Language Geek Site Updates

… but luckily for me, I’m not a cat.

In my stats, I see that someone - I assume a professor - linked to my blog here for one of his or her classes, via an installation of Blackboard. The installation of Blackboard in question is on the Brigham Young University - Idaho website. I can’t see what was linked to, and the curiosity is really getting to me. If someone who clicks over to my site from Brigham Young University, drop me a comment and tell me what it is that’s linked to in your Blackboard area, please.

I wanted to post and let those of you who are subscribed (a surprising number, considering my recent silence!) that things around here should be returning to normal. For those that don’t read my other blog, System 13, I’ve recently been busy studying for final exams and writing a term paper for one of my classes. The semester is now over, so I’ll have more time to do language stuff and post here.

I’ve been using Anki diligently, and am still enjoying the program far more than I ever enjoyed SuperMemo. However, I think I need to rethink my usage of it. I’ve mostly been putting in sentence items, based on the ideas presented at antimoon.com and All Japanese All The Time. However, I just came across this page on learning at the Anki website, which makes a fine case for more active recall items, rather than passive stuff. While I don’t have 10,000 items in Anki (AJATT puts forth the “10,000 sentences method”), I think I’ve made enough sentence items in SuperMemo and now Anki to see that they’re not making my production skills advance very much. When I abandoned SuperMemo I had about 600 items; I have about 300 in Anki. In both pieces of software, I was (or am) up to date on all of my reviews - in other words, I should “know” the words or whatever is of interest in each card. Did I in SuperMemo? Do I in Anki? No. I can understand the material, which is better than nothing, but I don’t think I could come close to producing even half of it if I needed to.

In looking around at Babelhut.com, I discovered that my blog isn’t the only one entitled “Language Geek.” Indeed, on Babelhut’s blogroll, I’m “Language Geek 2,” logically appearing right after “Language Geek 1.” As I rightly should be, by the way; looking at Language Geek’s archives (the other Language Geek’s archives, not mine!), it appears they’ve been at language blogging since 2005. Drat. That makes me the name thief (even though it wasn’t intentional). And here I was, thinking I was the only one who (proudly) called himself a “language geek.” Oops.

Now I’m wondering whether I should change the title of my blog. What do you folks think? I don’t really want to, because I’ve obviously already bought the domain name, languagegeek.net. On the other hand, I hate to be called Language Geek 2 (or cause someone else to be called Language Geek 1!)

I suppose a subdomain or a simple addon folder (languagegeek.net/namethief) would be fine.

Suggestions?

Hey everyone. I wanted to drop a quick post here to let those of you who are still subscribed to the feed (a surprising number of you!) that I’ve not abandoned this blog. I’ve been extremely busy with classes, and both of my blogs (this one and System 13) have suffered because of it. But, one must have priorities.

I won’t, however, post here without writing at least a little bit about language. So:

I have long been frustrated with people thinking that modern words with an -e slapped on the end constitute “Old English.” (Or should I say “Olde English”?) I hear expressions from people surprisingly often, showing how little they know about the evolution of their own, native language.

The most recent case was when I was discussing Myne Owne Ground, a book I had to read for a class I’m in. As can be discerned from the extended title (Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676), the book is concerned with 17th century Virginia. Throughout the book, there are excerpts from court cases, land grants, etc. Many of the words in these excerpts are spelled incorrectly or inconsistently, and a great deal of the words have an unneeded -e appended to the end.

When talking about this with a fellow classmate, he commented that, “Yeah, all of that Old English will get you everytime.” (I suppose he could have meant “old” as an antiquated, from a previous time, etc., but I seriously doubt it.) I just nodded and smiled, but I wanted to say: “Alas, no - that’s not Old English! You’re only about 5 centuries late. If I were to show you real Old English - Anglo-Saxon - you’d realize how silly you sound.”

Old[e] English, indeed.

I don’t know if anyone has been using them (my stats say “no”), but for the time being, I’ve discontinued the vocabulary lists on the resources page. Since no one is using them (and even I find them relatively useless, because most don’t have example sentences), I don’t really see the point of me burning time to put them up. I’m going to start adding things to the resources page - links to books I find helpful, glossaries, whatever - but I’m not going to “force” myself to add so many words to a list per day anymore.

However, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working diligently on my vocabulary. I’ve started using sentence items almost exclusively; after trying them out, I’ve found that they’re much, much more helpful than a simple word-to-word translation. I’ve been using a plethora of different programs, attempting to get a system in place: SuperMemo, VTrain, Interlex, and Mnemosyne. In the past week, I’ve added about 100 sentence items to my collection, and thus far, I think the regular vocabulary work is paying off.

I’ve settled on a theme I really like: blog.txt. It’s a minimalistic theme, with focus on pretty much one thing: the text (i.e., the content) of the site. I find that the readability is amazing (especially compared to that bright red mess I had previously). I thought that considering the topic of this blog, I might want to focus on my content instead of a shiny wrapper.

Let me know what you think of the new look. There are a few things I’m going to tweak, but for the most part, the theme will remain as it is now.

I’m in the process of putting a new coat of paint on Language Geek, so if anything seems broken, no worries - I’m working on fixing it. The “Share This” link in particular seems to be functioning a bit strangely, but I’ve not hunted down the troublesome CSS yet. The Share This link is now styled correctly. The subscribe to comments text is also displaying correctly now.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: Okay, after a few days of looking at that theme, I ended up… well, hating it, for a variety of reasons. At any rate, for now, I’ve dropped back to Cutline until I decide how I want LG to look.

… but it shouldn’t affect readers at all! The jump from WordPress.com to a subdomain at System13.org was (I think) a bit painful, both for me and for readers of the blog. I didn’t really have any way to redirect all traffic from the old WP.com blog to the new URL.

Today, however, Language Geek has been promoted - to its own domain name! The site is now at languagegeek.net. You shouldn’t have to change anything on your end, however. All old links should automagically bounce to the new URL. If you’ve linked to Language Geek at the subdomain URL, you can change your links - or not! Either way is fine.

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t yet, please subscribe if you like the blog.