#methods to study better

[chiropteracupola]

hornblower ceramics au that no one (incl. me) asked for

[callofthecorvus]

Connected Timelines Ramble: Backing off my previous 'Geno has an ex' headcanon, what if Dust happened to be that ex? I can see them bonding over shared trauma: surviving a genocided timeline and losing their brothers.

So when Dust eventually came clean about his past, that he genocided his own timeline [and others under Nightmare], even if he felt guilty and wanted to change, the heartbreak and betrayal Geno would have felt was devastating.

Even if it was originally done to stop Chara, the fact that he continued to genocide other timelines was despicable in Geno's eyes. Dust became the very same person he hated, and all Geno could see when looking at Dust was her. He broke it off instantly and Dust respected his decision and never contacted him again.

Given that Nightmare and Dream have now been at peace for decades, they're often invited to the same get togethers. They've never told anyone else about their previous relationship, so they act all awkward around each other and nobody knows why.

[nox-in-a-box]

my very lazy studying method is just looking up notes online and reading through them and then praying for the best because i can't really be arsed to do more and at this point it would be good if i just did not fail and that's it (just kidding i will do some very regrettable things if i get less than a B in anything)

[seventh-district]

.

[applecoreart]

+After avoiding it for a long time due to perfectionism issues, I've finally started a sketchbook. I'm using a Grumbacher 5.5x8.5in mixed media pad (so I can use markers, ink, and gouache) that has a nifty perk of allowing you to remove pages and insert them back in 👍

First page completed-- anatomy studies with a cheap black Bic (no under sketch), a Sharpie for solid black areas, and alcohol marker for highlighting. I'm looking forward to filling the book with lots of doodles and studies 📒

(in/out removable/replaceable pages)

[rigelmejo]

It is my sincere belief that all it takes to learn a language is:

Enough study time. This means studying a roughly similar amount of time to other people who have accomplished the goals you are aiming for. So compare your progress to someone studying a similar number of hours daily/on average, if you must compare at all. How many days or years did it take THEM to reach their goal? Expect it will take similar or longer for you. Study more hours daily if you want to see faster progress in terms of days or years. It is going to take hundreds or thousands of hours to reach many goals, so be realistic with yourself. You are not a failure because you aren't fluent after 50 hours! You're not a failure because you can't work in the language after 300 hours!

Studying some new stuff regularly that you have a way to understand - this either means using a textbook or tutor that explains the meaning of new stuff, or looking up translations like using a parallel text or a translation app, or looking up grammar items you don't know and reading explanations, or using flashcards that include translations or definitions, or using comprehensible input that is stuff you understand enough to GUESS some unknown new stuff, or using lesson materials made to be extremely understandable with the help of visuals (like comprehensible input lessons) or with the help of cognates (some graded readers, some textbooks). Studying some new stuff regularly just means you are learning new things, seeing what the new things mean, and over time increasing what you know. Regular can mean whatever you want it to mean, depends on you.

Reviewing the things you have studied by practicing listening, reading, writing, and speaking. At some point you will need to review words you learned by trying to read them, by practicing improving the skill of reading. By listening. By talking using the words. By writing using the words. You decide when you want to review and practice, and how, and it will probably be determined by your goals which practice you do first or more. Any engaging with the language will be practice, in a way, so even if all you do is talk to people or read novels or listen to podcasts, those all review the grammar and words (the stuff) you learned before. Those are all practice of getting used to recognizing and understanding the stuff you learned quicker, in context of the actual situations you'll need to understand and use that stuff. Immersing is 'practicing what you learned.' Reading is, listening is. Talking to people about topics that include what you've learned in the past is. Writing about topics that include what you've learned is.

(Of course this is all my opinion, and what works for me - or how I word it - may not work for others or be understandable to others. The short of it is - look at what other people with your goals did, and follow their example, if you're lost at what to do next. You will eventually succeed.)

Pretty much ANY study activities you can think of, any full on study plans you make up or you consider adopting, will have these. You'll do these. Textbooks and classes, Dreaming Spanish, FSI, podcasts for learners, graded readers, ALG classes, refold, anki decks, etc. Those all introduce NEW stuff for you to learn and understand in the context it's introduced (with translation or visuals etc), and you must keep moving along through those resources or new ones to pick new stuff to study regularly (and not get stuck in a loop reviewing the same 300 words for 2 years like I did), and you must practice the actual skills of reading/listening/writing/speaking (whatever your goals require) where you review the STUFF you've learned by needing to understand it while listening to or reading something in the language, or by talking with someone in the language, or by writing in the language.

