#Structured Learning

[werewolf-transgenderism]

keep seeing undergrads on social media saying “oh if a prof has a strict no-AI academic integrity policy that’s a red flag for me because that means they don’t know how to design assignments” like sorry girl but that just sounds like you’ve got a case of sour grapes about not being allowed to cheat with the plagiarism machine that doesn’t know how to evaluate sources and kills the environment! I have a strict no-AI policy because if you use AI to write your essays for a writing course it’s literally plagiarism because you didn’t write it and you’re not learning any of the things the course teaches if you just plug a prompt into the plagiarism generator that kills the environment, hope this helps!

[hilltopchildrencenter]

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[gaurhealthproducts]

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Actionable Strategies:

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Valuable Resources:

The membership area is packed with valuable resources that go beyond the core video marketing training. There's a library of downloadable templates, cheat sheets, and swipe files that saved me countless hours creating video content. Additionally, the program offers access to a community forum where you can connect with other members, share ideas, and get support.

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[japanese-cryptic-beauty]

Does it fit you?

There's a lot of advice for learning Japanese out there, and sometimes it just pisses me off.

Now, it's always good to look at why something irritates you in case there's a grain of truth that you're not seeing... or wanting to see. I mean, some things are unavoidable - like there being quite some work needed to learn Japanese. Especially if you want to see some results. But...

Maybe an example will help. IIRC, the YouTuber was called Mochi. I just browsed through her tips what is needed to learn Japanese, but if you want me to distill it for you, it was essentially a brute force approach, not very different from how Japanese students learn it. Using her app for Space Repetition (SRS) was basically the only nod to anything that has happened in the "learning Japanese for Westerners" space at all. I bowed out at "learn to write kanji" as a needed step.

Now, undoubtedly, writing kanji a few times can give some insight into kanji themselves, to learn concepts like stroke order. It isn't especially hard, either. And if you have problems telling certain kanji apart, this might help fix them into your brain. But in general, from my own experience, I disagree.

You see, I started out by learning to write 1,000 kanji. But now I have largely forgotten all the connections between meaning and kanji built through this exercise already. Maybe the effort to learn kanji that I've seen before through this method is lessened, but I still learn them all over with Wanikani.

I'm not claiming she said that only learning to write kanji was enough. That would be misrepresenting what she said. But if I were to paraphrase it another way, she basically said "Learn it how I did. Trust me, I'm Japanese."

Don't trust the Japanese

I've been talking about SRS a lot, and so you might think I'm a big proponent for Spaced Repetition. To that I would say... it depends.

You see, SRS by itself is only a slightly better way to do rote learning so that you are more likely to retain it in the long-term. So if somebody tries to sell you their approach by saying they use SRS (and nothing else), all they offer you is to schedule your rote learning for you. ("Anki", as I recently learned, the name of the most popular free SRS software, may simply to mean "memorize" - because that's the Japanese kanji/word for it.)

If you want to rote learn Japanese, be my guest.

I mean, it's a valid approach. It's not the fastest or most intuitive, but it's a big part of how Japanese learn the most vexing parts of, well, Japanese, aka "reading and writing Japanese."

But the general majority of Japanese dispensing advice on learning their language on the internet seem frankly uninspired. If you're looking for strategies matched to your own way of retaining information, it's quite hit and miss. (Wanikani has a Japanese founder, though.)

I have written kanji, I have trained them over two different types of SRS. But at times they don't come to mind directly, and then I'm glad if I can recall the mnemonic story I've associated with them. Because I might not recall the meaning of the kanji directly, or its readings, but maybe any of the other ways I stored them will come to mind. But that's not the effect of SRS (or SRS alone), but of an alternate learning strategy, not simply relying rote memorization.

What is your goal? What are your priorities?

But Mochi is not the only one. NihongoDekita is someone I like to watch YouTube shorts of. She wins the prize for making the lamest argument why you should learn to read Japanese (= kanji + hiragana + katakana) natively. She puts an English sentence in Japanese letters and reads out loud and says "that's not English, that's Japanese" as her argument why Romaji is not good enough for learning Japanese.

