It was a nice, long stretch there where I consistently had a lot to talk about in the blog as I worked my way through the challenge of learning Toki Pona for four weeks, then got back into the swing of Spanish and looked back over the autopsy notes on the challenge. I’m now fully back into the Spanish deep-end and things are more or less normal again. And, unfortunately, that means I’m back to not having a ton to talk about in these blogs again.
I think that the real truth of the matter is a lot of this process tends to blend together and get monotonous to talk about. There’s something to be said for approaching writing these things as if it could be someone’s first point of contact with this blog, and thus it’s totally okay for me to just rehash the same topics over and over again, but to be frank, I don’t really want to write that blog. If this project were designed around being some sort of commercial product like all the business emails WordPress keeps sending me wants it to be, it would probably be considered a spectacular failure at this point. I mean, if you were going off the site metrics compared to the length of time I’ve been running it. It was never about that for me, though, so I haven’t sweated not going through the ‘language learning starter pack’ motions all that often in this blog. It’d get boring and monotonous to write, and probably boring and monotonous to read.
On the other hand, this blog might be kind of … inaccessible at this point. There’s a lot of material in its archive—in fact, several novels’ worth of material—without many clear jumping on or off points. It certainly doesn’t need to be read from the beginning to be followed or anything (and oh god, don’t read the beginning, I was the wrong gender in those blogs, don’t look, oh god, the dysphoria), but I’ve gotten a bit loose in my style for individual entries, with lots of assumed knowledge on behalf of a reader. What I’m doing and when is all kind of approached from a perspective of ‘it’s just like what I was doing before.’ Which, while factual, doesn’t exactly help out someone who stumbled across the most recent entry.
I’m not sure if there’s a best practice scenario here, and I’m especially sure this blog is an absolute nightmare example of how to go about trying to fix these issues, but this is the sort of stuff flitting through my head this week. I don’t really have any solutions in mind going forward, either. I do like the structure and flow of writing this blog, as it grounds part of the week for me in a way that often feels floaty in this COVID-19 world where I’m mostly just at home, so I’m not really looking to stop or anything. I suppose I’d just like for there to be more exciting and interesting things that I could talk about.
Next week’s blog should be at least a little interesting, as it’s the first blog I’m gonna be drafting in Spanish since I took the break for Toki Pona, and I’m unsure what to expect from the experience of sitting down and working in purely Spanish after taking such a long gap between. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m going to continue ruminating on other ways to approach writing these blogs. I’d like to keep them approachable and inviting, even if the goal isn’t now, nor has it ever been to make them “profitable.” If anyone does stumble onto this and has any ideas, feel free to drop a comment.
Anyway, semi-off-topic rambling aside, let’s take a look at the numbers for this unremarkable week.
Tuesday 8/04
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 1% of El Ojo del Mundo, ~60 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Gravity Falls, 1 episode of Alfrely, 1 episode of Arte Divierte, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Wednesday 8/05
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ojo del Mundo, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Gravity Falls, 1 episode of Alfrely, 1 episode of La Zona Cero, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Thursday 8/06
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ojo del Mundo, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Gravity Falls, 1 episode of Alfrely, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Friday 8/07
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ojo del Mundo, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 1 episode of Alfrely, 1 episode of Kiwillius, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Saturday 8/08
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 1% of El Ojo del Mundo, ~60 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Kiwillius, 1 episode of Alfrely, 1 episode of Daniel San GMR, ~120 minutes
Sunday 8/09
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 1% of El Ojo del Mundo, various subreddit posts, ~30 minutes + 30 minutes (Toki Pona)
- Watching/Listening: 1 episode of Kiwillius, ~120 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Monday 8/10
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ojo del Mundo, various subreddit posts, ~90 minutes + 10 minutes (Toki Pona)
- Watching/Listening: 1 episode of Kiwillius, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
- Total Duolingo: 140 XP, 0 minutes
- Total reading: 1/10 books read, 480 minutes + 40 minutes (Toki Pona)
- Total watching/listening: 13 YouTube episodes and 5 television episodes watched, 540 minutes
- Total speaking: reading out loud, 180 minutes
- Total Time: 17 hours 40 minutes
Dios mío, the numbers aren’t remarkable, either.
Okay, so some interesting things, in that one of my youtube subscriptions, Kiwillius, put up a nearly nine-hour stream that I’ve been working my way through piecemeal. Which, yes, looking over these days, a number of them should say ‘1/8 of a video’ or whatever, but considering let’s plays on youtube get broken up into chunks based on time anyway, it hardly seems like it makes a difference breaking up bigger chunks like this on my own. This is something I’ve done before time to time, when it just makes more sense to watch a stream archive in parts and call them individual videos for ease of reading.
Outside of admitting to pointless numbers fraud, I’m getting further along on El Ojo del Mundo slowly but surely. This is going to be a pretty long series for me, I think, which is not me complaining. I’m never fond of needing to figure out what the “next thing to read” is, so not having to think about it is nice.
Speaking of not wanting to have to think, I put off giving it much consideration until this weekend, but I think I’ve settled into a groove on how I’m going to approach working on Toki Pona going forward. I opened up one of the busier Toki Pona subreddits in a browser, and I don’t plan on closing it out. I don’t spend a huge amount of time on reddit over the normal course of the day on account of being in my thirties, but there are a few I refresh and poke through from time to time, so I’m just going to make it a habit of doing that with Toki Pona, too. At this point there’s no real push to improve my Toki Pona the way there is with Spanish, but I’d just as soon not forget all of it if I can help it. Making it just a little point of amusement every day-ish should hopefully help with that. We’ll see if it sticks.
Now then, that’ll do for this one, I’m off to do the exact same thing as I’ve done pretty much every week since March. Ugh, the world really ought to get better soon, damnit. TTFN.
Fumbling Toward Fluent 