And you have to be realistic with yourself in terms of time required to reach your goals. If your goal is just to travel somewhere and say some 'how much does X cost? Thank you. Hi I'm X. Where is the bathroom?' lines then yes that could be memorized in several hours. You can find examples of people who've memorized that kind of stuff in several hours or less. If your goal is 'read a novel' or 'watch X show' or 'talk with people about my hobbies' or 'go to college in the language' or 'work in a company in the language' you need to be realistic. Look up how long it has taken other people to accomplish those goals. Look up how long it's taken them to reach whatever language level a standardized test has said is needed to do X goal tasks for you (like JLPT to work in Japan, or CEFR to go to university in Europe, or HSK to work in China, or FSI levels, etc).

See how many hours those standardized tests recommend, and how many hours learners who have passed those tests are saying they studied, and for a rough estimate assume you'll take at least as long as they did. If you have particular goals in mind, it might be more useful for you to compare to actual people who reached your goals and the hours they said they studied. I just suggest looking up standardized test study hour suggestions, because many people do mention online which standardized test level they passed and what they did/how many hours they studied to pass. So the information on what they did may be easier to find, and easier to find several people sharing how long it took them.

And yeah you may take longer than them, especially if they planned out what they did very focused and you kind of floundered with trying to figure out what to do for a while, or they've studied languages before and already knew what worked best for them, or any number of things. You might take less time. If you need a rough idea of how long it will take though, look up how long it took other people. Because if you have in your mind this expectation you will be C1/advanced after 200 hours of study, or that you'll be able to speak confidently with no mistakes after 100 hours, etc, you're going to feel disappointed if later you find out your expectation wasn't anywhere close to realistic.

Chances are you are not doing anything in particular wrong if you've been studying and getting nowhere. There's nothing wrong with you.

Look at if you: are studying enough time to see noticeable progress in the amount of days or months or years you were hoping to see progress (so if you're studying 5 minutes a day, bump that up to 1+ hour a day and see if progress becomes more noticeable), if you are studying new stuff regularly (if you've been re-reading Heisig's Remember the Kanji for 2 years it might be time to study something new, and keep studying some new stuff regularly), and see if you're practicing understanding what you've learned (perhaps you've grinded an entire anki deck, but you never actually practiced reading any of those words or listening to them, so maybe start reading a graded reader or learner podcast, or reading regular books or watching shows, or talking with a tutor who'll use the words you learned in conversations).

If you're doing all those things, perhaps the problem is you just don't like the study activities or study materials! I hate anki personally, I'm just bad at focusing on it, so when it's in my study plan I study very rarely (lowering my study time) so I stop making progress. I needed to switch to something I liked better (like reading and looking words up) to get myself to study more regularly and focus on what I was studying (so I could remember what I was studying). If you're doing Dreaming Spanish and frustrated and bored, maybe you would prefer a textbook or teacher that explicitly explained stuff to you! Maybe that would motivate you to study more, and to remember more of what you studied! If you hate reading, and really enjoy talking to people, getting a tutor you talk with regularly who gives you new words to study in a list and practice in conversations might suit you much better!

[bettyrightnow]

americans being unable to say that there are people who are certifiably smarter than you and better than you at many things is why we got to this place in the first place. like no the "research" you did on the covid vaccine is not better than the research done by the scientists that have degrees in the field. you are actually dumber than them in this area because they have spent far more time in it. you have so little knowledge on the subject that you don't even know what you don't know. obviously

[eiimblr]

So I was looking at numeric integration methods recently and I was disappointed with how slowly basic methods like trapezoidal integration converge. So I thought, what if you have the derivative of the function you're trying to integrate? Then, you can interpolate the interval with the unique cubic Hermite spline instead of a trapezoid. The calculation turns out to be simple as well, it just goes from this:

to this:

It seems like it should converge a fair bit quicker for smooth functions, and it definitely helps with the problem with curvature where you're consistently under- or over-estimating the integral. Obviously, knowing the derivative is a major requirement, but in some situations it might be reasonable and calculating the derivative with the original function at the point can be made more efficient (eg functions based around e^x). Is this a known technique? Does it have a name?