But... while Japanese is incapable to produce the sounds English requires, you can read Romaji and produce exactly the sounds Japanese requires. (You would make yourself aware of how to pronounce it properly, but the same is true for learning Hiragana as a Westerner - or any language in the world transcribed to Roman characters.) Talk about a badly made argument.

Your learning of Japanese would certainly be incomplete if you didn't learn how to read it. But then your learning of Japanese is also incomplete if you don't learn how to write it. Or if you don't learn Kansai dialect. Or if you don't learn conversational variations how contemporary Japanese change Japanese from "proper" to day-to-day speech. Etc.

But there's one question to cut through all of this: What do you want to achieve?

Do you want to learn to read manga originals? Learning to read is not optional for that. Do you want to learn basics of face-to-face conversation? Romaji is a viable way, then. Same for understanding what characters in anime say (if you are willing to ignore all the displayed kanji). None of these require being able to print kanji. And so it goes.

Learning kanji would be a bad investment of time if your primary goal or priority is to learn to converse fast. It will majorly slow you down. Ironically, it will slow you even more down if you learn less! Learning 100-200 of the most common kanji is harder because some of them are more complex ones and since you wouldn't know the radicals they are composed from from other kanji, you have less to anchor them in your brain with.

Wanikani has been criticized for not preparing you for the JLPT N5 and N4 tests, but its goal is teaching kanji in a good way for building a bottom-up understanding, not get you to the goal of the most common the fastest. You go from building blocks to bigger structures, and you build from what you know. Which helps retention in a different way. Simply using SRS would not have the same effect for retaining the kanji because they would look still alien to you. Frankly, they would, even if you learn to print them without a structured approach.

Return On Investment

The reality is, your learning time is likely limited. So might be your patience before you see results that reward you for your progress.

Yes, if you learn kanji, learning to print them can anchor them in your brain better. But if you want to learn to print them from scratch, there's an additional investment of time. In the Heisig method, you would arrange your mnemonic story so that you can actually give yourself hints what to print in what order. That's a more complex requirement for a mnemonic story than merely coming up with a story that helps you spotting the elements in any order to remember what kanji this is. Kanji elements can become quite crowded, and can appear left/right, above, under, etc. Then you need to retain some memory as to how to arrange the elements in the given space so that you can actually write the character properly.

The same time might be used to learn more kanji and vocab, or to practice grammar, tackle some graded readers... And it requires you have time to sit down and do it at a desk or table, pretty much. Commute times, in comparison, might be usable only for an app or index/flash cards, or reading.

Each learning strategy needs to evaluated for how much time it uses, how effective it is, and what kind of structure it builds for the future.

So, for example. If your goal is to take the JLPT N5 test ASAP because you need it professionally, Wanikani is not your best choice. Yes, by now I've covered practically all of them. I referenced two separate lists, and they basically say I have 99% of them. But they did not come in that order. And when I go over Bunpro's N5 vocab deck, there are lots of kanji in there that are in neither list.

I, myself, find that okay, since my goal is a complete learning of the Japanese language, not a test, but if you really have to, you might rightfully get frustrated by such "you will eventually get there" approaches. (Heisig is way worse, after all.)

There's no one true way to learn Japanese.

There are always compromises you make. And if you're taking classes, the compromises your teachers make. Reevaluate them over time and compare them to your goals. You can approximate what works best for you as you learn about the learning of Japanese itself.

Over time, unless you do courses in a fixed system, you will have to structure your Japanese learning yourself. And even then, if you apply your Japanese in some way in the real world, you need to come up with strategies to come up with the missing parts that class didn't cover yet. So being aware of your goals and priorities and comparing your current approach with them once in a while can give you a valuable sense of direction.

