confusing because the same kanji can be pronounced multiple ways but they don’t explain that. It’s also used in 日本. So I think the same kanji can be pronounced に or にち or び.
I also don’t like some of the kanji lessons where you draw the same one 10x in a row. I’d like less in a row, more variety, and better spaced repetition to repeat it later. I think not doing a good enough job with spaced repetition is one of the common criticisms of duolingo.
Yeah I think automatically checking if you got stuff right is the best feature.
I’m on section 2, unit 7.
I compared to some other stuff and I think Duo is the best to start with for most total beginners because it’s easier than others and it’s good enough to make progress. It can help you get to the point you can use other resources without too much difficulty and start learning from more than one source.
Oh I had a question about that which you could probably answer. Duo taught me to say “on weekends” and use は for that but it’s a modifier not the subject. Why?
You don’t have to answer my Japanese questions or talk about Japanese with me. Feel free not to. But I thought you might want to. I’m asking more because I thought you might want to answer than because I need the answer. Gemini could probably tell me the answer too.
Also if you know a good and reasonably short resource specifically about the particles that explains them all I’d be interested. Another thing I noticed is you can sometimes change the order of the parts of the sentence and I don’t know the rules for that. Like you can put the と part before or after the を part and Duo will usually (but not always I think) accept both as correct. And some modifiers like よく can often got in multiple places (before multiple different stuff+particle parts or maybe before the verb part too idk) and I don’t know where is best, or if it matters, or what the rules are and where it’d be wrong to put it.
I’m viewing sentences as having zero or more sections marked with particles at the end of the section followed by a verb section at the end of the sentence. Idk how much that structure is the right way to think about it since Duo didn’t explain; I just noticed the pattern so far. I also don’t know the standard terminology like if people call each particle section a “phrase” or would say something else.
This reminds me of another issue: they kind of mess up stroke order for kanji. Kinda. What I mean is that sometimes in a kanji lesson duo will already write some parts of a kanji and have you fill in the missing part. Here’s an example from a lesson I did today:
Duo already wrote the bottom part and had me fill in the top part. The issue I have with that is that it may give the impression that stroke order is unnecessary. Stroke order refers to the order in which you write the strokes for a character. Now honestly speaking I don’t really believe that a Japanese person can’t read a neatly written character out of stroke order. Maybe if the handwriting is sloppier stroke order helps? I’m not a huge advocate for caring about it, but it is something that Japan sees as important.
Oh, thanks! Yeah I do want to answer. Don’t get much chance to talk about the stuff I’ve learned (which, to clarify, isn’t much. if you know about jlpt levels i can probably pass n5 easily). Plus, in general, I do want to try and explain more stuff. Helps me understand better and helps me make sure I’m understanding better.
Since I skipped over that I don’t how duo is presenting that to you. Are you thinking that は is related to the subject? Are you saying that “on weekends” is a modifier (I guess it would be in english, “On weekends, I eat cake.” with on weekends modifying eat.)? An example sentence would help, but it may be something like this: しゅうまつ は いそがしい です。(the weekend is busy). は is declaring the topic of a sentence, not the subject or anything like that. Its the topic marking particle. I’m a little confused on something else to actually but I don’t want to just add stuff for no reason. Could you share a sentence from duo?
I do know some good resources and stuff. I’ll share them and comment on the other stuff you shared after work.
Yes I thought it’s the subject marker. That seemed like the pattern. There hasn’t been much explanation.
(I guess it would be in english, “On weekends, I eat cake.” with on weekends modifying eat.)
yes Duo is giving me stuff like that.
ah, ok, that makes some sense. i think i’ve seen は called both a topic or subject marker, and it seemed to mark the grammatical subject in all the previous sentences i’d dealt with. and then を seemed to be for the grammatical object so having one for subject and one for object seemed to make sense.
In English, for “On weekends, I eat cake.” I’d view what the topic is as kinda ambiguous or contextual. I might say eating was the topic, and it could also be primarily about me or cake, but I could also definitely see it as weekends, depending.