[seraristuff]

Since there's an ultimate yakuza and ultimate assassin, does hpa accept more criminals as students? Ultimate pickpocket. Ultimate scammer. Ultimate con artist. Ultimate substance abuser. Ultimate black market dealer?

[spoondrifts]

maybe i wouldn't be so annoyed and stressed out if i actually cared about any of the classes i was taking this semester

[two-hearts-beat]

the green owl really has a strange grip on me huh

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

I have this tea cup I made in highschool (it’s really cute and was designed more like those Japanese ones without a handle than it was those fancy English style with even more elements to them) but I never actually asked if the glaze we used was food safe (we all used the same glaze on those cups specifically because the teacher glazed those ones in particular and I don’t remember checking. I glazed and painted every other project but only one of them was something you would use for food and that thing broke a few years ago and was honestly more decorative) and this has haunted me ever since. It’s a super cute cup and I adore it, but I have no idea if I can use it for its intended purpose and while I could buy a lead testing kit I’m not sure how I would check for anything else that might have been in that glaze. I know the color used but not the brand, so that’s not really a help either. The teacher I had left the district after that year because our school district paid art teachers a shit wage and we rotated through them like elementary school kids needing new shoes every year. I’m not entirely sure how I would contact her, but even if I did track her down (something not entirely impossible from what I know about her life outside of teaching us for a year, I would feel slightly weird about it though, even though she was my favorite art teacher) but I highly doubt she would remember something like the glaze she used on one project her students made at a school she taught at for one year. I’m not sure what other testing kits I would need besides lead to confidently say it’s safe enough for my personal use, and it’s annoyed me for several years now.

[rigelmejo]

audio study methods

Still working on that 'lazy' study plan post, since I am just not satisfied with any chinese grammar guide summaries online enough to recommend them as a small grammar intro. If anyone knows of any good 'grammar overview summary' articles or sites for chinese grammar, please let me know. (I like AllSetLearning's Chinese Grammar Wiki but it is huge and in depth and not something I'd recommend a learner 'just read through' on month 4 of learning, and the grammar guide summary site I used as a beginner that was very easy to read through in a few hours... no longer exists)

So in the meantime. Not a grammar study tip, but a general 'lazy' option for language learners who (like me) can't focus on stuff like anki, or just don't want to. I go more in depth about using audio lessons and audio flashcards on other posts, and on the lazy study plan post i'm drafting, but the short of it is: you can listen and learn while doing your normal daily activities. That's what makes the study method so convenient. You don't have to squeeze in any extra time, or change your daily life schedule to make time for chinese, to use audio lessons and audio flashcards.

You simply find some times during the day when you'd either normally listen to audio in the background (like if you listen to music when commuting or shopping, or if you listen to podcasts when working, or if you listen to youtube while exercising or browsing social media). As usual, the more time the better as you'll make faster progress if you study 1-2 hours a day or more. But anything is better than nothing. So lets say you commute to work 30 minutes in morning and evening, there's your hour of studying audio. Or you go for a walk at lunch for 15 minutes, and browse tumblr for an hour scrolling (that's 1 hour and 15 minutes of study). It's very easy to fit 30 minutes of audio study into a day, and it's fairly easy to fit even 2-4 hours of audio study if you're so inclined. I usually do 30 minutes - 2 hours of audio study some days, since when I walk I decide if I feel like listening to a youtube essay or chinese or japanese stuff, when driving I decide which I feel like listening to, and I want to listen to something in english 2/3 of the time.

How do you use audio study material? Well, the easy way is you just press play on it, let it play in the background while you do other stuff, and that's it. If you tend to avoid studying new stuff (like me), then I recommend PRIORITIZING listening to NEW AUDIO every time, until you get into the habit of listening to NEW stuff to learn. Then you can re-listen to stuff sometimes, as review, especially when you're doing activities you have less attention on audio during. So for example: you'd listen to new audio on the commute or when walking (when you can mostly focus on what you're hearing), and then re-listen to audio as review while working or scrolling tumblr and reading english (activities where you pay more attention to other things besides audio).

What can you listen to?

There's audio lessons - which would be something like ChinesePod101 (Immersive Language Chinese in the Hoopla library app), Coffee Break Chinese, youtube videos where teachers talk in english and explain chinese as they teach it. These are good for study material, because you comprehend what you're learning due to the english explanations of every word and grammar point you hear. These are good for beginners, because you will understand everything you're listening to, and learn new words and grammar, thanks to the explanations. The drawback with audio lessons is they require the most focus.