[thekidsblogh]

Reading Head Start: Empowering Confident Readers through Engaging Learning

Click Here To Get Instant Access To The Reading Head Start Program

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Personalized Progress: Celebrating Achievements

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https://chat.openai.com/mermaid-diagram1.png

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Dyslexia Considerations: Seeking Professional Advice

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Conclusion

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Reading Head Start: The Complete Guide to Helping Your Child Learn to Read | by HASSAN OUBBA | Aug, 2023 | Medium

(6) Reading Head Start: Helping Children Learn to Love Reading | LinkedIn

Reading Head Start: The Key to Early Literacy Success | Families

[tender-emotional-music]

I need to do a whole post ranting about this, because it is so hilarious how people will see the leaks of byler always filming together and teaming up and say "it's just them on bikes! Byler isn't real!" or the alleged casting call for young byler + Jonathan and say "omg you delusional losers! There aren't going to be any romantic scenes between 8 year olds!"

Because surely they understand story structure and realise that El and Mike ending on ambiguous terms in s4 + Finn and Noah constantly filming together + Millie and Finn not filming together past the first two episodes + El apparently having a storyline with Hopper and Lucas/Erica/Max (just as the s4 finale foreshadowed!!) does indeed mean something?

I constantly see them refuse to place this information in the greater scope of the narrative and character arcs for s5, instead just interpreting them in isolation. We aren't excited about the flashbacks because we want to see romance between children; we're excited because it demonstrates that their early relationship is important enough to warrant showing on screen, and that whatever that scene establishes will be important to their current-day selves. The bike pics aren't significant because they're hanging out; they're significant because they suggest that they truly are teaming up in s5 and that this pairing will be important to the overall narrative (as is always the case when couples team up in the show). These things imply that the writers do take this plot seriously.

Of course, this doesn't CONFIRM byler, but as I've said before, the only place they can really take mlvn in s5 is them being a team, proving they did work through their issues in s4. But that does not seem to be happening, and yes, that does mean something. People will say that Will needs to move on and learn to be himself. If that were the case, he would not be paired up with Mike. He would be with someone/a group which enables him to foster his identity outside of Mike. Funnily enough, that does seem to be happening....with El.

[p4nishers]

one of the most important things terry pratchett has taught me is that it's okay to be angry. no one has ever said that to me before. he taught me that anger was an engine. that you can use that anger. that it goes hand in hand with love. he taught me to never underestimate my anger, because it's one of my strongest points. he taught me genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. he taught me i shouldn't be fighting my anger, but what caused it. he himself said rage underlines everything he wrote. i never heard anger talked about so openly like that before and it's freeing, i suppose, to realize you are truly, truly not alone in your rage at the world. you never were.

[phoenixcatch7]

Something that always bugs me is that the way fanfic authors have it, there's absolutely nothing between 'beloved son treated and raised precisely the same as the two blood siblings in the blood based ruling lineage' and 'despised and excluded indentured servant psychologically manipulated into having no self worth cut off from any emotional support'. This is, historically, a very, VERY recent binary, as the fostering system outgrows things like orphanages and the idea of the nuclear family is cemented.

There is a whole range of different statuses that exist between those two extremes just in Western society, and more than that outside of what I already know. Wardship, for example. Fostering without adoption. Room and board apprenticeship.

Wwx is older than jc. Him being adopted and legitimised, despite not being jiang, would cause a succession crisis. By rights, as the eldest male (and prodigious and well liked besides) he would be first to inherit in some people's eyes. Being adopted formally in this way would cause those rumours of bastardry madame yu was always banging on about (though I'm never convinced those rumours were as prevalent as she believed). Jfm would lose reputation and status, yzy would take a tremendous hit to her reputation, jc's place as heir would suddenly be cast into uncertainty, coming under intense scrutiny as people suddenly feel as though they had a choice in who to support, and wwx would be forced into a role and potential future he has absolutely no desire for. And by putting him in a position where he could become head of jiang, there's the risk that he might assassinate jc to become the undisputed heir, something impossible if he isn't brought into the family officially. Would wwx ever dream of doing so? No! Not even slightly! But it is a valid fear of the time and culture, jgy just proves that worst case scenario.