Some writing to share (some life stuff I was thinking on):
House is going through renovations. My mom decided to replace all the floors in the house along with some other renovations due to the recent water damage. She’s filling in the rest. However, the renovations are quite extensive. It went from just her room and bathroom and just the vanity/sink in my bathroom to us now changing all the floors in the house, repainting the house, and re-doing my whole bathroom ( I say its mine only to differentiate it from her bathroom).
I bring this up because I’m realizing how much I struggle with keeping up habits in changing environments. I’ve constantly tried to make my environment consistent to achieve my goals. The time periods where I’ve mentioned that I’ve done well before in are time periods where I was able to have relatively stable environments. Now I wonder if my effort is in the wrong spot? Hopefully this is the last big thing in our house for a while but I don’t know. Sure the mold we cleaned up and worked on was never planned, but the extra renovation is a choice by my family.
I guess I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the matter. I do think their are benefits to being able to keep up certain habits/routines in the face of a bunch of change. I always excused my failing to keep up with stuff due to big events as fine because the event will pass and things will get to normal, but I think it’s wrong of me to expect long peaceful time frames. Also: even if the peaceful timeframe was long eventually something will come up and that shouldn’t be a reason to not keep up with things I care about.
Yeah its kinda presented like that. I won’t try and comment more than I know, but I do know thats a common mistake(?) that a lot of resources do. My Japanese level (though I haven’t officially tested) is probably low N4.
yeah afaik thats right
I really really recommend Cure Dolly’s videos. They are quite short (under 10 minutes) and, from what I know, you’re comfortable watching videos at 2x speed (or even faster i think?). Here’s one where she covers は:
Here’s a playlist I found where she covers, from what I understand, the “big” particles:
Alternatively I would just recommend going through her Japanese grammar playlist:
I usually lose habits when something else comes along and disrupts them for some time.
I want to improve on this. I would think of it as having more robust habits and having more control over your life. TOC talks about dealing with variance, which is what this is about.
One thing that can help is if you just do the important stuff the first decent chance you get, rather than planning to do it towards the end of the time or energy you predict you have available. A lot of people seem to have issues with this though. Sometimes people try to work up to the top of their priority list by doing some lower down things first, rather than just starting at the top with the most important thing first. Finding ways to break important stuff into smaller, easier chunks can help so it doesn’t seem too hard or intimidating so there isn’t a need to work up to it.
Habits can be helpful and easier, but it’s also possible to do things with a chaotic schedule and unpredictable interruptions.
You can have a todo list and when you get some free time you look at the list and decide something to do. That’s a scheduling approach that isn’t dependent on fixed times of day.
Energy is an issue not just time. If you’re exhausted it’s important to recognize that and do something restful. If try to force yourself to do some productive stuff while tired that isn’t at the top of your priorities list, because it’s easier, that can keep you tired so you never have the energy for your highest priorities. Giving yourself permission to take a break or even a nap sometimes can be important.
The construction could have gotten more dust and mold into the air and you could potentially be having a health issue. Spending more time outside at a park or cafe (or using your backyard or balcony if you have one) with a laptop could be worth a try. An air purifier in your room might be worth a try.
Idk. Busy? I think my house being a mess plus being at work has made it hard to do CF stuff. I would say within the past seven days or so my house has finally gotten back to normalish. Now it’s just getting back into the state of doing things. During this mess of a time I spent a lot of time gaming, so this last week I just played games a lot. I was actually planning to start back up doing stuff today since I have every Tuesday off.
Hmm. Anything else? Mmm. No issues with the coding assignment yet. I don’t think I’ve been not doing CF because the coding assignment seems hard or annoying or anything. I just haven’t been posting much because I’ve been tired/busy from everything going on at home and playing games is easier during my free time.
Kinda related: part of the reason I got the badge for visiting is because I check up on CF from my phone, but I don’t post because I didn’t like typing on my phone. I thought it may be because of the keyboard? So I’m trying Gboard instead of the default Samsung keyboard. I think I like it so far. I typed this whole thing on my phone. It may not lead to more tutoring posting because, for example, I need to code on my computer but I think it should help me post more in general. There are plenty of times that the only reason I didn’t post is because I was on my phone and didn’t want to type a bunch with my phones keyboard.