There's learner podcasts like TeaTime Chinese and Slow Chinese, these are more often ENTIRELY in chinese. So these are better for practicing comprehension of stuff you've studied elsewhere, rather than for learning new things. You can learn new words and grammar from these, but if that is your goal then re-listen to learner podcasts a decent amount (5-20 times or more until you can't guess/figure out any more word meanings).

There's audio flashcards (which I love). These are sentence audio in english, then repeated in chinese. The order may vary, the chinese may be repeated more than once. These are good for beginners and upward, because you get a translation of every single thing you hear in chinese. You can pick up new words and grammar from audio flashcards. Audio flashcards require less focus than audio lessons, because you can learn from sentences while you pay attention and then if your attention drifts you can just focus again to the next sentence you hear and continue learning. The drawback is there are no explanations for which word specifically translates to what, some translations are not literal, and there's no explanation of why the grammar is the way it is. Audio flashcards require the listener to try and guess what means what by exposure to chinese sentences and their translations. So it's harder than audio lessons in terms of explanations, but easier than learner podcasts. Audio flashcards are the best substitute for traditional flashcards or SRS apps like anki, if you're trying to improve your vocabulary by hundreds of words ASAP. Audio flashcards are dense with new vocabulary (usually 1 new word or grammar point per sentence you can learn), so you'll learn more words than you would with an audio lesson that is paced slower with more english explanations or a learner podcast which would ideally be mostly words you know and only 20% or less new words.

There's Spoonfed Chinese Anki audio files (which I recommend since these start out very basic and increase in difficulty while also repeating words a lot so you can review, they're shared on reddit if you search, or ask me), if you search 'chinese english sentences' on youtube or bilibili (i've done this with chinese japanese sentences on bilibili) you'll find videos like this where you hear audio english then audio chinese. Old glossika cd files are basically this structure as well, which you can find the audio files of for free online or free in libraries (I'm using the new glossika app for japanese but I'm hesitant to recommend the modern app courses as there's significant errors in japanese so I'm not sure how good/bad the chinese one is). If you're a beginner, then the audio flashcard material you pick won't matter much as you need to learn a few thousand common words first which will be in most materials you find. But if you're an upper beginner, you may wish to prioritize finding audio flashcards with MORE unique words, more sentences, or may want to transition to using learner podcasts more for new vocabulary. If you aren't running into at least one new word for every 5 sentences you hear in audio flashcards (and ideally one new word for Every sentence), then that audio flashcard is way too easy for you and you know enough words to move onto new study material.

Audiobooks and audio dramas - use these like learner podcasts, listen to ones you can comprehend the main idea of, and then re-listen until you can't guess/figure out any more new words. If you're not very good at listening comprehension (like me lol), then you may want to listen to a given audiobook/audio drama file 3-5 times before deciding if you can comprehend the main idea (and use the material). When my listening skills are rusty, or just in general since my listening skills are bad, it can take me a few times of listening to recognize words I 'already know' and then a few more times of listening for my brain to put the words i recognize together into 'comprehending' what was communicated. So if you can read better than you can listen, you may want to listen 3-5+ times to a new audio file before deciding if you can follow the main idea or if it's too hard. And if you can READ the audio drama transcript, chapter text, but cannot understand the audio file? Then it probably IS at a good level for you to listen to, you just need a lot more practice hearing and recognizing the words you can read. So re-listen.

All of these listening study methods are good for:

Adding more study time into your day, since you can do them while doing other things.

Learning new words and grammar, when you don't have the time (or don't want) to spend time dedicated mainly to focusing on your study material.

Learning new words and grammar, if you don't use flashcards or SRS like anki but want the benefit of learning lots 'faster' than you would if you only picked up words during active study time (active study time being when you ONLY are focusing on study activities: like reading chinese, watching cdramas, chatting/texting people, and looking up words)

[phanomenology]

'you need to be kinder to yourself and set realistic goals' well the world isnt kind to me and i just learned how to be kind to other people and im sorry that i dont plan for not having a concept of time or my abilities in the future SORRY

[bangjiazheng]

Studying Bridgmen for Figure Drawing

[jeremiahthefroge]

yeah fuck it aphmau's 2015 minecraft roleplay series can get me back into fandom culture. sure. why not. adult life is already so fucking weird.