Instead of being the child prodigy coming out of nowhere, the son of respected rogue cultivators so generously taken in the jiang and well trained, suddenly he'd be 'proof' of infidelity, both families involved would become scandals, even post-humeously. As jgy and mxy prove, being a bastard is a lower social status than the right hand man of the sect heir, head disciple of a major sect. Now wrapped in gossip and scandal, they would no longer be called the prides of yunmeng.

And then of course that kind of divisive succession would backfire horrendously when lotus pier is burned and jc tries to rebuild the clan while wwx goes demonic cultivator! It would be DISASTROUS for the jiang, jc having lost a lot of his legitimacy and political support, wwx's now filthy reputation being tied even tighter to the clan, reflecting on them so much more. Worst case gossip would be that the jiang as a whole are turning to demonic cultivation. People who wanted wwx for heir would be in a very dangerous position! People who disliked jc as heir would make it even harder for him! Not that the jiangs would/could have predicted the war and the burning of the sect but fr it would have made an already nigh impossible situation even harder and more volatile.

And it's not like wwx is treated purely like a servant! He isn't going round fetching tea and carrying jcs sword and keeping one step behind. He eats every meal with them, he gets pocket money from them, he is openly and pretty universally considered siblings with the other two, and nobody except yzy acts like it's weird, or he's acting above his station for it (though people like the wens and jin aren't above trying to use that 'son of a servant' thing when they're targeting him to get their own way).

Yes, yzy is deeply insecure and blames him, yes during their goodbyes jc gets hugs and wwx gets orders. They're far from perfect. That's the most affection jc ever got from either of them. Jyl got nothing, she wasn't there. Which is pretty representative of her treatment from her parents, ngl. But wwx had support from jc, had sorta paternal support and a safe authority figure in jfm, had maternal support and care from jyl (though she shouldn't have had to, but that's a different conversation). There are actual family servants (yzy's twins) who grew up with her and were trained for it and they act very differently to wwx. For all yzy throws her weight around and jfm is a bit of a doormat, wwx grew up well cared for and well loved.

The fact that the family as a whole was pretty messed up and his part in it made it worse? That's on the family members themselves. His never arriving would not have fixed that family. For wwx, genuinely, there really wasn't anywhere else he could really go once he was orphaned. If he hadn't died on the streets perhaps he could have made it as a civilian working for someone else, dabbling in cultivation because we know him.

The wen and jin would have eaten him alive. The lans? Don't make me laugh. I love a good 'wwx gets betrothed to lwj as teens and he moves to gusu and Fixes Everything' as much as the next person but let's not kid ourselves, canon wwx would have ended up whipped to death or expelled with the way he is. As a visiting disciple he got so many punishments and kicked out not even halfway through the year! Him living there with lwj as adults is due to him 'redeeming' himself through mystery solving and lwj being fully, openly ready to ditch the sect for him. Even then they're constantly on the road night hunting and lwj being the lightning rod of all of wwx's trouble making tendencies (and being 100% down to breaking the rules with him without enacting punishment). They might accept him now but it would not have happened without lwj doing it first (and the juniors all loving him lol).

The nie? Maybe, but that would have left NHS in pretty much the exact same position as jc: inferior second fiddle, unskilled, constantly compared to him. Wwx would be in the exact same position of being pressured to tone himself down and keep his dangerous ideas to himself, and NHS would have double the fear of inevitably losing both his brothers. And of course, the nie aren't exactly as patient and laid back as the jiang sect as a whole, with their hyper aggressive murder resentment swords. The first sign of wwx acting 'outside' of the clans best interests and getting risky and he's going straight down those stairs the same way as jgy.

Tldr: there's more options to raise a kid than full adoption or abused servitude, even today, and though officially adopting wwx would have made everything SO much worse, his other options would not have survived him. He deserved better with the jiangs but frankly so did the blood kids (and the mother and the father). All three were emotionally neglected and adoption would not have fixed that.

This is why I believe that if wwx had been even a day younger than jc everyone would have been so much happier.

[too-fond-to-be-fearful]

Been thinking recently about the goings-on with Duolingo & AI, and I do want to throw my two cents in, actually.

There are ways in which computers can help us with languages, certainly. They absolutely should not be the be-all and end-all, and particularly for any sort of professional work I am wholly in favour of actually employing qualified translators & interpreters, because there's a lot of important nuances to language and translation (e.g. context, ambiguity, implied meaning, authorial intent, target audience, etc.) that a computer generally does not handle well. But translation software has made casual communication across language barriers accessible to the average person, and that's something that is incredibly valuable to have, I think.

Duolingo, however, is not translation software. Duolingo's purpose is to teach languages. And I do not think you can be effectively taught a language by something that does not understand it itself; or rather, that does not go about comprehending and producing language in the way that a person would.

Whilst a language model might be able to use probability & statistics to put together an output that is grammatically correct and contextually appropriate, it lacks an understanding of why, beyond "statistically speaking, this element is likely to come next". There is no communicative intent behind the output it produces; its only goal is mimicking the input it has been trained on. And whilst that can produce some very natural-seeming output, it does not capture the reality of language use in the real world.

Because language is not just a set of probabilities - there are an infinite array of other factors at play. And we do not set out only to mimic what we have seen or heard; we intend to communicate with the wider world, using the tools we have available, and that might require deviating from the realm of the expected.

Often, the most probable output is not actually what you're likely to encounter in practice. Ungrammatical or contextually inappropriate utterances can be used for dramatic or humorous effect, for example; or nonstandard linguistic styles may be used to indicate one's relationship to the community those styles are associated with. Social and cultural context might be needed to understand a reference, or a linguistic feature might seem extraneous or confusing when removed from its original environment.

To put it briefly, even without knowing exactly how the human brain processes and produces language (which we certainly don't), it's readily apparent that boiling it down to a statistical model is entirely misrepresentative of the reality of language.

And thus a statistical model is unlikely to be able to comprehend and assist with many of the difficulties of learning a language.

A statistical model might identify that a learner misuses some vocabulary more often than others; what it may not notice is that the vocabulary in question are similar in form, or in their meaning in translation. It might register that you consistently struggle with a particular grammar form; but not identify that the root cause of the struggle is that a comparable grammatical structure in your native language is either radically different or nonexistent. It might note that you have trouble recalling a common saying, but not that you lack the cultural background needed to understand why it has that meaning. And so it can identify points of weakness; but it is incapable of addressing them effectively, because it does not understand how people think.

This is all without considering the consequences of only having a singular source of very formal, very rigid input to learn from, unable to account for linguistic variation due to social factors. Without considering the errors still apparent in the output of most language models, and the biases they are prone to reproducing. Without considering the source of their data, and the ethical considerations regarding where and how such a substantial sample was collected.

I understand that Duolingo wants to introduce more interactivity and adaptability to their courses (and, I suspect, to improve their bottom line). But I genuinely think that going about it in this way is more likely to hinder than to help, and wrongfully prioritises the convenience of AI over the quality and expertise that their existing translators and course designers bring.

[werewolf-transgenderism]

man someone in the notes of that AI post left a several paragraph long response like “but what if students don’t know how to write well? what if they’re socioeconomically disadvantaged and never got good writing instruction? they should be allowed to use AI” no they fucking should not because that is not going to help them develop their writing or benefit from writing instruction if they’re not fucking doing any writing themselves! a student who does their own work and gets a low grade but still actually practices writing is learning at least ten times more than a student who just plugs the prompt into chatgpt and doesn’t write at all

[shakooo]

i won't lie to you, making this drawing distracted me from making the comic AND IT WAS because i just wanted to practice making a quick background, but uhh i think i took it more seriously lol

although i have been advancing :D/ i have not shown more progress cuz i do not want to spoiled everything hehe i want it to be a surprise 😌 anyway, i hope you like it and here's a close up shot( °∇^)］

[phoenix-arts7]

Going off the recent ask, I did say Twilight loosens up about Midna when he's a lil' buzzed.

And for the longest time, Warrior was convinced he was a freak.

For my AU House of Heroes. I'm still working on their designs so please bear with me lol

Don't tag as LU please.

[bengaly]

Experimenting with different visual cues to show that a character is not quite fluent in a language yet. Commentary and extras below the cut. (the other language is kalaallisut, a real language spoken in greenland, albeit machine translated and probs not 100% accurate)

1. Blurred bits

I feel like this one isn't very visually pleasing, but it speaks to me more regarding how learning a language feels. You don't quite make out what the words are, and slowly pick up bits from what is being said. This also adds room for uncertainty on the character's POV, the speech bubble wouldn't be theirs, but what you read off it would be their thoughts regarding whats being said. The blur also helps keeping things incomprehensible even if you speak the other language being spoken.

2. Bits in multiple languages

This one adds room for out of the speech bubble commentary. It doesn't make misunderstandings as easy as with the blurred speech, and with an agglutinative language like kalaallisut it might end up being confusing to organise or break the sentence's syntax. It looks cleaner than the blurred bits though, and it still makes the other language incomprehensible (if you dont speak kalaallisut, that is). Colour coding would help indicate whats being understood by the main character and what isnt, and the texts would slowly be fully red across the chapters.

3. Faded colour to indicate not understanding

This makes the reader able to understand everything, and relies on the reader memorising that faded = not understood by the character. Other than that, colour coding would indicate a change of languages.

I like the reader only understanding what the character can understand and I like the types that leave kalaallisut still visible. Though option 3 might be cleaner and easier to manange.

4. Faded colour + blur

This is something I thought after posting it earlier on patreon. Blurring the parts the main character wouldn't understand can be a way for the brain to quickly skip through the missed text, in hopes that at least the first reading will match what the character is understanding.

Also, for the enjoyment of my 4 greenlandic followers, heres the machine translated kalaallisut version I used for 1 & 2. I had to use a double way translation tool and an annotation tool to be sure the words were somewhat related to what I wanted them to be. I can't really fact check it though, so I hope that whichever way the translator messed up is at least worth a chuckle.

If you'd like to see more of this kinda stuff, please consider supporting me on patreon

[bixels]

I'm so in love with everything about your art!! I wanted to ask something about your MLP human designs in particular. all of them have really lovely and interesting face shapes/details. even though all the pony designs have the same head molds (save for eye shape), all the unique characteristics you gave them just... look RIGHT. is there a particular method or design principle you used? thanks for your time!! I can't wait to see more of your work!

It's all about shape language and how they inform a person's read on the character.

I talked about this before, but each of the Main 6 were paired together so I could design them in contrast with each other. For RD, I wanted her short hair to have a wind-swept look, as if she's constantly running. So bare forehead and hair spiking out at the bottom. She contains lots and lots of sharp lines and shapes to give her the look of a speeding arrow.

Felice, on the other hand, droops down a lot to reflect her solemn, shy disposition. I didn't want her hair to be perfectly straight though, as that'd suggest she spends a lot of time fretting over it and isn't outdoorsy, so I made it a bit of a tangled mess too.

In short, RD's features are sharp and point upwards, Felice's features are round and droop downwards. (Think Joshua tree vs. weeping willow.)

For these two, I specifically wanted to include non-Western facial features, as I found I haven't really included them in my character designs up until now.

Pinkie's bold and loud, so I gave her bold eyes, bold eyebrows, a bold nose, etc. I worked on Thea's nose for quite a bit and ended up abstracting the shape a bit to look more cartoony, borrowing from Pixar's Soul's character design notes. In cases like these, I recommend finding ways to simplify features and break them down into easily-recognizable shapes and forms (Cartoon Saloon are masters at this). The less visual noise, the easier their expressions are to read! And it's generally more fun to draw.

In short, diversify, exaggerate, and simplify. Figure out what works for you and get a little wacky with it. Character design is all about finding a balance between maintaining your voice and vision and creating something unique and lively.

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

this is a checkpoint!! please tell me something you're grateful for/praising God for rn in the tags thank-you :)